Philosophies of Lucid Dreaming

**Sensei** · 03-08-2014 08:19 PM

All across the boards, you see people post "lucid dreaming is like" or "lucid dreaming is all about"
This is a thread for all the different philosophies, I think that analogies for this can help a lot of people. My philosophy as you might have seen somewhere else on the forum:

Dual awareness
In my opinion, you need three things in order to get lucid:
Sleep
General Dream Awareness
State Awareness

I have used this as the three things that I think are needed to get lucid. You need to be asleep (which we all do anyways), Have enough awareness in a dream to actually be there and think for yourself, and have enough of a grasp on dreams that even on the fly, your mind will think "Dream" when something is wrong or just at the start of the dream.
http://www.dreamviews.com/attaining-...ml#post2084431
^^ It is all in this post.

Analogy:
In order to be successful in sports (really anything, going with sports for a narrow analogy) you need to do three things:
play (sleep)
pay attention when you are playing (general dream awareness)
know how to play correctly (state awareness)

If you don't play enough, you can't get good at it.
If you spend a lot of time just playing without paying attention, or without knowing how to do it right, you will develop bad habits in game, (this is where most start at with LDing, so we have to overcome all of our bad habits and that is why it gets easier and easier to LD because you are over all the bad habits)
If you know how to play correctly, but don't play enough you won't be able to get better than you ever were, it doesn't matter if you pay attention when you are playing because you don't have enough experience at one time to get better. If you get experience and don't get it close together, then it doesn't really stack up.

This one is confusing a bit
If you know how to play correctly and you do play often, but don't pay attention to the game, then you will find yourself playing correctly without thinking. This is good in sports but not in lucidity. (This is what some call "false lucidity", technically you are lucid, but in the dream you will know that you are dreaming but not do much about it, or just do random things that you have thought about doing without actually thinking in a dream)

Hope that was written well... I am freaking tired.

Spoiler for Sageous analogy and philosophu:

Sageous posted this:

In a sense, LD’ing is a 3-legged stool. The first leg is the state of dreaming itself, and the second and third legs are self-awareness and memory. The absence of any one of these legs means the stool topples and poof! No lucidity. It’s that simple. All the machines, gurus, techniques, and supplements in the world would do nothing, I knew, until I mastered these two things.

Of course I haven’t yet mastered either; that might never happen. Although I -- and any successful LD’er, I must assume -- had some grasp of these “legs,” my hold was far too tenuous to seek the things that I knew I should be able to find. But the act of finally making self-awareness and memory a priority elevated my LD’ing experience from one of enjoying the wonders of my dreams as supplied by my dreaming mind to one of real control, creativity, discovery, and growth. Since improving my self-awareness, some of my dreams, I think, have been downright transcendental in the last few years, and I believe it is because I simplified my quest. Now, for those still with me, the fundamentals:

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. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s a lot harder to master than it sounds. Most people are content to live their entire lives without a moment of self-awareness, content to let the events of their world wash over them and to remain unaware of how the things they do and say touch those events…sort of living life like it’s a dream, I suppose. Perfecting self-awareness is simple: pay attention! Unfortunately, humans are naturally wired to not pay this sort of attention, so it takes a lot of work to stay focused and not lapse back into the easy strides taken by those who travel life without ever once checking the path.

Memory is more of a physical issue, because it is “turned off” during sleep, naturally out of reach of dreamers. This is why so many things in your dreams seem so normal and obvious, but in reality are impossible. Turning memory back on is not easy, but it can be done. Indeed, there are many mnemonic techniques available that will help you, but suffice it for now to say that if you can’t remember during a dream that your waking life body is sleeping right where you left it, you might never be able to step above the lowest levels of lucidity. And yes, your dreams are certainly filled with “remembered” images; but these images are awash in a matrix of archetypes and powerful long-term memories. Short-term memory, and active long-term memory (the thing that reminds you that cows really can’t fly), are naturally inaccessible.

I hope that this is a thread that noobs can learn from so that they can get a better grasp on what it takes to LD. I think that a lot of them are similar in ways, but it is the tiny differences that I think that make the difference for it to click for someone.

**splodeymissile** · 03-08-2014 08:22 PM

To be honest, my philosophy on lucid dreaming (if it can be called that) is pretty much the same as yours.

**Nailler** · 03-12-2014 10:02 AM

Here's how I see it...

In the sleep state memory is turned off so we can't automatically compare the present with the past and thereby draw conclusions, like we do when awake. That's why whatever happens in a dream seems normal. We don't even bother to show up for normal, and isn't awareness really just showing up?

So to become lucid, all we need to do is turn on a bit of memory in the sleep state. Once memory turns on, we show up, recognize what's going on and become lucid. It's almost like memory and awareness are the same thing... maybe they are.

So the question becomes, how do we turn memory on in the sleeping state?

For WILDing, the answer is simple... go to sleep without letting memory turn off. How do you do that? Practice, practice, practice.

You can derive all kinds of techniques out of this basic concept. The common denominator to all the WILD techniques is an "anchor" which is something you remember to keep doing as you fall asleep. It's not the thing you're remembering that makes it work, but rather the action of continuing to remember. For a DEILD you may only have to keep the memory that you're in a dream turned on for a few seconds or minutes.

For DILDing, the answer that Stephen LaBerge came up with is "prospective memory", which is simply the ability that allows us to remember to perform some action at a future time, in other words, remembering to remember.

So we have this ability called prospective memory, but it's pretty weak because the only time we use it is when we decide to remember to remember to buy bread on the way home from school. Somehow LaBerge's big breakthrough gets lost in all the noise on the subject.

Keeping a dream journal is probably the most common way of injecting a bit of memory into the dream state.

Then there's the idea of a mantra, which can serve the dual purpose of injecting memory into the dream state and managing expectations.

Waking reality checks are another technique, but just between us I think what's really working there is we're exercising our prospective memory when we remember to remember to do them. But YOU have to remember to remember to do them... as opposed to putting them on automatic.

ADA and all the awareness stuff... maybe wha's really working isn't the practice itself, but rather the practice of remembering to remember to do them... exercising prospective memory.

If you haven't had much luck yet, but have already kept a dream journal long enough to know your dream signs, try this for a week or two:
Tie a piece of string around your index finger and whenever you notice it, visualize dream signs and say to yourself "Tonight I'm going to remember to recognize when I'm dreaming." Do it the same way you would if you wanted to remember to do something in waking life: "I've got to remember to remember to pick up toilet paper on the way home from work/school."

In the waking state when you drive by the supermarket, prospective memory kicks in, and you remember to stop for toilet paper.

In the dream state, when a dream sign shows up, prospective memory kicks in and you remember to recognize that you're dreaming.

For me, the actual few moments of gaining lucidity in a DILD seems to be a feedback cycle of sorts. There's a slight nag of a memory that somethings not right. That memory turns on a spec more awareness, which leads to more memory, which leads to more awareness... and suddenly my memory and awareness are turned on to the point I can seriously consider the possibility I'm dreaming. Then an RC pushes me over the edge into certainty that I'm in a dream.

What I found is that the further away I stray from basic principles, the less progress I make. Conversely the more I practice basic prep stuff like keeping a dream journal and exercising my prospective memory, the better I do.

I have a few other thoughts on the subject that I'll save for later.