Losing sleep!

Hey guys, was wondering if maybe you could help me out.

The past week or so i’ve been trying to have a LD. Mainly with the MILD and WILD techniques. But my problem is when I wake up after 5 hours or so. I cannot go back to sleep. I’ve tried the breathing technique. I’ve tried laying down, at an incline and even tried to sleep in different beds. I will lay there for hours and cannot go back to sleep.

Did anyone else have this problem? It really sucks cause I can’t go back to sleep till around 4 am the next day, wakeup at 9-10am and stay up to 4 am… rinse and repeat. Anyone think they can help.

If I confused anyone about anything, excuse me… been going on lil sleep for the past week! :help:

I use counting 1…I’m dreaming etc and I sleep soon but I lose consciousness just the same!

If you can’t do WBTB, you don’t have to. Some people deprive themselves of sleep just so they can fall asleep faster during WBTB, but maybe that’s not good for you…
I don’t think you should stay up too long if you have trouble. The maximum amount of time I can stay up is 5 mins for WBTB, and after that I can’t go back to sleep. It’s different for everyone. Although the effects of WBTB aren’t as strong as if you can stay up 30 mins, the effect is still there, and maybe you can’t go back to sleep because you rise out of sleep quickly and staying up 5 mins will actually produce 30 mins worth of WBTB for you. What I do is I wake up by internal alarm (set by continuous awakenings at 5 AM by my alarm clock) and shut off my alarm clock (it’s still on in case my internal clock screws up). I just go to the bathroom and then go back to bed with one statement: “Gonna have a lucid dream.” That’s it and I let myself fall right asleep. Oh, I don’t ever open my eyes all the way either, else I take a long time to get to sleep. I don’t fight the grogginess but I make sure I can think properly before going to sleep.

If you do end up not being able to do WBTB, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just one technique out of many that you can use to induce LD’s. There are many people that have a lot of LD’s that don’t practice WBTB, so don’t feel that you have to. If you do choose to though, try some relaxing music (if you are someone who falls asleep easily with music like me) or other relaxation techniques

I don’t really know any relaxing music. Any suggestions? Like no lyrics are anything…just music.

there are some enya songs without words, you can find relaxing guitar music almost anywhere (I find guitar music puts me to sleep in about 30 seconds) there are special CD’s that are designed to put people to sleep. I wouldn’t try using these all the time though, just for WBTB because you don’t want to start relying on them to get to sleep :shy:

Music doesn’t really need to have no lyrics to put you to sleep (though it may help). My advice is to listen to some Floyd, or maybe even Radiohead. Songs like Shine on You Crazy Diamond or Echoes I find are quite sleep-inducing.

If depressing music is not the thing you’re looking for, Kitaro is quite peaceful to listen to and calm me down.

I’ve had that problem too. I think it’s about trying to fall asleep consciously, which can be very difficult for some people. My advice would be to do MILD for 5-10 minutes, then stop. Forget about it and fall asleep naturally. If you try to WILD, you might be up all night. :neutral:

I used to have this problem of always attempting WILD every time I went to sleep. I couldn’t defeat it, it just happened and my mind was always super-active. I don’t know how I got rid of it, but this may be what’s happening to you. I think I was a little too concentrated on lucid dreams. I would suggest relaxing as you would before you go into trance a nice way to fall asleep. You can also put some suggestions in to fall asleep quickly and to supress stray thoughts if you’re in trance. I haven’t tried this though… might as well, but this hypnosis thing only worked for me once.

I might try to self-hypnotise myself. I did do it to make myself sleep at least once…

When I try the WBTB method, I never do MILD or anything, its to time consuming and wakes me up even more. I just try to lay still and get right back to sleep, even if its only a minute after I’ve woken up.
I’ll just remind myself about having a lucid dream for maybe a few seconds, and thats it, then I’ll fall asleep. Sometimes it works wonders, sometimes it doesn’t do diddley. The important thing is not to try to hard. Trying to hard can be your biggest obstacle here.
Ofcourse, you also have to be good with the reality checks for this one. Once your alseep its like you know you have to do something, but can’t quite remember, or you’ll see a huge dreamsign that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. You really have to have your witts about you.

I’ve had that sorta thing happen to me before, and it’s really quite frustrating. For some reason getting up and drinking two big glasses of water seems to help. I usually wait about a half an hour to drink the water because it usually means that I will be getting up in about 30 - 45 minutes again, but it does get me to sleep again.

ypm.

You might want to drink milk instead-it will put you to sleep better than a water:)
good luck
ps.Did i mention(or mabe it was other thread)that WILD isnt the best technique for peope having troubles with falling asleep?Its not.
Do it only on the occasions you are sure you are tired and sleepy so you dont stress there for two hours getting angry on yourself and all that dream stuff.

Warm milk works the best! Cold milk… is like… cold water that wakes you up! :bored:

And yeah, don’t ever try to WILD if you’re not tired or anything. That will make it more frustrating. Also… you need sleep. Your body isn’t immortal…you know? :smile:

So, Jack is very right about that.

You know what works even better? BEER! :tongue: