Senses Initiated Lucid Dream (SSILD) Part II

Try another position to excercise. I am not used to get asleep laying on my back.
Probably you can do so more cycles. After 4 or 5 cycles turn to the position you normally fall asleep.

This is great! Definately giving this a shot tonight!

but why does it work :confused: ,i don’t seem to understand the point of it,anyways,this tech is going to have a place in my program,we shall see :smile:
if i may ask,what was your name in DV ?

I tried this last night but I fall asleep after few seconds without any result. I decided to try it again this night. Do you think that if I drink some swings of cofee before I return to bed it will be better?? Or I couldn’t be able to sleep??

Let me give you one theory which I like the most (I’m not saying it is THE theory. After all, we know so little about these things in general, so it is always better to stay curious and modest than pretending we know it all.)

First let me provide a brief overview about the Focus Point model of our consciousness. Our consciousness is a vast and seamless “entity” (for lack of better terms) which covers a wide spectrum of “areas.” These areas include our waking state, dream, everything in between and beyond (higher state of consciousness). Just like how camera lense works, “focusing” on an area makes that area appear clearer, and other areas become blurry. Once it’s completely in focus, it becomes the focal point of our “self-awareness”. In this model, falling asleep and entering dreams is essentially the result of our focus shifting into the dream area. What we typically see as a slow and gradual process (falling asleep) can in fact happen in an instant if you could manage to shift your focus quickly. Whether or not this has any scientific basis I truly do not know. However, through years of practice I can indeed do this shift “manually” and sometimes extremely quickly – shifting from complete waking state (with small degrees of controllable physical movements still present at the time of shift) to other states in mere seconds. One interesting state is the intermediate state between waking and dreaming. In this state, our self-awareness is no longer confined in our physical body, but it has not yet entered the “dreamland” and assumed a “dream body.” Instead, it exists in pure intangible, shapeless state. Under this condition you can proceed to form a dream deliberately, or re-focus to move to a higher state of consciousness. This state is also extremely “fragile” because with but the slightest focus change you will return to the physical. In fact, it is not uncommon to be able to feel and command both the physical and mental at the same time, and that can produce some truly amazing results! Okay let’s not get carried away, LOL. Anyway, because our physical input and output are not fully “shielded” from us at this fragile state, our “attention” can be rather easily distracted. For example, sudden sounds, abrupt change of ambient lights, physical touches, and so on. When they happen we inevitably “pay attention” to them and as a result we change our Focus Point back to the waking state.

As you can see from the above, the way to move our Focus Point around is by “paying attention”. If we pay a lot of attention to the physical then we remain physical. Likewise if we pay more attention to things beyond physical then we are moving the focus point of our self-awareness toward them much closer. That, is the theory behind SSILD.

During the SSILD cycles, the first one is almost entirely loaded with the physical. You stare at the blackness behind your closed eyelids, that is physical. If your room is not completely dark you may even see the outside light, and that’s even more physical. You listen, and your ears are filled with outside noises – fans humming, wind blowing, and all that weird stuff. You try to feel and all you could feel is your bodily sensations – blanket rubbing against your skin, some itches, and that horrible backache, etc and etc. However, as you do more cycles, you may start to notice that these external sensations begin to fade, and some “internal” ones begin to appear. The more you cycle, the more attention you are paying to the internal sensations, and less attention are being paied to the external/physical ones. And that, moves your focus point closer to other areas in your consciousness. Think of this as a gentle massage of the mind. You are loosening the grips of the physical and warming up your mind for the more fun stuff.

Then you fall asleep. There are now more chances for you to become lucid in dreams because you have brought more focus/self-awareness with you. Or you may wake up into a false awakening. I suspect this is due to the fact that we all wake up multiple times at the end of each sleep cycle, and immediately fall asleep again. Since our focus point has shifted away from the physical so much during the exercise, when we briefly wake up we don’t have the necessary physical input so our mind simply makes it up for such occasions and immediately goes to sleep again.

Sometimes we do just wake up for real. However, our link with the physical world is still very loose due to the exercise, and thus we have much better chance to manually shift our focus at this stage. This is very powerful stuff. Once you can utilize this, you will almost be able to achieve 100% success with the technique.

