What EXACTLY can the lucid subconscious mind do?

Hello everybody! Not too long ago from making this post a user by the name of darkmatters commented on my recent post in this sub forum about the subconscious mind.


"Do you believe that spirit guides are just dream characters? or do you believe that they are actual spiritual beings that can connect to us in dreams?

... if i believe it is just a part of my subconscious, i wouldn't really expect the guide to have beneficial information (because if i don't know things consciously would the subconscious be any different?) and if i believe that it is an actual messenger, i would expect a very intriguing answer, something that would be very important to my lucid dreaming life."

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Originally Posted by Darkmatters

If you would remove the word "just" from both of these statements then I can agree with them. As a student of Carl Jung I believe that spiritual beings, if they exist, can communicate with us only through the psyche, which is what his extensive clinical experience suggested, and what he experienced for himself as well.

"if i don't know things consciously would the subconscious be any different?"

Why would the unconscious and the conscious be identical? By definition the majority of the mind is unconscious, since you are not consciously aware of what's going on in most of it. This means that the conscious mind is a small part of the total mind, the unconscious being vastly larger. People who wave off the unconscious as something trivial have no understanding of its immense power.

It contains repressed and forgotten memories, plus a great wealth of information that just isn't available consciously. And of course it also includes the archetypes, which Jung believed were what people actually experience when they report encountering God or some other spiritual entity*. But of course clinical research and psychoanalysis can only go so far in studying the depths of the mind - beyond a certain point it's only experienced by one person. No instruments can go in there and tell us anything. So whether the visions people experience are 'real', or are only imaginary, or are something else entirely is up in the air. But when you've studied the workings of the mind enough you realize that in a sense it doesn't matter if it's 'real' or an image conjured by the unconscious - if it carries a powerful message that's transformative to a person's life, what's the difference?

* Let me rephrase that. Actually Jung said that we can't know whether God and other spiritual beings are simply archetypes within the mind, or if the archetypes are somehow connecting us to something greater that's entirely beyond our understanding. And that's where I stand as well.

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Now this has me got me thinking a lot about the subconscious and what it can *really* do in lucid dreaming, since both the conscious and the subconscious are both linked, we can therefore directly tap into it's power and experience it for ourselves.

Well I've only experienced some of amazing things that the subconscious can do, so i'm going to pose some intriguing questions about what the subconscious mind can do in lucid dreams, and hopefully some people who have experienced an answer to these questions can tell me and you about them :)

1. Is it possible to have a stable lucid dream when you ask for 100% *conscious* (not subconscious read carefully) control of the dream

2. (This maybe a dumb one but) Can you tell your subconscious in a lucid dream to make the dream look a certain way?
Now there are many definitions for "certain ways", but mainly focused on completely altering the look of the dream.
Examples include:
Making the world 2D and with 8 bit art
Making the world anime styled art (old, new, or like a cartoon)
Making the world semi-transparent
Making the world 3D with 8 bit art
Making the world look like a video game with 1080p resolution and 4k graphics (Something that is slightly not photo realistic)
ect..

3. For the people that feel their normal bodies and dream bodies at the same time in a dream (including me) is it possible to ask the subconscious to not feel the normal body and make the dream body feel exactly like the normal body?

4. Could you tell the subconscious what your ideal lucid dreaming world would be like and it automatically makes things up fitted to that specific mold you set for it?
Examples include:
Making a world where everything is based off of an ancient civilization like the Egyptians and Persians (so that nothing like a cellphone would randomly appear in 5000 B.C :lol:)

Making a world where only yellow materials and stuff are used in everyday life (things like a green apple wouldn't appear in this world).

and plenty more examples..

5. Can you tell your subconscious once in a lucid dream to always return to the previous dream and build dreams off of that?

6. Can you make a lucid dream feel like a day has gone by? (this is semi answered because of the time dilation in dreaming concept, but can this be used to such an extreme like this?)



Those are the main questions that I have about the power of the subconscious and it will be very interesting actually seeing how many people experienced these things in a lucid dream. :)

Thanks for reading

Believing that something is impossible to do in a dream lowers the chances of being able to do it in a dream. So, it is good practice to believe that the subconscious mind can produce any type of dream.

Simple answer, yet interesting...

