In-Out Tagging (an add-on to Reality Checking)

Hey,

Recently, I did a quick review of the current scientific literature on lucid dreaming: Link to review. It was quick and not very critical so take it with a grain of salt, I'll definitely have to revisit the literature and make sure I'm making the right leaps, but I wanted to bring discussions from the scientific literature into our conversations.

There are three important concepts from this review that I will use to present this new exercise I have decided to highlight in my lucid dreaming practice:
- Continuity Hypothesis of Dreaming (There is continuity between dream cognition and waking cognition, dreaming being very alike wandering thoughts and spontaneous images our mind's eye (memories, scenarios).
- Mindfulness-Lucidity Gap (while waking mindfulness increases dreaming mindfulness, these are not associated with increased lucid dream frequency in non practitioners. There are two neurological signatures of lucid dreaming hypnotized: one that corresponds to the metacognitive recognition event of "Aha, I am dreaming" and one with the greater changes in brain function that shift from a REM stage to something more like awake, where you might feel more like your waking self.
- Dreaming impairment of Internal vs External generation Recognition

So here's the exercise I am emphasizing in my practice presently. Please tell me if there are other names for it, but for convenience, I named it
In-Out Tagging.

While non-lucid dreaming is often defined as "Not realizing one is dreaming" or "Not realizing the dream is not real" and while the lucid dream practice is supported with Reality Checks which check if you are in reality or if you are awake, I've noticed that recent scientific articles, mainly by Laberge himself have used different words. Mainly, they note that non-lucid dreaming is marked with a lack of recognition of what is internally and externally generated. This led me to try to take the Reality Check and change it for those words.

In-Out is a quick-hand for "Internally generated and Externally generated". Tagging is because instead of a "check" where you posit a hypothesis and rule it out, In-Out Tagging is about labeling various phenomenon as internally or externally generated. I am not presenting it as a check but rather as a recognition exercise.

Nonduality
It's also important to note that while In-Out Tagging seems to create a binary (this is In, that is Out), I actually aim the exercise to be grounded in non-duality. What I mean is, one must understand that all information we perceive has first been integrated by our brain and is currently being presented by our brain. In this sense, all contents of your consciousness could be tagged "In." Also, I think I can generally say that all contents of consciousness such as a memory or a spontaneous image or thought, once originated from information outside the body. Even if it is now made new, it's origins could be ultimately tagged "Out."

Therefore In-Out tagging models the external environment and the internal environment as dynamic systems. Instead of labeling events as purely internal or purely external, we're recognizing events as immediately generating from the external systems and internal events immediately generated from the internal system. You can chose whether internal stimuli such as hunger and itches our considered In our Out. This depends if you place your boundary around your psyche or around your body.

Comparing Reality Check with In-Out Tagging

Reality Check asks "Am I awake?" "Is this real"
If you are awake, you will always answer "Yes." You don't get to practice the "No" option unless you do MILD and visualize what you would do were the answer "No."

In-Out Tagging
Ex. I am walking outside, noticing the environment and daydreaming. I note that my environment is "Out" and my daydreaming is "In."
Ex. I am on the bus worrying about things I might have forgotten to do at work. I note that the bus is "Out" and my work scenarios are "In."

This allows me to practice both responses to an "In" and "Out" tag. An "Out" response might involve having to immediately and directly respond to it. This is different from, for example, if I am worrying about having forgotten to do something at work, once noting it is "In," I realize, I do not immediately and directly have to respond to the scenario. I am instead responding to my internally generated anxiety. I can go ahead and consider it, "Is it really likely I did that? What are the consequences? What do I want to do about it?" and then move on.

In alignment with the Continuity Hypothesis of dreaming, if dreaming cognition is a lot like waking wandering thoughts and daydreaming, practicing recognizing wandering thoughts as internally generated could cross over to recognizing dreams as internally generated. Additionally, while a reality check denounces the dreaming experience as unreal and fake, labeling dreaming as internally generated invites you to engage with your inner world. Mindfulness training such as ADA often encourages us to weed out wandering thoughts and focus on externally generated (Out) phenomena. In-Out Tagging appreciates internally generated (In) phenomena and encourages mindful engagement with them, recognizing that they are internal.

