You have to experiment a little to determine the best time period for you to stay awake while doing WBTB. If you’re having troubles of staying awake, do this: as soon as you wake up, get up without hesitating and go to the bathroom. Wash your face with ice cold water (preferably do this once every ten minutes or so). Works fine with me.
If you’re having a cold during WBTB, you could move to a warmer room, and read LD related books or browse the forum, before going back to your bedroom.
Hm doesn’t sound ideal… Perhaps you can set a large bowl of water inside your bedroom? Then you don’t have to go to the bathroom… Or you could move your bed to another room
Have you tried going right back to sleep? Staying up only a few minutes to memorize your dream and do MILD. It might not work for you but, on the other hand it might be a solution to your problem.
Normally I stay awake for 20-30 minutes. Sometimes more (if I’m motivated ). If I’d stay awake for hours I don’t think I could fall back asleep, unless I’m really really tired… But due to school I can’t do it anyway. How much one has to stay awake for good results depends from person to person, but I wonder if there’s an overall optimal time period to stay awake in order to have the best results (in general ofcourse).
Well I’ve tried 5 minutes so far and didn’t get a lucid dream. I used the MILD technique and ended up having a dream in the location of the dream scene that I was replaying.
I wasn’t lucid but I was controling some aspects of the dream environment with my mind, i.e. filling bottles of booze back up. I’ll see what 10 minutes does.
I don’t think it’s nessicarily how long you stay awake but how awake you become (although obviously the longer you stay awake, the more ‘awake’ you’re likely to become). What I mean is if i only stay up for 10 or so minutes I still feel mentally groggy and not very alert. When this happens chances of getting a WILD LD are almost zero. However if I stay up for 30 mins / and hour I feel fully alert and am almost garunteed to LD. This morning I woke up for an hour but spent most of it dozing in bed and didn’t feel very alert or awake the whole time. No surprise I didn’t have a proper lucid dream (although I did have a very low level lucid dream that lasted a few seconds).
I have tried to only stay up for a few minutes and that doesn’t seem to help at all, even if I’m very awake mentally . I would say that one should be up atleast 10 minutes and probably no more that 30 minutes.
Can the length of sleeping before awaking change if you will lucid dream? Monday night I tried 6 hours of sleeping before getting up for 30 minutes and going back to bed. Last night I tried 5 hours and got up for 30 minutes.
I find that if I stay up longer than 10 min it is disturbing to the quality of my sleep. I will not feel rested. 5-10 minutes seems to work good for me with WILD.