I hope it's okay, but I'll answer your pm in here LouaiB, because my answer goes (it seems) against the view of Sageous, and it's interesting to see 2 perspectives working out. One thing he's spot on: I might be biased towards a more mechanical view of lucidity, partially due the fact that lucidity has indeed visible neurocorrelates (you can see it happening in the brain). But let me develop (I accidentally deleted the original response, but I'll do my best to recall what I wrote!):
by LouaiB: LDing is the issue of memory. Since you memory is off during dreams, you need to turn it on so you can remember that a dreamlike thing is unnatural. How? By increasing your self-awareness in dreams.When you are self-aware in dreams, your memory will be much more accessible.
Many will agree here that LDing is (but not limited to) an issue of memory. The reality is not that you're memory is off but impaired to some extent, which we can't quite figure. You do possess qualities such as procedural memory, semantic memory, and even to some degree, autobiographical memory. What confuses us, is t
by LouaiB:RRCing is a great way to improve your self-awareness during the day. The nice thing about it is that , with practice, it becomes second nature.
by Sageous: I don't believe you could consider self-awareness a habit any more than you could consider being awake, or maybe joyful, a habit. There are lots of things we build through the years, like our physical forms, our knowledge and wisdom, our prowess at particular skills or arts. Are those things habits too, or are they time-honed facets of our personalities, of our selves?
This is where we disagree. Now, I think that we can all start with a basic truth regarding self-awareness, which for the purposes of this post (we can find another definition) we will define as:
Self-awareness is the capacity/state for/of introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals.
I'll agree that self-awareness is a state of mind, but that doesn't cut it into practical terms. Self-awareness, like you (Sageous) mention and many of us agree, is something which is not hard-wired into humans. But for that exact reason, a long part of journey (lding journey) is not engaging in self-awareness, it's creating the habit of self-awareness. Regardless of what self-awareness is, we need to consciously direct our minds to it. Like you said, you've been building this self-awareness for many many years, so what you are doing is not (correct me if I'm wrong) reaching self-awareness: what you're doing/trying to do is achieving a continuous of this state of mind - we know that it's biological impossible to keep a continuum, so eventually, we are consciously reprogramming ourselves to perform that shift. At some point, like LouaiB mentioned, it becomes second nature. But this all still qualifies as an habit:
A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously.
Even if self-awareness wasn't an habit, we need to engage in an habit to *reach it* or develop it, so in the end, it's all the same concept: one type of DILD involves the implementation of habits to increase self-awareness. You can't shift to self-awareness mode unconsciously unless the habit is formed. Now where you and I might be clashing without knowing is where self-awareness is relevant to lucid dreaming. Notice that the original post is dwelling on the level of "induction", while you seem to dwell on the level of "development". I'll explain:
- If we assume lucidity as a shift in the state of consciousness (I'm going with the perspective I already mentioned where you're advancing a bit more towards waking life consciousness), then it wouldn't necessarily be self-awareness that would grant you the tools for post-lucidity induction.
by Sageous: Those DILD techniques will both work (often in parallel, BTW), but they will only work if your mind is ready to be lucid. Otherwise you'll just manage to say, "Hey, this is a dream!" and then pretty much lose lucidity or wake up, because you lacked the self-awareness to truly appreciate where you are. I think that is my overriding problem with techniques: LD'ing, by definition, is a state of mind, and not the conclusion to a series of clever actions or habits (or for that matter a series of cues from machines, or stimuli from drugs). To see it in such linear terms I think leaves out much of what the lucid experience really entails.
It's this exact point that I find extremely relevant: so what we are picturing are DILD techniques that can and do work, that will grant you lucid dreaming induction. It's this simple! It doesn't matter if you're self-aware or not, you can induce lucid dreams based on:
- Habit formation;
- Prospective memory;
But what's the issue then? You lack development! See where I'm going at? Self-awareness is not a necessity to induce lucidity in itself, as random ordinary people have lucid dreams without any practice/information. But development of lucidity: dream stabilization, dream control are only a product of self-awareness: if you can't understand yourself and the reality you are in, you won't be able to dissociate yourself from mental schemas present in the waking life, that kick in the moment you become lucid. Another great example of why self-awareness relevance is not in the start/induction of lucidity, but in it's development is EILD. I'm just guessing, but wouldn't you believe that by finding the neurocorrelates of lucid dreaming, we could stimulate certain brain regions responsible for reflective thought, logic, etc (whatever they may be), and induce lucidity? After all, if you can use NovaDreamer without self-awareness, but a simple pattern recognition (boosted by MILD) over and over, where is the need for self-awareness for the induction?. I think you got my point now, and for those who didn't, what I'm basically saying is that self-awareness is only essential for post-lucidity induction (mostly dream control and maintenance of this state of mind), not for the induction itself.
by LouaiB: What you want to do is to use that advantage to your benefit. Since dreams are partially made out of our daily experiences, we hope that the self-awareness increased by those RRC will be a part of those experiences that will be lucky enough to be a part of the dream, thus making you more self-aware in the dream. As mentioned above, self-awareness , with practice, will become second nature, so it will be more likely for it to be a part of the dream(that's why it is more effective than RCing). So, more self-awareness= bigger chance of it being a part of the dream(expectations).
We don't know. Not only we don't understand the temporal aspect of daily residue process in dream content expression (we know it can happen days after, sometimes weeks), but we also don't understand exactly how the emotional aspect of it (brought by the allegedly function that dreams act as emotional regulation mechanisms), or even how exactly memory is expressed. Habit formation seems something simple, but why don't simple habits like checking the time, your mobile, biting your nails, occur often in dreams? We went as far as to include dream signs, but we still don't know what exactly makes a certain habit carry out in a dream, where your memory seems to be impaired. We know that prospective memory can't be the answer, otherwise veteran lders would need to keep thinking about inducting a lucid dream (they don't need to consciously think about it anymore it seems).
If you set up strong expectation with intention, and the thing(lets say a person) appears, it would trigger self-awareness, which will trigger memory so you remember that this person is the person you wanted to see in the dream, so you become lucid. this is one way to coax self-awareness.
Expectation and intention are part of memory ,and should be considered within it. You develop expectation based on retrospective memory, and if intention isn't the same as prospective memory, it sure seems a lot like it (I know I'm being over simplistic on this one, but it's for the sake of practical discussion).
(I keep loosing myself at the middle of the post, I'll stop here xD)
PS: forgot to mention: that discussion between StephL and Sageous got me a lucid last night lol. Me and a DC briefly discussed what dream control and lucidity was, and boy he looked at me like I was an alien after I presented my view on it.
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