^^ What is the difference between being "conscious you are going through the motions of a dream plot," and being aware that you are dreaming? They sound the same to me.
Consciousness is always present in dreams; it is self-awareness/memory, or cognition, that is missing in a NLD. Contrary to popular opinion, we think just fine during a NLD, but our thoughts are defined by the reality of the given dream, and not by the reality of our waking-life self-awareness and memories.
Also, I'm not sure you can directly apply the dictionary definition of lucidity to LD'ing, because LD'ing is really not about clarity, but self-awareness. You can have some amazingly clear NLD's in which you are consciously active and enjoy strong cognition based solely on the imagined dream scene that you think is real (without a hint of remembering or understanding that none of this is real), just as you can have LD's where imagery is dark and empty, and your thoughts are muddled (but those thoughts, you know, are based on your waking-life identity and memory). To say you are lucid just because you are consciously clear during a dream that you still take to be reality falls a bit short of lucidity by any measure, I think. And yes, I've heard LaBerge lament more than once that the term "Lucid Dreaming" was invented at all, because its use it tends to confuse more often than define the condition.
I believe as well that there is a "sliding scale" for lucidity, but that scale starts at the "Ah-ha" moment. That moment does not need to be an exciting "Oh my god I'm dreaming!" event that energizes your emotions and senses, either. It can also just be a quiet acknowledgment like "Oh, yeah, this is a dream," which allows you to understand that you are dreaming and, say, that charging T-Rex can't hurt you, but it doesn't free up enough self-awareness or memory to exercise any real control.
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