Thread: Senses Initiated Lucid Dream (SSILD)

Is ssild actually easy? How does it mnake you lucid dream? Is it like wild were you are already concious or?

How do you know when you are in false awakening or false awakening is going to happen?

I mean in the past trying DEILD, focusing on tactile sensations waiting for dream to appear i would like stay awake for too long or just pass out for a brief moment and wake up in false awakening with no transmition sensations or anything, few times i did RC and found myself into false awakening still waiting for the dream to appear and still focusing on my body sensations. I didn't get any signs of transmition or anything.

Is there a way for me to know when false awakening happens and identify it while doing this?

Originally Posted by Imaginary

How do you know when you are in false awakening or false awakening is going to happen?

I mean in the past trying DEILD, focusing on tactile sensations waiting for dream to appear i would like stay awake for too long or just pass out for a brief moment and wake up in false awakening with no transmition sensations or anything, few times i did RC and found myself into false awakening still waiting for the dream to appear and still focusing on my body sensations. I didn't get any signs of transmition or anything.

Is there a way for me to know when false awakening happens and identify it while doing this?

There is no way to identify the FAs easily -- they can be quite convincing. Worse, some of the SSILD triggered FAs can be extremely life-like. The good news is that the chance of having FAs after performing SSILD can be very high, and when you are into these FAs you usually can remember clearly that you are waking up from SSILD. Thus, if you can develop the habit of reality checking upon awakening then you will have a much higher chance to catch these FAs.

Not meaning it to be judgemental, but logically, length of discussion thread does not necessarily correlate with "goodness of" a technique, it more appropriately measures "interest in" (and/or "problems with") said technique. WBTB is also (scientifically BTW, the LaBerge study) proven to boost LD frequency. So maybe SSILD is just WBTB, or maybe it's just a "mental anchor" for WILD (after all, WILD just means falling asleep holding on to some awareness) . But even if so, SSILD is at least a concrete and fairly simple approach to doing these things. Sometimes we get too stuck on labels...

i've found success with ssild only twice and hadn't yield any real results since...there must be something wrong i'm doing, it's such a promising technique for me. last night i slept a bit before 12 and woke up around 3:50, stayed up for five minutes. fast cycles no problem, then the longer ones. i focus on each sense for at least 30 seconds. is that too long?

i find that when i'm successful with this technique i feel like i'm losing sleep..

Originally Posted by mitten1997

i've found success with ssild only twice and hadn't yield any real results since...there must be something wrong i'm doing, it's such a promising technique for me. last night i slept a bit before 12 and woke up around 3:50, stayed up for five minutes. fast cycles no problem, then the longer ones. i focus on each sense for at least 30 seconds. is that too long?

i find that when i'm successful with this technique i feel like i'm losing sleep..

So what happened last night? Did you fall asleep after the cycles? If so how long it took you? Did you remember any dreams afterward? Any subsequent awakenings? Let me know more details so I can help you diagnose.

hello as soon as i did the cycles i turned over to fall asleep, which was difficult. i was falling asleep during the cycles though. i spent the next two hours in light sleep and didn't dream at all. when i woke up i did an rc and failed. the thing is i also slept like this when the technique resulted in a dild on two occasions. the weird thing is that i felt like i was conscious during those two hours, it didn't even feel like i was asleep that long.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Not meaning it to be judgemental, but logically, length of discussion thread does not necessarily correlate with "goodness of" a technique, it more appropriately measures "interest in" (and/or "problems with") said technique. WBTB is also (scientifically BTW, the LaBerge study) proven to boost LD frequency. So maybe SSILD is just WBTB, or maybe it's just a "mental anchor" for WILD (after all, WILD just means falling asleep holding on to some awareness) . But even if so, SSILD is at least a concrete and fairly simple approach to doing these things. Sometimes we get too stuck on labels...

FryingMan, my friend...one counter if I may. I hear you on the logical point, but my experience in going around these forums is that people tend to move on if they don't either see people having success with a given technique or are finding success themselves. If a technique is difficult to comprehend and/or takes significant effort, then you lose a huge group of people right off of the top. That is unfortunate because long term success in lucid dreaming takes significant effort for most people. Anyway, here is a little hidden thread that was created just over 9 months after this thread was started:

http://www.dreamviews.com/induction-...s-stories.html

It is quite impressive to read all of the successes. It was posted almost a year and a half ago so there are more stories that could be added to it. Also, if you believe that it creates a trance-like state (which I can sometimes notice) then it would have to be a little more than just WBTB.

Yeah SSILD works, I don't think that can be questioned.

I think it takes a little personalized tweaking for everyone, meaning for some people they need to sleep for 6 hours before doing the cycles, for others it works best after 4. Some need to get out of bed and jump around for a couple minutes so they don't instantly fall asleep, others shouldn't even get out of bed or they will be awake for hours.

