I tried all sorts of methods in the beginning. Really, the only thing that worked for me was focusing hard on dream recall and dream journaling. I love to write and can type pretty fast, so you'd think dream journaling would be easy for me, right? Wrong! One thing I found out is that my mind tries very hard to prevent me from remembering my dreams, or even recalling those I do remember. I seem to have a built-in resistance that causes me to be uncharacteristically lazy where dreams are concerned. I even feel lazy about typing out the dreams that are bounding about freely in my memory. Through study I've found that this is fairly normal for lots of people. It's a hurdle that must be dealt with.

So, early on, I was simply stuck with hoping for an instance of "waking up" inside one of my dreams. The whole "reality check" thing simply didn't work for me - or so I thought! Slowly I am starting to recognize a few dream signs that have come out in my journaling. Currently my #1 sign is reading stuff. Just last night I became lucid for a brief moment because, in the dream, I was trying to read my t-shirt! I was looking really hard at the shapes and words on my shirt, then suddenly I realized! I'm dreaming! So there's certainly merit to it, I'm just slow to master it.

Now, though, I'm starting to have some success with WILD techniques. But I cannot be wakeful whatsoever for it to work. If I'm fully awake, the only thing I can do is daydream until I drop off. But it's when I wake in the middle of the night, when I'm still delirious with sleep, that's when I can sometimes fall into a lucid dream. I've found a few things that work for me that increase my lucid chances, some of which are usually anathema to other dreamers. But I've read older techniques, from occult sources, that promote some of the very things modern day lucid dreamers frown upon. Please don't assume I'm into witchcraft! But the occult has long had interest in OBE and lucidity, so I'll take the wheat from the chaff.

That's my bottom line. There is great resource in these forums and in modern literature. But different things for different people. And very often some techniques that some master quickly take much longer for others. And not all that's taboo is taboo for all. Peace!