An over-looked lucidity principle: Personality Fragmentation and its strong applications

I created an account solely so I could share some underlying lucidity principles that seem to be absent in the popular literature.

Typically prepatory wakeful training to attain lucidity is composed of reality checks, yet these checks are primarily extrinsically oriented. The problem with this is that there are particular fundamental differences in a lucid dream that cannot be noticed simply by becoming aware of your situation or the environment.

Many people, when they become lucid, do the first thing that comes to their mind. That, or they've used the MILD technique and simply carry out the plan they outlined for themselves while awake.

MILD is an important first step, but there is something I've noticed about dreams that can be solved by using the MILD technique in a different way.

In dreams, not only the environment and situation is changed, but YOU are as well. We (or I, at least) have made the mistake of believing my dream personality to be my waking personality upon becoming lucid. In other words, my dream self, with a completely different set of goals, motives, and interests, is the one who becomes lucid. This truly illustrates the fact that the conscious portion of the self is built on constantly remembering who we are.

For example, I may go into a dream with a particular goal. My dream self may remember that goal. Still, though, it is my dream personality that is carrying out that goal. Even when I DO become lucid AND remember the goal I set for myself, that's all I remember. I don't remember what happened the day before I went to sleep. I don't remember all the little nuances that is attached to my waking personality.

This means that although lucidity was attained, completely merging of the dream and waking selves has not occurred within the dream, meaning that the waking self cannot fully navigate the dreamscape. The reason I believe the ability to do this is important is because the waking self, if fully merged, could navigate the dreamscape primarily according to ITS goals rather than being influenced by the dreaming self's goals which will be irrelevant upon waking.

This principle of separation despite attaining lucidity is partially due to the nature of dreams; time does not function the same way, meaning the way the mind navigates and utilizes time will also be different. This makes it nearly impossible to fully merge both personalities, because one personality is the way it is because it remembers the way it does (i.e. the waking self remembers time in a linear fashion, opposed to the very fragmented, present-moment oriented dreaming self).

However, if one considers this concept during waking life reality checks, the reality checks could look something like this:

Become skeptical of the environment and present situation.
Bring all attention to what is occurring within the environment.
Bring attention to the current circumstances and become skeptical of them.
THEN, bring attention to one's own personality (present goals, hobbies, interests, and very importantly, past experiences) -- I say past experiences because memory is so suppressed in dreams that to activate memory is a potential way to access fragments of the waking personality and hopefully the entire integrated personality.
THEN bring one's attention to the sense of self; the sense of me-ness. Become skeptical of even that.
THEN attempt to remember who you are, similar to bringing one's attention to past experiences. Particularly remember waking life goals. In daily life, this would consist of being skeptical of everything you feel that you are, and then attempt to remember past goals.

The primary difference is that this type of examination encompasses the subjective aspect of the observer, the mental-objective aspect of thoughts, identity, goals, etc. and the physical environment-objective aspect of the body and its surroundings. In other words, it is a complete examination, rather than a partial one, which I hypothesize will lead to a fuller lucidity since there are more aspects that are being examined.

I don't fully understand what you mean. When I am lucid, I usually can remember things from the day before. Sometimes I even become lucid thanks to something that I've done the day before. For instance, I once had a false awakening in which I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and looked in the mirror. I saw my hair was down and became lucid because I remembered the day before I had washed my hair and put it up in a bun (which I do every few days, so it wasn't a coincidence).

However, I like the idea that the dream and waking self are two separate entities. They have different interests and of course different goals, but that's mainly because they live in different realities. It'd be pointless that the dream self tried to carry out the waking self's goals in a dream, because that wouldn't make a difference to the waking reality, and the other way around.

First of all, welcome to DV Theorist, nice to meet you :)

Don't take this the wrong way, but I see a few flaws in your theory:

First of all, there's no "dream personality". Personality is relatively stable across lifespan, and even if the (dream) experiences we have might alter it in a certain way, they certainly cannot be differentiated, since while you're lucid you're also technically awake.
You might counter-argument this first point by saying "well, how do you explain changes in behavior/cognition/perspective that occur in non-lucid and lucid dreams? A simple answer could be that lucid dreaming is an altered state of consciousness, and that determines that brain activity differs from, let's say, the waking state, and that alone is enough to produce slightly differentiated patterns of information processing. But hey, that's not even the most relevant part.

