Thread: Lucid Dreams ARE experienced in dreams and not just as memories!

So I was wondering if lucid dreams are really experienced in real time, or just as a memory of "yeah I remember doing that".

I was worried that lucid dreams were not really experienced, but only remembered. Lemme elaborate. Lets say you have sex with a fine lady or lad (in waking life). During the process, you know you are there. You know that right now at this moment, I am having sex. Lets say afterwards, about 2 or 3 hours (time doesn't really matter. It can be any moment AFTER the experience) later, you recall that memory of having sex. You relish in that memory.

HOWEVER! there is a huge difference in recalling an experience and taking part in that experience. So, again, my fear was that lucid dream was probably just a memory you experience while waking up, and not an experience you actually, well, Experience! The reason for that is that in non-lucids, after waking up, I always get the feeling of having experiencED the dream, but I am never sure, or I can never really get that feeling of being sure of actually being in the now of that dream.

Now I know. Without a doubt, when you lucid dream you are in the now of that dream (granted you are aware enough). you not only remember the dream once awake, you can say (or at the least, I can say) for sure that I was in the NOW of that dream. It's just like that sex example I gave above.

I wrote this to clarify on something I was never 100% sure on (even though I had a few lucid dreams before. Amount of awareness plays a role). I hope this helps to squash anyone's doubts of "not really being apart of the lucid dream".
Then again, it's something youre probably gonna have to experience yourself .

Hi, I think that's an excellent question to ask. In fact fabricated memories are the most likely explanation behind "time dilation" effects in dreams where you often feel like you were spending hours, days or even years in a dream which only lasted about 15 minutes objectively.
However, if I recall right, researchers had experienced oneironauts signal them during dreams with eye motions which is possible since that is the one part of the body that is not normally paralysed during REM. It has been established through similar studies that subjective time perception in lucid dreams is about the same as in waking life. That suggests that you do in fact actively experience those events and they are not in fact constructs in your memories.

I once had a strange experience where I had something like a lucid dream within a normal dream. I was in the middle of a dream where I decided to attempt to WILD. I succeeded and managed to float around above my bed. I also experienced heightened awareness during this brief interlude in that dream with less cloudy memories during that wild attempt. This suggests that my neocortex was reactivated during the duration of my dream astral projection but afterwards, it shut off again since I no longer felt the pressure to pay attention to subtle sensory cues.

I hope that helped answer your question from my perspective.

Yeah,

I myself sometimes feel after lucid dream as if it was fake memory but isn't that same with all memories that we barely remember?
Let's say you'd wake up at 3 AM due to some loud noise and two minutes later you fell asleep, at the morning if you'd try to recall that moment you'd probably have quite horrible quality memories from that time, they would feel as if they were fake, non existant or maybe even imagined events
That kind of poor quality memories are caused by our mind being to certain degree limited (Because you were barely awake?) than we are naturally during our waking life?
You were back then barely conscious due to being in sleep and then suddenly cut off out of it

This kind of situation is similar to some memories of lucid dreams or just let's say dreams
Sometimes lucid dreams quality is low and we are barely lucid aswell, that would be the cause of us beliving that dream might've been just produced memory?
Because we are barely conscious during the dream
Yet still the stuff that happend during the dream was done by us in real time (Not just produced memory?)

There are different types of LDs.Sometimes, yes, I think "Yes! I am in the dream now, I know I am in the dream now". Sometimes it's hazier than that. Sometimes it's just a case of waking and saying, "Oh! I had a lucid dream!" The latter probably wasn't a proper lucid dream.

I guess the difficulty is from the fact that consciousness is not an off-on switch but rather a continuum. I've had a false awakening that was so vivid that it might as well be a waking life experience but I've had ld's with stretches that I can barely remember with any concrete detail.
Also interestingly, those dreams exhibited significant time dilation effects.

Western Philosophy have had great problems with exactly this. How can dreams be experiences when we per definition are unconscious? In some early dream research they used different stimuli to awaken dreamers, and the dreams that they reported incorporated the stimuli into the narrative of the dream. One example was a car back firing outside (awakening the subject) reported as a gun firing in the dream. Another example was when dripping water on the subjects back to awaken them, they reported that an opera singer entered a stage, and a bucket of water fell from the roof onto him.

The philosophers had trouble finding solutions to this. It would almost seem that we are precognitive if the stimuli awaking us is incorporated into the dream narrative. So one suggestion was the so called "cassette theory of dreams" - in which our memories and experiences are slotted into our mind upon waking. Not really a well constructed theory, it got alot of critizism.

I think that we now can prove that dreaming, aswell as halucinations, hit the exact same centers in the brain as our normal perceptions, rendering them identical to our waking life perceptions.

Most of my lucid dreams start as False Awakenings (or, well, more like "Lucid Awakenings", since I'm lucid from the beginning), and personally I think those dreams feel exactly as "present" as waking life.
I feel myself walking around and thinking of things to do, and then when I lose the dream my very first thought in bed is "yeah, I was lucid again!", instantly when I wake up.
So in my experience, lucid dreams definitely happen "in the present moment".

That feeling of being 'present' in the dream still, to this day, blows me away. There's nothing like it. To know where you are, when you are, and yet know that you're not in a surrounding that most people would associate with 'real life', is just the most surreal experience! Congratulations on your revelation!