Having Issues with Inducing Sleep Paralysis & Attempting WILD

Alright, so I have been into the idea of lucid dreaming since last year but haven't had too many DILD's because I spent several months starting "training" my mind to prepare it (and many people know that it does take time for lucid dream induction to work when you first start) and the DILD's I've had are only occasionally, so I wasn't sure if I should try WILD considering that it is considered a reasonably "advanced" technique (thus I always thought I should wait after I've had more experience with more frequently inducing DILD's until I tried WILD, so I had enough mental control and recognition of what a lucid dream feels like when I do try), but I was always interested in one day trying WILD. Even though it was more difficult and I knew I would struggle to successfully have one back when I just started trying to induce lucid dreams, nonetheless barely a few months after I started I decided that I would at least try to practice lying still and inducing sleep paralysis in order to "train" myself so I can successfully lie still for when I'm ready to start properly attempting WILD, and so for a while, every so often, I would practice lying still. Months before I even started attempting WILD I already knew what the feelings of oncoming sleep paralysis felt like firsthand (the "lead blanket" feeling of partial paralysis.)

I finally decided that I should try to properly attempt WILD, and I tried a few times. However, in the time in which I have tried I have found a common problem, one that reared its head in my most recent attempt at WILD last night.

I woke up around a time near the morning. Definitely in my REM period - since I literally woke up straight out of a normal/non-lucid dream. I would have tried to attempt a DEILD if not for the fact that when I woke up I opened my eyes and moved, and in my attempts in which I've woken up from a dream and tried DEILD (even times where I've woken up both not moving and with my eyes closed), I've never been able to pull it off before (in terms of visualising the previous dream scene and getting back into it). So, since I was still deeply relaxed from the middle of the REM sleep I woke up from (one of my longer REM periods around the morning), I decided that instead I would just attempt the lengthier process of WILD and try the hypnagogic imagery method (since I believe I've seen some hypnagogic imagery before outside of WILD but didn't stay conscious/aware for more of it and instead succumbed to sleep soon after). I lay down on my back; after the practice I have had in the months before I have almost absolutely no problem with lying still, though it depends on my condition at the time. Occasionally, my body might end up involuntarily shivering, or twitching in a shivering-like way (not because of cold or anything), when try to lie still (usually it happens during the times where I struggle to take my attention away from my body), but usually I can very easily lie almost perfectly still for almost an hour or more on end and keep my trail of thoughts/attention away from my physical body except for noticing the feeling of SP. The latter was the case on this night. (As of this day the main reason why my WILD attempts have not yielded success is because I either fall asleep or I lie down perfectly still and aware but I wait for so long and nothing happens that I decide to give up.)

On this particular occasion I lay very still for minutes on end - I didn't not know how much time had passed, but I lay on my back and let my thoughts wander partially (letting the other parts of my thoughts focus on my breathing to keep me relaxed, and also during the middle starting to count as I relaxed to keep my mind from falling asleep a simple "1, I am dreaming... 2, I am dreaming... etc" that I had read as a suggested internal counting idea in Stephen LaBerge's "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" - just something to occupy the mind. By the time I stopped counting, I had reached about 137.). I had no problems or worries with saliva - as it came up on occasion I just swallowed it (noticing that my lips and the corners of my mouth were dry but not moving to dampen them) and continued on.

It didn't take very long after I started for the beginning feeling of partial sleep paralysis to set into my legs, and by the middle of the period of time I spent lying down I had felt sleep paralysis set quite strongly in my legs - the stiff, can't-move, "lead blanket" feeling was very prominent and I felt as if my legs were "locked" into stationary position and there was no way they could move involuntarily (that I would have to voluntarily and willingly move my own muscles to break it). In fact, this was probably the strongest feeling of sleep paralysis I had ever experienced while conscious in my body (considering that I haven't experienced the phenomenon of waking SP before). The best way to describe the feeling of the sleep paralysis was to imagine it like a pair of stiff or heavy long stockings/socks covering the whole of my legs - at one point the pinkie toe on my right foot broke of out of the sleep paralysis (it felt "normal" while the rest of my legs felt "heavy" and paralysed; imagine it like you take the SP "stockings" that have individual toes (like the fingers on a glove) and you cut off the pinkie toe on the stocking so the pinkie toe is not covered by the "fabric" of the stocking and is bare, exposed to the air). It involuntarily twitched every so often for about ten minutes, but it never broke or lessened the paralysis in my legs.

This is where the problems started coming in.

My legs may have been/felt, to my gladness (though luckily not excitement - I was still calm) at my progress, strongly paralysed (or with a heavy paralysis feeling), but the strongest feeling of paralysis only reached up to about my hips. In my upper body and my arms the paralysis was present, but noticeably much weaker (I still couldn't accidentally twitch any of my fingers, and my hands felt still, but the paralysis from above my hips and up felt obviously lighter than in my legs - it was partial paralysis that I knew was capable of being deeper if the heavier feeling in my legs spelled out anything.)

No matter how still I lay, the strong, deeper paralysis I was aiming for only went from my toes to my hips, and my upper body stayed only partially paralysed. Eventually, however, in spite of the stronger paralysis only covering around half of my body, I began to see some blobs, shapes and patterns moving around under my eyelids - in their initial colours they were slightly hard to discern from the colour of the backs of my eyelids, but they become more prominent, some in maroons and greens, having heard about what HI usually looked like I assumed this was obviously the hypnagogic imagery starting to show up. However, I wasn't completely heavily paralysed, so I wondered why (if it was HI) why it was setting in when the paralysis in my body was still weak in some areas. Nonetheless, I remembered WILD tutorials and tried not to focus intently on images or interfere with them, telling myself to simply play the passive observer to them. However, when I started seeing the patterns, when I looked at the back of my eyelids my eyelids twitched and they barely opened a tiny crack. I managed to keep them as closed as possible and the patterns didn't really disappear, but willfully keeping them closed required tension in my eyelids (which I was sort of worried would interfere with some of the paralysis even though the SP doesn't affect the eyes as they move during REM, but by simply telling the body there was tension somewhere). Every time I tried to relax my eyelids (to let them stay drooped-closed, instead of forced closed), they kept trying to open. I have a feeling that it probably had to do with it nearing another hour into the morning. During this time, for which I had been waiting for a while, I accidentally let my breathing become uneven in length (a quicker inhale and exhale, then a shorter inhale, longer exhale, etc.). In the end, I stayed still for some more time and then decided to give up.

