Realizing that you are dreaming without actually understanding what this means

[Laurelindo]

Last night I had a dream where I was kissing a cute girl, and for some reason I suddenly "realized" that she was "poisonuos" in some way (I don't know, maybe I had Alice Cooper's hit song "Poison" on my mind or something). Anyway, I worried about this for a while, but then I spontaneously told myself "hey, this isn't real anyway, so there's no fear, I will be fine 'when I get back to the ordinary world' or something like that - and then I just became lazy and viewed some still image of the dream, apparently waiting for the dream to end. It was some weird thing like that - I knew that nothing was "real", but I still didn't really get into my head what exactly this meant. It was almost as if I knew I was dreaming, but was too lazy or stupid to understand anything beyond that. Has this ever happened to you? Was this some form of low-level lucidity?

[Sageous]

Yes, this was some form of low-level lucidity, I think...sort of lucidity without self-awareness or memory. And also sort of like the lucidity we experience in waking-life most of the time: Yes, when we are awake we know that the world is real, but how often are we really conscious of the world around us, and our presence in it? Normally we just move from moment to moment, lazily waiting for the day to end (or for the next interesting event). The downside of this "unaware" awareness is that it is a very difficult state from which to become truly lucid (self-awareness is present). This is because you are cognitively comfortable with your state (just like you might be in waking life), and an interest in expanding your awareness of the moment or your self simply doesn't come up (just like in waking life). And yes, this happens to me all the time, and, upon waking, it can be very frustrating because I was "right there" and forgot to open my eyes! A couple more things I just thought of: I think this condition is very likely a side-effect of your day time work, so you can at least be confident that you are doing something right. This sort of non-aware awareness doesn't tend to happen during WILDs.