Quote Originally Posted by SinisterDezz View Post
Before I begin, anything I say is opinion-based.

I think that specializing in a certain area is the way to go if you want to have constant LDs. If you are going to focus on WILD, learn how to WILD to the best of your abilities and practice it exclusively. There are other small fundamentals that go along with WILD, though, so make sure you practice those as well.

If you are going to focus on DILD, make sure that you are doing your RCs and self-awareness tasks as much as possible to become lucid.

Same goes for all the other methods and techniques. Being a jack of all trades is harder to do when you are starting out, and can eventually lead to you being burnt out quickly.

Above all, being optimistic and mindful will get you further than anything else.

(Of course, being a natural can help too, but my guess is that you aren't...)
Heh, it's inevitable that when it comes to dreaming, ideas about "best practices" are going to lay all over the spectrum... in the end we all end up practicing a very personal concoction of approaches and techniques, based on what we've found has worked best for us. My experience has been the opposite of what SinisterDezz describes, but this isn't to say that either of us are right or wrong, only to reinforce the idea of "different strokes for different folks."

I've found that when I practice a single technique exclusively, it'll work for a bit but sooner or later I enter one of the dreaded "dry spells." Practicing harder during a dry spell only seems to make LDs more elusive, not to mention making me really frustrated when tons of effort yields no result. What has worked out best for me in the long run is to keep mixing things up: if I look back over my dream journal over the last few months, I see an alphabet soup: EILD, DEILD, DILD, WILD, even an entry marked "AILD"...I don't remember now what the heck that was! Moreover, my bathroom shelf looks like an apothecary's workshop after all the supplements I've tried.

I'm constantly trying new techniques and sometimes the sheer novelty seems to make them work at first even though they might not prove be very reliable in the long run (SSILD and FILD come to mind). But between the successes and the failures I'm constantly learning new things along the way and I think that, overall, the versatile approach has worked well for me.