Thinking in a LD

[VagalTone]

Hi ! I would like to receive your feedback about the relationship between thinking and keeping lucidity. Do you lose your lucidity if you think too much in LD? Are you aware of your thoughts during a lucid dream? Hehe

[Sageous]

Interesting question, but perhaps for unexpected reasons... For me, there has never been a relationship between thinking and lucidity. When I am lucid, I can think just as much as I do in waking-life without any risk to my lucidity. In a sense, my waking-life consciousness is simply active in a new place (dreams), and all the functions included in it, like thinking or accessing memory, are present and active. That activity is occurring in parallel with the dream, I think, and not in spite of the dream. Thinking really has no effect on the dream itself, unless I choose it to do so (i.e., to adapt what I'm thinking about to the dream imagery). So I believe, and have proven to myself uncounted times, that you can think all you want in a dream without any loss of lucidity, just as you can think all you want in waking-life, literally. About the only exception to this is giving too much thought to losing lucidity itself, especially if there is an emotional subtext to your thoughts, because you might accidentally convert your thoughts to unconscious action. Beyond that, think away! I personally have done some of my best thinking/work during LD's, and I highly recommend the practice. That said: I think this question has a different sort of validity, though, because it exposes a curious misconception shared by so many dreamers: When you are dreaming non-lucidly, your thinking processes are working just fine, just as your consciousness is working just fine. It is memory that is impaired. It is the failure to access memory that causes a dreamer to assume that they were not thinking properly in their dream (this judgment is made upon waking; during dreams you are usually quite confident in your thought processes). Terms like "dream logic" emerge in our lexicon, even though dream logic is just the same as waking-life logic, lucid or not. It is the absence of any real memory, especially long-term memory, that causes what in retrospect seems to be pretty addled thinking (i.e., if you cannot remember that you really don't live in a castle in the clouds, then you will find such a residence quite sensible, if not pretty cool). In other words your thinking works fine, based on available information, and it (consciousness) never shuts off; it is simply redirected by the lack of memories to define your past, your place, and your self. That redirection can seem, in retrospect, to be a loss of the capacity for thought, but it is not. tl;dr: I personally can think all I want when lucid, in the most abstract of terms, without any risk to my lucidity. You probably can as well, for the reasons I rambled incoherently through above. About the only time that thought becomes a threat to self-awareness is when you start thinking too hard about your fear of losing lucidity or waking up, because sometimes you get what you are thinking about.

[VagalTone]

My curiosity comes from the fact that, in waking life, thoughts represent a challenge in the sense that one can become completely knocked out, distracted, and lose touch with the present moment. They are completely fine, but unless there is some presence, one gets totally identified with the thought and lost in it. Just the same seems to happen to me in a LD. Why would a lucid dream turn slowly into a nonlucid? I think one reason is that the thought " this is a dream" tends to be more and more engulfed by a lack of presence or by an excess of thinking. But i might be wrong.

[Sageous]

My curiosity comes from the fact that, in waking life, thoughts represent a challenge in the sense that one can become completely knocked out, distracted, and lose touch with the present moment. They are completely fine, but unless there is some presence, one gets totally identified with the thought and lost in it. Just the same seems to happen to me in a LD. That's a good point. I suppose that, just as you can abandon lucidity with deep thoughts or daydreaming in waking-life, you can indeed abandon lucidity through that activity in dreaming life. But that abandonment is a decision, and not a result of thinking: you could certainly go about your thinking without losing touch with reality, of either the dream or waking-life variety, if you choose to keep a toe in the Here&Now as you are doing that thinking. This is not hard to do, as it is simply a matter of keeping a "focus file" open in your head while your mind browses other things. As long as you remember where you are, and who you are, you can hold onto your lucidity. In short, I agree, but there is difference between just thinking and literally losing your self in your thoughts. Doing the latter will cost you your lucidity, awake or asleep. Why would a lucid dream turn slowly into a nonlucid? I think one reason is that the thought " this is a dream" tends to be more and more engulfed by a lack of presence or by an excess of thinking. But i might be wrong. You are not completely wrong. Yes, if your entire grasp on self-awareness during the dream rests in actively maintaining the notion that "this is a dream," then yes, you will lose lucidity if that thought gets left behind. But it is very possible to establish that "this is a dream" as a part of your dreaming reality, making the fact of the dream obvious, rather than something that you must remind yourself about. This may be difficult at first but, with practice, it becomes second nature. If you develop a lucid routine that requires you to remind yourself every few minutes that you are in a dream, regardless of what you are doing, you are taking the first steps toward this second-nature awareness. However, if you are in the habit of losing yourself to your thoughts and daydreams, and that habit cannot be broken, then I recommend that you avoid that path during dreams, because, yes, when you lose your self in any respect during the dream, you have lost lucidity. I think I might have misdirected your thread right out of the chutes, VagalTone, with what was probably an off-topic response; sorry about that, and I hope others will come on with their experiences regardless of my blather.

[TravisE]

I can't say I've ever had much of a problem with losing lucidity by “thinking too much”; it probably helps me, in fact. Though, personally, I very rarely seem to lose lucidity once I gain it except via an awakening/false awakening (if I don't remember to RC), or some sort of unusual dream discontinuity. I've lately been inspired by Sageous and others to try to increase my overall self-awareness both in real life and in dreams, and another goal is to constantly evaluate myself and think about what I'm doing, why, and whether it's the best possible choice. I haven't been doing this long enough to say for sure what the result is, though in my last few LDs, my ability to remember most of my goals, make good decisions, and remember all sorts of little details afterward, even some random thoughts that went through my mind, has seemed to be much higher than my average.

[AnotherDreamer]

I usually lose lucidity from a lack of thinking rather than an overabundance of it. I don't know why, but it feels like I can start to lose myself in the dream when I stop thinking and sort of flow along with it. I suppose that might also have to do with a lack of awareness though.

[mimihigurashi]

Hmm, now that I think about it, the only time I 'had trouble' thinking while lucid was many LDs ago. It wasn't even actual trouble, I was just still very new at LDing and I was afraid that if I think too much, I'll shift my focus from the dream and it will disappear. Other than that, thinking in lucid dreams is pretty much just like in waking life for me.

[Yuusha]

My experience is that whenever I start thinking about my physical body I start feeling that I have to struggle to stay in the dream, and usually I lose grasp of the dream and wake up. Also, I tend to be more on "autopilot" in lucid dreams; I know that I am dreaming, but I tend to be more impulsive and be like "yeah, I am in a dream, time to rub my hands until the dream stabilizes --- okay, finished! now I will go here and try Dream Goal X!".

[TravisE]

Also, I tend to be more on "autopilot" in lucid dreams; I know that I am dreaming, but I tend to be more impulsive and be like "yeah, I am in a dream, time to rub my hands until the dream stabilizes --- okay, finished! now I will go here and try Dream Goal X!". I've often been the same way. In some LDs I tend to just sort of do different things as quickly as possible without thinking much about it, whereas in real life I tend to plan virtually everything I do in advance, even if by only a second or two. I'm working on changing that, though, since I seem to be generally more productive when I make more conscious decisions (especially if something unplanned happens). On the other hand, I've come up with a lot of creative things to try in “auto-pilot mode” that I might not have thought of if I had been more “conscious”.

[insideout]

When I am fully lucid in a dream I think just as I do when awake. When I lose lucidity is seems to be when I get distracted by dream events and forget that I am dreaming. The amount of thinking doesn't change. The only change is how I'm thinking about the objects and events around me (realizing that it is a dream, or accepting it as physical reality).