Thread: Critical thinking during dreams allows for lucidity.

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

Not always, the majority of my LDs it is just suddenly obvious to me that I am dreaming.

I had a number of these, as well. But can we ever really understand the actual process that takes place? Maybe the cognition of dolphin's steps 1 and 2 still took place, but below the level of our minds noticing it. Or maybe it's prospective memory recognizing the dream state (somehow? "feel?").

Anyway, I have had at least a few LDs via explicit critical thinking in the dream:

1: see girl, think "I wish I was dreaming right now!", then "… hmm, why do I think I'm awake?" *nose pinch* "woohoo!"

2: see weird thing, study it for a while (I do this a lot, up-close study of odd devices/things), scene transitions, I keep thinking about it "that was a weird thing, I've never seen a thing like that before"…."wait, weird thing? never seen it before? DREAM!"

3: (LD #2) I'm dropping things and can't pick them up, they keep falling through my fingers, after trying for a while I realize, "oh, haha, this is one of those times where you should check to see if you're dreaming….DREAMING!". This was a fun one, I "stood bolt upright" in shock realizing I was in fact dreaming.

Unfortunately I don't produce thinking like that very often in dreams recently.

So the questions I get from my experiences, which I try to ponder in the waking state as much as I can, are:"

"Why do I think I'm awake?"
"How odd is this / have I seen this before / has something changed?"
"Is this a dream-like situation/scenario?"

Something I work on periodically when waking is performing:

"STOP! Who/what/where?"

The STOP is to prevent the urge to just keep flowing with the plot and to kick start some critical thinking.

Who: who am I with? alone/friends/strangers? (strangers is a dream sign for me)
What: what am I doing? Does this make sense?
Where: is this a waking location?

But I have yet to perform one of these in my dreams.