The issue with the eyelids has happened to me before. Also, to anyone who has successfully induced a WILD with the hypnagogic imagery, how paralysed have you been when the imagery has set in? Has it only happened when your body is deeply paralysed (heavy feeling of paralysis covering almost all of your body), or have you had hypnagogic imagery ever happen when some parts of the body are not in as strong a paralysis as the others before? If I truly have to get the heavy paralysis to spread to my upper body as well, then I still have some practice with SP to go. The weaker paralysis in the upper body and the twitching/almost opening eyelids have been some of the most common roadblocks I come across when I try to induce SP for a WILD attempt, and the main thing in the way of my WILD attempts is that although I am very good at lying still for a long time, and seem to have decent progress with sleep paralysis, getting the apparent depth or paralysis I must need is the main step I can't get past. I can get my body to undergo some sleep paralysis, just not enough.

If any of you have similar experiences, or have some tips that might help with keeping tension out of the eyes and upper body (like ways to relax eyes or face, etc. or something else that helps), then I would love to know. I have looked on numerous posts on different sites (incl. some older DreamViews posts) but haven't found anyone discussing anything really similar to what I am going through- where I can lay still enough to induce the SP but struggle to induce it fully - even when relaxed.

Note: I know that sleep paralysis doesn't affect your respiratory system and the diaphragm, so you're still able to breathe (obviously - sleep is meant to greatly aid our body, not kill us!) which could explain why my upper body felt weakly paralysed since the respiratory system lies in your chest and your diaphragm is below your chest area, so it covers quite a portion of your upper body, but my shoulders, arms and fingers were still in the same weaker partial state of paralysis.

Respectfully, MissByakura, I think you have been given some very bad, or at least unhelpful information about achieving successful WILDs:

* WILD's are not an "advanced" form of transition to lucidity. Yes, they might take a bit more effort to do, initially, than DILD's (though that is arguable), but there is nothing particularly advanced about the techniques used or skills required to induce WILD's.

* There is absolutely no need to "get to SP" in order to successfully WILD. Sleep paralysis, among other things, is a phenomenon that happens in the morning, when you are waking up, not when you are going to sleep, so in theory you will never get to it during a WILD. Also, actual SP is an affliction suffered by a very small minority of people, and not something you want to have at all, I think. What you -- and so many misguided forum posters -- are probably talking about is merely deep relaxation or a feeling of the onset of REM Atonia as your body falls asleep... neither of these things are actual SP, because you can easily exit them by moving. You can learn a bit more about SP here and here, if you are interested.

But none of that matters. What does matter is that SP should not be your target during WILD. The only thing you want to "get to," period, is your dream. Even REM Atonia is an unnecessary target, because it generally begins at the same time as your dream; so if you sense it, you'll likely be better off noticing the dream! If you can avoid popular distractions like "getting to SP," you might find your path to lucidity much easier.

* I have never heard of a " hypnagogic imagery method," and highly recommend that you take a step away from such a concept. Sure, HI can be a helpful signpost on the way to sleep and your dream, but, like SP, it should not be something you seek, or make a priority. Your only priority, again, is the dream... everything else is just distracting noise. It is more than possible, for instance, to get to your dream through WILD without ever experiencing HI (that happens with me all the time); why feel a need or requirement to experience something that might not happen at all?

* If you wake up naturally, you are probably at the end -- and not the middle -- of a REM period. But do you know what? That doesn't matter! And neither does knowing whether you are in a REM period or not. If you properly do your WBTB late in your sleep cycle (after 5 or more hours' sleep; and you should do a WBTB, BTW), you will likely go back to sleep either during or very close to your next REM period. Worrying about catching REM is just another distraction; try not to make it important.

* When I read your bit about your eyes, I wondered how bright your room was. It is best to attempt your WILD in as dark a room as possible, or perhaps with a sleep mask on (or both, which is what I do), so you do not have to concern yourself with how tightly closed your eyes are. Light is the enemy of sleep; do what you can to avoid it during your WILD attempt.

I highly recommend that you take a moment to forget everything you've learned about WILD in all those posts and then choose to start all over. If you do, I humbly suggest that you take my DVA WILD class, or at least DV's excellent WILD tutorial. I think you will find the process much simpler than you've been led to believe, and you might have a bit more luck getting to your dream.

Thanks for the clarified information. It probably doesn't help that when I look up about WILD a lot of different people say different things and refer to things differently (some people using SP instead of REM Atonia) and I got slightly confused. I always thought that WILD was reasonably harder to achieve because of what people would say about it but I suppose that clearing my head of thoughts like getting to the point of hypnagogic imagery and such out of my head should probably make me feel more confident about WILD and that it is not as difficult as I thought it was.

When I started the attempt it was still dark but dawn must have risen in the time I was lying because the eye issue happened especially near the end of the period of time I spent on the attempt and I wasn't sure how long I was lying there for. When I gave up I looked out and there was some light, so yeah, I think that the eye issue must have indeed been some of the early light starting to catch me! If I accidentally go through dawn again or near it I should probably close the curtains, just in case.