shane - your goal is to obtain sleep paralysis. when paralyzed, moving is either difficult (shallow paralysis) or requires all your willpower just to twitch your finger (deep paralysis). during this whole time you are scanning your body …
keep it still buddy. use the jedi powers of your mind that the Great Pastamonster gave you.
what I do is imagine a single fingertip touching every piece of exposed skin (as a meditative exercise), then go through and scan all my muscles, ligaments, and tendons the same way, then my bones, then my organs, then all the stuff that’s not corporeal, then repeat the cycle. if you try to go through that whole thing while sleeping you won’t sleep, but you could take a much broader surface area and scan the skin with very little focus required (think 3 fingertips, or the palm of your hand).
fun fact: that meditative exercise, applied for 10 years straight and using increasingly smaller focus points, was how the Buddha finally attained enlightenment - it’s called vipassana meditation, and is very useful for beginning and experienced meditators alike.
but this isn’t a topic about meditation, it’s a topic about dreaming.
My progress: 1 step forward, 3 steps back. I suffered an undesirable setback in my polyphasic adaptation today (that was my own fault) that has made my naps of supremely poor quality. I intend to keep napping through the night and continuing to apply SILD to see if I can achieve another dream body experience.