Today we'll cover five new sleep commands that you can use to quickly trick the body into falling asleep. This will enables you to end insomnia and have frequent lucid dreams and OBEs.
I had been up all night working.
Around noon I was very tired and decided to lay down for a few moments. As I lay there I began to feel a very uncomfortable urge to roll over. For no real reason I decided to ignore it and just lay there. To my extreme surprise I felt the effect of sleep paralysis roll over me.
The paralysis was completely unexpected. I had always thought it was something you had to be very deeply relaxed to achieve. Instead I was actually fairly tense and my mind was not at all in any kind of meditative state.
I'd accidentally found something that I had never seen in any books on lucid dreaming: the "roll over signal" itself is all you need to enter paralysis.
I spent the next several months experimenting with different variations of what I'd done. I began looking for other ways to command the body into sleep and here's what I found.
It turns out sleep commands come in two types: sleep starters and sleep triggers.
In this section we'll cover two sleep starters: sleep breathing and stopping eye micromovements.
Then we'll cover three sleep triggers: pause breaths, muscle twitching, and eye movements.
Sleep breathing is simply mimicking your body's breathing pattern when it's asleep.
If you act closely enough like you're already asleep then your body thinks that it really is asleep, even if your mind is completely awake and not even slightly relaxed. There are three basic ways to find out what your personal sleep breathing is like.
When you use sleep breathing there are a three gotchas to be aware of:
The second sleep starter is to stop eye micromovements. During the day the eyes are searching for changes in motion. Because of this they make tiny eye micromovements all the time and at the end of they day they are still making these micromovements even though you may want to go to sleep.
If you close your eyes and try to keep them still you'll find that after about 30 seconds they are still twitching very slightly. It's not easy to totally relax the eyes. However if you can keep them at complete ease for several minutes the body will interpret that as a signal that the mind may have fallen asleep.
In fact if you keep your eyes still your body will often fall asleep even if the rest of your muscles are fairly tense.
Before sleep, relax your eye muscles by slowly rolling them around in wide circles in both directions several times and then letting them rest.
After 3 or 4 nights practicing this you'll be able to keep your eyes totally still and you'll fall asleep much faster.
This brings us to sleep triggers which are used to convert partial paralysis into full paralysis.
The first trigger is pause breaths. When you reach 90% paralysis, the reason the body doesn't go to full paralysis is it has a bit of doubt about just how asleep the mind really is. This is because of muscle tension. The best solution is to relax more deeply but sometimes that's not possible.
What you can do is exhale and pause for 2 or 3 seconds. Relax as much as you can and then begin breathing again like normal.
By relaxing your breathing you reduce your overall tension just barely enough to send a signal to complete the paralysis. During those 2 or 3 seconds you'll feel the paralysis deepening. Sometimes you may have to use 2 or 3 pause breaths about 15 seconds apart.
When you do this, you're not trying to alter your blood oxygen levels or anything like that. The purpose is to simply lower your overall muscle tension just long enough to paralyze completely.
Muscle twitching was the first sleep trigger I ever discovered.
I reached partial paralysis and on a whim decided to try twitching my right forearm to see what happened. To my surprise my entire arm paralyzed. I then twitched my right calf and my right leg paralyzed. I gradually paralyzed my entire body that way and completed the separation.
In other words muscle twitching only paralyses the surrounding muscles. I've actually found that I could paralyze just a single finger by twitching it when in partial paralysis.
Do this twitch once every second or two when you're in about 95% paralysis. The twitch is very gentle and only lasts the smallest fraction of a second. If you twitch your forearm the rest of your arm should not move at all. If you twitch too hard you'll wreck the paralysis so keep it very light.
Probably the reason this works is when you dream you try to move your muscles but sleep paralysis prevents you from moving. However you do move your muscles just a bit when dreaming which causes muscle twitching. This means the body associates muscle twitching with deep sleep so one way to mimic deep sleep is to use muscle twitching.
With your eyes closed, simply move your eyes up and down as fast as you can for about 10 seconds. I've never been able to get it to work using left and right movements.
However there is actually a type of hypnotic psychotherapy called "eye movement desensitization and reprocessing" or EMDR which uses side to side eye movements. You may try experimenting with side to side movement to complete partial paralysis but I find up and down is a safer bet.
So which trigger do you use first?
The most reliable strategy is to start with a few pause breaths which is usually all it takes to get to 100% paralysis.
If that doesn't work use arm twitching. If that doesn't work use up and down eye movements.
If none of those work - just relax for a few more minutes before using the triggers again.
I've experimented using sleep triggers to go directly from awake to asleep but that doesn't seem to work well.
I find that for up and down eye movements to work you need to be in about 99% paralysis, muscle twitching works at about 95% paralysis and pause breaths work at about 90% paralysis. So it's best to start out using sleep starters first and then switch to triggers to complete the process.
In the next lesson we'll cover the exact relaxation routine to fall asleep quickly to enter waking sleep paralysis.
Nick Newport is the author of Lucidology, a website that teaches how to have lucid dreams and out of body experiences from a waking state.
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