BLILD - Bi-Location Induced Lucid Dreaming (Skip the need for sleep paralysis!)
So now that I've resumed my schedule of lucid dreaming every night, got my dream recall, length, and clarity all in check, and been practising heavily, I figured it was time to contribute the little gem I discovered recently by accident in case it could be of use to anyone else. This is, in some senses, a natural thing that can and does sometimes happen to us when we're trying to WILD or WBTB or some other technique, but I figured by simplifying the technique down to all the necessities, it'll be useful to people struggling with other methods. It also is a life-saver for people like myself who struggle to get into sleep paralysis unless they wake up already in it.
BLILD - Bi-location Induced Lucid Dreams/Bi-Locating Into (a) Lucid Dream - What does it mean?
Quote:
noun: bi-location
"the supposed phenomenon of being in two places simultaneously."
Anyone who has much experience with WILD, knows that once you are comfortably in sleep paralysis, you can simply engage the images behind your eyes, and draw yourself right the way into them, coming out the other side in your new dream. What many people however don't realise, is that sleep paralysis is NOT required to do this! Yes, you can skip that one pesky step that gets in the way for people who find it hard to keep still for the necessary length of time.
The effect this has however, is one of "splitting" your awareness into two streams. You will be completely inside your dream, but you will still feel your waking body, until it paralyses naturally. Thus, I call it BLILD because you essentially end up experiencing from two bodies at the same time at the beginning of the technique.
Requirements:
- You must be in an REM stage - Simple, set an alarm for after 6 hours of sleep, or for any other REM period (common other examples = after ~1.5 hours, after ~4.5 hours etc), so that when you awake you're at the perfect time for lucid dreaming.
- You need to be able to relax your eyes so that the mind's eye takes over - This can be done by letting your eyes sort of roll upwards like they do when you're trying to watch the images your mind produces in hypnagogia, if you do it right you should feel a sensation like you're sinking back into your head when your eyes roll back and relax. This is sometimes referred to as "trancing".
Optional Things That Help:
- You should have a healthy sleep pattern that matches natural circadian rhythm - By this I mean, sleep during the night, and wake up nice and early in the morning. You will have far more luck lucid dreaming like this than if you try to be a night owl. Our bodies are wired to benefit the most from being awake during sunlight hours, and asleep during the latter half of night (i.e. past 10-11pm). This might sound like a drag at first if you usually stay up at night, but changing can have lots of other benefits, the amount of energy you'll have when you start waking up at 6-8am every day is HUGE compared to when you sleep through the day. It will take a few days to adjust initially, but once you do, it's well worth it. If you work night shifts or otherwise can't adjust, this'll still work, but you'll find it easier to do during natural times.
- Start relying less on alarms to wake you in REM - Initially when practising lucid dreaming you want to rely on an alarm to wake you during REM periods, but later on you can just tell yourself as you're falling asleep "I will wake up after 6 hours" or "I will wake during REM" - the subconscious understands and follows pre-sleep instructions pretty damned well, you'd be surprised. This gets me waking up in REM without fail every night, and I no longer ever use an alarm. Another tip I learned is that if you wake up and it isn't because you heard a noise, and it isn't either a) less than 90 minutes since you went to bed or b) more than 7 hours since you went to bed, then you've almost always awoken during REM stages. It's one of the easiest times for our body to awaken mid dream, and as such most of the times you awaken early are the perfect time for lucid dream attempts, even if you didn't plan to wake up. So next time you awake early, instead of cursing and going back to bed, perform a BLILD, or a WILD or SSILD etc. When you awake naturally in REM, it's far easier to get back to sleep, to attain lucidity, and you also don't suffer the same shock to your system that causes you that tiredness that the alarm wake up results in.
- Slow down each day - Instead of rushing around everywhere on auto-pilot, take the time to slow down each day. Eat your meals deliberately and carefully, enjoying the taste and texture. Look around you and explore your five senses when you're walking to school/work/the shops. Notice the little things in the day, and take things slower, and your awareness in all your senses will increase in both waking and sleeping life. I highly recommend checking out the ADA (All Day Awareness) induction technique by KingYoshi if you haven't already. Do this coupled with your other techniques, and the benefits will be huge.
- You should really be recording your dreams each night in a dream journal/diary - A dream diary isn't necessary, but I'm putting it here anyway because if you take lucid dreaming seriously a dream diary/journal is a MUST! It improves all aspects of the process, the amount of dreams you remember, how well you remember them, how long they are, how often you become lucid in them etc. Seriously, if you don't have a journal already, start off now by writing down last night's dreams, and keep it up to date each morning!
