Thread: Who or what should we blame for the lack of lucidity ?

Zoth: First, it must be said that Steph will like your post way more than mine... I'm okay with that, of course!

Now:

Originally Posted by Zoth

Maybe Sageous didn't use the best words, but he does have a point. We're as hard wired to lucid dream as we're hard-wired to induce sleep paralysis. Lucid dreaming is not hard-wired into humans because it is neither automatic or innate. Children have particular reasons to experience more lds than adults, and still, it's not extremely common, like it would be if we were hard-wired to it.

Nicely put; thanks!

Now that's a complex aspect, and honestly I don't find it surprising that Sageous would be called on that one xD You must understand that for someone like him, lucidity is not just awareness of being in a dream, but knowledge. If you're running from a dinosaur in a lucid dream, do you really grasp the concept of being in a dream? What if you're unconsciously lucid, should that be considered a lucid dream? When Sageous talks about lucidity ( or maybe he's gonna correct me all over the place in his next post ), he's talking about understanding the ramifications of your state of consciousness, not just being aware of it, because as we all know, being aware that you're in a dream will never take you far into dream control.

Spot on as usual Zoth! I could even take that one step farther: it isn't just about control, but being aware that you are interacting with your dream world and, at the same time, that dream world is you. Just being aware that "this is a dream" does not approach that kind of relationship with your environment (in this case, the dream world).

Sageous, one question: you put a lot of emphasis on self-awareness, and it got me thinking: if self-awareness is an habit, what makes it more effective than the habit of reality checking? Because now that I think about it, DILD techniques seem to fall into 2 categories:

- Explicit memory (the power of habit);
- Implicit memory (prospective memory being the largest player in here, way ahead of retrospective memory)

I'm sure I didn't word the above correctly, but let's assume: if self-awareness is something you build throughout the years, then it would be an habit right? You have the ingrained habit of assessing your state of consciousness, so much that you do it without thinking (in the sense, without effort to intentionally recall it). But if it's merely an habit, what makes it more effective than reality checking? Come to think about it, self-awareness and reality checking are the same thing in practical terms: you assess your state of consciousness. What is the important keyword of lucidity after this: self-awareness or habit? Because if they are the same, the real question is: is the journey from beginner to frequent lucid dreaming a matter of balance between prospective memory vs habit, more of the first in the beginning, and then largely due the later one?

I think you might be misunderstanding my take on self-awareness, Zoth. For me it is not a technique, but a state of mind. Self-awareness is literally sentience, and it is by no means a habit!

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?

That said, I think (a habit of) RC's could be an excellent tool for developing self-awareness, though not the only one. This is because, as a state test, if done correctly and not by rote, RC's allow their practitioner a moment to wonder about whether they are dreaming or not and, after they have determined that they are not, then they can wonder about where they really are. This sort of stream of consciousness is very handy when the RC reveals you are in a dream, and will probably lead to sparking self-awareness in the dream -- and a nice LD!

That said, I think you might be making the process of LD'ing a bit too mechanical. 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.

Perhaps that is my problem? That I see LD'ing not as a mechanical result of, say, habits, but as potential tool for growth, exploration, and entertainment of a self-aware mind? This perspective might not be correct, physiologically, but it certainly elevates our being above just that of a programmable machine... I think I like that perspective.

Hey, you don't suppose that the "barrier" to lucidity is nothing physical at all, but simply dreamers' choosing to set aside self-awareness in the name of all those techniques, do you? That perhaps people are indeed doing everything right, but they're doing so without including the most fundamental aspect of lucidity, self-awareness? Something to think about, I think.

So: No; practicing self-awareness -- or, rather, achieving the ability to exercise self-awareness -- is not the same as maintaining a habit of RC'ing. RC'ing, and all those other techniques, can be helpful toward reaching the moment where self-awareness unites with the dream, but that's all they are: helpful habits meant to reach a goal, that goal being self-awareness in a dream.

I hope that made some sense!