A Wake Back To Bed (WBTB) involves purposely waking up during your sleep period at a time optimal to perform lucid dream induction techniques. First, it would be good to discuss a little about sleep patterns.
An average person’s sleep cycle is 90 minutes long. This is not a set rule for everyone, and sleep cycles do vary from person to person, but you can use it as a rough guide. The image below courtesy of Wikipedia’s “Sleep Cycles” entry shows a generally accepted set of sleep cycles throughout the night. As we fall asleep at night, we fall from awakening into deep sleep rapidly. We then experience longer and longer periods of REM, highlighted in red, as the night unfolds. We can see that later into the night, we experience more REM sleep and this is where the majority of our dreaming and lucidity is likely to occur. The general rule of thumb is to go for either 4.5h or 6h of uninterrupted sleep, before attempting any kind of conscious dreaming techniques. I have spoken to a number of people before, unfamiliar with lucid dreaming in general, who show various irregularities to the accepted sleep pattern. One person seems to consistently dream throughout the night. After a period of only an hour’s sleep after a full day, upon waking, the person can often vividly recall dreams. I have no reason to doubt this person’s accounts, and it goes to show that these patterns can indeed vary dramatically from person to person. This is by no means ‘abnormal’ or necessarily a ‘sleep disorder’, and could simply be put down to individual differences, unless of course it causes the person any particular discomfort or issues.
Lucid dreaming and sleep patterns are mentioned throughout history in religion and various esoteric texts. The Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas provides valuable clues as to when a lucid dream would be most likely to take place, and in doing so he predates the findings of our present sleep researches by over five hundred years. He states that lucidity is most likely to occur, “Towards the end of sleep, in sober men and those gifted with strong imaginations”. We can find several references in history such as the one above in the book “The Lucid Dreamer; Malcolm Godwin” – a highly recommended book. It goes on to state, “To many, Mohammed’s Layat al-Miraj, or night journey, is just such a vision quest – a lucid dream if ever there was one, in which the Angel Gabriel led the prophet through Jerusalem, past the seven celestial spheres finally to ascend to God.” Reading various spiritual and religious accounts from various religious texts with conscious dreaming in mind starts to show some of the texts in a slightly different light. Accounts of religious experience which one has to either believe and accept at face value or entirely disregard as illogical could indeed have taken place during conscious dreaming and other trance states. Using such states to realize one’s true self, “enlightenment”, has long been accepted in various religions such as Buddhism, and a view which I personally, entirely accept. An excellent book on the subject is “The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche” which I have read several times. Further reading, and another excellent book from the Mexican sorcerer’s perspective is “The Art of Dreaming” – Carlos Castaneda.
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