Quote Originally Posted by gab View Post
I could be wrong here, but I don't think it's the masturbating that is getting you lucid. I think it's the fact that you woke up, stayed up a bit and then went to sleep or WILD. That's called WBTB - wake-back-to-bed.

It's crucial for a WILD, because it wakes our mind up. Just enough, so it's still sleepy, but not gonna fall asleep immediately into unconscious sleep and will be able to stay awake with you till a dream is ready for you to enter.
At first I thought it was WILD. But don't those who WILD see hypnagogic images, before entering a LD? I don't see any images. Everything is completely black. It feels like my body sinking down the into the darkness for a few minutes. When this feeling is gone, I know that at this point I have become lucid. Perhaps the masturbating helps relax my body which greatly assists with entering a lucid state. I've tried WILD without masturbating a few times, didn't work. Anway my LDs are very short. They last approximately only 1-4 minutes. That's why I wonder if my technique is wrong. Well my short LDs could be because I can sleep no more than 5 hrs on average.