Thread: Waking awareness without lucidity in a dream?

Going back through my dream journal has led me to interesting experiences I completely forgot I had. One of these was an “anti-lucid” dream that felt exactly like a LD, but with me being convinced I was awake rather than dreaming. By this I don't mean it was merely an ultra-vivid non-LD—it felt like the “real me” in the dream, not my “mechanical dream self” that's usually present in NLDs. In other words, it seemed like my waking awareness was present and that I even had a strong sense of self-awareness just as in a LD—except I somehow simply came to the wrong conclusion as to which “reality” I was in.

Has anyone experienced something like this?

Originally Posted by Travis E.

Going back through my dream journal has led me to interesting experiences I completely forgot I had. One of these was an “anti-lucid” dream that felt exactly like a LD, but with me being convinced I was awake rather than dreaming. By this I don't mean it was merely an ultra-vivid non-LD—it felt like the “real me” in the dream, not my “mechanical dream self” that's usually present in NLDs. In other words, it seemed like my waking awareness was present and that I even had a strong sense of self-awareness just as in a LD—except I somehow simply came to the wrong conclusion as to which “reality” I was in.

Has anyone experienced something like this?

Yes! I have a lot of experiences like this. My dream journal has lots of dreams where I have acted like my exact waking life self. I’ve had many dreams where I was in social situations, talking to people, and acting, speaking etc. exactly like I would in reality -- it literally felt like "me" rather than a DC of me. Just like you mentioned, I felt literally “awake” as I would be IWL, but the only thing I didn’t know, is that it was a dream.

By extension, I’ve also had dreams where I actually felt as self-aware as I do IWL while questioning if I was dreaming, and still not knowing it was a dream -- which I found very odd.

This is actually really interesting and I’ve often wondered about it myself. I’ve often woken up from them thinking, if I was that self-aware in the dream, or my ‘dream self’ was so reflective of my waking life self, how did lucidity not occur, how did I not even think a second that it was all a dream.

Originally Posted by Travis E.

Going back through my dream journal has led me to interesting experiences I completely forgot I had. One of these was an “anti-lucid” dream that felt exactly like a LD, but with me being convinced I was awake rather than dreaming. By this I don't mean it was merely an ultra-vivid non-LD—it felt like the “real me” in the dream, not my “mechanical dream self” that's usually present in NLDs. In other words, it seemed like my waking awareness was present and that I even had a strong sense of self-awareness just as in a LD—except I somehow simply came to the wrong conclusion as to which “reality” I was in.

Has anyone experienced something like this?

I would imagine we all have experienced this, whether we remember it or not.

Consciousness is always active in dreams, just as it is in waking-life; but consciousness does not equal self-awareness. Just as in waking-life, conscious can be present and quite active in dreams without one wit of self-awareness. In other words, during your dream your waking-life awareness was particularly active or elevated, but your waking-life self-awareness was still not with you. Bright as you may have felt, you still could not remember or suspect that your environment was a dream. So conscious, yes, self-aware, no; consciousness -- even very clear consciousness -- can be present without any self-awareness on hand.

This would, and does, create a sense of lucidity -- of awareness -- in dreams, and that sense would indeed feel just like your sense of awareness during waking-life...because it is. But, as Sensei already said, there is more than one form of awareness,

Travis, I also have experienced these dreams and I often find them just as amazing as lucid dreams.

Adding on the many forms of awareness discussion, I would say that we have been talking about more than one type of self-awareness in this discussion. Travis, you said you had self-awareness, but Sageous seems to say that you didn't or else you would of been lucid. Those statements contradict each-other but I would say you had self-awareness (as I do in such dreams) in the sense that I am aware that I am present, I am the one experiencing whatever I am doing, and that if things go wrong, I will die, and no longer be there. But I don't have (and you don't have) the self-awareness that Sageous refers to (sorry if that's not what he meant) which is about being aware of your self in relation with your environment and the time line of what is happening and the way the environment and you are effecting each other. Because, then, you would deduct from memory and goal and everything that you are in a dream (it's not hard of a deduction to make when you have memory) and that you have great effects on the environment since it is in your brain.

Most of my dreams I am in control and aware and making decisions. I think that it is often overlooked that there are two forms of awareness. They are both generally labeled awareness, but I label them differently.

General dream awareness - how much waking awareness you have in a dream
State awareness - how aware you are that there is more than one state (waking and dreaming state)

Always do at least one exercise a day for both of these. We always start noobs off with dj and RC, but don't feel limited to only this. There are millions of things to do for both (and even things that work for both at the same time).

Originally Posted by Sensei

Most of my dreams I am in control and aware and making decisions. I think that it is often overlooked that there are two forms of awareness. They are both generally labeled awareness, but I label them differently.

General dream awareness - how much waking awareness you have in a dream
State awareness - how aware you are that there is more than one state (waking and dreaming state)

Always do at least one exercise a day for both of these. We always start noobs off with dj and RC, but don't feel limited to only this. There are millions of things to do for both (and even things that work for both at the same time).

Sensei could you please give a few examples of these exercises? I often get stuck in general dream awareness without the state awareness. That is, I often find myself aware in a dream but unaware the environment is a dream.

Originally Posted by Eonnn

Sensei could you please give a few examples of these exercises? I often get stuck in general dream awareness without the state awareness. That is, I often find myself aware in a dream but unaware the environment is a dream.

General Dream Awareness usually goes up with recall, so doing things that increase your recall like:
http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-sign...ompendium.html

State Awareness is going to be things like RCing and other induction techniques. Generally it is good to find something that raises your awareness of the fact that there are two different realities and you enjoy doing and continue down that path.

