I paid a half-hour visit to a metaphysical section of a bookstore last night, searching for food, like a lonely man looking for love at a strip club. I find the volume of bullshit depressing. Its as if some creative people had a late night brainstorming session, then declared every result to be established fact to be authoritatively parroted thereafter. I'd put my time where my mouth is and write my own book, but I don't really know anything either, not enough to fill a book.
Unfortunately, I have to disagree about the standard definition of lucid dreaming, that "its a lucid dream if you're aware you're dreaming". That doesn't appear to me to be what most people are actually talking about when they speak of lucid dreaming, even though the two experiences often coincide for most people. It seems to me that the main thing that makes a "lucid dream" is that you're using your imagination to drive the same sensate mental simulation that you usually use to represent your surroundings when you're awake. That's what gives it the "holy shit, its just like I'm awake" experience that people find compelling. If they had a "normal" dream in which they were aware that they are dreaming, I think they would be unlikely to call it a lucid dream unless they had never experienced the other thing. Such is my impression anyway.
As I've often mentioned, I'm generally always aware that I'm dreaming when I'm dreaming, but very few of those dreams are lucid in the sense that people talk about here. I'm also mildly "lucid" while awake, using the "you're lucid if you know its a dream" definition. In other words I'm conscious that my sensate experience is an internally generated educated guess about my surroundings, and I feel it to be imagined rather than being a direct experience of my surroundings. Furthermore I think there's a sense in which the surroundings themselves are a kind of projection, but since I'm not conscious to the degree of the god-like mind that makes that projection, I don't necessarily experience it that way.
I realized something new on the astral projection subject this weekend, from reading a science fiction description of an out of body experience....In my 'astral projection' experiences I have warped my first-person thought of where I am, displacing it from the actual location of my body. In contrast, in my 'out of body' experience I have given a visual view to an imagined third person perspective on the location as my body. People have those third person perspectives all the time, as a part of their situational awareness, but they don't usually visualize them. This distinction, between moving the first person perspective without moving the body, vs shifting it to an alternative third person perspective, seems to account for much of the difference between sleep paralysis astral projection, and the floating-at-the ceiling type of dislocation that people have such with a near death experience.
See my response here http://www.dreamviews.com/f19/though...n-oobe-135900/ for an updated rehash of my general view on this subject, if you're interested and haven't seen it before.
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