Thread: Lucidity and Vividity?

I just had maybe one or two dreams that felt so real that I wasn't actually sure I was dreaming in the moment or not. One of them I woke in my room, but I was in my old loft bed (I have a daybed now) in the same room I have right now. The freaky part of it was that like I said, it felt so real I wasn't sure if it was reality or not. I then remember going down this step-ladder thing I used to have and realizing that, yes, this is a dream. I tried to fly from said step-ladder only to result in failing. Though I might've flown a tiny bit once I was on the floor.
Is it normal to have dreams this vivid? They don't happen often, but they freak me out nonetheless. I had one previous to this that I literally kept telling myself to wake up because what was happening on my ceiling (lightning streaking across) was so scary to me. Both dreams have taken place in my old bed along with being in my current room.

It's normal to have dreams this vivid. Do a reality check if you aren't sure if you're dreaming or not.

Yea sometimes you are even confused about deciding if it's a dream or not that's how our mind keeps trolling us.
Man when you catch such a vivid dream and become lucid in it it's just an incredible experience, trust me.

I believe that all dreams are experienced extremely vividly, like we are really there. It is just the memory of this impression that fades so quickly when waking. Building very high dream recall and very high waking awareness makes recalling these vivid experiences better and better.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Building very high dream recall and very high waking awareness makes recalling these vivid experiences better and better.

I couldn't agree more. But from my perspective awareness is the primary key. Memory is nice (if you want to cherish the memory of the dream), but awareness is necessary, if you want to experience the dream.

At any rate, to the OP: Please don't be freaked out by a vivid dream. In stead learn to enjoy it - and then to mold it according to your desires.

Originally Posted by Voldmer

I couldn't agree more. But from my perspective awareness is the primary key. Memory is nice (if you want to cherish the memory of the dream), but awareness is necessary, if you want to experience the dream.

At any rate, to the OP: Please don't be freaked out by a vivid dream. In stead learn to enjoy it - and then to mold it according to your desires.

Yes I believe it's a feedback cycle / synergy between the two. One or the other may be sufficient, but together they magnify each other's effect.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

I believe that all dreams are experienced extremely vividly, like we are really there.

Sorry I cannot agree with this. I remember some dreams where I was lucid and they were kinda fuzzy and I felt like half unconscious there. I don't think it was the fault of memory since I woke up in the middle of the dream so had a fresh memory still in my head.

I actually believe that a lot of dreams are as vivid as waking life, and that they just appear "blurry" when you wake up because you have forgotten a lot of details.
You can experience the same thing in waking life as well - let's say you regularly walk to the supermarket or something, and that one day you are absent-minded and daydream and don't pay much attention to the surroundings, and another time you decide to pay attention to everything that happens around you.
I can guarantee that the latter scenario will seem a whole lot more vivid, simply because you chose to be aware and "lucid" that time.

Speaking mainly from a NLD perspective, I find my most vivid, detailed and lifelike dreams are the ones that occurred immediately prior to waking. Both experience and recall are superior with extreme vividness and continuity. The same holds true for the one LD I had, even though it was short.

Another interesting thing I noticed is when I do wake up immediately after one of these epic, vivid and detailed dreams, there's usually another dream or two or three floating around and the more I go over the epic, the more I recall of the others. Not to the degree of the epic, but I believe much more than if I didn't awake with the epic just on the other side.

This does lead me to believe it's possible many more of my dreams have much more detail, vividness and continuity that I just don't recall.

^^ Yes JustASimpleGuy, this is certainly true. With effort and consistency, you can push back the levels of awesome vivid recall earlier and earlier in your individual REM cycles, and in earlier sleep cycles as well. sivason says the same thing about lucidity -- in the beginning, it comes at the end of late morning REM, and as your brain gets more and more accustomed to operating in "lucid dream mode" the lucidity will occur earlier and earlier in REM, and earlier in the night, leading to longer lucid dreams. He mentions that it takes around 100 LDs for this to start happening…..ONE TO GO, WOOHOO! haha I don't expect an instant change but I absolutely do notice changes progressing over the months in this directions, at least with vivid recall of non-lucids, and I hope soon this will extend to lucids.

Practicing backwards recall can work wonders sometimes -- just the other night I woke up with end of dream memories, and was able to work backwards to a number of earlier scenes which had fallen out of immediate memory.

^^ I've had dreams where after I got lucid I feel extremely dizzy and disoriented. The experience was not hazy, though. It depends on how good your recall is. It's of course hard to be sure, but it certainly likely that that could have been the fault of memory. I've woken up from dreams and after moving suddenly they all vanished. It's of course slightly dangerous to extrapolate from personal experience to universal experience in such a personal thing as dreaming, but from a sample size of one it does seem to be true, and others have concurred, so it's not just a single data point.

I agree it's hard to tell for sure but I still think that the level of vividness might differ in each dream.
Yea our memory fails us here very often in the dreams and their recall but I remember experience where I realised in the dream itself that it's not very vivid, I mean I remember the fact of myself realising that in the dream. I don't think that's caused by the memory error ^_^"