Thread: Lucidity issue

Just to be clear, being lucid is simply knowing you are dreaming, not just being in control. You can feel "present" and making "conscious" decisions in a dreamvwithout being lucid. In that case you never think to try something to challenge the dream boundaries.

This starts delving into the idea of higher and lower levels of lucidity, where you're in the territory of semi-lucidity. It's a bit oversimplistic for terminology since I'm about to describe a few tiers describing the levels of semi-lucidity. Placement (in terms of lowest to highest) deals most strictly with the level of control one has over the dream, which usually involves a higher level of conscious awareness (but not always), and how well you recognize that you are in fact dreaming.

The lowest level I recognize is the dream where, as opposed to simply being more vivid or memorable but otherwise being almost entirely reactive the duration of the dream, you are capable of thought and even recollecting memories on demand. During this level, you actually plan your actions (even if your critical thinking and reasoning skill still tanks a lot of the time), and you even remember things while thinking. A significant portion of the time, these memories are entirely false. Now, false memories themselves are nothing new to what I still deem as non-lucid dreams, but they serve more as minor backstory to the plot that's simply understood at some point (exactly when this is couldn't be less clear, honestly), and you otherwise have no real executive functions (being capable of thought, planning, etc.), you still more or less just do things. In one of these dreams, you more or less actually be yourself to be awake.

Then we come to a second level of semi-lucidity--higher than the last, but still relatively low. It almost always shares the characteristics of the level below it, but on occasion you aren't as capable of planning, critical thought, and/or recalling memories (be them fake, real, or of what just happened within the dream). The defining characteristic of this level is to actually be aware, on some level, that you're dreaming. You can range from being vaguely aware of it on a subconscious level, somehow just "knowing" but really only understanding what you knew when you woke up, to flat out consciously thinking to yourself "I'm dreaming" but never acting on it through no conscious decision of your own (more or less the realization rolls off your back like water to a duck). Typically when you wake up after one of these, you have no idea why you didn't actually realize the implications of what that awareness meant, as if you never made a logical bridge between knowing you're dreaming and understanding, on a higher conscious level, that you're dreaming. This is likely the type of dream you experienced. Its' defining characteristic (given I'm making the strict details themselves up right now, while building on previously existing concepts, I should know, lol) is knowing you are dreaming in one way or another but not achieving or even making an attempt at control of any kind.

The last level is the level where you exercise minor elements of control. A common thread here is that again, despite my placement of this level as the highest, it doesn't necessarily build on all of the characteristics of the lower levels (mostly the lowest level), but it typically does. This control comes through an unconscious understanding of actually being in a dream (control is more or less inaccurate here, because to be in control strongly implies conscious manipulation of something where as here you are able to change what's happening around you like it's something that naturally happens and is mostly driven by reactive thoughts and emotions), knowing consciously you are in a dream but experience significant difficulty in controlling the dream or even yourself (loss of lucidity or sinking to a lower level of semi-lucidity is common), or otherwise having been what we'll call fully lucid (ignoring there is always a spectrum to awareness and lucidity) and for some reason losing control/lucidity, and completely (consciously) forget you are dreaming. This is most often what has led to the unconscious understanding of dreaming allowing you a level of subconscious control of what's going in my experience. It's not a very common thing to experience on its own without lucidity preceding it (again, for me).