Thread: Degrees of lucidity

So this morning during a successful WBTB, I transitioned fairly perfectly from a dream into what I initially thought in the dream was me falling asleep (a dream inside a dream, for you Inception fans out there lol), and I recall exactly what set it off for me that I was dreaming, but I know that at one point I figured out that I was dreaming, and in fact even tested it with a reality check (the standard noseplug, my favorite). Now in the past a lot of my lucid dreams have been in scenarios which were more or less "plotless"--that is to say, first that I generally gain lucidity through DILD (haven't had the focus to try WILDing yet, but now that I've gotten really good at DILD I'm hoping to try it in the near future), and that when I do get lucid it's usually because the setting is open enough, I guess you could say, to facilitate my critical thinking enough that I can realize I'm dreaming. In dreams that are "plot-heavy", like say where there's some well-established overarching dream goal that me and my fellow dream characters are pursuing, no matter how ridiculous or patently fantastical it may be, I historically haven't been good at gaining lucidity because I just sort of go along with the dream plot, since it's so strongly understood by me. Another way to put it is that in the majority of my lucids it starts off like a sandbox environment, where there's a just a general area that I find myself in (a generic forest, neighborhood, house that perhaps I don't particularly recognize as being any one person's) so that when I become lucid I end up being able to be as exploratory as possible, just walk around, and maybe meet some dream characters along the way, but I'm able to fully take in the environment and try out a bunch of different things.

This morning however, when I became lucid, there was a definite plot (first I was in a house with a girl I didn't know, and we were trying to get away from another girl who I thought was her older sister or something--afterwards we ended up on a train with a bunch of other dream characters who I didn't know but who made it clear that they had some goal and I was to help them), and so even though I was totally aware that it was a dream the whole time, I made no attempt to remove myself from that environment. And that isn't because I didn't have other goals I wanted to try and accomplish with my lucid last night--I had gone to bed with the intention of trying out a few new things on my list of lucid goals. However, the reason I didn't try to do any of them, I think, is because it virtually didn't occur to me to leave that environment.

My question to you all is--do you believe there are perhaps "degrees" of lucidity? Which is to say, where total awareness leads to total freedom of movement and expression, and where minimal awareness is something like what even some people who aren't interested in lucid dreaming are able to do when they try and get out nightmares or something like that? My hypothesis would then be that my dream last night was somewhere on the upper end of the lucid scale, but maybe only like 75% lucid, because it was definitely like other lucids in that it was very vivid starting especially at the point where I gained lucidity, but unlike previous lucids of mine in which I made conscious effort to change scene or achieve some lucid goal.

Interested to see what you guys think.