Thread: Animism and Dreams

Originally Posted by snoop

I definitely agree that making a distinction between lucidity and non-lucidity, along with consciously directing effort toward becoming lucid is pretty much entirely irrelevant, if not in many ways potentially detrimental to developing and fully realizing one's ability to be aware of one's dream and to interact with it. Lucidity vs. non-lucidity is just a false dichotomy.

I realize as I read your post, that beyond the misleading dichotomy of lucidity, our definition of dreaming is bound to affect our lucidity. In a naive "aha moment," we feel we now have opened our eyes to our state: "I am dreaming!" If we are ignorant about this state, we have barely been made more aware of anything.

If I think about it, the "I am dreaming" eureka moment comes with the realization that "nothing is real; everything is illusion." Sure, that's not false. Yet, the assumption is that nothing is meaningful... And I feel this might be an important reason why my dreams break up upon lucidity (myself not being alone to experience this phenomena). If the "aha moment" is the realization that nothing is meaningful and if the dream is trying to find meaningful connections (as loose as they may be), it makes sense that the dream would collapse. The oneironaut experiences a nihilistic dream crisis.

Shamans dream with purpose. You wouldn't expect a shaman to experience dream nihilism. They think dreams are meaningful. You wouldn't expect their entry in the dream world to be "aha, nothing is real!"

I feel if we plan on realizing that we are in a dream, we must be cautious to know what that means to us. "I am dreaming, swimming in meaning" might be a more constructive "aha moment." Yet, I am not aware of all the negative or misleading assumptions that we make when the flash of lucidity washes over us.

At the risk of beating an already dead horse:

Originally Posted by Coatl

Well, this may again be the explanation why discerning between lucid and non-lucid is unimportant or even irrelevant for certain (level of) dreaming mindset. As for the absence of the "aha" moment though, I suppose this is just a difference between the DILD and WILD, because that's the condition how I always perceive them.

I've had about as many DILD's as I've had WILD's, and the "Aha!" moment has been pretty much absent from all of each.

Snoop and Occipitalred have already offered up excellent reasons for an absent "Aha" moment, and I couldn't have said what they said any better. I just thought I would mention that I believe that the "Aha" moment has far less to do with a dreamer's manner of transition to lucidity than it does his attitude toward the nature and consequences of the transition itself (which I think might be what we're really talking about here).