Thread: I want to think this is a lucid dream...

I may be wrong, but to me it seems like you weren't actually lucid, but were just dreaming that you were lucid. In other words, you act as if you are lucid, without actually realizing that you are dreaming.

The following is a quote from Sageous, who recently made a post about those kinds of dreams. He is a lot better at explaining things than I am.

Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ I call them False Lucid Dreams, though I'm assuming I didn't make up the term.

In a nutshell, a FLD is a non-lucid dream about being lucid, but with a total absence of self-awareness. This is likely a fairly controversial term here at DV, so I don't expect you to buy into the idea. I have a feeling, though, that they occur a lot more often than people think (I've been LD'ing for well over 30 years (gasp) and I still get them often. Here's how they happen:

We all want to LD very much, and spend a lot of time thinking about them, talking about them, and hoping for them. Mix that with waking-life activities like RC's, setting intent, conscious expectation, and induction techniques, and you wind up with an unconscious mind filled with day residue about LD'ing, expectation, plus some possible neural hard-wiring for LD'ing.

Now let's say you've got all that in your head, but you manage to go sleep without bringing any self-awareness along for the ride. Well, the fact that you're lacking awareness might not stop your dreaming mind from fulfilling all your wishes and providing you with a dream that fits all the proper parameters for an LD -- except that it's just a dream. That's right, you're having a dream about LD'ing.

With practice, it's not that hard to recognize that you're having one. There are some basic memory tests you can use to confirm that what happened was just a dream, like if the memory is behaving more like a non-lucid than a LD (ie, it's fading fast), or perhaps you remember a severe lack of control or way too many surprises. For more details, you might check out my thread, "A Treatise on Proof" for more details (and some interesting posts from those who think I'm wrong about this).

Bottom line: when you have a FLD, you are dreaming you are lucid, but really are not. I suppose they can be convincing enough that it doesn't matter when it happens, but I'm pretty sure they happen frequently.

You mentioned that this happens in all of your dreams. I don't know why it happens so often, but perhaps someone else will be able to give an explanation about that.

I hope this helps somehow.

In my opinion, you are not lucid, but your dreams are more conscious that most peoples.
For most people, a dream is basically real life, they don't question it, things happen as they "should".

For you it seems your brain makes the connection that you are not in waking life, but are actually asleep. You remember that when you are not in waking life, but still experiencing things, you are asleep. However your brain isn't awake enough to give you control like in a full lucid.

At a glance, ElizaLS, I'd say you're not lucid in those dreams. Saying things like "I never act upon it," and "never fully realize I was lucid" sort of gives it away. If your waking awareness were truly present in your dreams, you would likely act upon realizing you're dreaming, if only by being very amazed/frightened/curious/etc that you're dreaming -- aka the "A-Ha!" moment. Also, the realization that you're dreaming must come before you're lucid, not after. In other words, you can't realize you're lucid unless you already are (then I guess you wouldn't bother).

For what it's worth, I've had non-lucid dreams where I explained to dream characters at length things like "This is a dream, and all you people are creations of my dreaming mind," without ever once having waking awareness present with me in the dream! It is possible for your dreaming mind to include the notion that you're dreaming in the context of the dream; especially if you have an interest in dreaming, or particularly powerful dream recall (which would make dreaming a greater part of your waking life, which is the source for much of your dreaming material).

I would suggest that you use this mild advantage of dream context toward attaining true lucidity. After all, what better dream sign could there be than your own dreaming mind telling you that you're dreaming?

Thank you all; this really helped. I'll probably start trying to use it to get out of my dry spell, if it does end up giving me any advantage.

I would suggest working on dream control techniques, as well as performing regular reality checks. It sounds like you have a good foundation as far as the ability to lucid dream goes. I don't think it matters whether or not they were lucid dreams, or what you want to call them. It seems that whether they were lucids or not, you want more out of your dreams and want to increase your ability to decipher that your dreams are indeed dreams. It sounds like you're close

I've had a theory about this for a while. I think we all are subconsciously aware that we are dreaming but we have different levels of lucidity. For example one time I was dreaming I said "okay look around for something that you can say in the real world to remind yourself of this dream." I was okay with being in the dream, even though I knew it was a dream. Another time I had what you had.