As I understand, it, the main reason WOTB works is because you disrupt your sleep during a time where the REM cycles are much longer and therefore you’re more likelier to be dreaming. But what happens if you happen to wake up in a non-REM phase?
For example, take my situation from last night. I woke myself up at 3:30. I’d had dreams, but they seemed more like distant memories than anything I had just interrupted or was in the middle of. What should I do in that case? Should I still perform the method, or should I abandon ship and wake myself later?
It’s not that important what sleep phase you awaken from, what matters more is how much sleep total you got before waking. If you got 5h of sleep for example, the amount of NREM you get when falling asleep after that will be a lot shorter, doesn’t matter what phase you woke up from. You always pass through nrem before getting to rem. Later in the night the nrem barrier just get shorter and the rem cycle gets longer.
Another factor that matters in WBTB is how well you can fall back to sleep. Different timings work for different people, it’s trial and error.