Self awareness and All day awareness (what's the difference?)

[Tmako]

Hello, I have been wondering what the difference is between ADA and self awareness. All I've been doing is reality checks since I started lucid dreaming and I figured awareness is important but I don't know which one to do. Right now I ask myself, "am I dreaming" and I observe my surroundings, ask myself where i was before this and then do my RC's. Is this ADA or self awareness? Then sometimes I just focus on what I am experiencing, ie. my senses, what I am doing right now. Which technique is this? My last question is which one is better for beginners and if you could do both? Sorry if this is a lot, I have had some LD's and I want to have them more often/consistently. Thanks

[Fuzzman]

Sounds to me like you're doing a little bit of both, which I believe is the ideal way to do it. Observing your surroundings and senses is more ADA, while asking where you are, what you're doing, quality RCing, etc. is self-awareness. I'm no expert but from what I've researched and tried out it seems like your outer awareness will help you with dream vividness and recall, but you need self-awareness to actually become lucid. Depending on what you're struggling with I'd alternate which one you focus on more. If you don't have too much of a problem remembering your dreams but aren't lucid, then focus more on the self, but if you struggle with recall then add in more awareness of your surroundings. I just got back into working with this and for about 2 months I did strict ADA, during which my recall improved greatly but I had barely any lucid moments. Recently after reading through the forums and seeing people's input about it, I switched over to working on improving my self-awareness and trying to stay mindful of what I'm doing, which seems to have a lot more moments in my dream where I'm starting to feel more present, not just going with the dream on auto-pilot, and I'll sometimes actually question what I'm doing which is a good sign that I'm getting close. I'd say just keep at it with a little bit of both and kinda switch it up depending on which you feel like you need to work on more, either improving recall or getting lucid.

[FryingMan]

Right now I ask myself, "am I dreaming" and I observe my surroundings, ask myself where i was before this and then do my RC's. Is this ADA or self awareness? I would call this entire task an RC. A reality check is all about determining your state: dreaming, or awake. Observing your surroundings critically, checking memory, are just as much (if not MORE) of an RC than doing a nose pinch. The best RCs are combinations of the mental critical evaluation combined with the physical check. It is neither ADA nor self-awareness. You can exercise your self-awareness along with doing an RC, but self-awareness is not the same thing as evaluating your state (Sageous is the guru of all-things-self-awareness so he can expound more on this). Then sometimes I just focus on what I am experiencing, ie. my senses, what I am doing right now. Which technique is this? Sounds like "awareness". If you do it all the time all day long, it would be more like ADA (all day awareness). My last question is which one is better for beginners and if you could do both? Sorry if this is a lot, I have had some LD's and I want to have them more often/consistently. Thanks I'm a big fan of very frequent, high quality state checks. I try to build "continual RC" into my daily life, as in my signature, I want to "catch" every dream: so I'm always on the lookout for who (am I with)? what (am I doing)? where (am I)? It takes mental effort to get this going, but after a while it becomes second nature. The thing to avoid is to do it on auto-pilot. Auto-pilot is bad for lucidity, as is ever just assuming you're awake. When you're dreaming you feel like you're awake, so if you "know" when you're awake that you're awake, you'll also "know" when you're dreaming that you're "awake" and miss a LD opportunity. Developing a habit of continually, critically evaluating your state is something is a common trait that all/most very frequent LDers have. Some recommend not asking "am I dreaming?" because you do not want to develop a habit of answering "no" to that. Better is to ask yourself, "why do I think I'm awake?" and really try to prove it to yourself. Or just, "what's my state right now?" Self-awareness if very important, too, and can be done alongside RCs. Practicing access to memory (as you're doing) is also very useful (essential) to LDing.