Ah, interesting. So I guess what is meant by “waking awareness” and self-awareness are distinct things. Would consciousness and waking awareness be the same thing, then?

I bring this up because I had read about false lucids a little while back and am sort of trying to put the pieces together. The idea bothered me at first, but then I realized that I occasionally have what you might call “open-mouth initiated” LDs , where I will be talking in a dream and happen to blurt out something like “Oh well, this is just a dream” (or even start talking about what I could do if I became lucid in this dream), hear my own words and then become lucid and think, “Oh right, this is a dream, isn't it?!”. There definitely seems to be a subtle difference that's hard to describe crossing the non-lucid to lucid barrier in those cases. So I think I can actually see how someone could go through an entire dream saying things like “This is a dream; I'm lucid!” without actually becoming lucid, despite the apparent contradiction on the surface.

From my journal entry, I get the impression that the “this is me” feeling of awareness in that particular NLD I mentioned was very much like the one I get “waking up” in the middle of a DILD. The funny thing is that this was nine years ago, and I was apparently noticing these little subtleties of awareness long before I had more recently started hearing about this stuff or understood what was going on—and I had totally forgotten about it!

Originally Posted by Travis E.

Ah, interesting. So I guess what is meant by “waking awareness” and self-awareness are distinct things. Would consciousness and waking awareness be the same thing, then?

Given that the rest of your post seems to answer this, I'm not sure this question was rhetorical; but just in case:

Yes, consciousness and awareness are the same thing, whether you are awake or dreaming. It is waking-life self-awareness that equals lucidity, again whether you are dreaming or awake. Consciousness/simple awareness is certainly a required component of self-awareness, but they are not the same thing.

And yes, this does help explain false lucids: since consciousness is present in dreams, and it behaves about the same whether you are awake or dreaming (though it may seem quite different in dreams because consciousness has a different set of parameters to navigate in a dream, given that you believe the dreamworld to be real in a NLD), dreaming that you are lucid without remembering that you are dreaming and without any self-awareness can happen, because, until you are lucid, it is really just another dream schema that your consciousness responds to as best it can, given the lack of self-awareness or memory to point out the difference.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Given that the rest of your post seems to answer this, I'm not sure this question was rhetorical; but just in case:

Nope, just checking that I understand correctly. Or perhaps my mind is just hiding knowledge I didn't know I had. Thanks, everyone.

So what I'm getting out of this is that there may not have been anything particularly “special” about that NLD compared to others, besides a possibly heightened consciousness (or at least, a better memory of it). I can imagine there might be a range of levels of waking awareness, as remembered, with the “weaker” NLDs, perhaps, being the ones that tend to feel more “scripted” rather than like one actually making conscious decisions.

Yes I get this a lot. Generally I find the better my recall the more "present" moments I have in non-lucids. It feels like "I" am really there, experiencing, feeling, reacting, thinking, even remembering (many times false memories), not simply observing.

I have a growing theory that we all experience dreams in this vivid (vivid consciousness, not just vivid visuals) fashion most of the time, we just tend to forget it really quickly upon waking. Thus better recall means remembering a drastically more involved dreaming experience.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

I have a growing theory that we all experience dreams in this vivid (vivid consciousness, not just vivid visuals) fashion most of the time, we just tend to forget it really quickly upon waking. Thus better recall means remembering a drastically more involved dreaming experience.

That's probably a valid theory.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

Yes I get this a lot. Generally I find the better my recall the more "present" moments I have in non-lucids. It feels like "I" am really there, experiencing, feeling, reacting, thinking, even remembering (many times false memories), not simply observing.

I have a growing theory that we all experience dreams in this vivid (vivid consciousness, not just vivid visuals) fashion most of the time, we just tend to forget it really quickly upon waking. Thus better recall means remembering a drastically more involved dreaming experience.

This is also my hypothesis. I believe that in dreams you are conscious, and then there is a gap of consciousness as you wake up, and then you are conscious again; and dream recall is simply reducing this gap in consciousness progressively until you are aware of the end of the dream and of waking up, and there is an unbroken continuity of experience, leading to waking-level recall.

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

This is also my hypothesis. I believe that in dreams you are conscious, and then there is a gap of consciousness as you wake up, and then you are conscious again; and dream recall is simply reducing this gap in consciousness progressively until you are aware of the end of the dream and of waking up, and there is an unbroken continuity of experience, leading to waking-level recall.

It does usually seem much easier to remember dreams if you wake up immediately from them as opposed to later. That would also suggest that the better you remember a dream, the more likely you will feel like you were “there” during the dream, as opposed to it feeling “scripted” or “only in the past”, so to speak.

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

This is also my hypothesis. I believe that in dreams you are conscious, and then there is a gap of consciousness as you wake up, and then you are conscious again; and dream recall is simply reducing this gap in consciousness progressively until you are aware of the end of the dream and of waking up, and there is an unbroken continuity of experience, leading to waking-level recall.

I was told before that the easiest dreams to remember are the ones that you wake up from. I took this idea to mean that if I set alarms in the middle of the night that disrupted my sleep I would recall more dreams. I then found that the alarms made me forget some of the recall that I worked so hard on and found other methods for it. When I have lots and lots of awesome recall, I simply remember waking from every dream and write it down, then sleep, wake from the dream, write it down, and so on. The fact that my awareness is high enough to realize that I am waking means that it is easier to lucid dream as well. Note that if you do not lose lucidity, you always remember the waking. This is why I have always done multiple micro-WBTBs and one long WBTB. It seems to increase recall and awareness immensely.