Thread: JoshMcNaughts WorkBook

Hi Habba/Josh I am sorry I have been away from your workbook for over a week. I barely popped onto dreamviews but for a few quick posts over the last couple of days due to being very busy.

As someone striving for your first LD, I think you should be very encouraged by the dream you had! Whatever your dream was can come down to interpretation, and your own interpretation is the most important since you were the only one who experienced it, but I wanted to chime in. I see in your last post that you are leaning towards it being a false lucid. This tells me that you have been reading about false lucids and I personally think that you should put thoughts of false lucids out of your mind *until after you have had a good high level lucid dream*. This is the type FryingMan related as: "When you have your first solid LD, you'll know, through and through, that it's a LD." That is referring to a solid LD and you can see his other notes about lower level LDs. I think knowing what a false lucid is, is very important, just that it is not something that you personally should give much contemplation until after you've had a strong lucid dream to fall back on. Doubt can be powerful and we see examples everywhere. Sometimes doubt makes some ostensibly smart people truly question things as possibly being false that have huge levels of scientific consensus (earth being more than 5k years old, climate change).

My interpretation after reading your dream post is that you had a low level lucid dream, above the semi-lucid level. Though I am not saying "Jackpot! You got it!", I am saying that I think that you took a very important step up on the path to high level lucid dreams. Most all of us have a non-lucid dream or segment before the lucid segment, so just because you were not aware that you were dreaming in the previous segment before you teleported doesn't mean that your lucidity wasn't bumped up above semi-lucid once you performed that dream-only action. I sometimes question how to categorize a dream within a dream like your describe. An example is laying down in a dream to induce a lucid dream, perhaps a false awakening, having no clue you are already dreaming but as you start your induction technique crazy stuff starts happening or your find yourself in a new scene and then you know you are dreaming. Though not a WILD since you were not actually awake when starting the attempt, I would argue against anyone that would not call it a DILD and thus a valid lucid dream from the point of realization forward. Dream actions like your teleporting are sometimes what bump me up from semi-lucid to lucid since I don't regularly dream about dream only actions since adulthood unless I am semi-lucid, and I am not a video gamer. An example: I am in a crowd trying to get through it faster and I start getting semi-lucid ideas "If I were dreaming…wait…I can float up over this crowd and fly, aha!!" Other times in those scenarios I might stay semi-lucid and not get that strong aha type realization or yet other times I understand I am dreaming but more on the hazy side of awareness which I might characterize a low level lucid.

Several components need to be in place for higher level lucid dreams. I don't want to formulate my own outline for this so I will defer to author Daniel Love who speaks of them as the 3 pillars of lucidity (check out his book) -

1. Psychological preparation (everything we do while awake to prepare, RC's etc.)
2. Timing - attempting induction after ~4.5 to 5 hours of sleep and, when possible, timing falling back to sleep to when REM is imminent.
3. Brain Chemistry - from more simple things like not consuming counterproductive substances and consuming natural foods that aid in memory, to considerations (perhaps in the future of your practice) of whether or not to take a supplement like Galantamine to aid brain chemistry.