My second day of attempting WILD, and this time I actually had some interesting results. I went to bed a little earlier today (10:30 PM) and woke up about five hours later at 3:30 AM. As soon I woke up, I really just wanted to go back to bed, but I reminded myself about the benefits of lucid dreaming. I forced myself to get up and go to the bathroom; afterwards, I tried WILD again. I propped my pillow up against the wall in attempt to avoid the saliva reflex and laid on my back. It actually worked pretty well, and I managed to avoid swallowing for a solid thirty minutes. I observed the flashes of color behind my eyelids; I imagined them morphing into real shapes. I'm not sure if I was just impatient, but I have to admit that the images weren't doing much for my lucidity. And then I felt the spit gather at the bottom of my throat. And I unintentionally swallowed. Great. I rolled onto my left side and started over; only ten minutes later, I swallowed again. For the second night, I was too tired to keep trying, so I rolled over to my right side and slowly fell asleep. This is when things got fuzzy.
The Basics (pre-lucidity)
For any readers who aren't very educated in WILD, I should explain some background information. WILD is when your body falls asleep, while your mind stays awake. You will be conscience as your body enters sleep paralysis (SP), which is a process that happens every night as you sleep. Many people describe the feeling as an iron blanket being pulled over them, and in earlier times, people thought of it as an "old hag" sitting on their chest. The process is totally natural, but since it's incredibly difficult to move as SP sets in, many people find it frightening. Hypnagogia will likely appear around this point. I think of these as hallucinations that are most commonly seen, heard, and felt. Hypnagogic images (HI) are the blobs of color that are seen behind your eyelids, but they can transform into patterns, and with practice, people or objects. You might hear people calling your name, screams, gunshots, etc at this stage. I've read that a common sound is tearing metal. Once you enter SP, I read that if you try to move, you might have an out-of-body experience/false awakening. You'll think that you woke up in your room when you're really in an exceptionally detailed dream. Most people who get to this point will feel a menacing force watching them, and some people even hallucinate witches or goblins (intruders) coming into their room and approaching their bed. What's even scarier is that since these people are still in SP, they can't do anything to counter these demons. It's important to remember that these are only projections in the mind- your mind, so if you expect to see a scary figure, then you probably will. The hallucinations can't hurt you, so you shouldn't be scared of them no matter how real they may seem.
Back to my bedroom. So, I only remembered this about twenty minutes after waking up, but I'm pretty sure I felt an "intruder" in my room. It's weird because I had given up trying to WILD for the night, but, and I know this sounds creepy, I fuzzily remember feeling as if a guy was standing by my door. For whatever reason, I wasn't scared; in fact, I vaguely recall even talking to him. I read somewhere that women may hallucinate of rape intruders before entering lucidity, but the weird thing was that I felt comforted by this guy's presence. I told him to come over to the right of my bed because I was lying on my right side, and I wanted us to face each other. I don't remember his exact profile, but I do know for a fact that he was pretty cute. I'm categorizing this sensation in that of the hallucinations because, as I said before, I was lying on my right side in real life, which means that I must have been having a false awakening since I was still on my right side on the bed in my hallucination. Of all of the things I was worried about hallucinating, a cute guy was definitely not one of them, so let's just say that it was a pleasant surprise. My next goal is to realize when I'm in a false awakening in order to take full advantage of lucidity.
I remember glimpses of other dreams from last night, such as: a girl I know having her pictures on a golf website (one of her winning something individually and one of her and her dad winning a father-daughter match), one of last year's MasterChef's contestants coming back older only to be told that her food had become bland, and finally one of my old middle school rhetoric teacher presenting a lesson, while my group and I made a paper caterpillar named "Emm" (someone suggested "Em-"?). I think I'm making progress.
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