cosmiciron says......on SSILD...
Normally people do the exercise with a lot of mental effort and expect immediate result. This is a common mistake that causes them loss of sleep. Since the exercise is designed to work after you fall asleep, losing sleep will not help you succeed. Your problem, on the other hand, is the exact opposite -- you fall asleep too quickly without entering the trance. The trance is the state when you become deeply relaxed, your mind begins to wander, and you often forget about the exercise. The longer we hold onto this state, the more likely we will succeed later. This is much easier to deal with than the losing sleep problem . You can try the following solutions:
1. Increase the number of repetitions. Do not fall asleep until you sense you have entered the trance -- mind begins to drift, you forget which step you are into the exercise, and etc.
2. With each cycle, you should feel you are going deeper into the trance. The sensations should feel more real with each cycle. For example, do not expect to be able to see anything during the first couple of cycles, but in later cycles you should observe a bit more intently and expect to see something out if the dark. Same thing goes for hearing things. In the beginning you don't expect to hear anything but later you should expect to hear the noise in your head more clearly. Please be careful though -- do NOT force yourself if you absolutely don't feel anything. Being able to fall asleep always has much higher priority.
3. During the last step where you try to fall asleep quickly, you may want to occasionally quickly glance at the darkness behind your closed eyelids. Do this very quickly and sparingly, do not focus and absolutely do not stress your eye muscles! If you feel this is keeping you from falling asleep then you should drop it and let go of everything to fall asleep ASAP.
You don't have to do all three above. I suggest you try them and find the right balance between entering the trance and falling asleep. If anything, you don't want to lose sleep so please do not stress yourself!
