Thread: Balancing Awareness and Reflection-The key to attaining lucidity

In order to lucid dream, you have to be aware during the dream and reflect on this awareness to recognize what you're being aware of is a dream.

These two things must be balanced to have the best chance of LDing. Too much awareness leaves too little room for reflection and too much reflection leaves too little room for awareness.

100% Awareness/0% Reflection-You're so completely engaged in the plot of the dream that the concept of it being a dream never comes across your mind.
75% Awareness/25% Reflection-You're engaged in the plot of the dream. Then, something makes you step back and think "Wait, is this a dream?"
50% Awareness/50% Reflection-Your reflecting on everything you're being aware of and lucidity comes easily without need of a reality check.
25% Awareness/75% Reflection-You're reflecting when something you become aware of makes you think "Is this a dream?"
0% Awareness/100% Reflection-You're too deep in reflection to become aware of anything outside of it.

So with this knowledge, what do you do? Your analyze where you fall on the spectrum and make changes accordingly.

If you're so engaged during your dreams that the concept of it being a dream never comes across your mind, you need to be less aware during your dreams in order to leave more room for you reflect on what you're being aware of. To do this, try to be more thoughtful while falling asleep.

On the other hand, if you're thinking so much during your dreams that you're unaware during them, or if you're not conscious of your dreams at all, you need to be more aware during them. To do this, try to be more watchful while falling asleep.

Find the balance and you're all set.

Hey Dolphin ! Great post ! I think it is very useful, despite being very simple and not take into account other variables.

I think a good method to join these two mind activities wit good results is to keep a mindset of actively paying attention to odd, strange or curious things during the day as if you were searching for dream signs.

I think it can be done only some hours prior to sleep. I have done it with great results (always multiple lucids the very same night) but i eventually give up probably because it is very energy consuming. But as i am finding myself increasingly relaxed (due to other life style modificatioms) i think i can devote more and more energy to this.

As a note for reflection i post this quote from Paul Tholey

Paul Tholey emphasizes, it is not so important to frequently ask oneself the critical question as it is to develop a permanent critical attitude towards one’s state of consciousness

Originally Posted by VagalTone

Hey Dolphin ! Great post ! I think it is very useful, despite being very simple and not take into account other variables.

I think a good method to join these two mind activities wit good results is to keep a mindset of actively paying attention to odd, strange or curious things during the day as if you were searching for dream signs.

I think it can be done only some hours prior to sleep. I have done it with great results (always multiple lucids the very same night) but i eventually give up probably because it is very energy consuming. But as i am finding myself increasingly relaxed (due to other life style modificatioms) i think i can devote more and more energy to this.

As a note for reflection i post this quote from Paul Tholey

Hi, as there are no flying elephants in real life, what type of 'oddities' do you search for in the evening? Im guessing you have to lower the criteria for what is odd and what to look out for. Do you look out for flying elephants? How do you look for oddities when theres nothing really odd going on? As im sitting in the evening watching TV, what could i look out for to get into the right mindset? I understand your theory and i buy into it :-) After all if we go to sleep looking out for 'the odd' and 'strange' then we can easily spot it whilst in a dream ... can you elaborate furthur on exactly what you do during waking life to cultivate this mindset please

thanks
Ezzo

So again (and again, and again), it comes down to: balance! Awareness vs. reflection, intent/energy/excitement vs. relaxation. Balance is the meta-fundamental.

And I find myself ping-ponging back and forth between the two extremes of your scale. I'm most often either totally involved in the plot and reacting to it rather than reflecting upon it, or entirely absorbed in thinking about and examining a particular object or concerned about something and locked in a tight loop of thinking about it. Sometimes within the same dream I will go back and forth between these two many times.

And reflection (for lucidity) needs to be the right kind of reflection: "Is this dream-like?", "How odd is this?", "Is this a waking location?", and so forth. Which ties back in to memory, because if we could only crack the barrier to memory and remember our desire to reflect on the dreamishness of our experiences, we'd be lucid a lot more. Attention, reflection, recall/memory!

I changed the OP to be more thoughtful or watchful while falling asleep to adjust the balance.

Sure, there are other variables within awareness and reflection that affect the chances of lucidity but these things come naturally. Self awareness comes naturally with the blend of awareness and reflection, memory comes naturally with reflection and the right kind of reflection comes naturally with natural intention and learning from experience.

For example, last night I missed a false awakening because I was reflecting on a previous dream. I made an intention to be more aware during false awakenings and with this extra awareness and intention was able to catch one later on.

^^ Just because you may not find flying elephants, doesn't mean you shouldn't be looking out for them . It's the mindset where you're searching for the odd, rather than the finding, that's important. Kind of like RCs: we do RCs in the waking state so that when we're teetering on the edge of lucidity, we'll remember that we have this tool to help determine our state.

Things that you can find in the waking state include any kind of changes. Things that aren't the way you remember, or located where you recall them being. New construction on roads, buildings, etc. are very good times to peak your awareness.

Sivason notes that things in dreams tend to "waver" and change. One thing I remember he says he does is to look at something for about 30 seconds intently, remaining alert to any sort of changes that may indicate the dream state.

Hey ! I think FM pretty much said what i was going to say.

As i said i find it a little bit strenuous, but i think it can be practiced maybe during an WBTB or previous to sleep. But, as far as my personal experience goes, it can be very vey effective if practiced for an extended period of the day (usually evening) coupled with the intention to become lucid. Think of it like ADA on steroids, or mindfulness of surprising things (lol)

The goal is to be creative and find new things around you (which you probably never noticed) and get that feeling of novelty, surprise and even awe
As soon as you find something different, interesting, surprising, exciting, or odd (more rare) you can RC right there and say to yourself « I will recognize when i am dreaming» or something to establish your intention. Btw, MILD is very similar, right ? The difference is that you use a visualization ( eg. a nonlucid dream, which probably contained many surprising featutes you didn´t notice)

So, you can think of it as kind of daytime MILD technique or ADA on steroids. As i said it is strenuous, but who knows if it can be an enjoyable habit