Thread: Order

It occurred to me today while in light meditation what dream signs are trying to accomplish and what might be a better perspective from which to view our attempts at gaining lucidity naturally.

A dream sign is an object or event that your conscious mind should perceive as odd or just out of place while in a dream. And in recognizing this anomaly, you gain lucidity. But I have realized that what we should be doing is coming at gaining lucidity from a slightly different angle, not to imply that dream signs aren't important.

We are looking for these odd objects or events that conflict with our waking life experience and hoping to transfer that WL understanding to the dream state. I think what we should be doing is creating greater 'control of thought' in our daily life so these anomalies, such as jump cuts and strangely juxtaposed objects, stand out as out of place as a natural response to our heightened, more precise thought process and awareness. I believe that this is why practices such as meditation and mindfulness and awareness training build a natural lucid dreaming mindset.

If we stop uncontrollably reminiscing about the past and falling unawares into ruminations about the future, mindless daydreaming in other words, we will quite naturally translate that new mental control into the dream state and recognize those anomalies without having to resort to crossing our fingers and hoping to recognize a dream sign.

It doesn't mean you don't think about the past or plan into the future. You just do it with control, with your directed mind. It's the wandering mind that is our enemy, if you want to call it such. If your mind flits about haphazardly, going from daydream to daydream, in waking life, how can you expect it to notice when it flits about in your dreams and call it odd? It's through the focused attention of meditation and other practices that we can gain true control of our dream life as well as our waking.

This is what being in the 'Now' is all about: control of our mind in every state that we find ourselves.

Just a few thoughts I wanted to share. Good dreaming.

If I were to sum up what I said above, I would simply say that daydreaming (uncontrolled WL mind, more precisely) may be the biggest hindrance to acquiring lucidity. At least the uncontrolled version that I assume most of us engage in regularly. But I think it would be great to simply rely on controlling our thought processes in WL to become a natural lucid dreamer rather than relying on hit-or-miss techniques.

Just my perspective.

Originally Posted by madmagus

If I were to sum up what I said above, I would simply say that daydreaming (uncontrolled WL mind, more precisely) may be the biggest hindrance to acquiring lucidity. At least the uncontrolled version that I assume most of us engage in regularly. But I think it would be great to simply rely on controlling our thought processes in WL to become a natural lucid dreamer rather than relying on hit-or-miss techniques.

Just my perspective.

Im so glad you made this post as for the past 2 weeks iv been teaching myself to be in the moment and not day dream....i used to walk the dogs and after a while i would think "i cannot remember walking down this street?" Which im sure alot of people do and thats exactly what im staying away from.
Im great and staying in the moment and im getting used
To it alot more now but the only problem i have is when i play on my xbox or watch t.v....sometimes i have dreams that are being watched like how i watch t.v so i know i wont get lucid because i think im just watching these events happen on t.v......same with playing xbox.... im so into the game that i think its real whej ofcourse i forget im actually at home on the sofa.....eneways great post =)

I used to think this way, too, so I know where you're coming from.

What I realized, though, is the problem is not that the mind is wandering or thinking about the wrong thing, it's that the mind is not connecting the thoughts with dreaming. The mind could be completely wandering anywhere, but if it is wandering somewhere that reminds you of dreaming, you can still put 2+2 together and realize you're dreaming. Thinking about the past can lead you to think about how you got where you are, while thinking about the future can lead to thoughts about how you're going to get there.

On the flip end, one is often aware of what's presently going on in the dream, but if this awareness doesn't cause dreaming to come across the mind, there still won't be any lucidity.

So, the problem is not what you're thinking about, but how you're perceiving these thoughts in relation to dreaming. A technique that would allow for this consistently is what I'm looking for.

I agree it would be great to control thought processes to become lucid every dream, but with good dream awareness, the technique doesn't have to hit at a high percentage to become lucid consistently, if you're aware of 5 dreams a night on average and are only lucid in %20 of your dreams, that's still one ld a night on average, which isn't perfect, but still pretty decent. I still want to be lucid %100 but I'm happy with %20 too.

Thanks Clidu and good luck keeping with the awareness. Watching tv is a great time to practice your awareness, actually. Each time you realize you've been hypnotized and have gotten lost in the show, pull your awareness back so you have a dual awareness of your surroundings and what is going on in the program. It's a great way to take the dead time of tv watching and make it productive, at least in terms of awareness practice.

Dolphin, I appreciate your perspective. What i'm trying to do, in keeping with my post, is to acknowledge that I'm dreaming each time i catch myself in a daydream or coming back from one. Then I purposefully reassert my moment-to-moment awareness. I'll be traveling along this two-pronged approach for a bit to test results. I currently have 2-3 lucids a week on average, of varying degrees of lucidity. And absolutely, even getting to a consistent 20% would be great with 100% as that pie-in-the-sky goal. I'm sure with a united front of lucid dreamers we'll create enough momentum in the nether to come up with the perfect combination. Until then, we plug away.

I reread your post, Dolphin, which got me thinking some more on the topic. In an attempt to clarify, or add a little depth to my above thoughts, I look at day dreaming as the equivalent of jump cuts in our night dreams. Because we are so used to jump cutting in daily life with our daydreams, jump cutting through our night dreams seems perfectly normal when we experience them. My idea is that if we change the unconscious nature of our daydreams to daydreams of a controlled nature, or simply cut back on the quantity, we will pass that same concept of control into our dream state. We'll start seeing the jump cuts themselves as dream signs, realizing they are out of place.

This may in practice not be the case. I've tried to put myself into the mind of a natural lucid dreamer, and I believe that their awareness has to be something very basic, something natural to their mindset. I don't believe it would be something exotic. It should be something very natural, something they do without ever evaluating it. I don't believe they spend the day incorporating the concept of being in a dream into their normal daily routine, which is the artificial construct that I've had in my head as a solution. Other than control of their unconscious meandering mind, I haven't come to anything better as an explanation. Thanks for getting me thinking a bit more on it.