Making the transition.

Ok, today was a very unintentional but very fruitful WILD exercise. I’m not even trying to LD at the moment but the experience was worthwhile.
I woke up today after about 7 hours of sleep. I feel refreshed so I get out of bed and make breakfast. I return to bed after about an hour because I have the day off and I feel sleepy again. I sleep on my back (I’m usually never able to) but before drifting off, I start having hypnagogic imagery and sounds. I make a mental note of that and decide to go for WILD since I’m already unintentionally halfway there. I start trying to imagine a dream scene but nothing materializes. The HI stops without me entering any dream. I open my eyes and go for a RC to a avoid the potential FA: no luck.
Somehow I drift back to sleep, and I start dreaming. I’m completely unaware until a sudden burst of logical thinking makes me lucid. The moment leading to the RC was surreal because of how real everything was. The dream was stable so I was over-confident. I lose it and wake up.
I’m lying down, and decide to go for another attempt at WILD (DEILD?). I achieve HI and HS very quickly. There are various very real sounds (didn’t expect it to be this realistic). People talking, fire crackling and then out of nowhere a sound of man who’s unintelligibly trying to what I assume to be guiding me through the experience! All of that stops and I’m yet again not able to get into a dream.
I was able to acknowledge the experience and set aside to focus on entering the dream (it’s not the goal I know that) but I still wan’t able to get into a dream. What went wrong?

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Sounds like an awesome experience!! Although I am personally no expert, I would just say keep at it—the more often you get this far in the experience (even if you don’t get all the way into the dream) the more you will become familiar with what works for you and what doesn’t. It may be that you were trying too hard to focus, and subsequently blocked yourself from entering the dream, or even the opposite: maybe you were carried away by the sensations and they carried you into the abyss of dreams without bringing your consciousness along.
From what I’m reading in your post though, it sounds to me like the former situation. Next time perhaps try loosening your mental hold or focus on what you are experiencing. I believe this is also my problem; I hold my concentration so rigid that it keeps me from entering the dream. We have to find the balance where a little bit of mental wandering is permitted to establish a natural, uncontrolled train of thought that can evolve into a dreamworld.

Hope this makes sense, and good luck!

I haven’t posted here for ages… :smile:

WILD is something I have quite enough experience with, most of my lucid dreams were WILD’s and when it comes to the transition there is quite a lot topics on the forum.

But I can be quite short about that because it’s very simple, when you began to experience HI, sounds or any other physical or auditory sensations, there is one simple thing you need to do to find your self in a dream ergo to make a transition and that is fall asleep. In my experience I always hit the “wall” and couldn’t make a transition into a dream, I would always experience everything that I was supposed to experience but not the dream, not the transition and when everything was over or to say when I failed I would find myself awake, wide awake.

So this would happen on every try and then one night I decided to just let go, when I would feel the time is right I would let myself fall asleep, I would let go. When I let it go, when I wasn’t holding onto sensations that I would experience next second I would find myself in a dream, lucid dream.

At first I thought that I was lucky, that it was just a random luck, but it wasn’t :smile:, it’s actually something that works for me. There is one more detail, the most important one, with all hallucinations, physical and auditory there was one that was a “sign” to let go, it was something that felt like a powerfull surge of energy, through every muscle and through the spine, very powerful surge, if I wouldn’t “let go” at that moment I would be wide awake.

So the problem with this way would be that someone could say that you should be awake to make an actual WILD, but how you can be awake and be dreaming at the same time? So that’s the transition acutually in my opinion, the transition is falling asleep and letting your body and brain to be able to enter REM sleep and start to dream.

So falling asleep(at the right moment) = transition = lucid dream(or at least a dream)

I’ll be glad to answer any questions, but try this a few night, give it a try, nothing to loose, happy dreaming!

Cheers!

^^Thank you very much for the input all of you, it was really insightful!