Thread: Mindfulness - An Alternative Approach to ADA

I think it's really important to remember, and I forget this very often as well, that awareness by itself won't make you lucid.

If you look at the alternative translations to mindfulness

Mindfulness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You'll see:

• Mindful attention
• Reflective awareness
• Recollecting mindfulness
• Inspection

For LDing what you want is a state of critical awareness.

Often when we are faced with some sort of problem, we get too caught up in the problem to take a step back and ask "is this actually how it's supposed to be?", it's not just dreams that this happens in.

In real life you turn on the light in your room and you can be fully aware of this, in the dream you turn on a light and you can be fully aware of it. In both reality and in the dream you are aware and you remember turning on the light later in the day and you remember that you turned on a light when you wake up after the dream.

Pure awareness will give you great dream recollection, but not lucidity!

What you want is to note whether the light turned on the way it usually does, this means it's a two stage process.

1. You notice the feeling of turning the light on, the change from dark to light (awareness)
2. You then use your memory and decide if the light did what you expected it to do, did it turn on like it does all the other times you've done it? (reflection)

Only doing step one will only give you good dream recall, not lucidity.


Here's an example from an actual dream:

Last night I was dreaming that I was fixing a weirdly complicated mechanism, I was really busy trying to fix it and was wondering why I couldn't seem to get it right. Instead of wondering if it was actually a real object I was fixing, I was fully aware of what I was doing but only in order to help me work out the problem.

We actually do this in reality all the time, when something doesn't seem to go our way we butt heads with the problem, using all our wits to try and solve it, we don't generally step back and see if the problem is a real problem until much later.

So we need to not just be aware of something but also reflect on it.

By the way don't go into lengthy thoughts like "oh yeah this light switch totally seems to be working so I'm not dreaming let's try it again a few times just to make sure and then follow it up with holding my nose and trying to breath through it and let's see what else doesn't seem realistic" this will get tiresome really soon and there's no way you'll keep it up all day. Mindfulness isn't thinking it's more of a gentle nod.