Ssild Official Tutorial (2.0)

Upon becoming lucid, especially the ones which you rise from your bed, it is important to perform some stabilization techniques first. Try these: - Grab and examine small objects in your room. Examine a few in a row, don't stop at one for too long. Try touching, flipping, reading. - Crawl on floor. - Shout something such as "More lucidity now!". Once the dream stabilizes you should leave the house scene as quickly as possible. Also you should constantly remind yourself that you are dreaming, and set and reset goals frequently -- don't set far-reaching goals, instead, break your actions into smaller milestones. For example, see that stair? Consider reaching the top of it a milestone. Upon reaching the top, immediately set another goal. Hope this helps.

SSILD works especially well with supplements, if you do it correctly, that is. Melatonin is not exactly an LD trigger. In fact, it suppresses LD! What it does is to suppress REM sleep, thus creates more NREM deep sleeps. When taken prior to sleep, it gives you a few hours of deep sleep with little REM sleep in each sleep cycle. After its effect diminishes, due to REM rebound effect, you start to have a lot REM sleeps stacked together. This in turn gives you better chance to LD. What you have been doing though is exactly the opposite, and that will cause you to have even less REMs than usual! Do this instead: take Melatonin 1 or 2 hours before going to sleep. Wake up after 4 or 5 hours and take Galantamine and some Alpha GPC. Go immediately back to bed to perform a few SSILD cycles and allow yourself to fall asleep ASAP afterward -- try to do it before the supplements cross the blood brain barrier which takes approximately an hour. You will almost guaranteed to have lots and lots of LDs/OBEs!

Remembering no dreams at all during your first awakening is a sign that Melatonin worked. It suppressed your REM sleeps during the early part of your sleep. The strain you felt on your eyes is normal. As long as it does not cause you to lose sleep it is okay. Don't pay attention to them because with the cycling you will soon move your focus to other senses and in turn relax the eyes. Doing a few extra quick cycles might help too. You saw some imagery forming in front of you, and you should consider that a semi-success! It is sign that you are getting close to a WILD. Next time you see this type of HIs you should stop cycling and observe them while remaining relaxed and passive. As you enter the dream they will get more intense, which is quite an experience but nothing to be afraid of... actually they are quite enjoyable. The other thing is with the many alarms. You shouldn't use alarms one you begin using SSILD. The technique will wake you naturally, and many of the awakenings are False Awakening which you can use to enter a LD. If if they are not FAs you may still be under some sort of light trance which you can utilize to achieve WILDs much more easily. Using alarms disrupts them so it's no good.

Thomas Yuschak in his excellent book "Advanced Lucid Dreaming -- The Power of Supplements" talks about this in depth. My personal experience also confirms it. I also saw a few academic papers on this subject. However, I'm no neuroscientist so I won't say which theory is right or wrong in the definitive way.

24 hours? You must be really tired then, and that's not ideal for lucid dreaming. If you prefer to chain the SSILD (performing a few cycles upon each awakening without getting up) then you should not get up to record dreams as that will break the trance -- some people (including me) like to do that in order to avoid having to get up. Otherwise it's fine.

There are several ways to do it. 1. Upon every subsequent awakening, perform a few SSILD cycles. If you are in FA doing so will likely result in immediate sensations to occur. 2. Remember to RC every time you wake up. 3. Upon waking up, immediately relax the back of your head and allow it to sink into the pillow. Focus on hearing at the same time. If successful, you will experience vibrations. This trick while slightly more difficult to master, has the added advantage which may help you enter a phase from a real awakened state in addition to FAs.

Drifting off in general is better than not, so basically it's a nicer problem to have, LOL. Counting breathing is fine because that essentially is focusing on body sensations and does not involve too much mental activities. To make yourself drift off less, simply stay awake a bit longer before returning to bed to do SSILD. Try to increment the time only little by little, say, a couple minutes, until you find the most optimal schedule for yourself.