Thread: categorizing levels of Lucid dream experience

With any sort of study where one is trying to qualify relative levels of anything I would suggest starting at the end and identifying what it is that you're trying to show. Is it enough to have qualitative descriptions (as above) between different levels or do you want something more quantitative (ie. open to less 'interpretation')?

One way that you could do this would be to define the quality of a lucid dreamer in terms of some amount of metrics that you feel encompass everything that there is to do with lucid dreaming. For example you could say frequency, duration, recall, control, stability, level of self-awareness, etc. Whatever you feel captures everything.

Have people rate themselves (0-10, 1-5, whatever works) and combined the scores (sum or product) to determine an overall blended level. You can then divide these into equal/relevant bins to categorize each person by their qualitative skill level.

Example (5 metrics, 0-10 system):
Beginner (0-9)
Novice (10-19)
Intermediate (20-29)
Advanced (30-39)
Expert (40-50)

The power of a system like this is that you could, in the future, change the scope of your study and have all the stats to back it up. For example you could say, "I wonder if recall and stability are correlated," graph them and see if there is a correlation. Or if you notice an interesting trend in your interviews that doesn't correlate with overall skill level you could see if it lines up with one/some of your metrics instead.

Just my $0.02! If you're looking for actual metrics that define 'everything' about dreaming I'm sure that others with more skill than myself can more accurately speak to that.