Consider alcohol: a known depressive drug that has very interesting effects on an individual: you tend to loose self-awareness, inhibition, alternating between euphoria and melancholy, etc etc. Those changes though are temporary, and characteristic of specific impairement in certain neural networks.
In a certain sense, lucid dreaming is the same: our lucidity is not a box, more like a state in a continuum, and it fluctutates along with our cognitive capabilities. When we say "a person is lucid", it doesn't mean the person possess all the cognitive capacity similar to being awake. So, it's not really your dream personality carrying out your intention, it is you. But this "you" sometimes really doesn't feel like "you" because your memory or other cognitive aspect might be so impaired it feels like "you're not really there".

Still, on another point of view, I do like and relate to your notion of "dream self". Isn't it strange that we don't fear giants and dragons, that we thrive into a free fall jump like we were jumping into a pool, and that we are capable of perceiving and interacting with others in a much more profound way :)?

I'm sure most of us are very familiar with the different "selves" in waking and dreaming, although that difference is bigger or smaller depending on the dream.
Anyways I suggest you check this thread which is closely related to what you are talking about, specially the importance of the self an memory:
http://www.dreamviews.com/wild/12557...mentals-q.html

Zoth Thanks for the welcome.

I don't believe that the personality is at all stable. In fact, the self is itself hardly one entity, but an integration of many different behavioral tendencies (where behavioral includes mental-behavioral phenomena such as thought) influenced by neurological, environmental, genetic factors (as well as their subjective counterparts).

Because every single event modifies the physical-subjective system that can be called the "brain-mind", then that means you yourself are constantly evolving. It's not that that alcohol acts on a stable entity to modify it, but that there is no stable entity; there is only a process. The changes are not temporary because change is not reversible; things flow in one directions. Every single experience modifies the neural structure, synaptic strength, subjective memory (and its physiological correlate), thus the system which we call ourselves is always changing.

Martakartus

I don't mean that there are two separate entities, though I did speak using that dichotomy for simplicity's sake. Instead I meant that there is a set of tendencies, experiences, memories, and constraints (what we can and cannot control. I.e., we believe we are our mind because we can change our thoughts, but we are not the chair in front of us because we can immediately affect it; it is outside our locus of control; we can only affect it by first affecting our thoughts, which can be considered the immediately manipulable objects of awareness)that define who we are; that form our identity. So our identity is not an entity, but an integration of many many factors. Every state of consciousness gives us more or less access to various parts, thereby causing changes in the self. I have personally found the contrast between the self I am conscious of in the dream state and the self in the waking state very distinct.


I don't think it'd be pointless for the dream self to carry out waking self's tasks because that's exactly what we are attempting to do with lucid dreaming. Or rather, we are attempting to merge the two in order to have "our personal" (i.e. waking) self's goals fulfilled. Keep in mind I put that phrase in quotations because identification itself is a psychological phenomena, and during waking life, identification is with the waking self, during dream life, identification is with the dream self. If we learn to question that identification which is but a "type" of thought, we learn to question the self, itself. And this teaches us to "transcend" or go beyond the identity and in so doing, we are able to traverse between the two. This is why I proposed that specific reality checking technique. Lucid dreaming can teach us to find the transience, malleability, and vulnerability of the waking self as well. Most people wake up after dreaming and call that dream unreal. That's a relative opinion, though, because if the dream self could be asked about the waking self, "they" would say the same thing.

Quote:

---

I don't believe that the personality is at all stable. In fact, the self is itself hardly one entity, but an integration of many different behavioral tendencies (where behavioral includes mental-behavioral phenomena such as thought) influenced by neurological, environmental, genetic factors (as well as their subjective counterparts).

