Thread: Characteristics of a lucid dream

Over the years I've been making a list of what could be called "characteristics of lucidity". Two sources have been Wikipedia and the work of Paul Tholey (which I found out about by a posting by Zoth in the "Who or what should we blame for the lack of lucidity?" thread.) Let me know if there's some I've missed.

1) You remember waking life.
2) You know you are dreaming
3) You know dreams exist
4) You know normal rules don't apply
5) You know you can have "superpowers"
6) You know this world will cease to exist on awakening
7) You know your real body is back in bed
8) You know you do not have to react to what's happening to you (you don't get sucked into a plot)
9) You can actuate a pre-determined plan.


Numbers 8 and 9 are of the most interest to me. I am thinking to myself how I could use both or either of them as a doorway to lucidity, rather than what most of my focus on my LD journey has been so far - the focus on number 2.

I think your characteristics define a high-level lucid dream.
Personally I think that, as long as you understand that you are in a dream and that you have a limited amount of time to enjoy it before you wake up, then it is a lucid dream.

Also, my personal experience with lucid dreams is that they have a certain peculiar "surrealistic" atmosphere that you cannot really experience in waking life.
I guess the closest you can get to this feeling is from psychedelic drugs, since the effects of that, as far as I know, can be very similar (even Stephen LaBerge compares a lucid dream with the effects of LSD in his book "Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming" when he talks about different types of dreamsigns).
When I explore a lucid dream I always have this weird feeling that everything around me is somehow "alive" and even the most ordinary objects feel interesting and unexplored (heck, in a lucid dream you can stare at an ordinary wooden door and be like "wow, this door is so incredible and fascinating!", which would probably be somewhat weird in waking life).

Originally Posted by Yuusha

Also, my personal experience with lucid dreams is that they have a certain peculiar "surrealistic" atmosphere that you cannot really experience in waking life.

Yes, I agree with that. It's an amazing thing.
Do you ever get that surrealistic feeling in non-lds without quite becoming lucid? I'm pretty sure I do.


BTW, just to clarify - I don't mean all 9 characteristics have to be there at once.

Exploring the surreal feeling angle... I would define it this way: The surreal feeling is the subtle knowledge that the environment around you is a projection of your mind, rather than an externally consistent reality. In "real" reality, the environment around is, mostly, external and independent of us. You can interact with it (say, move an object) and you can alter your perception of it (say, close your eyes), but the outside world remains "concrete" and apart from you. But in a surreal dream environment, everything around you is generated by your mind. Thus, you can alter the environment in ways impossible in reality. For example, if you close your eyes, objects might permanently disappear. You didn't just alter your perception temporarily, you actually altered the environment.

I think that definition gels with Surrealist art. Surrealist art isn't just strange images. It's the representation of mental concepts in visual form. It may be very similar to reality or it may be bizarre. But even when it is bizzare, there is subtle familiarity because the symbolism connects with our mental concepts. Instead of observing external reality and recreating it, the artist instead reflects on inner mental concepts and projects them out on to a canvas.

So connecting back to the topic. Perhaps it's not that a lucid dream is recognizing a dream as a dream. We all know that there are degrees of lucidity, but dream/no dream is an all-or-nothing proposition. Instead, lucidity may be the degree to which you can detect the surreal feeling. At some point, the recognition is strong enough that one logically makes the conclusion that they are dreaming, but that's a secondary step. What's actually going on at a very narrow and perceptual level is that you are recognizing that the environment bears more similarly to your mental landscape that to objective reality.

Interesting, but my first full lucid dream had all of these and on further investigation, I discovered I was not 100% lucid. My mental level was similar to if you are very sleep deprived and just woke up. However, the presence of these signs makes me call it a "full" lucid dream. It can still be a full lucid dream if it has all the characteristics, even if you are not entirely lucid. So I think there should be two measurements, fullness and lucidity level.

Lucidity exists on a spectrum, one that constantly changes within the dream itself, going up and down. For me, awareness level is usually a graph that starts low, builds to a peak, then gradually subsides.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Lucidity exists on a spectrum, one that constantly changes within the dream itself, going up and down. For me, awareness level is usually a graph that starts low, builds to a peak, then gradually subsides.

Now that definitely sounds like a psychedelic drug trip!