How To Save A Boatload Of Time On The Relaxation Stage

You don’t have to spend hours relaxing every part of your body to have O.B.E.s. About 90% of your body’s tension is in about 10% of your muscles. If you target just those key areas you can quickly relax enough that your body will interpret it as a signal to sleep.

The Best Place To Start Relaxing

Most books on relaxation say to lay down and start relaxing at your feet and work your way up to your head. That’s not the most effective way to do it because the vast majority of your body’s tension is in your jaws, not your feet.

The jaw is the strongest muscle area in terms of extorted force. The world record for bite strength is 975 foot-pounds for 2 seconds. No other muscle in your body can exert more total force than your jaw muscles and no other muscle holds more tension.

The Top 5 Health Problems From Excess Jaw Tension

Many people go their whole lives and never consciously think to relax their jaws. This causes bruxism, or “teeth grinding” which wears down your teeth and cause other problems such as:

1 – Tooth aches
2 - Headaches
3 – Ear aches
4 – Tinnitus (which is ringing in the ears)
5 – Dizziness

So the very first thing I do before an O.B.E induction or falling asleep is to relax my jaws. This step is absolutely required. It only takes a few seconds so it gives you the most bang for your buck of all the relaxations you can do.

Step 1: Jaw Relaxation

Start with a very firm massage of the meaty part of your upper jaws in front of and below your ears. This is called your “masseter muscle” and is the single biggest culprit for locked up muscle knots in the entire body. Press strongly with your fingers on both sides of your head and get a ‘good hurt’ feeling.

Step 2: Palm Squeeze

The second step is to squeeze on both sides of your jaws with your palms instead of just your fingers. You can use quite a bit of force when you do this because your jaws are quite strong. Let your jaw go as slack as you can while pressing.

Step 3: The Jaw Stretch

It’s common to stretch before and after exercise such as stretching your legs by touching your toes. But have you ever stretched your jaws muscles? You may look silly doing this, but it really goes a long way to relaxing your jaws. So the third step is to relax your jaws as much as you can then use your fingers to pull your jaws open. You may be surprised how much your jaws resist your fingers but by stretching them you can get the tension out.

My grandfather was a professor of a science called relaxology. One of his colleagues could relax his jaws so much that you could wiggle it with your hands and it felt like there was almost nothing holding his jaws on his head. You don’t have to relax your jaws that much but I mention it to give you an idea just how much tension is in your jaws even if you think they’re relaxed.

Step 4: Horizontal Wall Chest Stretch

Step 4 is to stretch your arms and chest against the wall. Place a palm flat on the wall and turn the trunk of your body so that you get a good stretch from the very tips of your fingers, down your forearm, you bicep, shoulder and all across your chest. Exhale all the tension out. Repeat this twice with both arms.

Step 5: Vertical Chest Stretch

Step 5 is to stretch against the wall by placing both palms above your head against the wall and then bending forward. This really targets your shoulder and chest tension. Inhale and exhale fully and slowly 3 times to work all the tension out. Stand up normally, then repeat the vertical chest stretch.

Step 6: Stretch Your Feet

Step 6 is to stretch the bottom of your feet by propping your foot against the wall and leaning forward. This will also give you a good calf stretch. Repeat this on each foot two more times then sit down and massage the individual muscles in the soles of your feet with your hands.

Step 7: Stretch Your Hands

Step 7 is to stretch the palm of each hand by pushing your fingers back with the other hand. This also gives your forearms a nice stretch.

Step 8: Relax Your Shoulders

Step 8 is the last stretching step. Do some slow windmills to relax your shoulders. It’s tempting to skip this step but your shoulders carry almost as much tension as your jaw so it’s important to stretch and relax your shoulder as much as possible.

Step 9: “Pre-roll” To Dissipate Overall Body Tension

For step 9, remember that one purpose of the roll over signal is to get you to roll over which causes you to gradually gather and release tension. Here’s a trick to speed that up or even skip over it.

Lay down in bed and relax a much as you can for 15 seconds or so. Then roll over and relax for a couple more seconds. Roll again and relax… Repeat this several times and you’ll relax the rest of your muscles quite quickly.

This works because normally when you stretch one body part to relax it, you have to tense up another part.
For instance, to stretch one hand you had to tense up your other hand. By laying down and rolling around for a minute you stretch and relax everything a little bit at a time and get your “roll over” phase done all at once.