The cycles themselves are just one part of the equation, the rest of it is pretty personalized based on everything I've read (this whole thread) and my personal experience. Takes time to learn it/fit it into your life.

Yeah, but I don't pay much heed to success stories unless they hold steady and regular for serious time (months, years). "It worked once for me!" is really not statistically interesting (people LD for the first time sometimes just by being excited about this new thing). But I know you personally get a lot of LDs out of it, so that to me means it should remain in serious consideration...

Originally Posted by mitten1997

hello as soon as i did the cycles i turned over to fall asleep, which was difficult. i was falling asleep during the cycles though. i spent the next two hours in light sleep and didn't dream at all. when i woke up i did an rc and failed. the thing is i also slept like this when the technique resulted in a dild on two occasions. the weird thing is that i felt like i was conscious during those two hours, it didn't even feel like i was asleep that long.

This is normal, and usually goes away with a little bit more practice. If you are falling asleep during the cycles, just let go and sleep. The trick of SSILD is to know when to give up

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Yeah, but I don't pay much heed to success stories unless they hold steady and regular for serious time (months, years). "It worked once for me!" is really not statistically interesting (people LD for the first time sometimes just by being excited about this new thing). But I know you personally get a lot of LDs out of it, so that to me means it should remain in serious consideration...

There is also a thread in which people test the technique continuously for 30 days. While the technique is far from perfect, it does work consistently for many people, and the evidences are all over the net.

first and foremost i want to give my thanks to CosmicIron. Ive been a silent reader of this forum and this particular thread for a while now, 2 weeks to be exact. The main reason i wanted to try this method is because of its simplicity. Just lay back, relax and sleep. Any idiot can do that, i thought to myself.

How wrong was i. 2 weeks without nothing but total relaxation before drifting off to sleep. Maybe because of my sleep schedule which is quite messed up (3am - 9.30am), it had impacted my trial of this method. But i promised myself that i wouldn't give up unless i given this a months test. Right now, im on a vacation and decided what better time to try this out since my sleep scheduled would be normal again, even for a few days.

I didn't exactly perform a WBTB but i was able to be in a LD for the first time in my life. here how it goes:

I woke up and gone to the buffet breakfast, came back and still quite sleepy. Took the chance to catch a few zzzs, before falling asleep, i did 4 quick cycles, then continue with another 4 rounds of slow ones. This time i am able to complete all 4 cycles with some minor disturbances(itchiness , etc). I did this quite differently then before, i would usually do this on my back and fall asleep on my side, but today i would do it on my side while crossing my arms(so that i wouldnt fall asleep so easily) and after im done with all the cycles, i would let go of my arms and fall asleep on my side as usual.

After that, i fall asleep, with this method, i realise that it relaxes me to the max and it eases the process of falling asleep. Nothing out of the norm after that, got into a dream, normal. After i start practising this method, i realise that my dreams are much much more easier to remember/recall. The dream was quite vivid, i see the faces of my friends and remember each of them, but the environment was unknown to me. But suddenly, clones of my friends started to appear, so each of them had 3 clones with them. Then suddenly, i realised something, Im dreaming! I shouted loudly(in my dreams) that i'm dreaming and i demanded to be lucid. And guess what, i got lucid! yeay! for the first time ever in my life!

I was so happy at the time, and glad that i didnt woke up because i read that if you get to excited you might wake up. After screaming that, i decided to do a couple of RC and i dont know why since i'm already lucid. LOL. I did the hands check, i see that my fingers were all twisted up looking funny, and then did the nose plug. Both checked out and i know i'm dreaming. Now comes the fun part.

I start experimenting with the people i want to see, but i am not able to meet them. Guess have to practice more. Then i started walking around the area and started disturbing the people that seems to be working there. Suddenly, i closed my dream eyes and the place got dark. After that i open my eyes again and i woke up from my dream and sees my hotel room, the thing is, i woke up in a different position and the hotel room looks different. I did a nose plug again, and wallah, im still breathing. Guess this is what is called an FA right CosmicIron? Then i wanted to fly, but i only got up to the ceiling of my room and got stuck. Its okay, i opened the door and sees that its quite dark with some nightmareish characters around, so i decided to jump out of the window. When falling from my room, i see that i can slow down time almost Matrix like. LOL

After that i walked around the town that im in and did some crazy stuff. After that i hear my phone ringing and i finally woke up while cursing the caller. LOL. What a wonderful experience. Will try to LD again tonight.

