Thread: ADA: Right or Wrong for Lucidity?

Great topic Sageous, one that I wanted to discuss a long time ago.

I'll be brief (at work) in this initial post, but let expose my main view on ADA:

ADA's success is not on the attention payed to sensory input. Now, everyone might disagree with me here, but nowhere paying attention to sensory input gives you a higher degree of awareness. How could it? The fact that you're aware of sensory input gives you, at most, a biggest degree of attention to details, but as we know it, attention to details doesn't necessarily mean lucidity: as alert as we might be in the dream, we seem to lack meta-consciousness to assess our state. You might say "but it goes along other things like reality checks, we simply just need to add them", but reality checks are a thing in their own. If the questioning and the reality checks are the ones responsible for lucidity, then it's not the technique that is effective.

I must say (I know this is anecdotal evidence, but the OP did ask for experiences) that the best thing I get out of ADA is dream recall. It really improves after several weeks of intense ADA. I don't know if I'm the only one, but I for sure would recommend a few exercises of ADA during the day for a person trying to recall more dreams. Anyway...

So what makes ADA work?

One word: mindfulness. Mindfulness refers to living the moment, to pause your mind from the constant monologues it's running, and to focus it in the present moment. Mindfulness has many attested effects on mental health: it reduces stress, it makes people more aware (and importantly self-aware!), and this self-awareness also relates to feelings, just like meditation does. You might even seen the expression "mindfulness meditation": it refers to the specific practice of focusing your mind in only one stimuli, and ignoring all the rest. I think I still have some article around that talks about these advantages in a tested way.

That being said, it seems to me that ADA is an incomplete technique. It does start off great: be more aware. But awareness without questioning, is the same as learning without thinking critically (which is actually a wide spread phenomenon in the majority of our education system!). I agree strongly with Sageous in this point: the mere attention to sensory input won't help you with lucidity: in fact, it may immerse you so deeply in the roots of the dream that you actually might forget the most important thing: to question that same reality you're paying to much attention to.

Also, don't forget one big principle of maintaining lucidity: keep a balance between attachment and detachment with the dream world. Too detached, and you might end waking up. Too attached, you might end up getting caught on the plot and loose lucidity. So giving this amount of relevance to sensory input seems to me a bit counter-productive.

This is why I state ADA is not a "wrong technique", it's only an incomplete one. Wording aside, you can actually see some core similarities with other advocates of awareness, like Sageous itself. But where the line is draw, is how exactly you face your reality: do you embrace it like you do in ADA, or do you close in yourself as the agent in it?

In the bigger picture, awareness is one of the hardest concepts regarding lucidity. And that's because, like Sageous said, every living thing has a degree of awareness. But it's clear that it's not that awareness that gives you lucidity: the answers lies more on the side of an awareness towards that same awareness: the meta-consciousness, evaluating your own awareness.

PS: no one mentions the word mindfulness in their posts, but just by reading the few above, you actually notice several people mentioning the concept. All-day mindfulness would be a more appropriate name I'd give to ADA (just kidding kingyoshi ^^).