Lucid Dreaming – WILD Induction Techniques
Hey there again dreamers!
(Firstly a quick apology for the ugliness of the post, I tired to slim it down a little but it still looks like a horrid block of text…)
I noticed that I hadn’t really put much effort into to writing about dream induction recently, WILD’s specifically, so I thought I’d take some time this weekend to put something together for you all. I’ll be going through a the best methods I’ve found for inducing dreams from the waking state as well as explaining when to go about trying out a WILD and some tips on maintaining focus.
Just to make clear! In this sense, WILD stands for ‘Wake Induced Lucid Dream’. This is where you can take your waking awareness (or lucidity) directly into the dream without any lapse of consciousness.
Due to the possible experience of sleep paralysis, WILDs have a reputation within the lucid dreaming community for being frightening and upsetting. Firstly I’d just like to state that sleep paralysis happens to every one of us each night to ensure that we don’t effectively ‘act out’ our dreams. It is also something that we all experience differently but it’s important to remember that you are in complete control and can wake at any point.
When inducing a lucid dream using any of the WILD methods, clarity is usually much better in comparison to DILDs meaning your awareness (and lucidity) is much more pronounced. What’s more, once if you get to the point that you can successfully produce WILDs at will, they can act as a ‘print on demand’ way to produce any type of lucid dream you want.
There are some limiting factors to it all though, which I’ll explain now…
The Wake-Back-To-Bed Method [WBTB]
There are some drawbacks to WILDs based upon what times of the night you are asleep and dreaming. Inducing a lucid dream will only be successful if you are falling asleep at a stage in the night when you are naturally dreaming.
Each night when we go to bed our bodies go through cycles of both REM (when we dream) and non-REM sleep (sometimes called nREM). At the start of the night when you first go to sleep our brains are but into non-REM sleep where we are not dreaming. Each cycle lasts around 90 minutes with REM periods increasing in length right up until morning. For a WILD to work, we need to be falling asleep during one of these periods to lucid dream.
The wake-back-to-bed (or WBTB) method is useful in catching these REM periods in time to induce lucid dreams. The idea is simple, waking yourself at the right point of the night and then trying to induce a WILD, falling back into a REM (and therefore dreaming) stage of sleep. The WBTB is simply an organized way of doing this.
Start off by setting an alarm to wake yourself around 5-6 hours after you first go to sleep. Upon waking, occupy yourself for 30 minutes planning your strategy for lucid dreaming or reading up on some more information. Once the time is up, simply return to bed performing the WILD.
When you go about performing a WILD you can imagine it much like walking on a tightrope, it’s about balancing your awareness. If you start concentrating too much on keeping your mind awake you won’t be able to fall asleep. Concentrate too little and you’ll fall into a non-lucid dream.
These methods are something to focus your mind on, practices that place you attention (and therefore awareness) in a state where you can stay awake without it being too obvious. In this way you can trick your body into thinking it is asleep and you’ll slip into a lucid dream.
For the first three, it’s likely that the dream environment you find yourself in will be the same as the one you fell asleep in. You’ll be lucid in your dream bedroom, so it might be worth remembering to do a quick reality check when you think you’re dreaming.
This is a beautiful method which I found surprisingly I had been using for some time without any knowledge that it was a specific named technique.
The idea is that you can become aware of your thoughts, following the images that go through your mind as you fall asleep until you are dreaming. The metaphor is this, for much like you would watch a butterfly skip from flower to flower, you can watch your own thoughts skip from scene to scene before one materializes into a dream.
For this to work you need to remain passive, an observer of the images going through your mind as it wanders. It’s hard to explain but is similar to when you sit daydreaming, letting your mind work without directing it through visual images. Achieving the right form of awareness can be difficult but will come with practice as you learn to remove the part of you that is conscious and follow your thought patterns.
You should find that as you ‘watch’ the images and scenes creating in your mind flick about wildly, focusing on random scenarios for short periods of time before flicking again. As you spend longer following these images you should find they start appeared more clearly and last for longer. Eventually one of these images will form the dream and you’ll be lucid dreaming.
Remember to maintain some amount of focus and awareness when using this method as it’s very easy to fall asleep. For example each time you flick to another scene quietly remind yourself that you are dreaming.
This is a very simple method and once perfected can be very simple to achieve without much effort. It can be difficult to get the right amount of awareness as described above so could result in you staying awake or falling asleep too easily.
The idea is that you can choose something form waking life to focus on as you fall asleep. The common object of focus used is some type of sound whether that’s a clock, computer monitor buzzing or relaxing music.
Find something you can listen to without directly disturbing your sleep, loud enough to hear clearly but not too loud to keep you awake. Music is effective but avoid drum-beats and lyrics as these can be distracting.
The trick is to be able to focus on the noise completely, ignoring everything else going on. Gradually as you maintain all your focus on the sound you’ll find it starts to slip away as if your moving further from the source, spiralling away into the distance. At the point when you can no longer hear the noise then your awareness has been transferred over to the dream and you are now lucid dreaming.
Like before, this can be a difficult method to get right. Concentrate too solidly on something and you won’t fall to sleep, don’t concentrate enough and you’ll slip into sleep.
The Impossible Movement Practice [IMP]
As the name suggests, this method is based around trying to move parts of the body which cannot. The focus in placed on a part of your body where upon dreaming the action your are trying to perform will become possible and you’ll be placed in a lucid dream.
How to go about doing this is quite simple, try moving some part of your body that cannot be moved in the sleeping position that you are in. For example if you’re lying on your back, imagine swinging your legs back and forth at the knee as if you were sat on a bench. Though impossible when lying in bed, once dreaming this action will be completed proving you are now dreaming.
I recommend using your hands for this practice due to their natural instability during the dream and the ease of the visualization for yourself. Trying to clench your fist when it’s tucked under your head, or close your hand through the mattress are both things you can picture and repeat quite easily.
When performing the impossible movement practice remover to focus all of your awareness on the movement you are trying to perform. If your thoughts start to stray, bring your attention back to the impossible movement though not forcefully otherwise you’ll be too awake.
The action you are imagining yourself performing will suddenly come to life when you slip into a dreaming state.
Familiar Scene Visualization
Like before this is an easy to do method though it does require more advanced visualization skills. On the other hand it’s very effective at creating a specific dream environment of your choice without much effort.
The practice is based around your ability to imagine a scene or environment as you fall asleep. AS you slip into a lucid dream the scene you imagined will come to life around you and suddenly become ‘real’.
To start off with, choose a place which you can comfortable picture in your head. Make it complex enough to keep yourself from getting bored but not too difficult that you struggle to visualize it. A place you visit a lot or know very well is helpful. Now, upon going to sleep start picturing the scene you have chosen. Engage all of your senses, imagining yourself walking round and touching things, smelling things and most of all, seeing things.
If for example you have chosen an indoor office of work room, go round and feel the walls, the scent of coffee and the coldness of the air on your skin. Of course all of this is in your imagination but as you progress closer and closer to sleep these things will become increasingly more real until you’re really stood in the scene and therefore a dream.
Well I hope that was helpful for you all! I will most likely do a follow up tutorial from this with more WILD techniques but try experimenting with these and see what you think. Some of these ideas were taken from a book I recently brought called ‘Are you Dreaming’ by Daniel Love. It contained ideas that I hadn’t seen anywhere online before so I whole heartedly recommend buying lucid dreaming books for the further insight and explanations that you sometimes don’t get when researching on the web.
As always feel free to send in any questions, dreams or tutorial suggestions. I’m writing book reviews at the moment so I hope they’ll be up soon!
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