I have to say, Nazrax, now 7 weeks after my first response, it's spooky how your experience is so close to mine. Like a carbon-copy, almost EXACTLY the same. In early November I went on a WILD attempt marathon, about 3-4 nights in a row, whenever I woke up and it was close to or after the 5th hour after bedtime, I did a WILD attempt. Never got totally in to a WILD (got close, or perhaps even in, to a totally blank dream), but the result is that now my body / mind just does NOT want to go back to sleep after waking after the 5th hour. Not just on the same night as the WILD, but *every* night thereafter. Only when I took a 3mg melatonin tablet before bed did I get back to sleep after a 5th/6th hour waking for the last REM cycle before I had to get up.

I feel sort of stuck -- I'm not sure what to do. I've done just about all the things I've read about that are within my power. To-bed time is still not consistent, but is converging to plus or minus one hour, need to get that better but it's hard with a non-cooperative spouse.

It's really bizarre, because when I look back at my dream journal from about 3 months ago, I could go to bed at 23:30 and stay dreaming until 10:00 or even 11:00 sometimes. Of course, the environment was entirely different (quiet, dark, bed to myself, vs. light, noisy, shared bed), and I was doing nothing other than journaling and going right back to sleep.

I'm not sure, but it may be that I may have reset my sleep clock, like when doing CAT. If I could get back to sleep after the 5th/6th hour waking I could probably DILD very nicely due to CAT. For now I'm entirely avoiding WILDs and focusing on DILD and DEILD. I like attempting WILDs and I think I got really close to success, but something about falling asleep aware for me seems to leave a pearl of awareness that I have trouble turning off!