Over the past 5 days I have been trying WBTB coupled with a technique I read about (The user called it C-WILD. I’m giving credit to the forum user Lbsf1 for the post) It’s where you count to 100, get out of bed and do an rc. To start with, I only stay up for roughly 20 minutes. I enjoy reading peoples dream journals here, and it also gives me some ideas of what to do in my LD’s. Sorry if im rambling. I have been having trouble keeping focused on counting. I would get to about 15 and then I start drifting off. A few seconds later I would kind of catch myself and start counting again back at 1. I’m looking for some advice on how to stay focused. Could staying up longer help? Any advice would much appreciated.
I have never been very successful with WBTB. Perhaps this technique just doesn’t work for you? There are two techniques what work for me very well.
The DEILD-Technique and a variation of it called iWILD. If you are someone who wakes up several times at night or in the morning then this technique is just perfect.
If you don’t wake up that often then you could use your smartphone or something else what wakes you up but stops ringing by itself. The DEILD-Technique says: you wake up but you shan’t move a limb, not even open your eyes. Just lie in your bed, keep calm and try to remember what you’ve been dreaming before and then try to re-enter at the point where you woke up. The point is to enter your dream lucid at the moment you left it.
The iWILD variation needs a little bit more effort so I thought it should be enough to suggest you to try something different when it’s so hard for you to stay focused.
If you force yourself too much with WBTB then you propably just stay awake instead of to fall asleep again.
Hi! When doing WBTB there is a huge timing factor, so if you’re trying WBTB randomly most of the time it’s like not doing WBTB at all. But your issue seems more like you lose focus so I wouldn’t suggest to stop WBTB nor to ncessarily try a new tech.
Indeed if you feel like you’re falling asleep too fast and that it breaks your focus too often, you might want to stay up longer during WBTB. But then again if you do, you need to take in account the timing. If you stay awake too long, you might miss your REM cycle, or you might need too much time to fall asleep and again you might miss your REM cycle.
Even if you set an alarm to wake you up at the end of a cycle (the 90 minutes thingy suggested for WBTB), it’s not accurate enough, not to mention people can have different cycles so 90 min is very just an estimation. So after that, you should always try to remember when you first wake up if you had a dream, if it was long or not. If you hadn’t or if you had a long one, you might need to wait for longer cause maybe you’re still in N-REM or at the end of REM. If you had a short dream, you might want to go back to bed quickly cause your REM is happening right now.
After that, and only after that, you can add the fact that you either fall asleep too fast or that you have trouble falling asleep. For you, it seems like you fall asleep too fast. Or, maybe it’s that counting doesn’t suit you the best ? There are tons of “techniques” for WILD which often only differ from the way you decide to keep your awareness/focus. So maybe counting isn’t a strong enough effort for you to keep focus. Try something else. You can find and repeat a mantra. You can add to counting the “I’m dreaming” part to make it tougher, like “1 - I’m dreaming, 2 - I’m dreaming”. You can focus on the darkness of your eyelids, you can focus on trying to stimulate the phosphenes from the darkness of your eyelids, or you can slightly move one of your fingers so that it slightly presses your pillow or your bed ect… For each of these you pretty much have a different name of WILD technique, but at the end it’s still a WILD.
So, analyze your timing, according to that adapt how long you stay awake and if it still doesn’t work then try another focus method. You should be all good then!