Additional note: I always encourage doing SSILD in totally relaxed, lazy manner, and allow your mind to drift into a trance. The trance allows you to relax very quickly and divert your attention from the externals. People often run into problems with SSILD because they try so hard to bring out the sensations, and all that does is to glue their attentions to the external ones. Traditional meditation/relaxation techniques do not mix in well either, because focusing on relaxing your body is effectively, well, focusing on the physicals.

I hope this explains it rather than causing more confusion, LOL. Again, I must stress that this Focus Point model is just one way to look at this “consciousness” thing, and by no means I’m pitching it as a “fact”. It will be a lot more useful if you simply treat it as a “tool”. And in that case, it works wonderfully.

Ps. My DV forum user ID is “cosmiciron”. I no longer participate there outside the scope of SSILD related discussions.

i read it,and now,it’s time for some questions :tongue:
1-you said,The more you cycle, the more attention you are paying to the internal sensations, and less attention are being paied to the external/physical ones.
but,as we are cycling,aren’t we paying attention to our external/physical sensations every time we start a new cycle,you did said that we have to at the blackness behind your closed eyelids…etc,we keep doing this in each cycle,right?
or we are supposed to do something else after internal sensations begin to appear?
2-how many cycles i’am supposed to do before going to sleep,and if i don’t notice any internal sensations,should i just keep on going till i do?
3-you said that i should just use it as a “tool”,does that mean that i can have success with it even if i don’t know the Purpose of it.
thanx in advance :content: ,and sorry if i caused any Disturbance.

Questions are welcome, and no, it’s no Disturbance at all, LOL.

  1. You do each cycles in exact same manner, regardless of the sensation. Be it with or without the sensations, you just keep cycling through them. As you do more cycles, you get deeper into the trance (mind drifting back and forth), and you will notice that the external sensations become faded. For example, the humming from that ever-present AC unit no longer bothers you much, if not having completely faded away. Meanwhile, you may begin to notice the noises “in your head”. And as you pay more attention to them they may become more pronounced. This has the effect of shifting your focus away from the physicals. The beauty of SSILD is that you do not have to do this deliberately. The trance works like a gentle wave that carries you away from the physicals. Thus, you need to ease up, and allow the trance to do the trick for you. Even if you absolutely do not feel anything you should continue to cycle, knowing confidently you are slowing detaching yourself from the grip of the physical world.

  2. Typically 4 cycles are all you need. Some people fall asleep in the first couple of cycles and that is no good – you are not done with your “mental massage” yet! Some people find it harder to fall asleep if they do more cycles, but that actually means they are doing the exercise incorrectly – instead of riding with the wave, they are fighting against it! (People with traditional meditation/WILD backgrounds tend to do this.) Once you master the cycles, you can do as many rounds as you wish. You can massage your mind to such point that soon after your stop doing the cycles, you can shift your focus point in an instant and enter the dream world while being fully conscious. This, of course, is for more advanced users, so I won’t recommend it to everyone.

  3. Depend on what your beliefs are, the Focus Point model may contradict with what you believe to be the “truth”. In order to not get into debate of whether or not this model TRULY describes the nature of our consciousness, I decided to call it a “tool”. As long as it makes things easier then why not use it, LOL. For all matters of intent we now know that SSILD works, and this model seems not only explains it but compliments it quite nicely.

I hope this helps :smile:

Hey, I have a question if you don’t mind.

So, I continued doing the SSILD technique, and had a few more lucid dreams and FA. However, I am now pretty convinced that when I do SSILD I either get SP or get SP in a FA. Its pretty confusing lol. So far, I have had successful lucid dreams with this technique when I have SP with a FA, but there are sometimes when I have SP with FA but can’t exit my body. The normal techniques I would use to exit SP into a lucid dream/OBE don’t work all the time when in a FA and I was wondering if you have any suggestions as to have a lucid dream with the FA and SP seeing as how its pretty complex. Thanks in advance!

