Welcome back, Louai!
Though your post makes some good points and I think I can see your case for concern, I notice that you might still not have a clear understanding of self-awareness or the RRC's. So there may still be room for encouragement by me and a further place to go for you. Here are some specific responses that I hope will help:
Originally Posted by LouaiB
I think I'm getting better at self awareness. Though MILD is my main technique, I'd love to have a more powerful sense of self awareness if it grants me higher quality LDs.
Self-awareness is not about quality, period. Yes, if your self-awareness is strong in a dream, you have an opportunity to improve that dream's quality, but that is not why you must develop it. Self-awareness literally equals lucidity, and it is just as important to have it with you when practicing MILD as it is when attempting a WILD. Or a DILD... or whatever other "ILD" they've come up with.
I think you know this, but let me clarify anyway: self-awareness is not a technique; it is the state of mind that makes us human, that defines our sentience, that allows you to ask questions like "Who am I?" and "Is this a dream?" Master your sense of self-awareness, and you will never even need a technique to become lucid.
The RRC is a technique, one that offers a small step toward briefly gathering self-awareness, and perhaps help you become self-aware more easily in a dream (more in a bit), but it is by no means all you need. Self-awareness is a very big deal, by every measure; there is no trick or technique to magically summon it. You must work slowly, steadily, and positively on developing it yourself, and sometimes the rewiring involved can take quite a bit of effort!
I've been doing RRC exactly as it should be done and I'm getting more and more used to it, but I'm not feeling any changes, like I'm not feeling that I'm getting better at it. Is it because I'm doing it wrong or is it because it's a skill, like others, for instance art skills, that you get better at without actually feeling any improvement. So I consider my existence in this world, simply go through the idea that I am alive and conscious, and interacting with this world.
Well, you're not doing your RRC's exactly as suggested. When doing an RRC, you should be asking three simple questions: where you were a few minutes ago, where you will be in a few minutes, and where you are right now, and while asking those questions, really wonder about your interaction with your immediate reality.
Try not to consider things as big as your "existence in this world," or as abstract as things like "I am alive and conscious." Instead, wonder about the effect that things you have just done or said have had on others, or perhaps about the effect some action you are planning will really cause, or maybe about what kind of impact your presence right now is having on your local reality, or it on you. For example: Think about that conversation you just had with your friend an hour ago, and what effect your words might be having; think about the game you're going to play in a few minutes, and about the effect that time spent will have on you, and on your day; and think about yourself, perhaps sitting here at your computer, minding the Web, and touching other people's lives with your posts, and you with theirs, perhaps think about the impact you are having just by being present in the room you happen to be in at the moment, and wonder about its impact on you (there always is one). And while you are thinking, try to wonder, simply, and not intellectually -- just absorb the presence of each moment you're considering, and let its meaning find you, if it can... don't parse information, or lend definitions, or try any cause-and-effect logic; just wonder!
Above all else, don't make this wondering something that encompasses the whole universe; when you start wondering about your place in "everything," you are actually reducing your self-awareness by elevating the status of your surroundings. If you make everything else too important, you forget your self, and doing this will do exactly what you do not want to do during a dream.
Keep in mind that you are not developing a specific skill here, so there isn't a zero-sum exchange of results for effort. You are developing a state of mind, nurturing better access to a part of you that already exists. As you progress you will likely see results (i.e., possibly not needing techniques to LD anymore -- more in a sec)), but those results won't come in the form of new skills or talent, but in an improvement in the nature of your relationship with reality, that reality being in dreams or waking life.
Also keep in mind that this is pretty hi-end stuff I'm talking about here. Do RRC's, and RC's, correctly and you should find your WILD or MILD practice easier to do, and with more consistent positive results...no promises, though; results that always depend on your input can only be guaranteed by you, and not me (or anyone).
But this makes me wonder why is this particular thought so special?
It is special for a lot of reasons, but for LD'ing specifically it is special because it helps you to remember, during the dream, that this place, this world, is You, and that the interaction between you and it is perfect -- everything around you is created by you, everything you do and think will influence it, and you will be influenced by it -- you and your dream are all just one body of thought. This is also known as non-dualistic perception, which I feel is critical to successful LD'ing.
Of course as you've explained to me, it stimulated parts of the brain that serve a benefit in increasing the quality of LDs, and also inducing them. I guess it's like counting or singing, which induce different parts of our brain automatically without us feeling it. Surely the idea of using self awareness training (RRC) for this purpose would be useless if we don't build a tendency to unconsciously 'perform' it without conscious effort, or in other words, make it a 'habit' that will persist during our dreams.
Then I explained poorly.
Yes, one benefit of making a habit (I hate that word) of RRC's might make them "happen" during a dream, and that is a good thing; just as it is a good thing with regular RC's. So yes, RRC's do have a potential to induce LD's. But, just as with regular RC's, that induction is only a happy side-effect, and one BTW that can lead just as easily to false LD's about doing a RRC and being lucid as they can to doing a RRC that gets you lucid.
