I’ve managed to do WILD before, but I have a hard time falling asleep while maintaining that sort of focus. I kind of rely on doing a sort of story-scene visualization thing to fall asleep in the first place, building out a detailed worldspace and characters and playing through some story like I would when trying to form a scene when writing although in practice it’s more like falling back on a handful of rote scenes that just get iterated over and refined over time some of which are bits from things I’m working on and others are just nonsense. That is also a technique for priming lucid dreams, but it’s never carried anything through into actual dreams for me, it just knocks me out almost immediately.

The most I’ve been able to prime dreams is when something inadvertently induces the tetris effect and I get a disjointed, fitful loop of related nonsense until I wake up.

In the comment above I was just saying that I know I’m not asleep because I can read things and they work right, so I never doubt that I am awake when I am in fact awake. Dreams have a way of making problems like text not working just confusing rather than immediately alarming, although I’ve gotten sharper at jumping from text being broken to recognizing that something’s a dream.