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.