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I've been doing an experiment where I try to recognise the people who appear in my HIs as I'm drifting off to sleep. I will verbalise their name - for example, "it's Paul!" The action has carried over to my dreams to some extent but I'm not sure how to tweak the practice so it makes me lucid. I'm also recognising the speech that appears in my HHs. It's usually quite strange, but intelligible. Hopefully it will lead to a new technique.
I never thought that random people in HI can be useful in this way! Your method is completely new and can lead to LD by increasing awareness while falling sleep.I think if it's done well, it can act as an anchor in WILD attempts.
Please inform us how you progress on it. I may try it but as I do SSILD, I fall sleep very soon and I can't reach HI.
I will do that, yaya.
I did this a few times not on any purpose though, "Hey, that's Gary! oops, dangit, just a dreamlet"
I think, as Fryingman mentions, the biggest obstacle will be to not wake up upon focusing on something familiar. These little "shocks" tend to knock us out of the dream world. But it is possible to become lucid in a dreamlet (which I think is just a kind of transition), and not immediately wake up. So I think there are possibilities here :)
I am trying to get that balance right, ThreeCat.
Sometimes on the journey to sleep I will get clear cut images of people, sometimes just a kind of "impression" of a person that pops into my head. To make the images that appear lean towards clear cut over vague, I've been finding that starting with a visualisation can mean the following HIs are clearer. The images are not as sharp as looking at a photo (and for me it doesn't seem to be as sharp as what other people describe in their HIs) but it is an improvement.
HI yaya
I've experimented with this a bit now. I reasoned that merely recognising people in dreams and saying their name wouldn't lead to lucidity. So I did some lateral thinking. Whenever an image pops up during HH (or a more extended sequence of images that are almost working themselves into a story - (I think this may be what some refer to as "dreamlets")), I've noticed that paying attention to the image "kills" it - you can passively observe them but as soon as your observation becomes more active it vanishes. So I thought that instead of recognising people and stating their name, I could see myself as having a superpower where I can make people vanish by paying attention to them. The ideal consequence would be that I could - on becoming lucid - make people in my dream vanish simply by paying attention to them. A pretty cool superpower that would be. Another reason this appeals is because it sets up a situation where, on going to sleep, the arrival of HIs and my reaction to them could be seen as a practice run for my LD, thus removing the need to do affirmations like "I'll realise it's a dream" because I would already be rehearsing my dream by "killing" the HIs.
It hasn't worked so far. Why? I suspect it's because the superpower - making people vanish by paying attention to them - doesn't exist at all to any degree in WL and doesn't exist to any degree in NLDs. So my mission now is to find some action that exists in real life, in the HH stage, in NLDs and can be done (as a superpower or a normal action) in LDs.
I thought that one of the indicators of being on the path to sleep is easy to overlook - it's the blissful feeling of relaxation (are endorphins responsible for this in some way?) that is a combination of relaxation and "something else". I call it "feelgood". The feelgood is also experienced in meditation. It's a nice feeling and it may not be able to describe to someone who hasn't experienced it or paid attention to it. I thought maybe we took this feeling for granted when we are going to sleep. So, I did a couple of nights of experiments. I was more mindful of the onset of the feelgood when I was going to sleep, and also paid attention to the words spoken by the people in my HHs. The idea was, to connect the two with each other. I wondered if somehow my sleeping mind could continue the process of feeling good and make me feel better and better up to the point where I would kind of twig, "the only way to feel better from here is to realise it's a dream". I also had the idea that DCs would speak to me and maybe trigger lucidity - or make me remember my goal to increase the niceness of the feelgood, even. Plenty of party dreams have resulted, and plenty of - often weird - conversationlets, but no lucidity.
Ahahaha! Feelgood is a cool name! Thanks for providing scientific reason for it. I am sure your method will lead somewhere! At least it can results in DILD if one is able to bring more awareness to his or her dream before falling sleep.