Quote Originally Posted by dreamfeeder View Post
The third time was last night and this time as I entered and became trapped in the trippy infinite staircase, I became conscious of having been here before and that it scared me in the past so I was able to push myself through the membrane of the stairs/dreamscape (for lack of a better description) and escape them. I soon woke up after I escaped the staircase.

(...)

I've never had anything distinctly lucid in the past besides one time where I was having a regular dream and next minute I was hurtling through a black void at incredible speeds and became aware and conscious of the fact that I was, and I also felt G-forces comparable to a rollercoaster or something similar. I thought of that more as an out of body experience more than anything but I guess it could kind of fall into a lucid dream category too.
It's difficult for anyone to be able to say really. For obvious reasons I don't think we can exactly confirm it for you, but to me it sounds as though this particular case may have been a lucid dream for you - what you describe in the second part of me quoting you here would also be a lucid dream and not an OBE in my opinion, but at the end of the day all of these things are just words that don't necessarily mean the same things exactly to all of us. All in all, "lucidity" is best regarded simply as "being aware" (of what's actually happening), since that's all it's supposed to mean.

If you have had previous experiences that you think were lucid ones, then it's probably fairly safe for you to use them as reference points as to what "lucidity" feels like for you. On my personal experience, despite their rarity for me, it's always very clear if a dream was one in which I was lucid or not, they just feel a certain way and my recall of them tends to be much clearer and I definitely feel physically present in those dreams. Even so, like others I also find that my lucid dreams have different "levels" of awareness, clarity and vividness to them, in some of them I have still thought more dream-like things or gone along with dream logic a bit too much for my liking. So at least for me, it just varies, just like with any of my regular dreams anyway.