An account

Went back to what worked in the first place: SSILD. Realized I was dreaming and decided to complete a dream task. I have been telling myself for the past week and a half that my "lucid adventures" will not start until I find a particular dream character sitting on a park bench near my house. So as soon as I became lucid, I wasted no time in trying to execute this goal. I managed to get out my house and into the street. When I was half-way there, a powerful wind started blowing in the opposite direction making it obnoxiously hard for me to keep moving forward until I started flying into the air. I immediately tried to resort to my classic dream control tactics of using expectation to get everything under control but to no avail. I was so close too, unfortunately. I do not recall if I woke up later on but I do remember being in Dubai during a terrible sand storm that was pinning me to the side of a building wall. WARNING, RANT: I was reading a comment on reddit about the possibility of SSILD being so effective because it takes you outside of your head and quiets the mind whilst trying to fall asleep. This motivated me to try the technique again because I had came to similar conclusions in previous journal entries featuring lucid dreaming had post-meditation. So when doing SSILD, I made sure to go through the cycles as normal but to be aware of the fan that was running in the background of my room. My intention was to get my awareness 'outside' of my head and have it hone in on a distant object. This is mostly easy to do with hearing. For sight, since I was facing the fan, I simply relaxed my eyes and acted as if I was lazily looking through my eyelids and at the fan in the distance. For touch, it was a normal body scan of various sensations but I did lazily try to be aware of the ambient temperature of the room, if that makes any sense. What I am getting at here is that 'Awareness of Ambience' may be MY key to consistent lucidity. Some of my previous lucid dream inductions seem to attest to this. To anyone reading this, it may seem like I am trying to reinvent the wheel considering so much scientific research has been done to conclusively say that prospective memory and autosuggestion are the critical components of lucid dreaming. I have no refutation to the work that has been done in the field, it is just that I find 'brute-forcing' my way into lucidity via mantras/hypnosis/autosuggestion/binaural-beats/visualization tends to ruin my sleep and end up barely working. In the past 7 years, I have had FAR better success with simple dream journaling and meditation during a WBTB cycle. If I can have 4 more lucid dreams this week , I can perhaps begin to form my little pseudo-scientific hypothesis about "Ambience Induced Lucid Dreaming". If I find good results within a 30-day time frame, I guess I can get around to authoring a guide not necessarily about a new technique, but a general approach/tweak to the SSILD method.