False awakening...wow

I had a false awakening yesterday when trying to WILD, and wow, it completely blew my mind...

I only had 2 lucids before that. (and they weren't even proper lucids, they were very short and not very clear)

Basically I just stood up, staring at my room, seeing if everything looked normal. It did. It looked so real... I RC'ed before I decided to go back to my WILD attempt, and what the hell, I could still breathe. I stood there like 15 seconds, trying to understand what the hell was happening... it couldn't possibly be a dream, it was so damn real...
Then I suddenly wake up, laying in my bed, VERY confused lol

Made me wonder if I ever had any of those false awakenings before and was never aware of them.

Dreams can be so stunning and vivid! One of the lucids I had was EXTREMELY vivid, it looked SO REAL! More than real actually. Hopefully you will have more lucids soon!

Ahh..reading this thread got me excited...Can't wait to have my first lucid dream.

I hope it's a false awakening! Everyone says that they feel them so real, I always do a RC when I wake up so I think someday I will have a LD.

Yeah, all of my false awakenings have been so real.... :P

Makes you think about how the "reality" just might be a dream. I mean if a person is in a dream and believes that much or is that confident that it is reality, it will become stunningly real.

And if the dream world can get to the same level of reality as "reality," then who is to say which one is real?

Maybe they are both real, maybe how we behave in one reality (sleep/dream/night) creates our other reality(awake/conscious/day) or vice versa.

I came upon something from Stephen LaBerge online yesterday wherein he seemed to be saying that waking life and dreams ARE basically the same, just that one (waking life) is constrained by sensory contacts (what we see, feel, touch, hear, etc.), while the other is not.

I believe that both are constructed by our minds. For instance, our eyes see an apple, but don't directly have consciousness of the apple, while our minds get the news from our eyes about the apple being seen and give us the experience of being conscious of the apple and how it looks, but the mind itself doesn't actually see anything--it doesn't have eyes--so in that sense, our reality is constructed out of sensory impressions plus consciousness, the key word being "constructed."

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Originally Posted by LWA

I believe that both are constructed by our minds. For instance, our eyes see an apple, but don't directly have consciousness of the apple, while our minds get the news from our eyes about the apple being seen and give us the experience of being conscious of the apple and how it looks, but the mind itself doesn't actually see anything--it doesn't have eyes--so in that sense, our reality is constructed out of sensory impressions plus consciousness, the key word being "constructed."

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I had such a long argument over this with my philosophy teacher. Wether we see reality as it is, or if our idea of reality is "biased", influenced and limited by our senses.

Did you win the argument? :-)

It's philosophy, no one wins :P

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Originally Posted by LWA

I came upon something from Stephen LaBerge online yesterday wherein he seemed to be saying that waking life and dreams ARE basically the same, just that one (waking life) is constrained by sensory contacts (what we see, feel, touch, hear, etc.), while the other is not.

I believe that both are constructed by our minds. For instance, our eyes see an apple, but don't directly have consciousness of the apple, while our minds get the news from our eyes about the apple being seen and give us the experience of being conscious of the apple and how it looks, but the mind itself doesn't actually see anything--it doesn't have eyes--so in that sense, our reality is constructed out of sensory impressions plus consciousness, the key word being "constructed."

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Correct me if I'm wrong: An interesting point, but it almost sounds like you're arguing that the mind doesn't get what the senses are seeing/hearing/feeling/smelling/tasting. The mind does experience those senses, and is in fact conscious of what's going on in front of us, conscious of that apple for example. Otherwise, we'd just be walking around (maybe) not stringing any thoughts together. I mean, with what you said it sounds like you don't believe we could possibly have memories or reason, because our brains aren't conscious of anything around us.

Our brains process our eyes' perceived images so we understand what's going on, and does indeed construct experiences in our mind. In that way, yes, our brains construct our experiences of reality, otherwise our senses would send things to our minds and those senses would just be sending signals to the void. :P

I agree with what Dr. LaBerge said (read it in ETWoLD) but I don't think your statement there is entirely feasible. :?

I never really caught my Fa's untill one lucid...I ended up with FA's seriously every 30 seconds, must have been 10 or 12. After the first few, I didn't even have to RC, I just knew :P.

Good job! I still have a hard time catching FAs. :(

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Originally Posted by Clyde Machine

Correct me if I'm wrong: An interesting point, but it almost sounds like you're arguing that the mind doesn't get what the senses are seeing/hearing/feeling/smelling/tasting. The mind does experience those senses, and is in fact conscious of what's going on in front of us, conscious of that apple for example. Otherwise, we'd just be walking around (maybe) not stringing any thoughts together. I mean, with what you said it sounds like you don't believe we could possibly have memories or reason, because our brains aren't conscious of anything around us.

Our brains process our eyes' perceived images so we understand what's going on, and does indeed construct experiences in our mind. In that way, yes, our brains construct our experiences of reality, otherwise our senses would send things to our minds and those senses would just be sending signals to the void. :P

I agree with what Dr. LaBerge said (read it in ETWoLD) but I don't think your statement there is entirely feasible. :?

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By the time you are conscious of a thing, it has gone through many layers of association and interpretation. You don't just see the world 'as it is' but through many filters. This is why it is possible to 'see things another way' or 'in a different light'. Even with something as simple as an apple, your view of it is colored by your thoughts.

What your mind creates and what is actually there in front of you strongly correlate, but they are never the same. There will always be something that you miss, and there will always be something that your preconceptions add in.

I once had a dream that I had just woken up from a lucid dream. I lay in my bed staring up and the ceiling. I then thought "Oh! I have to record this in my DV!" I got up to search for my DV but then a thought came over me telling me that I was dreaming. I went back over to my bed and lay there for a while; thinking. I closed my eyes and fell asleep. I woke up in my room again, I got up out of my bed (thinking I was awake). I tripped while getting out of bed and went falling through the second floor of my house, down to the first. I realized that I was still dreaming. I ran around trying to find a way to wake up the suddenly my alarm went off (irl) and I woke up. So yes, false awakenings are common and lucid dreams are very vivid. I found that when I'd just regularly dream (before I knew about LDs), everything was blurry but now that I lucid dream, the details are very vivid and I have very strong feelings in them.

Haha, I had this one session of crazy false awakenings.

I woke up in my bed then floated to the ceiling,
then woke up, span out of bed accross the room,
then woke up, floated to the ceiling and started spinning,
then woke up on the other side of the room,

It was intense. Just kept falsely awakening into another dream.

Nowadays almost all my lucids start with false awakenings. I now look at my hands when i wake up. If they look strange i almost always get the LD. FA's look very real when you experience them, and when you RC, you will notice the difference. It's a fun way of having LD's. It's getting out of bed and starting the adventure rightaway. Strange new worlds are waiting for you to experience.

I also agree with LeBarge. What we see and experience as reality is a model constructed by our brain to be able to live in it. I do not see many problems here. The model seems to work, so i assume it represents reality closely. Some people might ask themselves what reality looks like in real, but i think thats all in the eye of the beholder. Like the observer in quantumphysics.
Also: if we look at electromagnetic radiation like visible light: We can only see that part of the spectrum. If our eyes would be capable of seeing in infrared, we would see people and warm object radiating light, and a really hot thing (like an oven) would be blinding to the eye while we now see it as a thing which feels hot. The world seen in rontgenrays on the other hand would be very misty and you would be able to see through most things.