I figured that skill in mindfulness meditation would help with sleep onset insomnia. Instead of getting frustrated at taking an hour or more to get sleep, you could just treat the time lying down as an extra meditation session. Hasn’t really worked out with the sort of undisciplined and infrequent practice I’ve been doing yet. I still tend to get frustrated and go into a funk of discomfort after lying awake past forty or so minutes.
I wonder if the idea is worth pursuing anyway. Focusing seems more difficult when lying down, and might be bad enough that there just isn’t much skill progress to be developed that way, but on the other hand there is twenty to ninety or more minutes of utterly unoccupied uninterrupted time there for every night when going to bed early.
Some nights I have sleep onset problems that can take well over an hour. I will usually either notice that I have excited thoughts or anxiety/tension while I am lying in bed. In this condition, l have found that doing a sitting meditation is better for clearing my head than continuing to lie down. I try to sleep again after I’m calmed down.
I’m a beginning meditator and can’t address MinibearRex’s concern about an experienced meditator possibly being too alert. If I was concerned about this, I’d just set a timer to schedule when I’d resume attempting sleep.
I had this same idea a while ago, but decided not to pursue it extensively, in case I succeeded. It seems to me that early on, as you’re learning to meditate, you will slip off, lose focus, and go to sleep. But as you get better at staying on topic on the meditation, it will be longer and longer before you lose focus, and your insomnia will only get worse.
I’ve seen a few things online that indicate that it might be possible to transition from meditation into lucid dreaming, but I don’t know how well that would work.
There is wake-induced lucid dreaming where you transition from being awake into a lucid dream while retaining consciousness. I can do it sorta-regularly with the wake-back-to-bed technique, which involves me getting up six hours after bedtime, staying up for half an hour, then lying awake and meditating in bed for up to an hour. Haven’t figured out a way to do this regularly without messing up my sleep cycle, and the lucid dreams are pretty short and uneventful.
I think the trick is to both have a sufficient level of wakefulness (need to stay awake a bit and read the morning news instead of just turn off the alarm clock and go back to bed) and having the brain in a state where the next phase of sleep isn’t very deep. Going to bed or taking a nap after a day of being awake always just leads to a full loss of consciousness.
I figured that skill in mindfulness meditation would help with sleep onset insomnia. Instead of getting frustrated at taking an hour or more to get sleep, you could just treat the time lying down as an extra meditation session. Hasn’t really worked out with the sort of undisciplined and infrequent practice I’ve been doing yet. I still tend to get frustrated and go into a funk of discomfort after lying awake past forty or so minutes.
I wonder if the idea is worth pursuing anyway. Focusing seems more difficult when lying down, and might be bad enough that there just isn’t much skill progress to be developed that way, but on the other hand there is twenty to ninety or more minutes of utterly unoccupied uninterrupted time there for every night when going to bed early.
Some nights I have sleep onset problems that can take well over an hour. I will usually either notice that I have excited thoughts or anxiety/tension while I am lying in bed. In this condition, l have found that doing a sitting meditation is better for clearing my head than continuing to lie down. I try to sleep again after I’m calmed down.
I’m a beginning meditator and can’t address MinibearRex’s concern about an experienced meditator possibly being too alert. If I was concerned about this, I’d just set a timer to schedule when I’d resume attempting sleep.
I had this same idea a while ago, but decided not to pursue it extensively, in case I succeeded. It seems to me that early on, as you’re learning to meditate, you will slip off, lose focus, and go to sleep. But as you get better at staying on topic on the meditation, it will be longer and longer before you lose focus, and your insomnia will only get worse.
I’ve seen a few things online that indicate that it might be possible to transition from meditation into lucid dreaming, but I don’t know how well that would work.
There is wake-induced lucid dreaming where you transition from being awake into a lucid dream while retaining consciousness. I can do it sorta-regularly with the wake-back-to-bed technique, which involves me getting up six hours after bedtime, staying up for half an hour, then lying awake and meditating in bed for up to an hour. Haven’t figured out a way to do this regularly without messing up my sleep cycle, and the lucid dreams are pretty short and uneventful.
I think the trick is to both have a sufficient level of wakefulness (need to stay awake a bit and read the morning news instead of just turn off the alarm clock and go back to bed) and having the brain in a state where the next phase of sleep isn’t very deep. Going to bed or taking a nap after a day of being awake always just leads to a full loss of consciousness.