Thread: Consciousness as a scale - Lucid or Incubated?

Originally posted by LunarMoon

Level –1: Dreamer behaves in a fashion similar to a very mentally ill person with schizophrenic disposition. The dreamer will have no problem believing that they’ve been chosen by Mickey Mouse to fight off the invading ninja pirates. Though the dreamer in question may exhibit startling powers, they never question their abilities to levitate and speak to super-powered cows.

Level 0: Dreamer is in a reality quite similar to the real world. They often perform their daily activities and think relatively logically; as such, it would merely take a bizarre event to bring them into the realization that they’re in a dream. Most false awakenings fall under this category.

Level 1: Dreamer has a vague idea that they’re in a dream but is unable to react logically to the knowledge; lucidness typically fades quickly.

Level 2: Dreamer is certain that they’re in a dream and is able to think in a strategic and logical manner (objective-based). This use of logic often leads to overexcitement is by extension, expulsion from the dream. However, once in a stable position, they may be able to perform extraordinary, physics defying acts such as flight, the ability to go through matter, or even a combination of the two. These dreams are among the easiest to remember after awakening, even outranking nightmares.

This is a very practical scale.
I do believe there are many levels of consciousness. So you could attach so many add ons to make it confusing. But it is a summarization, IMO... but yet it for the most part encompass what we experience.
What has this lunar moon been telling you?

[quote]

Nice!
When we become lucid in a dream this image on the right would likely change no?. Albeit that you would only have internal stimuli but the addition of lucidity brings about similar thought patterns to that of the wakeful state.
Like the anticipation for example.


Indeed. I didnt include a lucid model because thats the part i am in the dark about. This additional layer of awareness that may or may not precipitate "total control" doesnt seem to change anything about the dream, but something obviously must have drastically changed in our brain/mind.

To AnonymousTipster and Howetzer:
Thanks.

I think Lunar Moon's scale for lucidity is pretty good. Its simple and easy to use.

For consciousness I've been thinking of a slightly different scale:

0 - Unconscious - not aware of anything thats happening

1 - Hallucinatory/regular dreams - some awareness but highly subjective states

2 - pre-lucid dreams - still subjective, but beginnings of rational thought and action

3 - waking consciousness

4 - true lucid state (I put as higher than waking because I believe it is more complex)

5 - peak experience (could be in waking, meditation, or lucid dream state)

This scale is still quite coarse. Also I don't think it reflects the reality of simultaneous multiple levels of consciousness.

In one dream a DC knew I was dreaming and made my dream ego lucid.

In another dream, I had one ND set on a train, then in a second dream on a train I became lucid, because I knew I had just been dreaming that I was on a train. Although I never woke up and registered that i had been dreaming.

Some dreamers in lucid state are aware: 1) of dream content 2) of being lucid and 3) of events happening in waking life. So multiplicity of awareness is possible.

Hey Asclepius, I like your model, particularly because instead of a real scale based on a hierarchy, it can be reversed and then superimposed upon itself,(does this make any sense?) So then it would oscillate, ending where it started. This might sound bizarre, but I’ve started to merge this kind of model with the little I know of brain physiology.

It seems we could visualize our different mental states as various overlapping spheres, called phase states in neuro-physiology. When we attach a scale to this procedure we might think of two spheres of the same size, and in the same exact space, but in different dimensions so that they don’t interact directly. They are connected by interlocking patterns of the transfer of input and output information, which gets sedimented or encoded in the brain. When one sphere, consciousness, is large and the other, unconsciousness, is smaller and inside of it, we can say that this is waking consciousness. When the reverse is true, and the sphere that stands for consciousness is inside of the one for unconsciousness, we can say this is a dream state. Maybe lucidity would then be when both spheres are as expansive as they can get .

Our brain has a vast networking of filtering structures for memory, and these structures break down and then re-assimilate distinct pieces of information to form symmetrical patterns that can become a part of a phase transition. Once a number of these patterns are encoded, the brain then begins to encode similarities between those as well, until a system of mirrors is composed and ready for integration in dreams.

When thinking about the actual content of the subconscious mind, we just have to begin by realizing that our brains have undergone millions of years of brain-wave sedimentation, and these have continued operating at some level in the deep recesses of the brain. These complex networks have received and modeled some of the meaningful aspects of language, to create their own worlds that mirror our world. In dreaming the conscious mind takes a little road trip we might say, and travels along many of its long lost acquaintances, exploring them with its present-day tools.

Maybe the reason we don’t know exactly what we are as humans, is the fact that we figured this out sometime in the past, and then got so used to it that it drifted away like dream….