---

I agree with that presentation of the self as a unit even if it's composed by several sub-systems, practically each of them pushing into its own direction. But personality as we know it (although we could indeed argue that there are several definitions we can work with), is more related to a pattern, at least in the general sense of the word: I can feel a strong emotion like anger in a dream and extreme calmness in another, but I will exhibit a pattern of behavior (or tendency to) that will come across the large variety of my experiences (oniric or otherwise). In this sense, the self exhibits personality through the pattern response that emerges from the constant interaction of those systems.

So we do seem to agree on the presentation of the self, but why does that lead you to state that personality isn't stable? The way I presented it isn't that deterministic as not to allow a constant reformulation of the self, simply deterministic enough that it allows you to circumvent patterns of response to certain categories.
I do agree with alcohol: in fact, the self presented during a drunken state is simply a result of changes on said systems that produce altered consciousness. But those changes are temporary/of short-duration, just like lucidity is. The self mutates, but the personality is not the self, more like a sort of line (which certainly changes and can be crossed, just not that easily) that gives you a notion of the range of the self. In this analogy, we seem to agree that lucidity moves the content inside the circle around, but if you suggest a differentiated personality, then you'd be talking about moving the entire area to a (possible) whole new space, which not only doesn't seem feasible (remember you're, for a big part, you) but also seems to contradict the concept of personality (because it would imply that the response of the dreamer regarding the oniric content would be somewhat stable with itself, but different from the waking life, and by then, you're changing your waking life personality at the same time). Personality changes through experience, so experiencing lucidity and altering your "dream personality" and not your waking personality (due assuming they could be 2 separate things)...would seem impossible, what do you think?

Another point: your perspective also contradicts many experiences that I (and I bet many others have), like relatively functional auto-biographical memory, normal sense of time (studies do not show altered sense of time unless for certain tasks). Even if that was the case, it had nothing to do with personality, as personality doesn't drastically change with minor losses of cognition/memory impairment.

Quote:

---

This means that although lucidity was attained, completely merging of the dream and waking selves has not occurred within the dream, meaning that the waking self cannot fully navigate the dreamscape.

---

What is there to merge? We know what the "waking self" is, what is the dreamer self if not the waking life with impaired self-awareness? Same memories (even if the dreamer self doesn't possess all of them, he certainly doesn't possess memories that the waking self doesn't possess), same experiences, same constraints (well, debatable, but a bit off-topic). In what basis do you assert a different self during (lucid) dreaming?

The self is talked about as a unit. yet it is, as we've both agreed, different parts from which a single pattern emerges. These parts, if isolated, would not allow that particular pattern to emerge, therefore there is an integration where different parts affect each other. This is the self. The 'individual' sense comes from this integration. In fact, this integration that causes individuality is LESS fundamental than the parts themselves. Therefore, when a part changes, the entire function changes. Of course, this system of integrated parts stores information in the form of reflexive action i.e. it can act on itself (memory). This creates a sense of continuity. You say that the alcohol is temporary, and you're right; it only modifies the function for a certain amount of time, however, from then on, the information stored is different than it was before; the self has been forever modified.

Information storage is an ambiguous term. What do I mean by this? Whenever a system assumes a particular state, it generates information. The more states a system can assume, the more information generated. Thus, anything that alters the state of the system generates information, and this information is "stored" because the system has been modified according to that information. That probably sounds too vague to make sense, so here is an example: muscle memory is due to someone completing a task so many times that the nervous system has stored information so that it can more easily accomplish that task. But what does that entail? It entails not little "packets" of information somewhere in the brain, but simply an increase in connections as well as stronger synaptic firing. The information is stored, therefore, in the way of the system simply adding "pulleys" that allow it to better be able to life that hand in that way.

How do we recognize change? Because the present state is in a constant flux, which means you are never in the same state. This means that the system upon which "You" rest is constantly changing, causing you to change. You only believe in yourself as a constant variable, despite the ever-changing world, because the system which created you is constantly remembering who you are. That is only one of its functions. Damage that function, and you're gone.

