Thread: Trouble with staying awake while body goes to sleep

I've been attempting a wild every night for the past week now. Every attempt ends the same way: I wake up 5 hrs after I initially go to sleep, I attempt to keep my mind active while my body goes to sleep, but I end up falling asleep. I'm also not really sure what I should be focusing on during the first stage of a WILD.

I actually used to be really good at keeping my mind awake until my body went into sleep paralysis. I would inadvertently keep thinking about stuff and at some point I would feel sleep paralysis starting to come on. This doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Any tips for how to keep my mind awake while my body goes to sleep?

I’m still in the early stages of learning Wild however I’m finding I’m able to straddle the line of the body being a sleep and the mind aware for longer periods of time

Once my body feels relaxed I.e heavy / sunk in the mattress I turn my attention to the darkness behind my eye lids and just observe the Hi without rejecting or chasing it, occasionally I use a mantra if I feel I’m falling asleep to remind me what I’m doing and my goal.

I use “ walk the line” for me it has an element of mindfulness to it as well as the literal meaning steadily walking a thin line that leads to a WILD.

I currently hold the opinion that the more times we practice WILD , over time our ability to do it improves, we are creating/ training/ retraining a neural pathway.

Hope this helps.

WILD is tricky. Sensei (a well-known, very talented, non-natural lucid dreamer), writes this:

After a year of trying wild, I’d generally get one wild a week from a year to 18 months
And I was trying about 30-40 times a week
Maybe I suck at wild naturally, but this is how I see wild. When you get the hang of it, It would be something like 3% chance and then slowly go up from there

So, WILD is tricky, it takes a lot of attempt to get a good feel for it, and still, once you do, it can remain a fairly low-probability LD method. Some are clearly better at it than others.

I can't take the hit to sleep that this requires, so WILD is off the menu for me.

Most people, myself included use some form of “anchor”. This is something you keep very loose attention on as you fall asleep. Some use a mantra, others visualisation. I find attention on the breath works best for me but still my success rate is low. If you’re falling asleep too fast then try wake yourself up a bit. Use the toilet or write in your journal. It is a tricky thing to achieve but what I’ve found is even if I attempt WILD and fail I still raise my chances of having a DILD when I fall back asleep so it’s all worthwhile.