Step 10: Stop Drop And Roll

Once you’re done rolling around, step 10 is to start Stop Drop And Roll. Lay flat on your back with your arms above your head and start daydreaming. See Lucidology 101 part 3 for how to do Stop Drop & Roll to fall asleep if you haven’t yet.

Step : Start Sleep Breathing

Step is to begin sleep breathing. See Lucidology 101 part 4 for details if you haven’t seen it yet.

Step 12: Roll Eyes To Relax Them

Step 12 is to relax your eyes and the stop micromovements. Roll your eyes around both directions a few times and then let them rest. The idea is to completely forget that your eyes even exist. To do that count 150 heart beats.

Step 13: 150 Heart Beat Count To Forget About Eyes

Focusing on your heart for a long time will make it feel like it’s going to beat its way out of your chest. However if you get up and actually check your pulse you’ll find that it’s beating like normal. The heart pounding sensation is just a trick of the mind which will help to distract you from your eyes.

Step 12: Bring Arms Down To Enter ‘Drop’ Mode

After 150 heart beats you’ve come to step 14 which is to switch on the roll over signal. Drop your arms down to your side and move to step 15 which is to tense and release each muscle group.

Step 15: Tense And Relax Muscles

By now you should be pretty deeply relaxed. Continue to sleep breathe and sense where you still have some tension left. Slightly tense that area for a moment then release it. This will cause you to relax that muscle further than before you tensed it. Start at your jaws and end at your feet.

To do this, count 150 heart beats starting at 300 which tires your brain out a little faster. After every 10 heart beats pause the count and tense and release another muscle group. For instance, when you get to 160 tense and relax your jaws. At 170 tense and release your face, at 180 your neck and so forth. If you lose track of where what number you’re on that’s a good sign that it’s working and you’re falling asleep.

Step 16: ‘Roll’ Phase

When you get to 450 you’ll either be asleep or feeling the roll over signal. If you don’t have a very strong roll signal then just daydream and continue sleep breathing for a while until it’s strong enough. When you really feel the need to roll over you’ve reached step 16 which is to simply roll over and release any remaining tension. Continue sleep breathing and you’ll black out within a few moments.

Warm Socks

Two things that really speed things up are socks and earplugs. You may not realize how much your body temperature drops when you fall asleep but when you’re feet are just a little bit cold it’s really hard to relax. So wear socks even if you don’t think you need them.

Silicone Earplugs

Earplugs are also incredibly valuable for falling asleep fast. You can get them on amazon or Target. The silicone putty earplugs work the best and you can make them last several uses by washing them with soap after each use.

Here’s the complete system, step by step.

1 Jaw Massage
2 Jaw Palm Squeeze
3 Jaw Stretch
4 Horizontal Wall Chest Stretch
5 Vertical Chest Stretch
6 Stretch Your Feet
7 Stretch Your Hands
8 Relax Your Shoulders
9 “Pre-Roll” To Dissipate Overall Body Tension
10 Start “Stop, Drop & Roll”: Hands Above Your Head
Start Sleep Breathing
12 Roll Eyes To Relax Them
13 150 Heart Beat Count To Forget About Eyes
14 Bring Arms Down To Enter To “Drop” Mode
15 Tense & Relax Muscles That Are Still Tense
16 Roll

Coming up in Part 6 you’ll find out how to use the sun to avoid the #1 mistake everyone makes in O.B.E.s & how to optimize your brain chemistry for lucidity.

Plus we’ll cover the ONE O.B.E. induction I would use if I was not allowed to use any others.

The Discovery Of The Roll Over Signal And Sleep Paralysis Connection

A while back I had been up all night working on something. 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 paralysis wave roll over me and put me in full sleep paralysis.

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 was 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.

The Two Types Of Sleep Commands

It turns out sleep commands come in two types: sleep starters and sleep triggers.

1.) Sleep Starters

Sleep starters are what you use to get the body to start thinking that maybe it’s time to fall asleep. For instance, using stop drop and roll is a sleep starter because it makes your body ask for permission to fall asleep by artificially creating the roll signal.

2.) Sleep Triggers

Sleep triggers are how you then tell it “Yes: fall asleep right now”. SDR has an implicit sleep trigger: when you simply ignore the roll over signal the body interprets it a trigger to enter sleep paralysis.

