SP just... ended?

Hi there,
I skipped a night’s sleep so of course I was quite tired when I went to bed last night. Hadn’t been doing much LD’ing for a while and thought that this might be a good time to experiment a little with WILD immediately upon going to sleep (without WBTB, but with having been awale for 37 hours).

As it takes me about two hours to fall asleep daily, I was getting ready for another session of boring myself to death with endless LD-incubation techniques - really, they get boring after 120 minutes. But to my surprise, within five to ten minutes SP started.

It went completely silent, both outside and inside my head, then I heard the common rushing sound and felt great tension on my chest. I didn’t fear anything, didn’t see weird stuff, just went through it. To me, it felt like gravity had just decided to increase a lot. It went on for probably two minutes.

And then, while I was trying to keep nice thoughts to prevent “Old Hag” difficulties, SP just faded away. Within ten seconds, I had returned to my normal state of being completely relaxed but able to move, and I was again very much awake.
After that it took me another hour until I fell asleep. (No LD, after half an hour I had given up WILD attempts because of boredom).

What was wrong with my SP? It was unmistakenably SP, but I didn’t see or feel anything whatsoever, only the feeling of too much gravity. My breathing became very hard and as I tried to focus on keeping breathing, it became irregular too. At the same time maybe I thought too hard about nice, fear-preventing stuff.

What do you think caused the sudden end to this SP and wonderful oppurtunity to WILD?

Based on what you said, you were either almost in SP or just at the beginning of it. What happens is you began concentrating on SP and thinking about your body being in SP, and the concentration on your body is enough to break out of SP. This is the issue I have with so many WILD guides that keep telling people to get into SP. It’s not necessary. It’s just a natural part of the process and it’ll happen on its own, it does not have to be a goal. Your goal is lucid dreaming, just let everything else happen on its own.

Oh, and I also take a while to fall asleep. If you want to try WBTB, instead of actually getting out of bed, just set an intention to wake up in 4-6 hours or use an alarm. Once you wake up, go right back to bed. No reading, no getting up, just right back to sleep. That helped me out a whole lot, so I hope it helps you.

Thanks for the answer!
The point is not not being able to maintain SP, rather than the fact that I was close to falling asleep “awake” and that it resulted in another hour of not sleeping. I’ll try to keep my concentration elsewhere.

Hm, I’ll try getting right back to sleep. See if that helps.