Thread: Fed up with semi-lucidity

Originally Posted by Sageous

There is nothing meditative about remembering to remember, or gathering waking-life self-awareness in a dream (or in waking-life, for that matter). There is nothing deep, meaningful, or supercritical about this action; in fact it is little more than a decision.

I firmly believe that one of the errors of advanced LD'ers these days, and the tutorials they spawn, is putting too much introspection and other deep thought into their philosophies and instructions. Lucid dreaming, full-on lucid dreaming, is nothing more than simply being your self -- your waking-life self -- during the dream. Adding more simply confuses both instructor and instructees.

Awareness of awareness is sort of a silly term to me, and decidedly complicates simply being present/self-aware. You don't need to observe and appreciate self-awareness, you need only have it... yes, the practice necessary to achieve this state easily can be difficult, but the best things (like LD'ing) usually need a little extra effort, don't they?

Our cogntive abilities work just fine in dreams; what is impaired is our ability to access memory. Without that access, the sharpest mind in the world can't properly process thoughts or interpret sensory input (real or imagined). But with that access, cognition works just as well in a dream as it does in waking-life, because you can access real memory to assess the unreal stuff you see in dreams (i.e., when semi-lucid you might be quite comfortable with the "fact" that your long-dead grandmother is chatting with you, as though she were still alive, but if your granny is chatting with you when fully lucid, you can remember that she is dead -- and the experience just might be more wonderful for that remembering).

I think of it more as nurturing a clearness of mind that immediately sobers my drunken mind, through conjuring self-awareness and accessing memory. If a dreamer ever, ever imagines that he must become Buddha (per se, of course) to be a successful LD'er, he is definitely on the wrong path. All he needs to be is present.

Yes, access to memory is shut off during normal dreaming, and that is certainly by genetic design, but an LD'er has the ability to turn it back on, to access memory as if she were awake. Lucid dreaming almost by definition -- being awake while you are asleep -- is done in defiance of nature. We humans do lots of things in defiance of nature, why not this? Also, to assume that access to memory is inherently and obligatorily disrupted is to guarantee that it will be.

Now this is something I completely agree with, and am sure is a common -- but ignored -- issue in the art of LD'ing. Dreams are the only things in human experience whose existence relies completely on memory, so how we remember our experience is critical... unfortunately, many, many people tend to quickly form memories that conform to their desires rather than carefully and humbly reviewing their raw memories immediately upon waking, and let them form into accurate renditions of their dreaming experience, for better or worse.

You never really need to examine how you are thinking about an experience to appreciate the experience; the opposite, appreciating the experience without thinking about how you are appreciating it is in my mind a supremely better attitude. I really like the term "semi-living," BTW; I have a feeling that is the cognitive default mode for most people, and one that self-awareness (which is to me a decidedly unnatural state) easily elevates to "full-on living" -- without meditation or metacognition!

I took a long time to respond because your comment actually surprised me which prompted me to scour the scientific literature to bring myself back to date with the modern understanding of dreaming and lucid dreaming.

First, I was pleasantly surprised that you do not take self-awareness to be this complicated metacognitive meditative state one has to maintain perpetually whilst dreaming. It's not that I thought you thought that. I more so get this feeling from the broader discussion. Recently, we are often talking about semi-lucidity, claiming no lucid dream is lucid enough. With practices such as ADA that require unbroken attention to all the subtleties of our external environment, and other such mindfulness practice, it begs the question, are we making this more complicated than it ought to be. And I'm happy you agree there!

Just the way IndigoRose defined "true lucidity" is indicative of the collective understanding: "True lucidity is awareness of this awareness." IndigoRose has gone through your course and left with this understanding. And I personally, have come out of your course multiple time with a different understanding of what "self-awareness" might specifically refer to. And I've for sure sometimes thought it might be like what IndigoRose said. This is not a comment on your course but on the general confusion of what it means to practice self-awareness regarding "true" lucid dreaming.

Secondly, I was surprised when you claimed that cognition in lucid dreams could be the same as waking. Not because I have never felt that way in lucid dreams, and not because I don't trust my memory of that feeling but because I just don't trust that my impression while dreaming was necessarily accurate (or grounded in a stable/long enough scenario to really test the extent of my cognition).

On my scientific literature scavenger hunt linked here, I did find the discussion is presently aligned with your statement. Presently, there is agreement with the Continuity Hypothesis of dreaming which claims a continuity between dreaming and waking cognition. This mostly means that dreaming is a lot like waking wandering thoughts and spontaneous mental scenarios and memories, and that cognition is otherwise very continuous. Additionally, there is evidence that during REM lucid dreams from dream practitioners, the brain state changes from a REM phase to a hybrid between a REM phase and a waking brain state. In the article, this state change is considered voluntary (resulting from the intention before going to sleep). So, it is true that while lucid dreaming, we can reactivate our mind to be more like our waking mind.