5 New Sleep Commands

In this section we’ll cover sleep breathing and stopped eye micromovements, which are sleep starters. Then we’ll cover three sleep triggers. The first is pause breaths, the second is muscle twitching and third is eye movements.

3 Ways To Learn The Sleep Breathing Sleep Starter

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 3 basic ways to find out what your personal sleep breathing is like.

1.) Sleep Paralysis Perspective

First, when you enter waking sleep paralysis a lot of times your perspective shifts slightly away from the center of your head and in to your sinuses. It sounds like you’re breathing in a cavern and you’ll find your body automatically breathes with quite a lot more force than you do when you’re awake. The breathing is much deeper and longer. Pay attention to how this sounds in order to learn your sleep breathing pattern.

2.) Watch Waking Breathing

The second way to learn your sleep breathing pattern is to practice staying perfectly still when you wake up in the morning. You can continue to breathe the same way you did when asleep if you wake up gradually.

3.) Record Sleep Breathing

The third way, which is the best, is to record yourself sleeping. For $30 you can get a digital voice recorder that can record the entire night. You can then use free software like Audacity to find the parts of the recording that have your sleep breathing.

Here is a recording I made of myself. It sounds a little creepy, but that’s just how it sounds in a cheap recorder.

Once you have your recording you can listen to it right before you go to sleep in order to make sure you’re on the right breathing rhythm. If you don’t want to record yourself, you can download a free mp3 of my breathing pattern in the O.B.E Quickstart at www.Lucidology.com.

3 Sleep Breathing Gotchas

When you use sleep breathing there are a 3 gotchas to be aware of: These are the learning curve, blackout breathing, and the narcotic breathing effect.

1.) Sleep Breathing Learning Curve

The learning curve means that it takes practice and if you don’t have the rhythm right it can prolong the time it takes to fall asleep. It’s best to practice using sleep breathing for a couple nights before using it during an early morning O.B.E induction. However once you have the rhythm right, sleep breathing is probably the single most powerful of all the sleep commands.

A while back I laid down in the afternoon and just starting doing sleep breathing. I didn’t use any other methods at all and within 15 minutes I entered waking sleep paralysis. I could roll over and completely wreck the paralysis and then bring it back again with just 3 or 4 sleep breaths.

I usually don’t have that amount of control with sleep breathing, however it does show the potential power it has when you get the rhythm right.

2.) Blackout Breathing

The second gotcha is blackout breathing. A lot of times when you use sleep breathing for the first few minutes it seems like it’s not working and you feel like you should give up. But then all of a sudden you black out and you’re in a dream or you’re waking up the next morning. The blackout breathing effect is very real so if you use sleep breathing for WILDs make sure you have a timer because otherwise there’s a very good chance you’ll send yourself so far into sleep so quickly that you’ll never become lucid without a beep.

3.) Narcotic Breathing

The third gotcha is narcotic breathing. Sometimes instead of blacking out all at once you get a relaxing feeling. It feels like when you first wake up in the morning and the last thing you want to do is get up out of bed. You just want to go back to sleep. This is very useful in destroying insomnia. When you get the narcotic breathing effect it feels really good to lay there and breathe and you’ll have no desire to get up. Narcotic breathing is a signal that it’s working and you’ll be asleep very soon.

Second Sleep Starter: Stop Eye Micromovements

That wraps it up for sleep breathing. 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 micro movements all the time and at the end of they day they are still making these micro movements 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.

Roll Eyes To Relax Them

Before sleep, relax your eye muscles by rolling them around in wide circles in both directions several times and then letting them rest. After 3 or 4 nights of 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.

First Sleep Trigger: Pause Breaths

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.

Second Sleep Trigger: Muscle Twitching

The second sleep trigger is muscle twitching which was actually the first sleep trigger I ever found. 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.

How To Do Muscle Twitching

To 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.

Third Sleep Trigger: Up And Down Eye Micromovements

The third sleep trigger is up and down eye movements. With your eyes closed you 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.

The Order To Use Triggers

So which trigger do you use? 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 that doesn’t work just relax for a few more minutes before using the triggers again.

When To Use Sleep Triggers

I’ve experimented using sleep triggers to go directly from awake to asleep but that doesn’t seem to work. 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 and then switch to triggers for the last step.

Up next in part 5 we’ll cover the exact relaxation routine you can use to fall asleep quickly to cure insomnia and enter waking sleep paralysis for frequent lucid dreams and O.B.E.s.