I've always been more interested in the theory behind lucidity and how our brains work. I want to bring something to the table to discuss openly, be it right or wrong.... This thread may be too sciency or non-applied for some of you..

THEORUM:

Your conscious actions do not have direct impact on your attainment of lucidity. They only effect it indirectly. The true underlying foundations for lucidity are found EXCLUSIVELY in unconscious action or learned behaviour, which are often triggered by your conscious activity (in a technique, etc.)

I have no rigorous proof but there is a serious case for this. (I wouldn't be wasting time with this if it probably wasn't true). Below are some of the supporting arguments.

SUPPORTING ARGUMENTS:

- If lucidity could be induced by purely conscious activity, there must exist a technique (defined here as a series of conscious actions) that will induce a lucid dream without fail. (It it feasible to say, however, that this tech has simply not yet been found)

- Successful techniques such as MILD rely on priming and related mental phenomena that are exclusive to the unconscious mind. There is no logical basis for these techs in the conscious realm.

- Different techs work for different people with wild, seemingly random variance. This variance cannot be adequately explained when assuming that the conscious aspects of the techs are the foundation of success. If, however, you were to assume that there is an unconscious underpinning, it becomes expected. Each person's unconscious and schema are diverse enough to cause some techs to fail while causing others to succeed.

- When one person tries the exact same conscious steps two different nights in a row and gets lucid once, fails the next time, the only two explanations are that implicit effects on one of the trials caused it to succeed or that the conscious steps to obtain lucidity were not preformed correctly and continue to be preformed incorrectly every night you fail to get lucid.

- Placebo has an effect

(and the list goes on)

COROLLARIES : (This means results that are implied if this theorem is true)

1. No technique has face value. All benefit gained from a tech is 1 level removed. IE: person does conscious action -> implicit effect/action -> results. All conscious actions exist for the purpose of causing unconscious action.

2. A technique that legitimately works 100% for you may work for no other person, ever.

3. It is possible for anyone to induce lucidity without any sort of technique. Even if you classify yourself as fully "non-natural"

4. The only techs that are useful are the ones that use unconscious effects which are present in the entire population (such as MILD with priming effects)

I know these are strong statements, but it's almost all simple logic. Everything logically follows the theorem. If this theorem could be proven/disproven, it would mean ALOT for the evolution of lucidity. If it is false, there exists a perfect tech. If it is true, this has a large effect on how we must think about WILDing and lucid induction.

Discuss.