Thread: Selective Lucidity...

A very interesting thoughts. I have heard that LD is sometimes recommended as a way to get over nightmares by doctors. There was even one temple where monks practiced LD just as you said to help them realize their own minds and feel the existence as a whole. Like the soul is still here, not matter if you sleep or not and maybe LD might be the side effect of a perfect mind-control, where you are aware of your existence every moment.

Anyway I think the negative moments work similarly to reality checks. The mind just remembers that when something goes wrong, use LD to fix it. And I believe that our minds always know that we are actually dreaming. I tried to teach myself to feel that little hidden thought somewhere deep in my brain that holds the information "This is a dream!" and it is there. Try to focus on it when you have a LD. Try to compare the state of dreaming itself to the normal waking state and you can feel something like in the back of your head, something too small to normally feel but it's there. Our mind always knows somewhere what is going on. ^^

Originally Posted by Hitokage

And I believe that our minds always know that we are actually dreaming

This is may be true; but is certainly a little more complicated (or so one of the leading theory goes...)

Essentially, during dreaming your consciousness breaks up into two components: primary and secondary.
Primary does not know that it is dreaming, for it cannot self-reflect strictly speaking. It may (according to my own interpretation) grow to accept the dream state at a more fundamental/intuitive level.

Secondary Consciousness is much more interesting: it is structurally uncoupled from Primary Consciousness and depleted of vital blood flow, rendering it in a kind of robotic activation state where it too cannot self-reflect, due to being so dramatically disempowered, but may activate spontaneously to produce self-reflection. This spontaneous activation of the secondary consciousness is the neurophysiological corollary of gaining dream lucidly.

So where does this signal to activate lucidity actually come from? This is the question that remains entirely unanswered. I would theorise that primary consciousness can be trained to attain a kind of pseudo-lucidity that it cannot itself fully appreciate, which in turn triggers aspects of the dormant Secondary Consciousness to come on-line.

Another idea is that the seat of metacognition in the brain emerges from neither of these systems specifically; and brings about heightened cognitive states though a separate, hitherto unexplored mechanism. There is a lot of circular causality in the way these systems operate, so agency is insidiously difficult to reduce to just one region.

Originally Posted by hayaku

This is may be true....

Thanks for the info. I am currently experimenting with that. I would like to reach the state where I will be able to feel this. It's not important if the consciousness is divided into two or three parts, to me it's important that I can feel the change. I am currently experimenting with that and trying to be able to naturally recognize the dream state. That's my goal now in LD.