Selective Lucidity...

A question for some of the more experienced lucid dreamers out there...

Does anybody here experience anything along the lines of opt-in selective lucidity? By that I mean an ability to gain lucidity at any momentary point, but a general tendency not to if circumstances allow.
I would describe this as a sense of lucidity that rapidly emerges as a response to negative emotions that occur mid-dream, that subsides just as quickly once the thread has passed. The lucidity here is not the actual goal... just a mechanism to ensure peaceful dreaming, with total surrender to (safe) unconsciousness being the more important achievement.

I ask this as my lucid dreaming ability rapidly gave way to these later kind of dreams at about the age of 25. Since then I rarely maintain lucidity any longer than necessary to micro-manage the dream narrative.
The direct benefit is that my dream-recollection has seemingly surged to dramatic levels, and I tend to have at least one dream a month that I recall so vividly that I can write 5,000+ words of detail on their subject if I want.

Previously, I might have one such dream a year, and would agonise over half-remembered dreams in immense frustration for days and days. As my lucidity gave way to selective-lucidity, I have enjoyed my dreaming experience significantly more, and never struggle to remember a dream.

Please advise if anybody shares this experience

I am engaged in academic research on this very subject (metacognition of protoconscious states) and would like to know just how unique my self-directed training has been.

Thanks

J

What you're describing kind of fits with my experience too. I've drifted away from deliberately practising lucid dreaming over the years (mainly because I rarely get the chance to sleep in any more, which was lucid prime-time in the past), and have been having mini lucid episodes like you describe pretty much every night. As you say, moments of lucidity emerge for me in response to negative situations or emotions, and generally serve to improve the situation before receding. For example, I haven't had a full-blown nightmare for years (due to this), but any time I'm threatened in a dream, I seem to "clock in" and use this awareness to either destroy the monster/antagonist or do something that makes it less threatening. Then it's back to dreaming as usual, no lucidity.

It has been pretty handy and I suppose has led to years of totally peaceful (dream-wise) sleep, but I don't know if I'd say it's a directed or adaptive mechanism with the function of ensuring peaceful sleep. I think it's quite common for lucid dreamers to become lucid in response to a dreamed threat, but I imagine that people deal with the threat in many different ways, e.g. waking themselves up or engaging in a long, drawn-out dream battle - things not necessarily conducive to peaceful sleep.

I think it's a consequence of extended lucid-dreaming practice, kind of a residual ability that doesn't take much effort (unlike becoming fully lucid and staying that way for as long as possible). Whether or not it ends up being used to deliver peaceful, unconscious dreaming is probably more to do with characteristics of the individual.

I'm 24 and this started happening to me over the last 3-or-so years, but I don't think age is a factor in this change I've noticed. For me it's definitely lifestyle-related and at least partly due to the fact that I haven't had time to engage in much deliberate lucid dreaming for a while.

Your research area sounds really interesting, have you written anything you wouldn't mind me reading (maybe link through PM rather than posting publicly, up to you)? Or could you recommend a good paper for someone new to the area? My main research interest is in perception/action and motor skill learning, so I've at least got a Psychological base to start from.

Thanks for the reply JD

Yes I have written a fair bit, I am currently contributing several chapters to the book of a very well known Neuroscientist who specialises in sleep and dream physiology.
I would not feel ready to put those out to the public domain quite yet, they are still works in progress... however I do keep a blog where I chronicle my more intense and vivid dreams and attempt to analyse them using the research that I do. The chapters are based off a selection of these entries. I'll post the link in 3 days when the inbuilt forum rules let me :/

The theory I build from is that dreams occur essentially to prepare the organism for the following days waking experiences, as best as it effectively can.
It has been my own personal experience that my dreams have served and exceeded this purpose, with the extent of brain function being modified existing as a corollary of the subjective experience of one's own dream content.

As such, I feel lucidity acts as a stepping stone that the brain may or may not take in finding more arduous autoemergent processes to perfect in its state of diminished executive agency. I do not feel that lucidity is necessarily the end achievement in of itself, just as I feel intense paranoia and anxiety are not ends of themselves, despite the fact that they might be necessary to capitalise on other favourable traits such as "attention to detail".

About the only practical application I could assume to arise from the routine abandonment of lucidity by lucidity itself would be a kind of Buddhist like philosophical position in waking life, where by the tenancy to over-think and over-reflect in a given situation is mediated by the reflexive understanding that some problems are best solved when left to simplicity. Whether or not this is actually objectively true is another issue that you will have to argue with the Buddhists, however I think this is very much in line with what I am trying to describe here.

Well, hope all that made sense!

J

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. ^^

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Originally Posted by Hitokage

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by hayaku

This is may be true....

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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.

I do have similar experience. Only one big difference that I'll quote below. I use LDs to understand all that I am more and watch all the images that my unconscious show me in the manifestation of the dream.

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I would describe this as a sense of lucidity that rapidly emerges as a response to negative emotions

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I intervene in this kind of dream only if I have a lucid nightmare ( which I learned recently. by myself, how to defeat it ) but I dont become lucid because of a nightmare, I am lucid and have a nightmare. so it's not a response to negative emotions ( for me ).

After I wake up I analyze the dream.

Well! It's been 3 days so I can finally post the link to my blog where I discuss these ideas in greater depth.
Hope you all enjoy!

Dream Introspection