The Technique:
- Wake up in an REM stage - If you're new to lucid dreaming, set an alarm for 6 hours after you go to bed. This'll place you right at the time before your longest and most easily usable REM stage. If you're more experienced, try just telling yourself before bed "I'll wake up in 6 hours" or "I'll wake up during REM" and letting your subconscious be its own alarm instead of being jolted awake unpleasantly.
- Use the bathroom and/or sit up and write down your dreams - Just something to ensure that you're comfortable when you lay back down, but also not so comfortable that you immediately fall back to sleep before you can conduct the rest of the process. Don't stay up for any longer though, since this method requires you to be more relaxed than regular WBTB etc. If you find even the smallest movement makes it hard for you to relax again, then don't even get up to go to the bathroom, just engage your thoughts, try to remember your dreams, maybe stretch your arms a little, then commence with the next step.
- Lay down, get comfortable and close your eyes - Make sure you're in a position you could fall asleep in. If you're like me you might find you need to make a few adjustments and shifts, but the cool thing is since sleep paralysis isn't required for this technique, it doesn't matter if you have to fidget a little to get comfortable, so long as you're not fidgeting so much you get insomnia and can't relax.
- Try and imagine the last dream you had, and see it in your mind's eye - As you do this, try and visualise it before your eyes like if you were there again. You'll find that since you're already relaxed, you can actually picture it more clearly than normal, but usually you'll notice that you can't get it looking crystal clear. That's okay, we're just visualising the last dream to activate that part of our brain that was active while dreaming, and to speed up the hypnagogia so we can jump straight into a dream. Keep doing this until you can find yourself imagining the details in your mind's eye, it doesn't matter if they're blurry or unclear, as long as you're engaging your mind's eye, you're ready for the next step.
- Now let go of the image, and relax your eyes completely, so you're no longer looking with your eyes, but your mind's eye - This is probably the hardest step, so I'll try my best to explain this one in more detail. Basically, you want to be holding the images of your last dream in your mind until you start to get other thoughts or images trying to replace it. The moment these thoughts/images other than the ones you're focusing on start to appear, you're about ready to jump into a dream. What you do now, is relax your eyes, let go of your focus on the previous dream, and shift your attention upwards slightly, there's a spot, roughly the centre of your forehead, which when you gaze at with relaxed eyes will cause imagery to come flooding in a lot clearer. If you're struggling to find the spot, the easiest thing I can tell you is to imagine the last time you fell asleep, you know how your eyes relax before you fall asleep? Do that, just let them sink back into your head, instead of focusing on your eyelids. As they sink back, you'll find the images start forming, and get clearer, and you might feel like you're sinking back into your head. In the Out-Of-Body experience community we sometimes call this eye technique "trancing", because just by relaxing your eyes in this way the images and sensations all get much more vivid and you disconnect a little more each time from your external senses.
- Now follow the images that form with your mind's eye - Again, the trick here is just to let the images come to you, they'll get clearer on their own just by you examining what you see. So say you start to see a blurry dark outline, try and think, what could it be an outline of? Oh, it looks like a roof? Well maybe its a house! As you fill in the details, the image will get clearer and become more vivid. Just keep following the details. Sometimes you'll find the image doesn't want to get any clearer, if that's the case, just "let go" of it, focus on visualising your last dream again, and then relax your eyes once more and let new images start coming to you. You want to keep repeating this until an image starts to get clear enough that it looks almost like you're watching the TV in your mind. This is your opportunity to jump into a dream, you're almost there!
- When one image becomes really clear, just keep focusing on it, exploring it with your eyes, until it is completely solid around you - You'll find that the more you look at the image, you eventually find yourself drawn into it. Suddenly you're no longer "watching TV in your mind", you're inside the image itself, inside the room, or by the house you saw earlier, etc. This is where the technique skips a stage though, you haven't yet entered sleep paralysis, so DO NOT move inside the dream! If you do, your real body will start to move, and while small movements won't wake you, larger ones will.
You are now inside the dream while still being aware of your probably still not paralysed body. If it's your first time, you might find this takes longer, and as such you'll just end up conducting a regular WILD, going through SP, and ending up in a dream (if that's the case, just enjoy your dream now).
