You should never really have the choice of falling asleep or giving up. You should not be trying to keep yourself from falling asleep. You have all the details right, but you are missing the big concept. Remember your main goal is to keep a small part of yourself aware as you fall asleep. Everything you are already doing is supposed to be helping to make this possible. When you are counting your breaths, you should find yourself losing count every once and a while and having to start over. This is a good sign that you are about to fall asleep. When you are relaxing your body, you should eventually become so relaxed, you lose track of it all together. Make sure you are really relaxing the way you would to fall asleep.

Your timing may be off, also. You want to time your WBTB so you are falling back to sleep right as a long REM cycle hits. Try moving your WBTB around, or shortening or lengthening it so you will hit a long block of dreams. A successful WILD should really only take 5-15 minutes. It becomes difficult to keep yourself in the right frame of mind for longer than that without lots of practice and experience.