What i noticed was that it was so vivid that every touch i can feel, almost as if im in real life. Thank you CosmicIron for sharing this technique and i will continue updating this thread everytime i have an LD. sorry if this post is too long. I was super excited to share my first LD ever with you and the others

Thank you cosmiciron! I've tried ssild 3 times and it has worked 2 times in a row

I tried this for my 1st time after 4-5 hours
and nothing happened to me.
I was "reporting" what task would be next as well
such as: "next stage i'll have to imagine a color"
Maybe that interfered in my sleep?
I also take a long time to sleep, so i just have to re-do it
over and over again?

Originally Posted by Iriba

I tried this for my 1st time after 4-5 hours
and nothing happened to me.
I was "reporting" what task would be next as well
such as: "next stage i'll have to imagine a color"
Maybe that interfered in my sleep?
I also take a long time to sleep, so i just have to re-do it
over and over again?

You don't need to "imagine" seeing things. That interferes with the technique and causes stress to prevent you from falling sleep. Just passively observe what's in front of you, with your eyes closd of course, and do not strain to see anything. It is perfectly okay not to see anything. Just the action of seeing is enough. Don't think too much.

First of all I want to say that this technique has worked wonders for me. I have a pretty much 100% success rate with LDs now and that was going from having maybe one LD a week, and never knowing when it would happen. And the really cool thing is that when it works, it really works and I'll tend to have at least 3 or 4 LDs with it. I am curious and at some point in time I am going to test whether it is the technique, or just wbtb that is making me lucid, but for now I'm enjoying having tons of LDs and will have faith in the technique.

Now the question I have is this, except for helping with deilds, does dream journaling help when using this technique? Also, should I be doing the technique every time I wake up after my initial wbtb? Thanks!

Hey Cosmic, it says in the tutorial that doing the cycles upon initial sleep is a waste of time. However, I have found that is not the case for me. Lately I have been doing the cycles upon initial sleep, then waking via alarm somewhere between 3-5 hours later. And I have noticed that my recall/awareness is way higher during that time when I did the cycles beforehand than when I didn't.

I just came across this thread yesterday and so last night I tried out the technique. The first time worked like a charm! It could just be the enthusiasm about trying something new, but what impressed me was that the LD itself felt very different from either the WILDs or DILDs I have typically.

My usual homebrew WILD technique is to WBTB after 3-5 hours (I never use an alarm as I often wake up naturally during the night), lie on my back and count incrementally while using meditative breathing, the same number on each in and out breath. The advantage of this technique is that I can tell when I'm getting close to sleep by how easily I lose my place in the numbers, so it makes me attentive to the process of falling asleep. The disadvantage is that I almost never go directly into the dream state: I would drift very close to sleep and then at some point fully wake up again, usually before reaching 100. At this point I would give up on the attempt and turn on my side to let myself fall asleep without any further technique, but this pattern led to enough successes that I eventually realized that what I had thought of as "giving up" was actually an integral part of the process. Still, my success rate was never as high as I would like.

At risk of being criticized by people with different notions or who use the terms differently, I should perhaps point out that when I say "WILD" I am referring to the type of dream that some people apparently call "OBE," that is, my WILDs have always involved transitioning to a dream body and getting up out of bed into a dream version of the place I fell asleep. This is relevant because the dream I experienced with the SSILD was distinct from what I would normally class as a WILD. It was also not really a DILD, in that I didn't become lucid within an ongoing dream. Rather, the emergence of the dream state and my awareness of it seemed to coalesce together at the border of sleep. It actually felt like a type of dream I hadn't had before, which is encouraging. (Then again, the whole time I was falling asleep I kept reminding myself, as per the OP's instructions, that I was not trying to WILD, so maybe the dream was just responding to my expectations!)

I've never been prone to vivid hypnogogic imagery, sounds, or sensations, even during the onset of successful WILDs, but I did notice that the SSILD technique of sense-cycling seemed to make me better attuned than normal to hypnogogic imagery and phrases (my hypnogogic experiences usually consist of random verbal constructions rather than sensations). It's also notable that the vividness did not occur while I was performing the sense-cycling exercise, but afterwards when I was no longer paying deliberate attention but just trying to let myself fall asleep. This surprised me because I always thought I had been sufficiently attentive to the hypnogogic state while using my normal WILD technique, but this was much more vivid. It seemed as though the deliberateness of cycling my attention through one type of sensation at a time ("sight, sound, somatic," I kept reminding myself) worked to enhance my overall awareness afterward.

It also delayed the onset of sleep rather longer than I would have expected, but I might have done the initially cycling a bit "aggressively," as the OP put in a later post. Still, I was hoping for success and I got it. A single success is, of course, by no means definitive, but it was encouraging, and I will continue to experiment with this technique.

(My description of the dream itself is posted on my dream journal.)

Am i able to SSILD when going for a sleep in the morning?