If you managed to do this properly though, you should already be inside a dream 2-3 minutes after you closed your eyes, sometimes even quicker. It really is an incredibly fast technique. However, you will not be in sleep paralysis just yet, and you still have full control over your body. You also have a dream body, but since there's no sleep paralysis, moving your dream body = your real body moves, which can be problematic.
So, at this stage, you have, three choices, I'll outline all three and explain the pros and cons of each:
- Option 1 - Wait for sleep paralysis to rid you of your sense of your physical body - This is simple, and one of the ways that this dream is useful for people like me who struggle to relax enough to induce SP during WILD. Basically, when you're awake and trying to relax into sleep paralysis, it can be hard, especially if one of your muscles is tensed without you realising. When you're already in a dream however, your body automatically becomes relaxed enough for SP, and as such, it only takes 30-60 seconds of being in the dream before your body should become paralysed. At which point you can start moving around in the dream. The easy way to check if your body is still paralysed, is to think "Can I still feel myself in bed?" - if you can, it's probably not paralysed yet, if you can't feel it any more, try moving your finger slightly, and see if you feel it happen in two places or just in the dream. If it's just in the dream, success, you're fully lucid and in the dream now, enjoy!
- Option 2 - Be a set of eyes - If you're finding that using option 1 takes too long, or you like being able to feel your real body at the same time and the freedom having two sets of senses gives, then why not make the most of it. Instead of relying on a body to get around, be inventive. Be a floating orb or a set of floating eyes. Turn around using your mind, or, imagine the dream shifting around you to be weird and wonderful places that you've always wanted to see. Perhaps you could even see if this has any uses. Why not try this Remote Viewing Challenge and see if you can transport your eyes to a real location and gather information about it? It is a dream, so don't take anything you see too serious, but hey, it could be some fun, so why not give it a shot? ;) - If you're having trouble transporting yourself to a new location, then once you're in your first location, simply focus on feeling your body in bed until you're back in your mind's eye looking at the image from afar, then just let the image fade, and focus on the place you want to be transported to. The second image should come a lot easier and you should be able to jump right back into it with no trouble. You can view like 10-20+ places like this in sequence if you like.
- Option 3 - Grow a pair! - No not a pair of those, a new pair of legs, and a new pair of arms! Moving your existing dream body will result in the one in bed moving too, but if you use your mind to grow a new body for yourself or new limbs, you can use those to move around instead before you're even paralysed. Experiment, how does it feel to have two sets of bodies? To control 4 arms? Etc. If you find the new limbs still require your usual limb senses to control and are engaging your physical body, then try engaging them with your mind instead - if it helps, imagine the limb being like a prosthetic cyborg arm or something that you can move with your thoughts or with speech. Go wild with experimentation, there's so much you can do here. This is another reason I love this particular method because I find it a lot easier to play around changing my body when I'm focused on two bodies at once and my focus isn't entirely in the dream alone yet.
Feedback!
So this is where I'd like to ask your help. If you try this out, please post feedback here, did it work for you? Did you find changing anything about the method made it easier? Did you have any trouble? Which steps were easy and which were hard?
Any information helps, this is a new technique I only discovered in the past couple of weeks, and while I've had success with it most of the times I've tried it, I only know the method that works well for me, and haven't had the chance to share it with many others yet. So you guys have the opportunity to help improve the method.
I'd also love to hear what doorways this method opened up for you. Did you find yourself able to leave your body and OBE/Astral Project using this technique? Did you find yourself making new crazy bodies for your dream self? Or perhaps you tried remote viewing and actually saw something you believe was real? Maybe you found something new this method allows for that I never even thought of myself, if so, you should share!
Credit Where Due:
- Most of the steps in this technique are similar to WILD, the difference is the split awareness and skipping sleep paralysis, but I'd feel wrong not crediting the WILD method since it's the basis on which I discovered this.
- Robert Bruce, Monroe etc all deserve credit, since I discovered this originally while attempting certain Astral Projection methods. It's worth noting however that this is a form of lucid dreaming not a form of astral projection in its default form, there is a difference between the two, and it's one worth being aware of. I'm fairly certain this method could be adapted into an OBE exit though, and that's what I'm trying to work on at the moment, as well as narrowing down the steps more to make it easier/quicker.
- Dreamviews for all the other awesome techniques I've learned along the way and for spurring on my initial interest in LDs years back after I had my first couple of accidental ones!
:offtobed: Happy dreaming! Remember your reality checks! :dreaming:
