Why Not Lucid? (BILD)

[DNK]

Reading through a thread on the forum, I came up with a fairly interesting question: if we can be lucid or non-lucid in a dream, why are we usually non-lucid? Why is non-lucid the natural state of dreaming and not lucidity? We go to sleep and hand over control to a different form of consciousness, our dream selves. These selves are much like our waking selves, except that they readily morph into imagined characters and take on our hypothetical situations like they were real (for the most part). They have fairly short attention spans and even shorter memories. From time to time, they get tired of a certain role or situation enough to become lucid, but generally they get easily fixated on just about anything and forget about the lucid option. In reality, they would be hopelessly comic, if not tragic, figures. Sometimes beforehand we program our minds to create dream selves that desire lucidity, and will have that as a part of their character. These selves will perhaps periodically check something in their world to determine their status, and then upon realizing their state will become lucid, handing control back over to our conscious selves. Or at some subconscious level we will simply be expecting and used to lucid dream selves, and that is what it produces for us. And yet, upon gaining control, we too easily lose it again, fading back into those dream characters, lost in our own creation. So why do we do it this way? Why do we so easily hand ourselves over to fantasy? We could be perpetual gods in our dreams, yet instead we all too regularly decide/desire to be nothing more than simple characters, at the mercy of ourselves. Is there an innate desire to be a character and to lose yourself, only for a bit? We can still act a character out in a lucid state, but it would never be as complete. Is there an innate need to lose yourself? Would perpetual lucidity drain us? Or is it that we are just too used to it? Grew up with it, before we understood lucidity, before we even were able to understand the world around us, before we were even self aware, and now it's part of our expectations, part of our understanding of reality: our dreams will always tend towards non-lucidity; it takes lots of work and effort to become lucid regularly. But could we, if we believed it enough, always tend towards lucidity? Is non-lucidity just a remnant of a feeble infant mind, or do we still gain something from it? Could we just ditch all the xILD methods and say, "I'm just going to always be lucid from now on"? Maybe we would need to first examine why it was we desired to be non-lucid in the first place. It should be possible. I call it the belief induced lucid dream (BILD). Discuss

[Sonicm]

I think figuring this out would require knowledge of what exactly dreams are for, and since that issue is pretty undecided as of yet, I think it'd be pretty hard to know for sure whether non-lucidity is learned or natural. One theory says that dreams are just the conscious minds interpretation of what the subconscious mind is doing while you sleep. If so, then that'd mean non-lucidity could just be a learned behavior. Another theory, though, says that it's the minds way of practicing what you learned during the day and that it's way of learning to deal with possible risks in your life, which would be why you dream about actions you do all day and have nightmares about scary(harmful) things you've encountered recently. In that case, non-lucidity would natural because doing these things would be much more useful than running around in a dream world playing out impossible scenarios. Of course, there are many other theories as to the role of dreams, and with them many more arguments about whether or not non-lucidity is natural. I guess it's out for discussion at the moment. BTW: It's really late right now so sorry if this didn't make much sense or anything. I'll fix any errors I've made if can remember to come back here.

[imj]

No we won't and it's because we are familiar with only one reality...this one. Creating another reality, the dream reality is a result of wanting to lucid dream otherwise there has always been only one reality that we know of. It is by default like you said grew up with it that we cannot do any thing that is outside of the physical laws. Even with training it's still difficult to outgrow or change the way we have been wired. And also on a physiological level when we are asleep, the brain shuts down the areas that are normally used in waking life like logical conciousness and memory that's why it isn't always easy to remember to reality check in dreams. So it is not a given that we should lucid dream, it is a skill that can be learnt. Much like language and going to school. We can't talk when we are a baby, we have to go to school to learn to talk in a language. IMJ

[Shift]

I haven't read or thought much about the subject, since as of now there is no way to prove any related theories scientifically. But I always attributed it to a lack of consciousness about the self and the environment. I mean, when you do reality checks and are constantly aware of and questioning reality, your DILD lucid dream frequency goes up (obviously, WILDing is a whole different topic). That's gotta be a huge factor into whatever the reason is. I personally think that people spend their lives mostly on autopilot, and so they spend most of their dreams on autopilot. By paying attention to and taking control of one, we can do so with the other, too.

[DNK]

Interesting replies. Sonicm, is there no reason we couldn't manage to fulfill our natural needs of going through the day, etc, while LDing, or find some sort of middle ground? For instance, only controlling your actions but not actively affecting your environment? You would still be exposed to the same stimuli, but would have a different reaction to them. imj, the brain can be actively rewired, though. It is a very plastic organ. It may take a while, but with enough effort it can happen. Shift, your post reminds me of the Dream Yoga thread. It was precisely by being constantly aware of his surroundings that the OP managed to score a 90% LD rate in all his dreams, according to his stats.