Thanks for sharing, Caboose128; interesting stuff.
It sounds like others have already struck up an interesting conversation in the "What the hell happened to me?" department, so I'll keep out. However, since I opened my yap about it, I feel obliged to respond to the "natural" bit. So I will:
Originally Posted by Caboose128
For the sake of the natural LDer debate I feel the need to chime in. I consider myself somewhat of a natural LDer. Not that it's been happening my whole life, but just that little deliberate conscious effort was needed to kickstart my lucid dreaming career. I believe I have a thread floating around here somewhere explaining how it all started for me, but I'll try to summarize as best as possible.
Up until about a year ago, I was never lucid in my dreams and had very terrible dream recall...So now to get to the point: every night after this incident at the hospital, I started to have all kinds of OBEs and LDs. They just seemed to happen, it wasn't like I was trying to purposely achieve them or anything. It wasn't until months after that i started to come on here and research all the various phenomenon I've been going through. So while my story might not be the typical one of a natural LDer, from my experience I know they have to exist. It's almost as if the people involved with my hospital trip that night taught my how to LD, as weird as it sounds. I just find it very odd that after this experience, which very closely resembled a dream itself, I was able to LD almost every night.
Not to defend Aneas or anything (he is being incredibly short with us), one thing he said rang true for me. Every time I dream now, I feel like I am at least somewhat lucid and aware of the state. A lot of time this info won't get me anywhere though, like it won't really click. The implications of what it means to be dreaming don't really hit me, and I just go about the dream like normal. I'm still aware of things being "off" or different from my normal waking reality, pretty much every time I dream, but my mind just kind of accepts this as reality without really pondering it, almost like living a completely separate life. So his advice of "just feel it" is somewhat true, although he should probably explain more if he was really trying to help anyone.
I'm not sure this makes you a natural at all, from my perspective (more on that below).
This is because it was the event of that night that gave you the "artificial" boost necessary to begin to LD. Had you been a natural, you would have been LD'ing nightly at some level since childhood, and as you matured, I imagine that your developing sense of self would have made higher-level LD'ing both naturally unavoidable and a very regular, memorable, occurrence. Instead, you had essentially nothing until this event, so it was the event that artificially infused a tendency to LD into you.
This would be true even if everything that happened was just a dream (which I hope is not the case, BTW), because it was still your own psyche triggering an unconscious interest in bringing awareness into your dreams. In other words, you made it happen, or perhaps it was thrust upon you by some magical outside source; your LD'ing skills were not embedded in your DNA, they were artificially attached to your experience. So, not a natural.
As I mentioned somewhere above, I too have a sense in pretty much all of my dreams that I am dreaming (there are three rarely recurring dreams where this is not true, but that is for another time); it is pretty much as you describe it here, where I always "know" I am in a dream, but must give that knowledge a bit of a kick of self-awareness to raise the experience above the very low-level lucid it is to a "true" lucid (that was for you, Darkmatters!). I may not have said that correctly, but I sensed on reading your post that my experience regarding this sort of lucidity is quite similar to yours, and I by no means consider myself a natural. In my case, the artificial infusion was not one major moment like yours, but more a side-effect of decades of LD practice. Low-level lucidity in all dreams can certainly happen, I obviously agree, but not on its own. Your consciousness must contribute something to make this sort of lucidity happen. But:
Now, after reading and writing all that, I'm beginning to wonder if I may have gotten something very wrong in my understanding of this developing "natural" phenomenon:
Why? Not because of my unchanged skepticism about naturals, but because I'm wondering if I, in my old-school sense of language, have completely misinterpreted what's going on here!
If people are calling accomplished LD'ers -- people who taught themselves over time or in your case dramatically at once to easily spot their presence in dreams whenever they care to do so (or even when they don't care to do so) -- "naturals," just because that seems a good term, then that is just fine. Indeed, its no different then than calling accomplished LD'ers "Pros," or "Masters," as is done regularly here. This in my mind is way different that the natural ability I was discussing earlier, and if that's the case then I'm very wrong and "naturals" as defined in this way, can certainly exist -- I might even fall into the category myself.
tl;dr: By the classic definition of "natural" I was using, Caboose128, your experience does not represent being a "natural" LD'er. But, after reading your post and thinking a bit, I may have misunderstood the whole damn thing: "Natural" on these forums simply means a person who, due to long practice, sudden shock (only word I could find, sorry!) as in your case, or some other artificial infusion, has a tendency to experience very low-level lucidity in all dreams, and enjoys an ability to easily power-up that lucidity with little more than a decision. If that's the case, I can live with that and, though I don't like the term "natural," it makes a lot more sense.
And, of course, this has little to do with the OP, but at least we're talking about something!
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