Pretty much what dolphin said. To answer most of your questions, your subconscious mind changes what happens in your dream based on what you believe should happen. For example, if you are in a dream and are walking down the street and see someone and think that they are an assassin trying to kill you, chances are that they would probably do that.

To answer number 2, in waking life can you imagine something normal and then in 8bit/whatever graphics? It's possible to change how a dream looks in that fashion.

For number 3, yes, just ignore the feeling of your real body and it will go away. That worked for me.

4, maybe with a lot of control. The nature of dreams goes against this where things show up where they shouldn't. Trying to control your whole dream by focusing on that would retract from the experience and probably be not worth it.

5, I managed to pull that off a few times several years ago but I can never get it to work now. I guess with enough control, you can spawn everything in the dream to be how it was and press play. Before the story sort of just continued where it left off.

6, With shorter periods of time like a day, it's possible. I've had dreams where I've had my whole school day in one rem cycle and when I woke up and actually had to go to school, I was pissed. The only reason that it felt so long was because my mind filled in the gaps. The boring parts were left out and I just guessed that time had passed. I wouldn't find much enjoyment out of actively trying to do this, I'd much rather be focusing on controlling how time affects everything else in the dream, such as stoping it, slowing it down or speeding it up

This is also based off my own experiences so some of what I said may not be true for others so take it as you will.

Keep in mind that I'm by no means an expert, the following is just my opinion on the matter, and I don't claim it to be how things really are without question:

I think a very important thing to realize when you get into lucid dreaming is just how alone you are, and I'd advise anyone getting into it to actually reflect uppon that at least for a while. It's not that people won't offer help, or that advice isn't useful or doesn't work, that's not what I mean, I mean just how utterly practically unpredictable a specific mind seems to be, given the many connections our brain takes care of daily.

Speaking for myself - although I guess results may vary for people who actually entertain the possibility of spiritual beings - I'm used to having models of reality, which were meticulously constructed by other observers, to lean on when I don't fully understand something about our world. I can pick up a book on electronics, medicine, mechanics, and all these would do their best to describe a common world view in detail, that I could then use to make predictions; with dreams, and the subconscious in general, that's mostly out of the window, and when I first started really getting into this, it took me a while to realize just how alone I was when it came to predicting my subconscious. It was jarring.

Truth is, even those methods which we take as basically axioms of communicating with and changing the subconscious, such as symbolism, are not guaranteed to work with everyone, and it's quite important to understand that you build your own 'subconscious reality'. This is only speculation, and to what extent your subconscious is dictated by physiology I don't know, but I argue that it seems that you - both your conscious and subconscious - are the builder of the rules which dictate how your conscious interacts with your subconscious, to a large extent.

What dolphin said is perhaps the one rule that has been shown to work consistently without fail: what you believe in - and when I say believing, I'm not using the term lightly - is mirrored by your subconscious as being the truth - to the extent it can be, of course.

As for the questions, I feel like the one which I can relate to more and give a better answer to is the nº 6, as regards to time in dreams:

I have long dreams, or at least long spanning dreams. I have had dreams which spanned months, even, but of course. I feel compelled to believe that all this time was just an illusion, however, because I know REM's don't last for months, I actually have to get up and go to work eventually, and oneironauts and oneirologists so far have found no evidence that supports time dilation in dreams (I don't know where you got that from, but I'd like to see the source, maybe things have changed); and I don't recall more than a few hours of events, when I put the dream together, which I find to be a much stronger piece of evidence against the dream actually being that long.

When I become lucid, however, one of two things happen: I either wake up after a while, never going past an hour or so of actual lucid dream time; or, and this is something that is really annoying, I simply seem to lose lucidity and the dream carries on as usual, with all the tricks an unaware mind might be susceptible to. This all being said, I've never heard of someone trying to actually slow down time within a dream, and I think it would give a cool challenge of the month.

Time is really important, of course, and we all wished we could dream for longer - part of why dreams are so sweet is because we can't, I feel - but if I were to be honest and left wishful thinking aside, I'd say, while it doesn't seem to me impossible to actually achieve a certain level of time dilation in a dream from a first, rough look through my uneducated lens, I'd say it wouldn't be nearly as strong of an effect as to give you an extra day, or even an extra hour.

