Thread: Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals -- With Q & A

Hi Sageous, I wanted to get your thoughts. Perhaps this specific angle could be something that you or someone has already talked about in the forums. I believe you have spoken of WBTB as being helpful in firing up parts of the brain useful to lucid dreaming, but I believe you have also mentioned not firing up all parts of the brain lest you convince your brain that your night of sleep is over and end up switching off REM. I am wondering if specific awareness work might be useful as the primary focus during all WBTB's if you are going for DILDs. I was just reading an article and it reminded me of a previous article we had discussed...both are referenced below.

2012 article I just read where the only real correlation is a study of which areas of the brain are activated while closely reading text literary versus pleasure reading: This is your brain on Jane Austen, and researchers at Stanford are taking notes
bottom line: paying close attention to literary texts "requires the coordination of multiple complex cognitive functions" as shown by MRI scans of the brain during such reading as opposed to pleasure reading that showed blood flow in different parts of the brain.

Original article we discussed briefly: Lucid dreamers help scientists locate the seat of meta-consciousness in the brain
"In a lucid state, however, the activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex increases markedly within seconds. The involved areas of the cerebral cortex are the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, to which commonly the function of self-assessment is attributed, and the frontopolar regions, which are responsible for evaluating our own thoughts and feelings. The precuneus is also especially active, a part of the brain that has long been linked with self-perception.”

Perhaps we could use targeted activities focused on self awareness during WBTB to maximize our level of lucidity while being careful to not fire up the wrong parts of the brain. Edit: I am recalling something about not getting too intellectual with awareness work...perhaps something I should heed here as well.

Originally Posted by fogelbise

Perhaps we could use targeted activities focused on self awareness during WBTB to maximize our level of lucidity while being careful to not fire up the wrong parts of the brain.

I think I already advocate that; don't I?

Seriously, though: yes, WBTB ought definitely to be practiced with a focus on targeted self-awareness. The trouble is, what to target?

I have a brother who is a professor of neurobiology at a major university whose primary lot in life is locating what parts of the brain are fired by what activity and why. He's made a lot of progress, but a funny thing has developed as we discussed his work over the years: though he can tell you all about examples like reading Jane Austen, and might even try defending that meta-consciousness experiment Zoth found for us last year, he seems to have changed his position regarding consciousness and memory (aka, the stuff of dreams). Yes, we might be able to see a few basal brain bits fire during dreams, but it seems that the entire brain is accessed for the higher stuff like self-awareness, and in (as yet) no discernible pattern. [Keep in mind that self-perception and self-awareness are two very different things -- at least in my opinion.]

So, if we could stimulate the frontopolar regions (whatever they are), successfully firing places, for instance, that have lit up when LD'ers were tested, we still might not have triggered or amplified our self-awareness or memory... Indeed, we might have made a real mess of things, because it may be that it's our self-awareness triggering those regions, and not the other way around: lighting them first, before self-awareness has had input, might cause some confusion, I think.

What I get from all this is that there may be no specific part of your brain you can target while massaging as complex a part of your mind as self-awareness, so the best you can do is go after the more global things, like keeping your brain in as close a state to sleep as you can get it, so that the target-able centers like those that oversee sleep can continue their processes... in a sense, you are literally avoiding any stimulus to the system.

One way to keep your brain centered on sleep during WBTB is by not taxing it with things like using your computer or, perhaps, reading and enjoying Jane Austen. Since we don't know which centers "drive" self-awareness yet, or indeed if there are any, the best we can do is maintain it ourselves without disturbing the parts of the brain we can effect. Did I just say that?

In other words, keep your brain calm and dreamy during WBTB, and trust your self-awareness to kick in when needed; nobody's going to do it for you, possibly ever. Once again the fundamentals eclipse science and shortcuts?

I am recalling something about not getting too intellectual with awareness work...perhaps something I should heed here as well.

Perhaps! The last thing you want to do is lie there in the dark intention set, dream-plans in place, maybe a little excited about it all, only to spend the next hour or two thinking about which bits of your brain are lighting up, or if you took the right pills or did the right mental exercises to have them lit for you. That may be one too many layers of complexity over a process that ought to be as clean as possible.

That was a good question, though, and certainly one whose answer I hope to one day be proven wrong about.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Yes, we might be able to see a few basal brain bits fire during dreams, but it seems that the entire brain is accessed for the higher stuff like self-awareness, and in (as yet) no discernible pattern. [Keep in mind that self-perception and self-awareness are two very different things -- at least in my opinion.]

That completely makes sense to me. How could something like self-awareness be so defined within our complex brain!