Thread: Trying to explain lucid dreaming to somebody

Originally Posted by lucy

I think a lot of people confuse dream control with lucidity. As far as I can see it, they're two different things. It's possible to control a dream without being lucid. A lot of people I explain lucid dreaming to say they've experienced it too, but when I probe further it usually turns out to be either non-lucid dream control or what I would call a 'pre-lucid' dream, the state of questioning reality that you get before you actually become fully lucid. I think most people who experience these things think that's the extent of lucid-dreaming.

When I've explained to people that this is not in fact lucid-dreaming, but the precursor to it, and that lucid-dreaming is a skill that can be trained and improved, I'm usually met with surprise and curiousity. I've never met a completely negative or derisory attitude to it, but I think often I fall short of explaining it properly.

For example: I had a wonderful lucid dream where I turned into a mermaid (great fun, because I can't actually swim in real life). Trying to explain this to a non-LDer is difficult, because they will think you mean that you simply dreamt you were a mermaid. It would be closer to say that during that experience you actually were a mermaid, as far as your conscious mind is concerned, because the experience happened when you were fully conscious.

To put it another way (this is hard to explain) when you start thinking about objective reality, it really is actually all inside your brain. You don't see things or hear things, your brain receives light waves or sound waves and then your brain interprets them in a certain way. A dream is simply an image of reality without any external input. So if you're conscious of yourself in a dream, I would argue that you are actually in another reality which is distinguishable from everyday reality but every bit as concrete as far as your brain is concerned. You can think of lucid-dreaming as being a way of entering a parallel dimension that exists inside your mind.

That probably makes absolutely no sense, but is the only way I can come close to explaining what lucid dreaming is, to me.

Great post!

In our waking life we put our faith in that external input, or we're called lunatics. But all we really have is experiences.

We are conditioned (by our waking life) to believe that even in a dream we see images, but maybe even that isn't true. I feel the dreams are pure experience, although it's practically impossible to distinguish the experience of an image from the actual sight of an image.

In a LD we can be in a scenario, and we wouldn't say each moment "i'm dreaming about being here". We feel "i'm here".

To say "i'm dreaming about this" is a direct (and totally unnecessary) reference to our waking life, that other part of our reality we have so much faith in.