Since we don't really know what consiousness is, it's very difficult to talk about it in an objective way. You are talking about conscious and subconscious as two separate things, but really it is just the same mind working with two different levels of waking awareness. To think that the subconscious is somehow greater than the conscious I think is wrong. They are both active at the same time, but to different degrees and with different waking awareness. This to me is the fascinating thing about lucid dreaming, because it gives an insight into the workings of the subconscious mind, although maybe in a lucid dream, our mind already has a preconception of what the subconscious is, so maybe we are fooling ourselves when we "converse" with it?

^ I agree with Goldenspark. It's easy to fall into the mindset of the “subconscious” being like a separate entity inside ourselves that we try to communicate with and appeal to. I've done the same thing myself. But I've more recently decided that it makes more sense to think of it as merely me, but the parts of it I'm not consciously aware of. Instead of thinking in terms of “accessing” and “talking to” the subconscious, I suspect it might make more sense to think in terms of becoming more consciously aware of the subconscious (that is, of our own very deep, inner thoughts and mental workings) instead. Perhaps aspects of ourselves that seem totally inexplicable and mysterious would make sense if we could inspect the full picture of what's going on underneath our usual veil of consciousness. We can be remarkably good at concealing from ourselves what we truly think and feel. Our minds are such fantastically complicated and mysterious things that we should not underestimate ourselves.

What I'd like to do in my LD and waking-life self-awareness practice is find a way, somehow, to do more of this. I remember having one or two very unique, mysterious LD experiences that seemed different from all the others. Instead of it feeling like my conscious and unconscious were operating independently, more or less unaware of each other and constantly getting in each other's way like most LDs, it felt, as best as I can describe it, more like we were one and the same and operating in cooperation and unison. This experience was very cool and seemed to result in much more creativity and far better dream control than I ever experience in my typical LDs. I really want to have more like these so I can investigate them further.

Hey Travis, I have had some dreams like that as well, although sometimes I'm fairly sure it's because I'm wanting to find some deeper meaning.
The subconscious really is "undiscovered country", mostly because it's unique to each individual. Because of our conscious intelligence, we are able to ponder what dreams mean. Some think they are fairly random "musings", but I believe there are clear pointers to some quite deep messages within dreams (lucid or otherwise), even if there is a danger the mind is fooling us. I suspect that some of the messages may be a little disturbing at times, like acknowledgement of our fears, desires or frailties, but they could offer insight into who we really are.
Of course sometimes the weirdness of dreams can make it difficult to decode the underlying message.

Lucid dreams have another layer of complexity, because the conscious mind is having influence. I wonder if some of my (few) deeper LDs, where philosophical thoughts have come in, are nothing to do with subconscious, in other words I can't really remember a non-lucid where I had the same inciteful thoughts. That makes me think that the subconscious mind is really the baser part of the mind - more animal like, with less higher thought.

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Originally Posted by Him

Pretty much what dolphin said. To answer most of your questions, your subconscious mind changes what happens in your dream based on what you believe should happen. For example, if you are in a dream and are walking down the street and see someone and think that they are an assassin trying to kill you, chances are that they would probably do that.

To answer number 2, in waking life can you imagine something normal and then in 8bit/whatever graphics? It's possible to change how a dream looks in that fashion.

For number 3, yes, just ignore the feeling of your real body and it will go away. That worked for me.

4, maybe with a lot of control. The nature of dreams goes against this where things show up where they shouldn't. Trying to control your whole dream by focusing on that would retract from the experience and probably be not worth it.

5, I managed to pull that off a few times several years ago but I can never get it to work now. I guess with enough control, you can spawn everything in the dream to be how it was and press play. Before the story sort of just continued where it left off.

6, With shorter periods of time like a day, it's possible. I've had dreams where I've had my whole school day in one rem cycle and when I woke up and actually had to go to school, I was pissed. The only reason that it felt so long was because my mind filled in the gaps. The boring parts were left out and I just guessed that time had passed. I wouldn't find much enjoyment out of actively trying to do this, I'd much rather be focusing on controlling how time affects everything else in the dream, such as stoping it, slowing it down or speeding it up

This is also based off my own experiences so some of what I said may not be true for others so take it as you will.

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When you say "in waking life can you imagine something normal and then in 8 bit/whatever graphics?" do you mean daydreaming, meditating or just pure imagination?

The most interesting thing to me you said in that post was "you can spawn everything in the dream to be how it was and press play.", i think that is very cool. Makes me wonder how long can you chain the same exact dream at each drop off point.