Thread: ADA: Right or Wrong for Lucidity?

I’ve noticed that All Day Awareness (ADA) has been gaining in popularity lately, and one tutorial and advisory thread after another has come to accept it as given that ADA is an important, if not essential, tool for achieving lucidity. I have been familiar with ADA for a long time, and understand its value as a tool for meditation, but I for probably one have never considered ADA a useful tool for developing LD’ing skills. Indeed, I have been wondering lately if the rise of ADA’s popularity might be moving people away from, rather than toward, consistent lucidity.

So, at the risk of the slings and arrows that accompany contradiction, and at the suggestion of a couple of interested dreamers on another thread, I thought I’d start a thread to discuss ADA, and maybe determine whether practicing it clears or clutters the path to lucidity. I hope everyone will bear with me through this post so we can get a good baseline for healthy discussion. Here we go:

First, what is ADA? Here is the definition from DV’s Wiki, which seems pretty straightforward and more than acceptable:

ADA is all about developing a habit of paying attention to details of your surroundings and yourself (awareness) while awake, with the intention of being more aware in your dreams. You can focus on things like the objects in the room around you, your muscles as you walk down the street, people's faces, your own breathing, the sound of the wind, or the pressure you use to hit a key in your keyboard. Everything in your surroundings, including any sensation, can be used to practice ADA.

Now, this thread is for discussion of ADA, where hopefully LD’er’s will offer their opinions about why ADA works or why they think it is not very helpful. Regardless of my stated personal (and still quite flexible) opinion, this is not an OP announcing that ADA doesn’t work, so please let’s not get into an “Is too, because I said so!” “Is not, because I said so!” sort of argument, because that doesn’t help anyone.

It would be great to hear from both experienced LDer’s and novices alike. From the experienced dreamers we can get opinions from dreamers who have had more than a couple of successful dreams using ADA, or have found it unhelpful. Plus, because all techniques, no matter how useful, tend to work well a couple of times thanks to the placebo effect, and then are “inexplicably” rendered useless after the placebo effect wears off, it would be nice to hear from novices (aka newbies) who practiced ADA but have seen little to no ongoing success with LD’ing.

Basically there are just two questions to consider:

1. Has ADA worked for you? If so, how and why?

2. Regardless of your success, what is your take on ADA?

If you have any questions about this, or my way-too-brief opinion below, please ask.

So I hope we’ll have a good discussion among lots of dreamers, experienced and novice alike, that everyone stays calm and open, and I also hope that I don’t get dragged into some electronic public square to be punished for my heresy!

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Here is my take on ADA:

On paper, ADA seems ideal to LD’ing, because it exercises your awareness. On paper. In reality, though, I think it exercises the wrong awareness necessary to successfully LD.

Huh, you ask?

Yeah, that does sound strange, but in truth it is not. And be assured I am not playing some silly semantics game. The sort of awareness we want to develop and have on hand for LD’ing is self-awareness, whose definition and practice lies at the other end of the consciousness spectrum from the awareness practiced in ADA.

Self-awareness is nothing more -- or less -- than being aware that you are here, that you have an effect on everything around you, and everything around you has an effect on you. Self-awareness is the sense that “I am here, and I am interacting with reality” which is also the sense you want to have during a dream. In other words, it is the most “unnatural” state of consciousness, in that we only invented sentience a short time ago, evolutionarily-speaking.

Mastering self-awareness allows a dreamer to know that the universe she is in is a dream, and that universe is of her own making, a part of her consciousness... fairly important things to know for successful LD'ing, I think!

Awareness in this context is the condition of being on one’s guard, conscious of your surroundings, or simply knowing that there is stuff going on around you. Awareness is the sense that “the world is here, and I am a small part of it.” Awareness is a primordial function that exists to some degree in every living thing, and always has.

As opposed to self-awareness, which is drawn from biologically unique sentient consciousness (which is the basis for a whole other thread, I think, but ask if you want more about that), awareness is a universally common natural function: all living things practice awareness, with most of them being truly adept at ADA. A mouse, for instance, practices ADA far better than we do, so as not to get eaten. Awareness at this level is fine, and ought to be practiced; we all need to pay attention! But awareness at this level -- which by the way is already built, naturally, into dreams -- is anathema to lucidity. This is so because natural awareness causes a dreamer to believe that the world of his dream is the world that is here, and that the dreamer is but a part of it. ADA, I think, would only amplify that feeling:

ADA teaches you to pay attention to everything around you, every physical impulse you can comfortably absorb. Doing this all day, every day, might eventually lead you to believe that the world is huge, complex, and you are just a small unwitting participant in it “all.” That may all be true, I suppose, but I think it might not be the best cognitive place a budding LD’er necessarily wants to go.

That is because, come dreamtime, though your ADA training will have helped you to notice lots of details in your dream, and possibly has increased your chances of spotting a dream sign or two, there is a better chance that you will believe, from all that daytime observation, that this dream world you are in is much bigger than you, and you are only an insignificant player in it… the dream is not yours.

In other words, ADA might embed in you a sense that the dream world is real, that all these details you are observing have to be there, were always there, and did not spring from your own unconscious imagination.

Self-awareness, on the other hand, allows you to remember that this dream world, complex and enormous as it may be, is simply an extension of your own mind and everything that happens here is a result of your presence. From that comes lucidity, control, and adventures of your own conscious invention.

Tl;dr: ADA is fine, but you must have self-awareness in order to achieve and sustain lucidity. Enhanced natural awareness may actually diminish your chances of LD’ing because it makes the dream world too important, and it would be especially damaging if you practiced it in place of working on your self-awareness.

That's what I have so far... anyone care to discuss?