Thread: High and Low-Level LDs?

Originally Posted by Sageous

High-level lucidity means nothing more (or less) than you have a strong sense of self-awareness and easy access to memory. I have never understood where vividness came into play with lucidity, other than the word "lucid" kind of implies as much. I think that one of the things people notice when lucid is the amazing clarity of their dreams, but they don't stop to consider whether that clarity wasn't just as clear before they took conscious note if it.

Dreams seem "realer than real" because, from a perceptual standpoint, they are. When you perceive images in a dream, you are doing so without any physical filters to distort the imagery, like eyes or ears. In other words, you are getting your imagery deposited into your perception straight from your unconscious/memory, without the imagery having to pass through things like air, dust, light, the lenses of your eyes, or your optic nerves/ all of which have some opportunity to distort the original object being perceived. Also, in waking life your perception also must navigate through the distractions of all the other objects vying for your attention, whereas in a dream you can perceive an object without distraction. What you are perceiving in a dream is essentially perfect, so it will certainly tend to seem more real than real. Again, this "direct" perception has nothing to do with lucidity, and will work the same whether you are lucid or not -- the only difference is that when you are lucid you are able to notice the "realer than real" effect, and when not lucid you don't notice because everything looks just like it's supposed to look, as far as your memory-impaired dreaming self can remember.

Wow, that’s very interesting, Sageous, thanks for explaining! Before, I just thought that the reason dreams could seem so real was because of the power of the subconscious mind -- that it simply has the ability to create a world which is superior to reality. But your explanation completely makes sense -- good to know! I suppose it’s also similar to what LaBerge said once about dreaming being unconstrained by sensory input.

Originally Posted by Sageous

I know this all runs counter to what pretty much everyone says around here, but I hope you'll consider it anyway.

Yes I’ve always thought that the two (self-awareness and vividness) were separate anyway (ever since I read it in one of your posts long ago ). But what I didn’t know was that self-awareness really only makes the dreamer ‘notice’ the perfect clarity of the dream, as you mentioned above -- I thought having strong self-awareness gave the dreamer the ability to enhance the realism of the dream on their own, if for example, the dream did happen to be dull (as well as other things like prolonging, dream control etc.). So the reason high self-awareness does this is really only because of the strengthened appreciation of the dream quality which was there all along? But has no real 'enhancing' power itself?

Perhaps the only question that remains is the one of what causes such fluctuations in the quality of the dream state itself, regardless of levels of lucidity -- but I guess that’s for another thread!