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I call this phenomenon a "false still awake"-ing, sort of a companion to false awakening.   You're WILDing, and you think you're still awake, but you're actually in the dream state, but with visuals that match the back of your eyelids and you have no indications at all that you're dreaming.   I think I may have had a ton of these, but it's impossible to know for sure.   Some advice is to test this without messing up your WILD dive by risking physical movement is to periodically try teleporting, levitating, and "moving your dream body" (that should move simply from your imagination, not your muscles).   I've not ever gotten this to work.    Some people report that trying to "roll your dream body out of bed" works.   "Seeing through your eyelids" is a really bizarre feeling.  

How soon did you see your ceiling? Was it as soon as your head hit the pillow? I'm so ready to lucid dream now lol  

Do what works!  If LDing is personal, then WILDing is personal to the Nth power.  

Thank you. I did something similar where I just imagined a nose RC is failing and could breathe through it, it worked one time. I'm going to try this now.  

This kind of experience is actually quite common among SSILD users. SSILD is a tool to condition the mind/body. If you let go in the end it does its thing while you sleep. However, if one tries to hang on after the cycles it is very possible for him or her to experience what's described here. In fact, this is exactly how I, prior to developing SSILD, managed to WILD. SSILD was developed from these routines once I realized that the important part is not the visualizations or whatever you perform at the end of the cycles to form/enter the dream. It is actually the cycles that make this work! Without conditioning your mind/body first, it's very hard to perform any techniques effectively, be it visualizations, imagining physical movement, or other traditional techniques such as those described by Robert Monroe... However, once your mind/body is prepped with the cycles, all those techniques become a lot easier to execute! Of course, "easy" is a relative term... Anyway, after this realization I decided to chop the WILD part from my routines and only retained the cycles, thus SSild was born.  

Just wanted to say, thank you for sharing this awesome technique, seriously, you're a legend. Having frequent, realistic LDs now seems like something I can easily achieve because of SSILD. Thanks!  

Awww shit, you're that guy!  I love SSILD.  

Glad it helps! I do believe, both from my own experience and observation on many others, that frequent and even at-will LD induction can be achieved by mastering this simple technique. Better yet, it's something that requires relatively little effort so it can actually become a habit.  

I'm curious -- have you done studies, introducing people to SSILD who knew absolutely nothing about lucid dreaming or the purpose behind SSILD, and found that SSILD generated lucid dreams in them?    Because simply falling asleep with the intention to lucid dream is extremely powerful, and I don't see any other way to reliably determine the effectiveness of the cycles vs. the effectiveness of the intention + WBTB.  

Not in the form of scientific studies, if that's what you meant. However, recently I was contacted by a science researcher who has conducted some research over the past 3 years and he was able to confirm SSILD's effectiveness. I'm still curious and eagerly waiting to read his paper.

Personally, I see a few differences between SSILD and plain-old intention setting:

1. SSILD works over a consistent long period of time, whereas intentions don't (at least for most people)

2. SSILD causes frequent super-realistic false awakenings. This is almost a "trademark" quality now recognized "worldwide". Simple intention-setting doesn't seem to accomplish that.

3. SSILD tends to improve vividness of normal dreams and their recalls. Again, merely setting intentions doesn't seem to directly result in that.

4. When SSILD fails to produce DILD or FA, and even when one completely wakes up and physically moved, one can still remain in a subtle mind/body state that can be more easily utilized to create direct dream entry. Again, this doesn't hold true with intentions.

SSILD is actually a community-driven project. It was tested by hundreds of people on the Chinese lucid dreaming forum when it was first introduced, and subsequently refined. Many people contributed their experiences and we recorded thousands of successful cases. These people ranged from newbies to experts, and many of them had used combinations of intention-setting and other traditional techniques. And SSILD did make a difference for them! For example, there is one guy who practiced lucid dreaming for a year, utilizing just about every techniques (including non-stop intention-setting and affirmations during the day). In that year he managed to receive no more than a dozen LDs. However, once he started using SSILD, he recorded over 550 LDs in less than a year! His detailed recording is an invaulable learning tool and we recommend everyone new to our forum to read it. And this is not an isolated case. On that forum we now see many people with the ability to induce multiple LDs on a daily basis, all due to their use of SSILD. Can intention-setting achieve similar result? I honestly don't know the answer, but based on my own experience and observation of others I suspect that may not be the case.  

This technique is what I know as "phasing". It's great because it bypasses the need for "exit" techniques during WILDs. Beyond just imagining that you can see your ceiling, I'd say it works even better if you imagine moving around and interacting with any environment of your choosing (places you're familiar with work best, either real or fictional).

As a side effect, it seems that my most vivid lucid dreams happen using this type of technique.  

Too bad it doesn't work for everybody.   It has never produced a FA for me, for example.   I get FAs in general very very rarely.   Less than a handful per year, max, and I recall 6-10+ dreams per night every night, and am lucid about once every 4 days on average.

But it's still a very important question: if the cycles alone produce all that you say they do, then giving it to a group of people (without using its name) as for example, a "method to combat insomnia" or "promote good sleep", they should according to you, start having tons of lucid dreams, yes?

Also of scientific interest, is whether it is these specific cycles that have any effect, or simply a slightly slower falling asleep together with intention to lucid dream.    I believe that any analogous awareness anchor peformed for about the same length as the SSILD cycles would produce the same results.   But I don't have a big pool of people to test out the theory.  

I so love that idea because Bild is the german word for picture