Wake-Initiated Lucid Dreaming Is Easier Than You Think (WILD)

Presenting on how to WILD at the Lucid Dream Yoga retreat , Shambhala Mountain Center ~ 2018 ~ with Andrew Holocek and Stephen LaBerge

You can WILD. You just don't know it yet.

WILD has a reputation. People treat it like the advanced move, the thing you graduate to after years of practice. Too hard. Too technical. Definitely not for beginners.

It's really not. WILDs were my backdoor into lucid dreaming, and they get a worse rap than they deserve.

The photo on this post is from a retreat I co-facilitated with Andrew Holecek and Stephen LaBerge at Shambhala Mountain Center. The room was a mix of longtime meditators and lucid dream yoga enthusiasts. In that shot I'm presenting on how to induce Wake-Initiated Lucid Dreams, right before guiding the group into a hypnotic trance. That's all a WILD is: you go from waking straight into a dream while keeping awareness of your state intact.

Why WILD is actually easier than DILD

Most people come to lucid dreaming through DILD, dream-initiated lucid dreaming, where you're already inside a dream and you suddenly realize it. That works and is an essential foundation to have in order to lucid dream. But look at what it's asking of you. You have to catch yourself mid-dream, often hours after setting your intention to lucid dream...and go from forgetting your state to suddenly remembering to notice it.

A WILD flips that. You're awake, you know REM is only moments away, and all you have to do is stay conscious of your own state as you cross over. For many, it can be a lot easier to remember to get lucid when the dream is seconds out than to stumble into the realization later. The timing does half the work for you.

Would you be good at WILDs?

Meditation experience already gives you an edge with lucid dreaming, and it sets you up especially well for WILDs, because the whole skill is staying aware of your state through the wake to REM transition. That's basically what you're already doing on the cushion.

Your odds are even better if you:

• notice hypnagogic imagery as you fall asleep

• have experienced sleep paralysis

• can fall asleep easily while meditating

• have good recall and dreamsign awareness

• you learn to understand metachoric experience

  
  

And if none of that sounds like you yet, don't count yourself out. All of it is learnable.

What the wake-to-REM transition is like

As you cross from waking into REM, you might notice some strange things:

• sleep paralysis

• odd bodily sensations, like vibrations

• a heaviness on the chest

• a sense of a presence in the room

• abstract thoughts

• auditory hallucinations

• visual hypnagogic imagery

• a mix of waking and dreaming stimuli

• experiences of light

• floating over, rolling, or sliding off the bed

• dreaming of yourself laying in bed trying to WILD (...a dream body, in a dream bed, in a dream bedroom)

• a brand new dream scene suddenly appears

  
  

These experiences happen naturally when you fall asleep, you just don't typically notice it. If you don't know that, you might read them as signs that something is wrong. They're not. They're signposts. They mean you're close to REM sleep, or possibly already in it.

A simple WILD practice

The easiest place to start is right after you wake from a dream, when REM is still nearby. Try this during a brief awakening, or after a more prolonged period of sleep interruption (wake-back-to-bed technique; WBTB). As you drift back to sleep:

1. Meditate. A body scan or a 61-point yoga nidra relaxation works well. I have guided versions on my YouTube.

2. Keep repeating to yourself: "The next scene will be a dream."

3. Watch for the signs above, or any dreamsign.
   

That next scene might be somewhere completely new, or you might find yourself in a dream body, in a dream bed, in a dream bedroom. (The latter experience is one of the most common hurdles WILD-seekers miss... I discuss it more in this post). Either way, you're in.

Even if you lose lucidity, it isn't wasted

This is the part that kept me coming back. On the nights I lost awareness as I fell asleep, the attempt was not a failure. My intense focus on getting lucid made it more likely I'd go lucid later, in the dream that followed. So a WILD that "fails" often turns into a DILD anyway. And even if it doesn't, you're still practicing dreamsign recognition at the borderlands of REM. It's win, win, win.

It's why I had so many more lucid dreams once I started attempting WILDs regularly. So don't let the myth that "WILDs are hard" deter you!

Come practice WILD with us

You may be someone who could WILD pretty easily, even if you thought it was too hard before. If you want to take your lucid dream practice more seriously, come visit me in my Lucid Dreaming Practice Group. It's a small group of serious practitioners and we meet for one hour a month.