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

Warning: zoth is writing while he's thinking, so the long chain of thought ahead which might sound confusing

Quantity, especially in this department, does not necessarily guarantee eventual quality. I've known plenty of dreamers who have had many dozens of low-level LD's, and have never really gotten to the point where they could truly explore their dreams as themselves. Why? Because they were not interested in diving into the deep end of their dreaming pool -- the fact of induction was enough for them, so working on things like self-awareness and memory did not matter. Many of those people, BTW, eventually got bored with LD'ing; I wonder why?

Yeah, just reminded myself of something I mentioned some posts ago: classical conditioning. Extinction is quick when the reward is regularly presented, and it's expressed in form of (for example) frustration. In this example, a more memorable experience with less frequency of reward would actually increase behavior, because extinction would be slower. You're right.
Still, there's one point to be made: we're assuming that you can't have medium to high level lucid dreams unless you practice self-awareness, but this doesn't have to necessarily be true. Also, there's still the issue of self-awareness practice being an habit or not. The deal is, after some thought, I realized that while you deny the self-awareness is an habit, you do have a point: self-awareness would also qualify for a personality trait - assuming (just for this particular thought) that self-awareness would relate to those 3 areas of brain activation during lucidity, some people could naturally be more self-aware than others (and this would actually be possible to test to some degree)....(slight pause to make sure with myself that I'm not intentionally trying to bash self-awareness....nope, I'm not, free to continue ^^). Also, self-awareness could also be perceived as mindfulness, and mindfulness relates a lot with meditation (if these 3 are not the same thing, they're at least inter-connected, but that's irrelevant for this). The fact is, meditation is not a "doing", it's a "being". Is this the aspect that you were trying to explain to me? That self-awareness is about "being" and not "doing"? Because if so, it couldn't possibly be an habit. This is hard to conceptualize: introspection "states", like meditation/mindfulness/self-awareness (not that I think about it, self-aware may as well be the primitive word, meditation and mindfulness being types/ways of reaching self-awareness), don't require any action: they require inaction. But the exercise of "meditating" can be an habit or not...no it can't, it's doesn't remotely qualify as the type of habit like a reality check: that' would be the same as saying that meditation is like the habit of touching your nose (you can't meditate without self-awareness, aka unconsciously, but the habit of touching your nose HAS to be unconscious to some degree to be qualified as an habit).
After 50 premisses, 1 conclusion: self-awareness cannot be an habit, at least not in the same way we consider reality checks an habit. This inevitably leads to (at least) one extra conclusion:

- Self-awareness regarding lucid dreaming induction is always a parallelism to any other "known" practice: whatever "technique" you practice, self-awareness would always be beneficial, especially because as an introspection event, it would affect your brain in both short/medium/long term. How do I know? Because if you assume self-awareness as an introspection event, you'd have to include (like mentioned above) concepts like meditation/mindfulness, and both of these have been scientifically demonstrated to affect your brain (in more than one way).

Self-awareness would also be above any other technique due a simple principle: whatever method you use to induce lucidity, it requires self-awareness (and by self-awareness, I'm talking about the functions performed by those 3 brain regions mentioned in the study), so *enter guessing mode* it's very likely that it would be way more worthy of your time/energy to devote it to self-awareness even if takes longer to produce results, then to actually engage in "short-term exercises" that still require you to develop self-awareness later.

PS: there seems to be activation of precuneus to certain types of meditation. Maybe self-awareness is an abstract concept, in the same way that certain "perspectives/exercises" used to develop self-awareness would not necessarily help you with lucid induction. This could explain why ADA doesn't work for everyone?

In fact, converging evidence from recent functional imaging studies in healthy subjects indicate that the precuneus may play a role in the internal mentation processes of self-consciousness. Lou et al. (1999) found a medial parietal-prefrontal core in the enhanced consciousness state of yoga meditation, by measuring cerebral blood distribution with the PET technique in experienced yoga teachers.

PS: I think I sympathize much more with your "attempts" of explaining self-awareness Sageous, it's complexity it's its beauty but at the same time its curse
Now I'm gonna sit in a chair and think about the implications of these conclusions ^^
PPS: pure old meditation might just be an example of something possibly way more boring but possibly way more effective than many lucid dreaming techniques...
PPPS:

So maybe we are in a way on the same page here - would need to research further to come up with supporting data - but maybe there is a more intimate connection between mental health and LDing, than I thought.

It's a bit more complex than that: we'd need to understand what exactly is making that change in the brain: emotional response towards the experience, the experience itself, or interference with the regular pattern of sleep? Because there is a study that correlates interference with REM (and we can assume dreams as well) and improvements of negative-dream content seen in people with depression. But I feel like this post is too big already. I do have loads of studies regarding sleep and mental health that we could find useful if you want to expand that particular discussion ^^

PPPPS (it's the last one I promise xD):

I'm surprised no one mentioned that study about children, there are many aspects of lucid dreaming mentioned there that go against general beliefs the majority of us possess, like "increase the number of hours you sleep will help you with lucidity" which doesn't seem to be true (which would make WBTB way more valuable for example, and WILD as well).