The Big WBTB Topic

Ugh. I tried to do a WBTB on a school day. I went to bed at like 9 (I was sleepy) and woke up around 3:30. I read for about 15 (not a half hour because I was afriad I woudln’t be able to go back to sleep. As it turned out I couldn’t fall back asleep, was just tossing and turning. So now I only got 6.5 hours of sleep and and I have a midterm first thing today… :cry:

So far I’ve had success with WBTB… the two times I was able to drag myself out of my warm soft comfy bed into the chilly, dark night. Yeah. WBTB/MILD is a technique that may very well work for me, if only I didn’t go right back to sleep after my soft mobile phone alarm goes off. I really severely dislike barging out of bed in the middle of the night… and more often, even when I wake up naturally, I just flip over and continue to sleep. It’s not an entirely uncommon problem is it? :wink:

I’ve had very much success with naps. So far the three most powerful LD’s I’ve had in the past year were all from naps. WBTB/MILD is the most comparable method… so I really have to figure something out for dragging myself out of bed.

Is doing exercises (squatting, stretching, etc) a good idea? Or turning on the computer and visiting LD4All? :wink:

whenever i do WBTB i visit the forums and read for a while, it gets your thoughts on lucid dreaming… and helps you get ready for your dreams. i’d recommend it over exercising… maybe just a few stretches to get up or something.

Well, I just ordered EWLD, so that should help. :happy:

I had a nap this afternoon but didn’t LD! Argh! I hope I’m not hitting a dry spell.

Anyway, waiting until the weekend when I can try WBTB/MILD again. (These busy weekdays… argh.)

Hehe. In my case, I seem to not even remember a single dream when I take an afternoon nap. It’s probably because I sleep very heavily, due to being exhausted from the night before. :smile:

And as for WBTBs, I’ve stopped trying those mainly because of my brother who sleeps in the same room with me and it wakes him up :\ If only there was SOME way to be woken up without sound… Maybe something like a large vibrating teddybear…? :bored:

Hey OneWingedAngel,

Whenever I try using WBTB or MILD I just set my intention to wake up after every dream that I have. That usually is enough to wake me up after my dreams.

ypm.

If you’re saying that it works for you then I don’t see any reason NOT to try it myself :content: Thanks ypm.

So OneWingedAngel? Any results?

ypm.

I was just going to report about the results :smile:

I tried your suggestion in the last 3 days (in which I had only 7 hours of sleep each night – because of school), with having a true intention and motivation of recording my dreams and waking up in the middle of the night, and quite suprisingly - it worked well! In those 3 nights I set my alarm clock after 6 hours of sleep, and at each night I had found myself waking up at about 15 minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off! I woke up immediately after a dream and wrote it down. Then, I set my intention on remembering more dreams when I got back to sleep.

So I got to a point which I have never been before in, at which I can remember about 2-3 dreams a night on school nights, having 7 hours of sleep at maximum! And at the last night I got to a point in a dream in which I was about to realize I’m dreaming but the dream had faded by the time I performed the RC. :tongue:

Thanks a LOT for your advice ypm! It motivated me to continue trying :smile:

What I’m trying to do now is finding out what are the best times to wake up at when your sleep is limited to 7 hours or less, and make full use out of that sleeping time :grin:

Hey good to hear OneWingedAngel. It’s pretty neat how the mind works with stuff like that. I was pretty impressed when I found just thinking about waking up after each of my dreams was enough to actually wake up after each of my dreams.

I’ve also found that waking up after each of my dreams helps my dream recall a lot. I’m often able to remember 2 or 3 dreams a night when I do this.

Now I just need to use this to start inducing more and more lucid dreams.

Good luck with your experiments, let us know what the results are.

ypm.

Yes! I succeed with the help of WBTB to have two LD’s last night. :happy: I’m so glad I finally found something that actually works for me.

Now, I’m going to try what ypm suggested to improve my dream recall, as well. :slight_smile: If I am able to wake up naturally, by intention, after each dream, I can use WBTB/MILD (or in my case, WBTB/WILD sometimes happens) more effectively and have more LDs. Thanks for the tips!

