Hi folks,

My first post - but first I have to say this is a great community and has been a fantastic source of information! Really happy to have landed here...

I'm definitely a beginner, but I've been able to get a couple very brief LD's (the usual over-excitement syndrome) since joining the forum. But that's been more than enough to keep me motivated.

So those couple of experiences were DILD's, but I have also been practicing the WILD techniques in parallel. I haven't been obsessing on the success/failure (all failures so far, though), since I figure if I just practice the technique, after time the success will come (I hope!).

I've been reading every post on this topic of Numbness vs Paralysis I can find. I think I understand better now, but was still just hoping for a little guidance.


I've actually done a fair share of zen meditation prior to getting interested in LD, and that seems to make the first steps of WILD fairly easy for me. This is what my typical experience has been:

- I'm waking up to do the WILD after about 6-7 hours of sleep or doing daytime naps
- I lie on my back and I like to rest my hands right where they naturally land on my legs
- Probably due to the zen, I don't have much problem staying still, clearing my mind, and ignoring the little itches, etc.
- So after awhile, I feel that lightness of the body. I get that sensation where even though I know my hands are palms down, I can't really feel any particular orientation to them. It almost just feels like I'm floating in liquid.
- Eventually I start to experience what seem like little dream fragments. I'm actually still not sure if these are HI, HH, or true non-lucid dream fragments. But they last 1-2 seconds and once in awhile I actually have a split second of lucidity where I physically enter the sequence and can feel the solidity of objects. The most memorable was where I brought a fork of spaghetti up to my mouth and actual felt myself biting down on it before I snapped out...
- I'm sure due to my newbie-ness, these WILD sessions have so far either resulted in accidentally falling asleep completely, or just continuing to hop back and forth between dream fragments and awakeness, sometimes for more than an hour.


So on to my question...

So far I have never really experienced those vibrations or tingling that should be associated with actual SP (though I've read some posts saying that some people never really feel them). So I've been thinking that I'm probably only getting to that "numbness" stage and not beyond.

But at the same time, I don't quite understand how I can get to the stage of seeing those "dream fragments" if I'm not in SP.

I'm sure I'm just missing a fine detail here... Thanks in advance!


Thanks!