Thread: Just joined, have question(s) about achieving lucidity.

Hello Leaverus, welcome to DV!

First of all, there's nothing wrong with your main reason to LD, a lot of people do the same, and almost everyone wastes or wasted a lucid dream having dream sex
Secondly, let's talk about your first question. The fact is that you're not just "recalling" a dream in which you were lucid: you're living it. You're as conscious as you are right now while reading this, and you are - in the present tense. Imagine like you spend 30 minutes eating your favorite dish...it tastes amazing, you can't get full so you eat more and more. And eventually you wake up. You indeed spend that time enjoying the taste of the food, which is all that matters right? The brain doesn't distinguish a real action from a dream action, so lucid dreaming is as real as it gets!

Now, reality checks are indeed necessary to induce lucidity: if you don't ask yourself if you're dreaming, how can you expect to get lucid? There are several ways of gaining lucidity inside a dream (aka DILD, which refers to Dream Initiated Lucid Dream):

- You can pratice your prospective memory to perfom a reality check whenever you see something strange or out of the ordinary, or any future event (this technique is called MILD);
- You can train yourself to recognize certain events (called Dream signs) and trigger lucidity by connecting them to the scenario of you being asleep and dreaming;
- You can practice visualization and intensify your intention of becoming lucid by flooding your brain with queues and self-created experiences of you lucid (Tholey's method is a popular technique).

These are in general the ways to perform a DILD, or in a more simple wording, to become lucid while you are dreaming. In the other hand, you can perfom a WILD (Wake Initiated Lucid Dream) which differs from DILD since you'll be lucid before you enter the dream. You basically do this by letting your body fall asleep while retaining a tiny bit of self-consciousness. There are many techniques in order to reach DILDs or WILDs, and each one of them has a specific way to induce lucidity.

The reason we aren't lucid in every single dream is due we having certain parts of the brain less activated (or almost completely shut down). Parts like certain types of memory, self-reflection, critical thinking, etc. For last, a lucid dream can be as real as this very moment you're at. It's hard to explain the feeling without you experiencing one first, but when you do, you'll understand how real it is. You're not imagining things, you're really living them, with the only difference that all the sensations you experience aren't external, but are made of memories. The brain is so efficient that these memories are pretty much the same as the "waking" sensation. And when you wake up from your lucid, you can still recall it (the better your dream recall is the better naturally) the experience.

Hope this cleared your doubts if you got others just post away