I think it's relevant here to note the Mindfulness-lucidity gap. I called it that so you won't find anything by googling that and it's only really based on one study so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the conclusion is meaningful to this thread. In the study, they demonstrated that waking mindfulness correlated with dreaming mindfulness, but both of these did not correlate with lucid dream frequency, in non lucid dream practitioners. This means that practicing mindfulness in waking life could increase mindfulness in our dreaming life, but that this will not in itself produce greater lucid dream frequency. To increase lucid dream frequency, you actually have to train to recognize dreams. Mindfulness training does not influence lucid dream frequency unless you are a meditator. It is possible that this is because meditators train to recognize internally generated phenomena such as thoughts and mental scenarios which I think is a form of practice to recognize dreams. I talk more about this in this thread linked here. Even in another article, this Mindfulness-lucidity gap is referenced when they say there is probably two neurobiological signatures of lucid dreaming: one associated to the metacogntive "aha, I am dreaming" and another associated with the shift from REM phase to the REM-waking hybrid of lucid dreams, which perhaps pertains to increased mindfulness or something else like just increased wakefulness during the dream. I don't like to use the word wakefulness while dreaming though. But this is probably what we mean when talking about semi-lucidity. We recognized it's a dream (lucidity) but we didn't completely change from REM to Hybrid sleep.

So to conclude, I like your answer and I think it matches the scientific literature. Particularly, that self-awareness is perhaps merely a choice, and not a complicated meditative sustained attention on awareness of awareness. While the scientists in one of the articles said that REM sleep could be elevated to a hybrid phase of wakefulness due to a voluntary decision prior to sleep, I think we can perhaps make this choice while in the dream. If we recognize we are dreaming (lucidity), we perhaps should take this first moment to chose to be more self-aware/present (mindful) and hence bridging the mindfulness-lucidity gap and elevating our REM to Hybrid sleep.

Update:

Recently, I've been feeling really low, unhappy with both my life and my LD progress. And I was completely stuck. Nothing worked, my sleep patterns have been bad and different every night. What worked before stopped working completely. But I still had a very good recall and some semi-lucid dreams.
I oven ordered some B6 a 5-HTP, not only for dreaming but also hoping that it could help with my mental health and sleep. I haven't tried it yet.

I adopted the new routine anyway - memory triggers for reality checks:
- when my cat jumps on my lap - quick RC
- when my mother messages me online or any other communication with my family, including FB posts - thorough RC
- when I see a dog outside - RRC
And also anything unusual or dreamy or sometimes when I go from A to B, as this is common in dreams.
I've been doing well with the memory triggers, some of them are now completely habituated, so I maybe change some or add some more. But the differences between the RCs disappeared, I just look around for dreamsign, think about what I am doing, think about the situation and do an RC.

Then, I guess, something clicked, because yesterday, I got lucid in a completely normal situation, just asking myself "could this be a dream". This is the first time ever I got lucid in this way, without any dreamsign and without any nighttime technique.
And today, the same thing again (plus a prelucid, where I got tricked).
I still need to add these to my dream journal here.

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

Just the way IndigoRose defined "true lucidity" is indicative of the collective understanding: "True lucidity is awareness of this awareness." IndigoRose has gone through your course and left with this understanding. And I personally, have come out of your course multiple time with a different understanding of what "self-awareness" might specifically refer to. And I've for sure sometimes thought it might be like what IndigoRose said. This is not a comment on your course but on the general confusion of what it means to practice self-awareness regarding "true" lucid dreaming.

Secondly, I was surprised when you claimed that cognition in lucid dreams could be the same as waking. Not because I have never felt that way in lucid dreams, and not because I don't trust my memory of that feeling but because I just don't trust that my impression while dreaming was necessarily accurate (or grounded in a stable/long enough scenario to really test the extent of my cognition).

I read Sageous's threads and class but my concept of awareness of the awareness isn't from there, I think. Honestly, I still don't understand the concept of self-awareness well. From one point of view, it should be easy. But if it is the definition of the difference between the lucid state of mind and non-lucid state of mind, it stops making sense to me. Because I have non-lucid dreams in which I feel present while they are happening, thinking in them, making some decisions, having access to some memories. There is obviously some metacognition in these dreams, it's just the understanding of the context that is wrong. I also think the difference between lucids and non-lucids isn't just self-awareness and memory, it is in cognitive abilities too. My non-lucidity isn't about thinking wrongly or not remembering that blue dogs with horns don't exist, it is about not thinking at all, because thinking is hard and there are other interesting things to do, distractions, basically.
I also think my dream schema is very often on, subconsciously. Like when you watch a movie, your movie schema is on and you don't think why there are fantastical beings fighting, these things just happen in movies. A semi-lucid dream maybe happens when this comes out, over the subconscious-conscious barrier, for a moment, but not really triggering any form of higher awareness or cognition.

Thank you for taking the time and making the threads about the scientific progress in the field of dreaming, I'll read them later, looking very much forward to it.

EDIT: I think your science review thread answers a lot of my questions. Thank you!

Congrats on your DILDs!

I really do think memory boosting is key for them. When the RC triggers become habitual, time to change them up.