Originally Posted by
Sageous
I think JoannaB's and King Yoshi have this pegged, but I had an additional thought:
That may be exactly my problem with "natural" awareness training, because driving you to become just a witness may be an unintended and unwanted side-effect of awareness-only training.
Yes, becoming only that witness makes the dream world more stable, but it also makes it more real, and your dream less lucid. As King Yoshi said, you must remember that the observer part of you and the witness part of you (and the dreaming mind part of you, for that matter) are all you, and must be smoothly combined into one self-aware "You." If you only witness, then you sacrifice the union of all aspects of "You," and risk lapsing back into a NLD or waking up.
However:
I think of it less natural intuition than a "sense" built into your consciousness that can sort of put it all together, at least at a very low, almost subliminal level. This sense need not be natural; indeed, I have a feeling that, except in children, this sense is far more often artificially infused through training than it is natural.
Perhaps that is the real value of ADA, as it both teaches you to have a special sense of your surroundings while, thanks to the constant practice with LD'ing in mind, building powerful expectations of having LD's. So, come dreamtime, your unconscious is already hard at work fulfilling your expectations while your ADA "habit" has got your DC "you" paying slightly elevated attention. Then, once the "feeling" is in place, your self-awareness and memory kick in and Bam!, you're lucid.
Hmm... Did I just turn back on myself to accidentally summarize the real value of ADA as LD'ing tool? Seems to all make sense...or am I just babbling?