Memory, in relation to self-awareness?

**DarkSyntax** · 05-23-2016 08:07 PM

As far as i know, memory is considered one of the lucid dreaming fundamentals. However there isn't a lot of info that explains it properly in the case of becoming lucid. With that in mind, i have been thinking about how much does memory assist in lucidity.

So, suppose that someone has been negatively affecting their memory strength through some sort of activity, would this hugely damage the ability to lucid dream? From my observations that seems to be true to some extents, but the question lies:

If someone had a good amount of self-awareness in a dream but a weakened memory, would that by-logic make lucidity harder to attain? In my search for why my lucid dreaming ability has gone weaker, i have noticed that i have also weakened my memory along the way. Coincidence or not, there has to be a reason for that. Even though self-awareness is lucidity, what role would memory take in that matter is something that i've yet to know for sure..

I could have answered my questions without knowing, but the fact is that i'm not perfectly sure right now.

**FryingMan** · 05-23-2016 09:02 PM

Self-awareness is related to memory in the way that who we are, our core "self," is mostly (entirely?) determined by our experiences and our memory of these experiences. People who suffer amnesia are not "the same person" they were before they lost their memories.

In terms of getting lucid in dreams, mostly is it impairment of access to memory that keeps dreamers in the dark as to the true nature of their dreaming experiences. In many ways, "the universe has just begun" for dreamers at the beginning of a dream. It is lack of access to memory that prevents us from thinking (as Sageous always likes to say

) that there is anything unusual about pink elephants playing ping pong on the moon.

I think LaBerge was right on when he formulated lucid dreaming in essence as a problem of memory: remembering the desire to fully recognize the dream state while we are experiencing it.

In order to get lucid in a dream, we need to remember:

that there is such a thing as dreaming
that we desire to recognize the dream state while we're experiencing it
that things in dreams happen that cannot happen when awake (or happen decidedly differently)
that we can determine our state by means of a state check (RC)

If only these things could be on our mind while dreaming, anyone with the slightest interest in lucid dreaming could be lucid easily. But the physiological impairment of access to memory that occurs in the dream state makes this quite tricky in practice.

**Hitokage** · 05-25-2016 05:28 PM

Interesting ideas, memory can surely affect dreaming in many different ways. You can remember to do RC or you can simply get lost in the memories of the events you've experience during the day. I noticed that the more new stuff I experience during the day, the more I dream about them but without lucidity. Like the mind is too obsessed by those memories that it has to process.