Hello, making an effort at lucid dreaming again and I've made a WILD attempt this morning after re-reading Sageous' material.
For about a month I've been doing general awareness / Am I dreaming checks, my dream recall has gotten quite decent, and lately I've been incorporating the RRC and really thinking about my influence on the world and the worlds influence on me.
But anyways, I'm going to attempt a few serious tries at this and try to gather as much information as possible to debug where I've gone wrong and try to narrow down the issues.
General Facts
Bed time - 12:30 AM
Wake time - 9:10 AM
Attempt time - 9:20 AM
Attempt length - 40 minutes
Attempt position - Back
Result - Not today :)
The Dive
I woke up around 9 AM ready to do an attempt, I had been reading through Sageous' class threads the night before and felt I was ready for the dive. I decided the night before on the mantra "Remain", I felt it was easy to recite and did a good job of encapsulating the intention of keeping my awareness around while my body proceeds into sleep as usual. I was tempted to use "Persist" as I'm a software developer by trade so I liked it for that reason but it didn't really roll of my mind's tongue as well as the former.
So I got myself comfortable on my back, and it's worth noting that I typically don't sleep on my back at all, so it took a minute to get used to. After that I put on my sleep mask to block out any light, closed my eyes, and started out by just letting my body relax into the bed and let any impulse to move any muscles fade away.
After relaxed, I focused on my breath- reciting "Remain" on each exhale. After 20 minutes or so- I felt myself relax even further, it felt like it got brighter behind my eyelids? Although I was wearing a sleep mask so I thought maybe this was the vibrations, it felt like my breathing was a lot more relaxed and some tension I was holding had gone away. As a result of these things I figured I was advancing in the WILD and couldn't help but get a bit excited but I quickly realized this wasn't a good thing for the attempt so I went back to focusing on the breath, reciting the mantra. It worked and I seemed to be just as relaxed as that moment and my breathing was less tense and felt effortless.
After about 10 more minutes I find that constantly repeating the mantra seems that it may be keeping me too awake, I decide it would make more sense to let my mind drift on whatever thoughts arise, and when I found myself lost in thought, to reel myself back by reciting the mantra at that point. Although there were times where I didn't have many thoughts to get lost in so I would end up in a sort of meditative like blank mind canvas state. I figured to combat this I would go over my past dreams, which worked fine for a bit but I felt I would always return to that blank space and even check up on how relaxed I felt (which doesn't seem like a good idea to focus on the physical body). So it seemed I need a thought that would be constant and occupy me- So I imagined climbing a dream ladder endlessly, I focused on this for about 5 minutes.
After that I felt myself thinking about just getting up, gave it about 5 more minutes and got up.
Potential Issues (likeliest issues stated first)
-Attempt made way too late after initial sleep (8-9 hours)
---Body too well rested?
---No REM cycle available
-Sleeping position- maybe I should try my side next time
-Focused too much on repeating mantra, the drift and reel technique I employed seemed promising for finding balance
-Need to have dreamy thoughts and visualizations prepared perhaps?
-Was trying to overthink everything and come up with solutions in real time (perhaps this kept me awake)
-Killed my chance when I got excited by the noise?