Thread: categorizing levels of Lucid dream experience

There are a few issues with the categorization you mentioned:

Newbie-less than 15 LD’s, often poor dream recall and not yet established any regular LD’ing practices

This is bad design:

a) In order to include dream recall, you have to show causal relation between it and lucid dreaming. Some studies do show positive correlations between dream recall and lucid dreaming, but we don't have evidence that you need higher levels of dream recall to have higher LDing frequency.

b) The amount of lucid dreams is a bad parameter: since we have reasons to believe that many people experiences several lucid dreams throughout their lives, without any kind of intentional practice, you would end up ruining your data by including people that had 16 (for example) lucid dreams throughout a span of 40 years.

c) By the same logic, you're biasing your sample by eliminating "natural" lucid dreamers, that although are rare, do exist (they will be the outliers).

Often able to Lucid dream. Able to carry out experiments well at times but still quite inconsistent either due to dreams being often of short duration or lacking control of reason and will.

More of the same issues: control is not a requisite for lucid dreaming. We just assume it here in the forum because after some time it can feel pretty useless to experience a lucid dream if you can't direct the experience towards something you want, but in a proper study, this is clear bias.

Has had a number of what could be called “super-Lucid dreams”, which the dreamer strongly realises the nature of the dream.

How can you even measure this ?

I also disagree with Sageous system in the sense that while it seems to relate to the characteristics of lucid dreamers, it would be very impractical to use since it assumes more than lucid dreaming induction, which in a proper study you wouldn't be able to, regarding things like, but not limited to: dream control, length of lucidity, degree of memory impairment, intention required for induction, motivation for the event.

I guess my post is more in the lines of what BrotherGoose is saying: you need a system that allows you to measure exactly what you want to study, and not assume anything before-hand, even if you have correlations between 2 variables related to the subject. If you don't make proper statistical analysis your study is going to be meaningless.

PS: a much better parameter is lucidity frequency: how frequently in a space of X days do people become lucid. Ask also for information regarding dream recall, sleep habits, and any other parameter used in the past studies, but only use that information to draw/notice correlations. Be careful when using Voss's lucidity scale either to make sure you're not making erroneous assumptions regarding the "skill level" of a lucid dreamer because of his position on the curve of the graph.