I am not claiming to reduce the mind to the brain. In fact, I think that's impossible. Brain states are obviously correlated with mental states, and in order to experience particular mental functions, the correlated brain state must be able to be assumed. However, that mass of tissue in your head communicating via synaptic firing and electromagnetic fields, does not contain thoughts. Neurons are not thoughts. Ions are not thoughts. EMFs are not thoughts. Quantum collapses are not thoughts. There is a reason we experience the subjective correlate (thought) rather than the physical correlate (the brain function). That reason is because they are different. If they were the same, we would immediately know upon existing of our brain! But we don't. We know of our minds. Thus, the brain seems more of a physical mechanism that can reflect certain patterns in nature, meaning that mental patterns exist in nature as well, on some level. Just a theory. This is becoming off-topic, but the point is that: My reductionist approach to the self is not necessarily a reductionist approach to the mind. Moreover, because of the nature of information, there is absolutely no way there can be a constant self. Even the notion of "constant" is but a side effect of particular biopscyhological processes.

I could follow up until that last paragraph Theorist. Just because we don't know the decryption code that translates electromagnetic impulses in our brain into coherent data (not talking EEG, I mean thoughts directly to a computer), it doesn't mean that memories or feelings or any other sensation we perceive are something more than electrical impulses caused by chemical reactions.

As for the differences between the lucid self and the waking self, Ill give a simple example. Think of your brain as a road map, now when you want to get from one destination to another, you follow the roads to get from 'A' to point 'B'. But when you are lucid you can forget the roads (preformed neural networks from waking life) and just draw a straight line from 'A' to 'B' or zig zag all over the place if you don't have good dream control. The differences in mental state (therefore actions and behaviors) come from the "unnatural" mental state of lucid dreaming, which in an MRI looks like a composition of a waking person's and a non-lucid dreaming person's scans.

And you are right, there is no such thing as a constant self, each experience you have affects you in some way, so of course it will change you, but most of the time the effects are negligible, and the only things that cause any measurable change are major or repeated events.

Ksero,

I am a proponent of always leaning towards the most reasonable answer. When a door moves on its own, I think air draft, not ghost. Similarly, regardless of how complex the system which utilizes these components are (the brain utilizing emf, chemicals, action potential) if these components have no subjective nature to them whatsoever, the emergent properties will not either. There is an explanatory gap between quail and their physiological correlates. This is undeniable.

Moreover, I would not consider lucid dreaming unnatural, nor would I consider it a "shortcut" where you can simply forget the preformed neural networks. That is an incredible claim because you are essentially saying that the preformed neural networks do not confine us; that the mind is not only a subjective COUNTERPART of the brain, but a different thing altogether. I'm surprised you say this since in the previous paragraph you just argued for the exact opposite. The first paragraph and the second paragraph you wrote contradict each other. If we are not confined to the neural networks in a particular state of consciousness, then that means our mind is an independent entity. While I believe the mind and brain are not the same thing, It is the particular brain state that allows us to experience particular mental states.

I'd like to see evidence of an MRI demonstrating that we are not confined the preformed neural networks that were formed in waking life, when we are lucid dreaming.

Furthermore, any change whatsoever completely alters the system. There are many unconscious processes which form the basis for your conscious experience. Just because the changes do not immediately leak into conscious experience, they most certainly have changed something about the unconscious processes upon which conscious experience rests.

Sorry Theorist, I don't really follow you at all. In the few short LDs I've had, my feeling of self was indistinguishable from my waking self. To me it seems you are over-complicating the idea of self when talking about the difference between lucid and waking self. To me it feels like waking, dreaming and lucid selves are all the same, but just under different influences by the level of consciousness. Even in non-lucid dreams, I still feel the same ''me", even if it's more fuzzy.
I do accept that there might be an alter ego in the form of the unconscious, as has been described by Waggoner (IIRC), but I have yet to experience this.

In an attempt to understand an observation, I have over complicated the matter... I agree! You are now the third person to say they do not understand the issue I'm talking about, which simply tells me that what I've observed is a personal psyche matter that does not apply to all minds, as I had previously thought... Damn.

Great theory! I have had dreams where I am different people and even where I am multiple people at once. Your theory sounds like something similar to Jungian archetypes...

So maybe another practice worth testing is to imagine the archetypes / personality fragments doing the reality checks... visualize your mother, father, shadow, anima and animus doing the reality checks, becoming lucid and realizing your goals and carrying out your tasks.