Thread: Bringing lucidity into real life

Originally Posted by martakartus

It's like instead of my waking self-awareness transferring into my dreams to become lucid, I've developed this self-awareness in my lucid dreams and it's now transferring into my waking life. I hope this doesn't sound completely insane.

This is not insane to me, or even much of a surprise, Marta.

In order to be lucid in a dream you must have some measure of self-awareness, so it makes sense that you will necessarily exercise self-awareness in your lucid dreams. But in order to navigate waking life you need only be conscious, so there is no need to exercise self-awareness when awake at all... indeed, some people manage to live their entire lives without one moment of self-awareness. This lack of a need to be self-aware (aka, it is easier to not be self-aware) in waking-life makes true moments of waking-life self-awareness all the more difficult to encounter or achieve. And yet, those moments of self-awareness, when achieved in waking-life, can be truly enlightening; so it makes sense that you would find a way -- if even accidentally -- to tap the skills you developed in your lucid dreams to occasionally become self-aware during waking-life.

In fact, your OP sort of summarizes one of the many rewards that accompany successful LD'ing, I think: Learning to become lucid in dreams helps to enable lucidity during waking-life, and if you are lucid often enough in dreams, that lucidity will bleed through to your waking-life experience, whether or not you request it (or even know how to request it) in waking-life.

tl;dr: Not insane at all, I think. Through LD'ing you by necessity developed a level of sentience that exceeds normal waking-life requirements, so it makes sense that you would tap that expanded sentience during waking-life. In other words, by being lucid in your dreams, you have also learned to welcome self-awareness into your waking-life; pretty cool, I think!