WILDs

Wake Induced Lucid Dream (WILD) techniques have always been a frustrating idea to me, as they seem to require and extensive amount of practice and expertise. In many descriptions, it seems you nearly need to become a high level Tibetan Buddhist monk, in order to master this type of induction. However, I just read a research paper supporting the idea that WILD can actually be one of the simplest techniques. In a 1991 paper, Lynne Levitan reports on 30 subjects who used a "Counting" technique. Essentially they just counted themselves back to sleep: they would go to bed with the intention of noticing when they would awaken from a dream and once awake would count themselves back to sleep by saying, "one, I'm dreaming, two, I'm dreaming, etc." That's it! This is much easier than imagining a lotus flower on your throat or counting through 61 points on your body. This technique resulted in dream re-entry in 57% of trials. Out of all attempts, 23% resulted in lucid dreams (this also included a "Body" technique that was a bit more complicated). She comments that 30 subjects is not enough data to make firm conclusions, but based on this limited data, it appears that simply "counting" can lead to lucid dreams on almost 1 in 4 tries.