Thread: (Prove Me Wrong) No One Has Literally Ever Talked to Their Subconscious. Ever.

I know I am more than a little late to this game (story of my life), and folks like Darkmatters, BrandonBoss, and Steph have already said anything I would have said in direct terms, but as long as I'm here:

Unfortunately, Screen, you may have the whole thing backward. I have been working on this for many years, and have found that LD'ing seems to be a great tool for exploring the unconscious; indeed, it might be the best tool, given the unique perspective you have when consciously observing your self from a dream.

This observation is done almost totally through metaphor and emotion, since verbal communication seems a function of the conscious end of the mind's spectrum (so a direct verbal conversation is likely impossible, or would be little more than a DC repeating exactly what you expect to hear, because that marks the limit of unconscious verbal communication). But the observation can only occur after you've gotten good enough at LD'ing to actively pay attention to the right things; you are not going to learn how to do it from your unconscious. Why? Because your unconscious doesn't know how to do it!

LD'ing is an extremely conscious event, couched in self-awareness and waking-life conscious activity. In a sense, LD'ing is an affront to the unconscious, because during dreams we are daring to meld our conscious selves with its natural nighttime function -- dreaming, whose engine is the unconscious, exclusively. Indeed, every time we LD we are communicating directly with our unconscious minds, because it is the dreaming mind: the engine driving the dreams we are exploring, changing, and learning from. But its purview is creating dreams, and it has no interest or experience in this melding with it that you are attempting while lucid. In fact, it could be said that your unconscious is wired to prevent you from being self-aware in dreams; not only does it not know how to get you lucid, it actively attempts to prevent it.

So, if there were a separate being in your head that was the unconscious (which there is not), and you could communicate verbally with it (which you cannot), it would likely just say "Hell if I know" to your question about how to be lucid; or, more likely, it would offer up a way to LD that is a direct reflection or projection of what you already know.

I am by no means belittling the unconscious here. I believe that the unconscious mind does represent a vast storehouse of knowledge and action, because it has a more global access to memory and body than we do consciously. In a sense, that rest of Freud's "iceberg" is memory, perhaps even everything you've ever experienced. Combine that with unconscious connections to otherwise autonomic processes (i.e., memory creation and storage, social behavior, maintenance of your physical body), and you have a potentially very powerful tool for learning about yourself, bettering yourself, and maybe even making yourself (and your Self) a bit more healthy. But that combination would result from a conscious connection with the machinery of your mind (the unconscious being its control room), and that conscious connection could happen with lucid dreaming. But you need to teach our unconscious how to LD, and not the other way around.

Finally, even if your unconscious held all the secrets of LD'ing, the skills you would need to master to unearth those secrets during a dream are vastly more difficult than simply learning to LD... so if you are able to literally ask your unconscious how to LD, you probably would already know how to do it, and likely wouldn't even care anymore!

tl;dr: You must know how to lucid dream before you can ask your unconscious anything, and not the other way around. Also, you must know how to do it quite well before you can assemble metaphors and emotional cues that mean something unconsciously, that will coax it into desired action (i.e., memory retrieval, physical healing, problem solving). Similarly, you must have these skills well in hand before you can truly observe and understand the foundations of the communications coming from your unconscious in dreams (if there truly are any). In a sense, you are teaching your unconscious to LD, not vise-verse.


A little aside:

Originally Posted by StephL

That is the idea of there being a unified unconscious ("sub" would indicate I subscribe to Freud).

Thank you, Steph, for being pretty much the only one here who recognizes that unconscious is the recognized term for what we're talking about; I was beginning to feel a bit lonely. For what it's worth, I used to try to point this out, but it's pretty useless... one of Freud's great successes was firmly embedding "subconscious" in the pop-culture lexicon.