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

Where is this article Zoth??

Again - not much time - sorry for not reading and considering it all - but:

Found a short BBC feature on conciousness - with this mirror-recognition test Darkmatters mentioned - they show, that basic self-awareness sets in between 18 and 24 month of age.

Not really fitting in here maybe - but this is already a "hopeless mix-thread" - so I throw it in anyway..

Originally Posted by Zoth

Can I just call it dream incubation (think it's the term most people use I think)?

Yes, that’s what I was referring to. Sorry.

Originally Posted by Zoth

[It] doesn't take into account the majority of people who have lucid dreamers: those who don't go out to intentionally induce them.

Good point. Now, I do not think this endangers the hypothesis that a lot of lucid dreams are actually just dreams of being in a dream and knowing you are in a dream, but I just have to add two types of such dreams:
1. Dream Incubation of a dream about Lucid Dreaming: The person trains so that in the next dream, once they recognize certain cues, they will dream about doing a pre-defined task, like the task of the month.
2. Simply a random dream about being in a dream and knowing that you are dreaming.

This parallels a dream in which you are in the Harry Potter Universe and you know it (you also have a feeling that this world is otherwise fictitious but now that’s where you are) and that affects how you act in the dream, for example, you use brooms to fly and you use Harry Potter spells.

I think a lot of people, even kids, simply dream that they are lucid dreaming without actually being lucid dreaming.
How can they dream that they are in a dream if they are not familiar with the concept of lucid dreaming? Simply because they are very familiar with the concept of dreaming and knowledge of the additional word “lucid” that comes before dreaming is not necessary to have a lucid dream. To dream about being in a dream, you only just need to know what dreaming is.

Originally Posted by Zoth

My point is not the value of experience: it's the categorization of the experience. Take a look at the small segment of this video between 0 and 1:50 (disregard the video as a whole, it's just an easier way of telling you to read a whole page of text) - it mentions perspectival switching. You'll understand my point as to why any lucid dream experience has the limited value I mentioned.

Thank you for that video, I watched it all actually (it was very insightful).
I think the point of the video is that you must choose one point of perspective and not mix them together. For example, you can say:
1. (1st person perspective) When I become aware of myself and that the world around me is a creation of my own, I feel so and so, and this is what I define as a lucid dream because what I experience is not the same as what I experience in normal dreams
2. (3rd person perspective) When a person’s certain regions of the cortex are activated during sleep which comes with a set of physiological characteristics, well… what happens?

I was going to finish the 3rd person perspective but I really don’t know. It’s not like a movement, where you can see an activation in the brain, a signal travel through the body and a limb flexing. Is the activated regions of the brain that we see in a lucid dreamer the cause or the result of a lucid dream?

I feel like I can give a reasonable definition of lucid dreaming using 1st perspective but not 3rd .

Another point is, how is consciousness observed with technology? By looking at brain waves? I don’t feel like alpha and beta waves and the rest of them have too broad of definitions to explain consciousness.

In the 3rd person perspective, is it “consciousness brain waves or whatever it is” that affect the activated regions or the opposite?

Zoth, it appears to me like you are interested in knowing which factors are important of mastering at different stages of lucid dreaming development rather than what is a lucid dream in general and that seems very interesting to me. I’ll think further about this later but I’ll have a rapid go at it:
1. To be a non-lucid dreamer, you need to first practice memory. For memory to be stored, you have to pay attention. Therefore, first step should be to do something like ADA (being observant) just to make dreams more vivid and to be more memorable. Also, the dream journal is a big thing because it allows you to remember more dreams.
2. For a non-lucid dreamer wanting to become a lucid dreamer, they most just train to question their worlds through RCs so that they may ask themselves that question in their dreams and also having that prospective memory of when I see this, I will do that.
3. For a lucid dreamer to last in the dream, they most train stabilization which involves having a balance in your attention given to your knowledge that you are dreaming and to the dream so that the dream will be stabilized and at the same time you will stay lucid. That is just a matter of training your attention, may that be by meditation
4. Once the dream is stabilized, the lucid dreamer must try to attain control thanks to being good at having faith in their own abilities and also probably an ability to visualize.
5. Then, I would say, the lucid dreamer still needs to become self-aware but now, I would even say that self-awareness is not at all important for lucid dreaming… Wow, I didn’t expect that from myself. Instead, I would say that self-awareness is something completely different from lucid dreaming which has to be used frequently in everything we do, whether that be our waking life or our dreaming life and it adds value to everything. It makes doing martial arts better, it makes lucid dreaming better, it makes watching tv better, it just makes life better. But it does not have anything to do with lucid dreaming. Now, I have a problem with this. I feel that since lucid dreaming has a lot to do with certain types of awareness, being a self-aware person can only help the process.

I really can’t keep up with this discussion…

EDIT

Originally Posted by StephL

The three regions, which newly light up:

Just to clarify, are you saying this study shows that self-awareness is important for lucid-dreaming since they are all self-assessment related?

Also, as for the original question of this thread and about the physiological barrier to lucid dreaming,
why is it that we lose awareness during sleep and how would we go about changing that?
If we have not answered that question, I think it was what the thread was looking for initially.

Originally Posted by StephL

Found a short BBC feature on conciousness - with this mirror-recognition test Darkmatters mentioned - they show, that basic self-awareness sets in between 18 and 24 month of age.

If self-awareness was the only prerequisite to lucid dream, then kids could therefore start lucid dreaming at the age of 18-24 months. However, I have some questions about this mirror-recognition test:

1. What if the kids under a certain age and the animals that don't pass this test is only because they don't care about having a spot on their cheek?

2. If an animal can identify other animals in their environment such as prey, family, and predators, why would it not recognize itself? Maybe they can recognize their own arm, just not identify with an arm that's in front of them because that makes no sense for someone that doesn't believe in mirrors.

3. Just being able to recognize yourself in a mirror is something that even a robot could do. Therefore the mirror-recognition test does not correspond to the same type of self-awareness we are talking about. Self-Awareness is more of a mystical (as in hard to explain) experience where you are aware of your own awareness, your thoughts, your emotions, your actions, how they affect the world around you, how they are affected by the world and in what context-space-time you're in. Maybe I added more to the self-awareness definition, but this is more what I think about when I think about self-awareness. I think this definition corresponds more to what a child needs to be able to experience to have a conscious dream than being able to know they're looking at themselves in a mirror.

EDIT

4. I find it hard to be self-aware when looking into the big mirror in my bathroom because it feels like me is the person in the mirror that's looking right into my eyes.

5. Also, I feel like the mirror thing depends on an understanding of what a mirror is to some degree. Why would a horse say "Hey this is me, it makes total sense that I am here but I see myself in front of me. They're more likely to think. Hey, this other horse is copying me. I am self-aware so I know I'm here and not there."