While Reality Checking + MILD has you visualize lucid dreaming (Which I support 100%), In-Out Tagging has you recognize and engage with your waking internally generated spontaneous thoughts and daydreams. It's real time practice.

I'm really not ready to say I've seen the effects of this exercise on my lucid dream frequency, but I was happy to notice I've had one lucid dream a night for 6 days straight and I wanted to share one lucid dream in particular where I reacted exactly the same way as during my In-Out tagging exercise, where I would tag my mind's eyes spontaneous images as "In" and quickly follow one image to another. In this case, this did not allow the visuals to stabilize and become crisps, but this only lets me know I need to use different strategies than quick roaming through visuals. For example, now, I can practice focusing on a mind's eye image with the intention of becoming more clear.

There's the thing with the mindfulness-lucidity gap: merely becoming lucid does not necessarily increase mindfulness. You need to chose to turn on mindfulness. So, once I tag something as in (or even out), I've incorporated responding by intending to be more mindful/awake/present/alive. In a dream, this hopefully leads to reactivating certain brain processes that restore mindfulness (thus bridging the gap).

I'm going to leave it at that for now. I'm curious what your thoughts are on this!

Strangely enough I've been a bit out of interest with lucid dreaming lately and have not felt much particular pull towards DV as a result. Although my mind hasn't much interest in lucidity right now, maybe because I am feeling more interested in non-lucid stuff anyway, this and your other supporting post are pulling my interest back in, a bit. I won't go on about this since that's best left for the rant/rave thread. :P

And reading your post has made me feel I should re-read Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, it has been a while since I last read all the way through it.

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Personally, as years have gone by since I first started to learn about lucid dreaming, I have started to distance myself from the notions of "Not realizing one is dreaming" or "Not realizing the dream is not real", mostly because these thoughts (to me) invalidate the very real and valid experience of dreaming as a whole, lucid or not.

To me, this seems to come as a sound conclusion to what we have known all along about how we experience reality, that it is all "In" on some level. Interestingly, I recently watched a film that touched on the concept of Phenomenology. Though I have been aware of the concept for many years now, I did not realise it had a formal name until I was reading about the film. Incidentally, the film was Dark Star (1974), nothing to write home about for most people but I appreciated it.

I wish I had a reliable source for this but I remember being told that a lot of what we "sense" is information that is guessed (filled in) by the brain, rather than actually sensed and processed. Humans, and animals in general maybe, do a lot of guesswork in day-to-day activity to judge whether or not something is a "good idea" and generally there always seems to be the possibility of gaps of information when it comes to both the senses and to communication, otherwise misunderstandings and accidents probably wouldn't happen at all...

At any point in our lives, there is always some relevance to those questions about whether or not we are being deceived by our senses and present experience. After all, many (probably most of us here at least, I'd wager) have had the experience of dreaming something that was so engaging or lifelike that we feel amazed, stupid or confused when we actually wake up, to find that the experience was "simply" internal. My personal opinion has been for some time, that it is a mistake to minimise these events as "simply" internal, because as I have lived on, I have personally felt that the dream world is just as important as waking life in many respects, even if it's often harder to recall what happened in the dream world.

I think that avoiding an aspect of duality is a good idea in this respect, precisely because it takes not only reasoning but some kind of intuition too, to make an assessment on our present situation and what surrounds us. Reasoning and logic can be flawed, be we awake or dreaming, for any number of reasons, though I'd guess that distraction is at least one reason that is common to both worlds and then there are reasons such as impaired ability to think clearly, because of substances in waking life or because of an unknown factor (certainly at the time, to the dreamer) whilst dreaming. In my view, the other aspect of it is that logic is not necessarily the "truth" or factual in a sense of unchanging, otherwise we wouldn't speak of fallacies and we wouldn't have changes of heart on matters that are supposedly of intellect and reason, I think.

So to me, the assumption that we should judge something regarding its "In-Out" factor based on its current presentation to us, rather than what we have known of it from past experience alone, seems sound. Of course, intuition is far from flawless too and so we end up with scenarios where we are often making our "best guess" about something anyway.

I think your exercise is interesting and worth considering, because it goes beyond recognising something as "thought" and thus internal, but also goes into recognising another important factor. That factor is why for example, I often fail with reality checks while dreaming, because I don't go into analysing the immediacy of context, both internal and external, something which your exercise promotes.