Great post, cosmic.iron! The Focus Point model does make a lot of sense to me, so I’m going with it. I think this explanation might really help me SSILD :smile:

A false awakening is just like a lucid dream, so an SP within an FA is essentially an illusion which is no different than being unable to fly or walking through walls. The method I find most effective in this situation is to focus on another place or object. For example, you could focus on the doorway of your room. A few seconds later you will find yourself standing in front of it!

I posted this on the other forum but I don’t think you saw:

Can you help me out a bit more? Thanks.

Okay… the eye problem. It indicates several things:

  1. You are using your physical eyes. Do your eyes twitch like that when you are sleeping normally? I guess not, right? Then you should do exactly the same. Just relax, don’t focus your physical eyes. You are seeing things through your mind’s eye. If you feel you are still stretching your eye muscles then just quickly move on to the other sensations.

  2. You are under the wrong impression that you should remain motionless, as with all other techniques. With SSILD you should do whatever that makes you feel comfortable. If that means roll over a couple of times, scratch that itch, swallow, or whatever, just do it!

  3. You are trying too hard and expecting to see immediate results. If you don’t feel like you are seeing anything, that’s PERFECTLY normal! You are not supposed to see things until your focus shifts away from the physicals (see my length posts above). You should not have any expectations throughout the exercise. :razz:

Becoming lucid in later dreams can happen frequently, but they are not guaranteed. You should pay close attention to the awakenings after doing the exercise. It is very possible that they are FAs. Even if they are not, you should immediately do a few more cycles which might give you a WILD or DILD in the dreams that follow.

Thank you mattias! I’m glad you liked it :smile:

I have done this exercise 5-6 times in total and have had a lucid dream on the same night twice. It may well be a technique that works for me after all.

Although I often have found myself forgetting where I am in the exercise and drifting away a bit, I have not noticed any peculiar imagery, sounds or sensations yet. In addition, I haven’t fallen asleep instantly after doing the cycles yet; I may well try doing one or two more than usual (I tend to stop at 4) to see if that puts me in any more of a trance.

Thanks for the post on the ‘Focus Point’ model. I suppose when the science isn’t there, it’s necessary to make somewhat bold theories like this.

Some people somehow tend to experience strange sensations more frequently than others. I’m still investigating this but so far no conclusion yet :smile: I will be interested in the result of your experiment as well.

First try and i got an LD ! :content: it was unstable and short, but still longer and more stable than my other LDs :happy:

and, this is the first tech that actually worked for me, other LDs i had was my own experiments that didn’t work well :smile:

Great! Make sure you also read my previous post on the theory, it might help.

Thank you for sharing this technique.

I’m very new to LD (about a month ago). All this time mostly I only use WBTB since it’s the easiest technique for me. I ever use WILD tree times and I dropped the tech since it make me awake more and then it kill my DR due to lost of time to sleep.

My DR is still at horrible state so MILD and other tech related are out of question.

Yesterday I stumble on your thread in DreamView about SSILD and try it on my WBTB session. I only through the cycle 2 times and then let my mind wander (since yesterday I didn’t make myself understand more on what being said in the tutorial and what I understand the most is not to force it, just lazily observe). Because I thought I need to focus to only one sense and not three of them but I did those three sense anyway.

The result is I recall 2 dreams. One was almost lucid because I thought I want to plant some blue weed that I saw in the dream so the weed would also grew in my dream. Thinking about dream in my dream is rare for me.

I would stick to this technique and see the further result.

Just to let you know, I did the technique this morning. I didn’t really get to sleep afterwards, but I went into SP not once, not twice, not three times, but four times in total. On the last two of these I was able to step into a lucid dream for a few seconds. On all occasions, however, I was woken up by external noise.

I have had these bouts of SP before in the morning, and am interested in finding out what it is that lets me be aware of it so easily. I just doze off without paying much attention to anything and then feel a bit of tingling which, once noticed, develops into full SP. SSILD could well help with getting into this ‘mode’! I’ll keep at it.

By repeatedly focusing on the various senses, SSILD seems to bring heightened awareness within dreams, as well as making you more sensitive to the sensations felt while falling asleep. On previous page there are couple of posts in which I was discussing the theory behind SSILD. Maybe you will find that interesting.