Line of lucidity - a blurred edge?

Had an interesting experience last night in a dream:

Was having a pretty vivid dream of walking throughout this house on a small island. It was one of those carribean or spanish homes; white stucko walls, stone floors and clay tile shingles. Very beautiful and the architecture was unique. I found it so intriguing, in fact, that I had a thought, something to the effect of, "ah wow, that's cool. I gotta stare at it longer or I'll forget it when I wake up."

:hrm:

Sounds like lucidity, no? Well, I really wasn't. I because it wasn't untill moments later, when I decided to climb over a wall, that I noticed my hands out in front of me. It was THEN that I said to myself "I'm dreaming!" The sight of seeing my hands not only tipped me off to dreaming, but also changed the scene a bit. Still in front of the wall, but now the wall seemed much higher. I thought about floating to the top - was difficult at first but was then succesful after reassuring myself that it was a dream. Strange, though, I found it difficult to get to the top. Everytime I reached what I thought was the top, it ended up being a small ledge. I never made it to a "top" - I tried to convince myself that the next ledge would be the roof, but I woke up before I got anyhwere.

Strange thing, the dream seemed less interesting and harder to manage once lucid. It was as if being lucid put too much responsibility in myself to "create" the dreamscape. This makes me see non-lucids as being on auto pilot and lucids are manual drive.

Well I think being lucid is having the *concious* understanding that you are dreaming. Stuff like that, to me, is just a subconcious recognition that you are dreaming. But once you conciously become aware that you are dreaming, like you did, you become lucid. I understand what you mean with that last part!

i agree very much and think it's an astute observation. To extend it that observation about the hands into a post I wrote in on the dream control forum, I think that the reason why focusing on our hands stabilizes our dreams is because the amount of detail we have to cope with drops dramatically. eg the process goes something like -> 'I am already very familiar with my hands, they are the easiest part of my body to focus on and my brain is intimately aware of what they look like, therefore if I concentrate on them I can ignore what's happening around me and allow the dream to stabilize'.

I find the time that we start losing control is when there is too much information for our brain comfortably process. To make a comparison, look at simple old fashioned cartoons like for instance the animated "Alice in Wonderland" (to pick an apt example) and a more modern animated film "Final Fantasy: Spirits within". A very important element of fantasy films like this is 'suspension of disbelief', ignoring for the moment that something is impossible and believing it could happen.

It has been very noticable in recent times as animated films became more complex that they have become harder to believe, ie. suspension of disbelief is harder. If you look at FF:SW this was an incredibly well animated, beautiful film. However it irritated a lot of people because it tried to make characters that looked as realistic as possible, while putting them in fantastic and impossible situations (apparently the skin for the characters in FF was mind blowingly complex, having many different layers to create the final effect).

However as said people didn't like the film because they found the realism implausible. One of the easiest places to pick it up was in characters eyes. This - deadeye - is common with computer generated imagery. There is just something extremely subtle about it that we recognise as not being real. Humans are extremely eye-centric, we make eye contact all day, every day. It's very important.

On the otherhand, an old fashioned film like Alice has characters with simple eyes that are if you think about it extremely simple representations of the shape of an eye. A football like squashed circle with a black cornea and iris. Our brain is very good at making the jump and interpreting that shape to be an eye. As our brain accepts this animation with much less information to challenge it films done in this style are easier to believe.

I guess the point I am making in a rambling way is that our brain processes data and is good at it, and at seeing problems with what it is processing. When we sleep a part of our brain that deals with events and how believable they are is turned off. This same part of the brain is the part that is supressed when people take halucinogenic drugs or are schitzophrenic.

I've found that the more data I have to deal with in a dream the harder it is to stay asleep. If I focus on just my hands, the easiest part of my 'self' to see, I can stabalize my dream because the amount of data I have to interpret (or my brain rather has to interpret) has gone down dramatically.

Sorry if this post is very fragmented I started writing it, stopped half way and went off to talk to my housemate before coming back to finish.

Hi Nemo,

No you didn't ramble too much, you make some good points ;)

If I understand correctly, you're saying too much info leads to a sort of 'distraction' - while studying something that's 'familiar' to us (like our hands) somehow centers our thoughts -- gives us something to focus on.

Not sure if you're familiar with LaBerge's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, but talks about something called "Schemas". He describes it as the following: a model of, or theory about, some part of the world.

I belive this is closely related to what you're referring to in your Alice and Wonderland simple eye and how the mind interprets it.

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Originally posted by Tornado Joe

This makes me see non-lucids as being on auto pilot and lucids are manual drive.

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That's exactly how I see my lucid dreaming self and normal dreaming self being different.

I've had plenty of dreams where I know that I'm dreaming and haven't been lucid. I guess it's just because you can remember things from the previous day in a dream, so presumably you'll sometimes remember that you went to bed. Or something. I don't really know how it works.

It's like the difference between knowing saturn has rings, and actually going to see them for yourself.

(which would be pretty cool... *adds to LD to-do list*)

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I've had plenty of dreams where I know that I'm dreaming and haven't been lucid[/b]

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The simple definition of lucid dreaming is knowing you are dreaming. Of course now, I question that simplicity of the definition. However, I could not imagine this correlation of knowing your dreaming yet not being lucid lasting for more than a second or so - is that usually the case with you?

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It's like the difference between knowing saturn has rings, and actually going to see them for yourself.
(which would be pretty cool... *adds to LD to-do list*) [/b]

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I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure ridding the rings of Saturn was one of the Lucid Tasks of the Month (might want to check with Seeker). Good luck with that :wink:

PS -- I really enjoyed your work, you've got a great style for storyboarding. I liked going through the sketches mostly. Your color work is great for childrens book illustration too (I should go back to using more color myself :? ) - I hope you don't mess up your personal style and get "Anime-ized" too much - would be a shame to loose that uniqueness. :|
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