Frightened

[Bokononymous]

For some background: I began reading LaBerge and Rheingold's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming a few days ago and have been keeping a journal fairly steadily and checking, perhaps obsessive-compulsively, whether or not I'm dreaming upon anything close to a dream sign, but have yet to attain Lucidity. I've been trying every method possible and certainly am making progress, but still find blocks. While attempting a WILD, I have used Pot-Shaped Breathing and Progressive Relaxation, Attention to Hypnagogic Imagery, the White Dot technique, the Dream Lotus and Flame technique, counting myself to sleep, and attention to body, sometimes incorporating multiple techniques. In many ways, I've been successful, but there's one thing that seems to hold me back: Fear. Here's how it usually happens, with varying degrees of success: I listen to Brian Eno's Music For Airports during a midday nap and begin to close my eyes, breathing deeply and watching shapes and colors of light float by, passively reacting to them, counting to myself "one, I'm dreaming, two, I'm dreaming," et cetera, to one hundred, about three times over. By this point in time, I am fully aware that my body is at least numb if not mostly paralyzed. This does not frighten me, however, I suddenly feel my heartbeat uncomfortably hard and fast and a sensation--not necessarily painful, but certainly active--around the area between my eyebrows. After experiencing this for a bit, my vision stops appearing like normal vision with foci and peripherals and instead jumps out at me, suddenly, covering a spectrum too full to fully explain. I can feel Rapid Eye Movement set in my eyes, and the picture, which just looks like random yellow spray paint on a white wall, stays somewhat still as opposed to flowing hypnagogic imagery. A few seconds more and the picture begins to appear like a strip of analog film, with imperfections. At this point, I simply can't take the heartbeat anymore, and twitch a finger or toe and lose my state. Considering that I am a newbie, I should view this objectively as successful: Five days and I'm already nearly attaining something that takes most many months to attain. And yet--this mental/physiological block has happened more than once and I don't know how to remove it. Will achieving lucidity through a MILD perhaps remove some of the fear going into a WILD?