Originally Posted by solpic

First of all I want to say that this technique has worked wonders for me. I have a pretty much 100% success rate with LDs now and that was going from having maybe one LD a week, and never knowing when it would happen. And the really cool thing is that when it works, it really works and I'll tend to have at least 3 or 4 LDs with it. I am curious and at some point in time I am going to test whether it is the technique, or just wbtb that is making me lucid, but for now I'm enjoying having tons of LDs and will have faith in the technique.

Now the question I have is this, except for helping with deilds, does dream journaling help when using this technique? Also, should I be doing the technique every time I wake up after my initial wbtb? Thanks!

Dream journaling is nice and improves dream recall, but I personally don't feel it adds extra value to the technique. As for your other question, I feel that since you already have a very high success rate you probably shouldn't alter your routines too much. There is no definitive BEST way to do this technique. What's best is the one that works for you

Originally Posted by Matt1

Hey Cosmic, it says in the tutorial that doing the cycles upon initial sleep is a waste of time. However, I have found that is not the case for me. Lately I have been doing the cycles upon initial sleep, then waking via alarm somewhere between 3-5 hours later. And I have noticed that my recall/awareness is way higher during that time when I did the cycles beforehand than when I didn't.

Your observation is true, I think. On our forum there are quite a few people who have managed to use SSILD to trigger LDs during initial sleep. Personally I also observe better recall and dream vividness whenever I perform the cycles.

Originally Posted by TheAssassin56

Am i able to SSILD when going for a sleep in the morning?

You can use SSILD any time you want. Just don't focus too much or get excited when doing it, as you may risk losing sleep.

Originally Posted by CosmicIron

You can use SSILD any time you want. Just don't focus too much or get excited when doing it, as you may risk losing sleep.

Haha, you're damn right about that. After using SSILD so successfully the night before last, but only getting about five hours of sleep because I spent the rest of the morning writing everything down, last night I was just planning to catch up on my sleep without any kind of practice. But upon waking up naturally after five hours I was like, "Well, it couldn't hurt just to run through some cycles. It's not a real attempt or anything. I'll just see what happens." After lying in bed awake for the next hour and a half, I had to acknowledge that I was up for the day!

I actually find this quite interesting because normally I'll wake up and even get out of bed from two to six times in an average night and never have any trouble getting back to sleep, even after hour-long WBTBs drinking caffeinated tea and using my computer with all the lights on, followed by intensive counting regimes when I'm making a WILD attempt. After I'm done, I usually fall back asleep effortlessly within minutes. It makes me speculate that something about engaging the senses with SSILD signals "wakefulness" to part of the brain -- perhaps the very part that needs to be active during dreaming to establish lucid awareness.

On the same basis, on the rare occasions that I have experienced real insomnia, I'm always pleased because I know that if I do succeed in getting to sleep, my chances of having an LD are greatly increased. So I wonder if the reason SSILD is effective is because it stimulates the very conditions that would normally keep the higher brain functions active and awake, but counters the potential for insomnia with the suggestion to do it "lazily," don't actively try to WILD, just relax and go to sleep.

Hi all,

Just wanted to say I have practiced this seriously for one night -- had three false awakenings and one LD.

Also wanted to add that this LD was a false awakening, and occurred at the beginning of the night (in the first cycle). So it can work at the beginning of the night, seemingly, and with there not being too much time or effort investment, it's worth a shot, isn't it?

EDIT: Just read some of the newer stuff, so I realize I am not alone! Hurray for first-cycle SSILDs!

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Not meaning it to be judgemental, but logically, length of discussion thread does not necessarily correlate with "goodness of" a technique, it more appropriately measures "interest in" (and/or "problems with") said technique. WBTB is also (scientifically BTW, the LaBerge study) proven to boost LD frequency. So maybe SSILD is just WBTB, or maybe it's just a "mental anchor" for WILD (after all, WILD just means falling asleep holding on to some awareness) . But even if so, SSILD is at least a concrete and fairly simple approach to doing these things. Sometimes we get too stuck on labels...

FryingMan (are you a cook, BTW?), here is my guess at why SSILD works. I believe it is a mix of stimulating our strongest senses before REM (which has already been hypothesized by many others here) which may make us more aware and all that good stuff. On the other hand, I think that the emptiness of the mind during SSILD creates a kind of default dream landscape (your bedroom, probably, with the dream "program" that you've awakened).

I think it is very similar to what Sageous talks about in his WILD thread -- the quietness of the mind during WILD, in general, can create a kind of landscape that resembles the place you started, as the mind has not had time to really spin up some wild dream scene. Also, FAs are easier to turn into LDs because (IMO) it is easier to train the mind to RC upon awakening (because it can be made a habit) than it is to train the mind to recognize dream signs.

BTW, is one of your dream signs being blown away by the wind? Please tell me yes. I've snooped on your DJ a couple of times and was struck by how much that wind wants to blow you away.