Hi.
This will be a lengthy post about my current progress, because I need some guidance. I’ll try to keep it as short as I can. If you don’t feel like reading everything, the last paragraph has a straight question you might be able to answer.
So, I’ve managed to get lucid a few times after I learned about lucid dreaming and read a bunch of stuff on the topic, so you’ll hear no skepticism from me.
Unfortunately most of the times they didn’t last long, since more often than not I’d get too excited and fatally lose grip on the dream. I remember the spinning trick working once, though.
As of now, I managed to become lucid only thanks to the nose-pinch reality check I randomly did in a dream. It never failed so I’m pretty content with that.
There were a few instances where I told myself “Wait, I’m dreaming.” and then carried on normally without becoming lucid. Heh, bad luck, I guess.
Anyways here’s the situation:
I’m a college student and a huge nerd. I spend my life in front of a monitor and I will do so until the day I croak. Even my studies and my work require me to spend time in front of a monitor (I’m a CG artist), with all the disadvantages to my sleep cycles that follow.
I’ve had a hard time falling asleep for as long as I can remember. For me to come home and just slip into bed and fall asleep require me either to be drunk, completely exhausted (as in, walking from one place to another for a whole day, e.g. when I’m on vacation visiting a city), or staying awake through the night (which happens more often than not).
When I’m finally sleeping however, even the alarm clock has a hard time waking me up. I’ve had to download an app that let me set my alarm clock to sound again if I didn’t check on it 15 minutes after shutting it off the first time, just to get me to not oversleep. Even then, I still manage to go through a few cycles of this.
My sleep routines are all over the place. Usually I end up staying awake through the wee hours of the night, oversleep and then have an even harder time getting tired the following night and so on, until one night I decide not to sleep (not that I have much of a choice), eventually nap for a few hours in the afternoon and manage to “set back my clock” to at least before sunrise.
I try aiding myself with melatonin pills, but sometimes they don’t work as well as they should.
So, back on the topic of lucid dreams, I mostly tried WILD and MILD, since WBTB was out of the question, but every time I’ve had a lucid dream was not thanks to me actually trying.
I’ve tried wearing headphones in bed, listening to white noise, but that didn’t work either.
So basically I’ve had periods where I constantly tried and then the motivation died down.
This is one of the periods where I got my motivation back but now I want to get some help, aswell.
It got triggered a few nights ago when I went to bed feeling unusually tired, then suddenly I felt increasingly numb and like I was on a rocking boat and that feeling persisted for a while. I thought “maybe I’m going into sleep paralysis, I should try going lucid”. I never felt conscious sleep paralysis so I wouldn’t know, maybe it was nothing. In the end, it didn’t result in anything good, but hell, I’m not giving up now.
I’ve kept a dream journal for a while, but other than the “classic dreams” like falling teeth and unexpected exams (which I haven’t had in a good while), my dreams all pretty much all different. On the bright side, I manage to remember dreams pretty well and usually the “alarm clock snooze cycles” I do at the end of my sleep are usually do to me having been dreaming and wanting to go back to continue. Just today this was the case and just before the fun moment was supposed to begin I couldn’t go back to sleep again. How lucky of me.
Anyways, I think my best bet would be doing reality checks out of habit in my dreams, but I have a question. I remember reading somewhere that reality checks done randomly don’t help and that you should be doing them only when you doubt reality being… well, real.
I mean, it doesn’t happen very often, now does it? This way it becomes hard to develop an habit. But is it really the case? Or did I just read a bunch of bull?
In any case, this is my story. I’m grateful for any advice you can give me. As usual, it’s almost 5:00 am over here and I’m off to try getting some sleep.