[color=green]Hello fellows,
I actually have found WBTB the best way for me to LD. I do this almost every night. Set my watch to go off cause it’s quiet and won’t startle me to much, I just sit up and play guitar quietly for a little bit or listen to a cd, then just lay down again and start picturing a dream in my head, after a little bit I fall asleep and slip into a dream, because I’ve been thinking about this dream, It is the dream I was thinking of, and I just do my usual RC and I’m all set to explore and have fun all night. :cool_laugh:

-Eric-[/color]

WBTB is worthless for me. If I’m up for more than 15 minutes, I’ll be up for at least 4 hours afterwards. This hapenned to me this morning, I woke up at 4:00 hoping to fall back to sleep by 5:00, but of course sleep never came. To add to the situation, I have eating disorders, and get absolutely starving if awake for more than an hour and have to eat a dinner-size meal. I’ve tried all kinds of herbal tea concoctions, meditations, relaxation techniques, sleep aid pills, PM cough medicine,etc…nothing works. It seems for some reason that when I wake up during the middle of the night, its tougher to fall alseep than it would be for me to take a nap in the middle of the day. Any ideas? Suggestions? I would REALLY appreciate other peoples methods on how to fall asleep when using WBTB. I know how effective a method WBTB is, from experiences with it from when I was a child. Also, it’s nearly impossible for me to do MILD or WILD in the morning hours because of this. Can someone PLEASE help me? I’m desperate here… :bored:

Alright, tonight im gona do it, after waking up plenty of times, I’m going to actually not be lazy and get up out of bed! Hear me roar! :scream:

Hello everyone,

Lately I’ve had to get up earlier than is natural for me to bring my mother to work a few times. (she has a knee problem right now that prevents her driving)

I am very… protective of my sleep and I prefer not to compromise my natural sleep for anything if at all possible. I thought, however, that I could turn this stumbling block into a stepping stone by reading the forum a bit before returning to bed and then trying for a LD.

This didn’t help. I had trouble getting back to bed. I found by trying this that it didn’t really help my LD attempt at all. I think that I experience more HI when I go pee during the night and see my “DREAMING” sign on the wall opposite me :smile: Also, waking up early for this just resulted in my usual stuffy head headache feeling that comes from messing with my sleep. Perhaps I should try WBTB at a different time, maybe during the night more?

Hi enlightened_on_occasion,

Well it depends what time you go to bed and what time you wake up.

If you, for example, go to bed at 11pm, and wake at 7, thats 8 hours, so then you could probably plan to wake about 5:00-5:30, read about LD’s and whatever, for about a good 30 minutes, then go back to bed for another 1-1.5 hours sleep.

If you can only manage about 5-6 hours sleep a night, then maybe WBTB is not the thing for you until the weekend comes and you can sleep in further. in this case maybe WILD/MILD is a good idea for weekdays (or if you need to get up weekends too).

Just a note, when you wake up, try and always think about your dreams, as a first thing to do. Sometimes I awake because the phone rings and I must answer, or because someone wakes me and talks to me. I find that if I talk to someone straight after I wake up, and then try to think iof what dream I had, it is much more difficult to remember.

Good luck! let us know how it goes

-stranger

I go to bed at around 12-12:30 and I get up around 10-10:30, sometimes later. I wake up naturally whenever possible. I also got rid of my phone, because it made noise when someone called, even with the ringer off. The cell phone and voice mail combo has been great :> I really optimized my sleep schedule for LD without knowing it :grin:

I really like what you said about trying to think of my dreams first thing after I wake up. I think I will try this, as well as just taking a minute to wake up whenever I have a small awakening in the night, so that I can achieve a kind of mini-WBTB thing.

Thanks for the input! :tongue:

To be honest I was never a big fan of WBTB until recently. I have always practiced WILD at bed time and found I was able to do it. But one night I woke up in the middle of the night after a failed WILD attempt. I went right back to sleep with my WILD method and moved into the dream state so easily and quickly that I could hardly believe it. I did not like WBTB for the same reasons others have mentioned. Mainly, the fear of not getting back to sleep. Now I still do WILD at bedtime but when I wake in the middle of the night I only stay up for 2-3minutes. Just enough time to go to the bathroom and maybe write a sentence or two in my dream journal. This might be a solution for people who are afraid to do WBTB out of fear of losing sleep.

Right, I’ve just started to WBTB/MILD, and have nearly reached an LD. But I have a little problem that is bothering me.

I can’t stay up for half an hour. Well, i could, but it wouldn’t be nice. At most, I can usually get nearly 20 minutes - not bad, but I’d rather have a full half hour.

The reason why I don’t like it, is becuase I have trouble reading (I read slower then I normally do) and I’m freezing cold. I thought about pulling my duvet down to keep me warm, by the noise I’d make worries me. As does the fact that the warmth may put me back to sleep…

Anyone have any ideas?

Personally I like falling right back asleep after I wake up. I usually try to stay up long enough to remember the dream, pick a dream sign, and then set my intention.

If I’m up for much longer I find that I end up staying away for at least an hour, sometimes more. Interestingly enough if I do end up staying away for an hour or two I am almost always going to have a lucid dream.

Even this morning I always had one, I could feel myself falling asleep and then got too excited (it’s been a while for me) and then woke myself back up.

So I’m not sure that staying up 30 minutes is absolutely necessary, it may help you, but I wouldn’t worry about it that much.

ypm.

ypm.