Thread: Consistency

Thank you very much, everyone. I am sorry for getting back to this so late but I needed some time for processing.
I am actually quite happy with my last week in the end, it was a very relaxed one but I still had many interesting dream experiences and I can feel that the relaxed approach can work for me.

Originally Posted by Sivason

I would say never let a day go by without thinking some about if you might in fact be dreaming. Beyond that just keep working on it. It will not matter so much if you change what you do as long as the attention to lucid dreaming is the consistent thing.

This is basically what I hoped to hear.

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

But here's the main point I want to get to about lucid dreaming. I think we are fast to categorize dreams as non-lucids and lucids. I think we are conscious in both those types of dreams. Lucids have that extra meta moment where you become mindful of the fact that you are dreaming. You can have those moments in life and daydreaming, reading a book or watching TV but these moments don't add so much meaning to those events in themselves. So anyway, I think the line between non-lucid/lucid can be blurred constructively.

Thank you for your well thought out posts. I agree with this wholeheartedly. It reminded me of your recent advice to InvisibleO (it took me some time to found it, so here it is for a reference).

Spoiler for post:

I have grown convinced that there's something about the way we learn about and practice lucid dreaming that inherently creates this subconscious expectation because of the lucid dream police trend I've seen from so many people. What I call the "lucid dream police" is when someone becomes lucid, and the dream characters start to oppose it, and stop them from doing this or that.

I think it's because we treat lucid dreaming as abnormal, as unnatural, for the elite, for the rare interested person. I like to think that all dreams are conscious dreams: even in non-lucid dreams, we are conscious enough to be aware of the dream. If we were unconscious during dreams, we wouldn't be seeing and feeling things, making decisions, thinking, and remembering. Lucid dreaming only means we recognize the experience as a dream, which honestly, doesn't require much more awareness. We've dreamed every day of our life, and we easily recognize it subconsciously, I think.

I dreamed last night that I got caught by an enemy and they injected me with my own blood, and then my corporal experience was weird, so I started narrating over the dream and saying I was now a spiritual being, that my gravity was opposite everyone else's and that I couldn't exist in water. And then as I said those things, I would experience them. I wasn't "lucid", but I was deciding the dream at this point. Doing this, then, thinking, wow, that's crazy, what if someone pulls me underwater, I will die!" I was simply engaged, but subconsciously, I clearly recognized I was dreaming or else I wouldn't be narrating and deciding the dream.

In that sense, lucid dreaming is not abnormal or unnatural. It is anything but. Nonlucid and lucid dreams are natural dreams. Our awareness belongs to dreams.

I agree with this so much I think it should be set in stone.
I love many of my non-lucid dreams. And recently, I've been amazed how many "shades of grey" there are between a completely non-lucid dream and a lucid dream. Not just levels of lucidity, but also levels of awareness in non-lucid dreams and the scale isn't simply linear but branched, like there are different types of awareness, I don't know how to describe or classify it.
Knowing it is a dream subconsciously - this happens to me very often. My dream me often comments about the dream but there is no real reflective awareness. Then there are semis which are considered something else than a dream while they have a high level of awareness. False lucids. And maybe even false non-lucids - I had a dream recently in which I reflected on the dream from the point of the dreamer ("I am just telling myself stories in my head", "things changes because that's what dreams do"), I thought it is only a light dream or partially a daydream or me thinking, I never realized "this is a dream, I can do whatever I want, I am lucid", I just thought about it in the background, while it was happening. When I woke up, it felt surprisingly like waking up from a lucid dream. Very smooth, no shift of perspective, no major change in my thinking.
That brings me to the thought that I really dislike the usual definition " lucid = knowing/being aware it is a dream while dreaming". It's not well defined and it isn't as binary as people see it. It's really all about the perspective - seeing and perceiving the dream as the dream ego (awareness of the dream) vs perceiving it as the dreamer (meta-awareness, awareness of the awareness, reflective awareness). And I think this isn't completely black and white either.

Anyway, I am getting off-topic
I like your daydreaming technique for your restaurant/food dreams.