Thread: Critical thinking during dreams allows for lucidity.

There seems to be a bit of misrepresentation of what critical thinking is, and with that it might be hard to perceive how "critical" (no pun intended) it is for lucid dreaming.

QualitySoup's video explain it perfectly imo:

This sounds to complicated. RC essential do the same thing.

Actually, reality checking is an example of critical thinking.

Because to remember to do is to already be lucid.

Perhaps critical reflection is useful in the beginning, then the mere moment of questioning is enough.

Depends: if you check DJ's around DV, there's many instances of genuine "reality check because this sounds weird/I passed a door/this reminds me of something", which point that you can reality check without being lucid: it's called questioning.
When we talk about reality checks as a confirmation that you are dreaming, there was already a process of reasoning (that might be unconscious to you, just like so many of us do when we're driving for example) that allowed to reach such conclusion, and that leads to lucidity.
But reasoning is a mark of critical thinking: you need critical thinking throughout your entire lucid dreaming "career", because to become lucid is to analyse information. There's never such thing as "simply becoming lucid" because lucidity is a rationalization over a concept of state of consciousness, that's why animals like dogs don't know they are dreaming, as they possess no knowledge of the concept of dreaming (but they are capable of critical thinking).

When I become lucid the moment of wondering is often enough, and then it's obvious. Sometimes even the moment of wonder is not needed.

It's also my belief that these 'I just know' lucids are of a higher lucidity at the outset, and that the lucids attained via in-dream reasoning require additional work on cognition levels.

It's not that you're skipping steps, it's more that you're making use of tacit knowledge. But naturally "wondering" is not the whole process, because if you don't answer the question "am I dreaming?" you'll never become lucid. So what you're doing is being intuitive about it (this is also a great example of how tacit knowledge is so hard to explain/transcribe to others). I do agree though that different ways to rationalize over whether you are dreaming or not might require different levels of cognition.

I feel it's just important to remember that whenever you make a judgement regarding something, like "I am lucid", there's always reasoning occurring, even if you're not aware of it.