I am trying as hard as I can to get some sleep before doing NILD and WILD…But the problem is, i have school. So everything I do has to be adjusted to that. I also normally go to bed at 12…And I’m trying to change, but one thing is in the way:
FAMILY.
I’m trying, and I’m trying as hard as I can to change my schedule. However, there is constantly light and sound and loud music going around everywhere, it gets very annoying. To the point where I cannot sleep at all. And I cant get them to cooperate either, because every time I mention this they kind of laugh and say I’m crazy…UGH!!!
How do I solve this problem? The way I see it…
I can get no sleep at all during the night so no matter what I’m tired during the day. This will ruin my schedule but is a temporary solution (This is the one I am currently doing)
I can try going to bed at 12 (although sometimes its 1 or 2) and waking myself up at 5 or 6…but that would leave An hour and a half or…half an hour!
Do you have your own room? If so then close the door and block the window with a shade or something. If there is a lot of sound coming from outside… you could try sleeping with a fan on. The white noise from a fan will block out a lot of noise that will be coming from other rooms. Thats my suggestion. I always sleep with a fan on.
Your family stays up until midnight every night? At least you have a valid excuse to sleep in class.
But seriously though, I don’t see why you can’t just close the door. This should remove the problem with the light. As for the sound, you could try asking them to turn whatever is making the noise down, or off. If it’s just them, ask them to talk a little quieter so you can get to sleep.
You could also try LostBoys suggestion and use a fan or other ambient sound generator. If your like me though, and can’t sleep until it’s dead silent, it may require a slight adjustment over time to do this.
Just a side-note that you may be interested in. I used to have this same problem on the opposite side of midnight. My family would wake me up with their loud talking at all hours of the morning. Usually at about 5 someone would be up clashing everything around in the kitchen in an attempt to make breakfast without the aid of a natural light source.
Anyway, while this often woke me up, when I went back to sleep they would still be there making lots of sound, which often made it’s way into my dreams. I would usually have thousands of false awakenings in which I get up and join them in the kitchen for breakfast. Eventually, I managed to use this as a dream sign and become lucid almost any time I dreamed about my family in the kitchen.
Perhaps you can try to get to sleep even earlier (say about 9), set your alarm for midnight, and try a WILD while keeping your mind focused on your family making all that noise in the other room. Don’t forget, it’s easy to get back to sleep if you have just woken up.
If you need things to be really quiet try buying some of those spingy formable ear plugs from the pharmacy. They work pretty good. Thats what I used to use in the dorms at school last year. I roomed with a guy who would annoyingly sleep through all of his classes and then stay up all night. Nice guy… bad for sleeping in the same room with.
I don’t mean to be judgmental towards your personal life, but I really don’t see what’s funny about undisturbed sleep. Try reasoning and show them that you respect them when they sleep, and you also have to worry about school which is very important. Earplugs can’t be comfortable all night…I’ve had to wear them for a job and they become painful.
The idea of a fan isn’t to drown out the noise. It’s to create a constant ambiant sound that you can get used to fairly quickly. It’s quite hard to fall asleep when you can hear people talking and bashing things around in another room, because the sound is not constant. There are breif moments of silence, then sudden noises, then strange sounds that make you actively think. With a fan, not only does it stop you from hearing these other things, but it also dosn’t keep your mind actively listening to anything.
Yeah… not only do you have the sound of the fan close to you… but the white noise created by the fan, in fact all white noise, blocks a lot of other sound out. It effectively blocks other sound frequencies. Its not going to block all the sound out, probably, but it will make sounds outside the room fade into the background and become, perhaps, easier to handle.
As for the earplugs… I guess thats a personal thing. I had these foam plugs that you squeeze and then insert into your ear. They then expand to fill the contours of your ear canal. I found them to be quite comfortable and I slept with them all night long… even with my ear against the pillow. In fact, I always slept really deeply with them in. Ross can always give them a try.
I agree though that his family should respect his wish to sleep without all the noise. Especially if its at a decent time like 12 am.
If none of this works then i suggest that you could be noisy when they try to get to sleep and when they need to go to work or wherever. Say on a school holiday. Then when they aer awake all night with your noise maybe then the’ll realise how it is and be quiet for you.
This is just a thought, you don’t need to try it if you don’t want to of course. I don’t know how your family are so i leave the decision to you.
The general purpose of WILD is to allow you to enter a dream directly, without the usual period of unconscious sleep first. The idea is that after you wake up from 3 or 4 hours sleep, upon returing to bed you will almost certainly fall straight into a dream.
Now, if you can keep your mind focused on the transition, and prevent it from getting lost on the random thoughts that will start to occur, then you have a good chance of successfully performing the WILD. This used to happen to me quite often when I was about 10. After waking up in the middle of the night, I would find that as I went back to sleep I could sometimes see the dream coming back. Usually it would zoom in from the distance, or fade in.
You will notice strange sounds at this point, like a set of tones humming in your ear. You may or may not experience other hypnagogic hallucinations, but you should try to concentrate on imaginging yourself back in a dream. After all, it’s your imagination creating the entire dream world. There is nothing stopping you from guiding it while you are falling asleep.
I’m trying to make this sound easy, because your success depends a lot on how much you believe you can do it. Often someone might reply and tell me I’m making it sound like a trivial activity that anyone can do, but that’s the point. Anyone can do it, you just have to be thinking about the right things.
Anyway, good luck with it. Weekends are always great for trying WILDs.