No, the core purpose of RRC's is to allow you a quiet moment of self-awareness a few times a day, to help get your mind comfortable with this sort of introspection. Yes, you are triggering parts of your brain in ways that it would not normally be triggered, but that effect is far more global than just stimulating certain centers, or getting a couple of synapses to fire regularly, This exercise helps exercise the nebulous, incredibly complicated, remarkably unmapped brain circuitry that is the engine of your waking-life self-awareness. If you are able to exercise that process to the point where you find yourself easily self-aware many times a day -- or perhaps, say, you start considering the consequence of your words and actions before you say or do things -- you will be rewarded with an accessible state of mind that will help you LD (and do many other things) without ever once having a RRC happen in your dream.
This is a very important bit...if I explained poorly again, let me know and I will try one more time!
OK great, this is a sweet deal, but I just can't stop this feeling that lingers through my bones telling me this information has a weak scientific foundation. Our knowledge of brain functions is still vague, and thus this complex procedure involving self awareness can't be proven true, not yet. And in the other hand, it may not be true at all.
A weak scientific foundation? Are you kidding me? The real question here is whether there is a scientific foundation for any of this stuff at all! And of course the next, and perhaps more valid, question to ask is if that even matters.
When you learned how to walk, to run, to ride a bicycle, to read, to fall in love, did you expect a scientific explanation for those things as well? Developing self-awareness, to date, is about as unscientific a process and goal as there is, but for me it is also the most important goal you will ever set (with or without LD'ing).
Scientifically proven or not, keep in mind that self-awareness is a proven fact simply because we can consider its existence. The thing that makes us human is self-awareness: The roots of religion, philosophy, science, and pretty much every other uniquely human endeavor, not only sprouted from self-awareness, but it was self-awareness that created them in the first place. If we didn't know that we "Are," then we would not know we "were," or "will be," either, and there would never have developed any curiosity or concern about our environment, our selves, and our futures. Without self-awareness, we would have gotten real good at hunting, maybe, but farming, technology, religion, philosophy, literature -- hell, anything that makes us human -- would not exist today were it not for self-awareness. Self-awareness defines us as a species, literally. So, whether or not its physical processes are ever proven, it clearly has proven its existence.
The sad part of all this, of course, is that, as far as we've come, humans to this day are still very bad at actually exercising, recognizing, or understanding the importance of their self-awareness.
Maybe it is other factors from this procedure that causes results, not the actual self awareness part. Of course you might disagree, and I am surely no expert, and I'd trust your word more than mine, and frankly the self awareness technique seems to be the only technique that promises such great results.
Again, you may have this backward. The "actual self-awareness part" is the goal, and the coincidence of the RRC procedure happening in a dream -- and happening correctly -- is a welcome side-effect or secondary result. I hope I was not too vague about this in the past, but that is the case. And again, self-awareness is not a technique: I wonder if your problem with it, and with the RRC, is that you are considering it one. I suggest that you consider not doing that. You are not achieving great results by successfully enacting some "self-awareness technique;" you are achieving great results because you have done things to help increase or make more accessible your own potentials to consciously enjoy the very real state of self-awareness.
So the RRC is not a self-awareness technique; it by no means "gives you" self-awareness. No, it is a technique meant to invite, nourish, and make familiar a state of self-awareness, this state being drawn from mental conditions and processes that have existed in you since day one.
[A brief aside: If I misunderstood this and you do not have this backward, I hope you will still read what I have said and not immediately make defenses -- these things still hold their meaning if you fully understand that self-awareness is not a technique.]
Trust me, LDing is the thing I want most in this world, and surely it's quality is very very crucial, and what I'm about to do might change my whole LDing future experiences, but having no other way to achieve such quality except a technique which isn't very clear in it's cores, worries me a lot and makes me feel a great deal of despair.
Surely I didn't come here to rant. I just want to ask you, how sure are you about this? I'm willing to go all the way if you want me to and are sure I'll get the promised results (of course if I do it right)(and I understand it takes years and years of practice, and I am ready and willing), and if you can provide any possible cognitive clues indicating this technique's possible validity, that'll really ease my mind.
Well, I hope I was a little clearer this time, and that you don't despair! I am obviously sure about self-awareness, and frankly I am confident that the RRC is a good technique for helping to develop it. The RRC is by no means the only technique, and likely there ultimately are no techniques that will bring you to heightened, consistent self-awareness on their own, and certainly not in a short amount a time. As you said, developing self-awareness is a lifelong pursuit, and you will likely never reach a state of constant self-awareness.
That said, the RRC is a good step toward developing a personal system for summoning self-awareness when you need it (like during a dream, or perhaps during a fight with a dear friend). Even that small step might take years to develop, but it will happen much more quickly than complete self-awareness.
At the risk of sounding like a mystic asshole, you will receive your cognitive clues as you progress. I can't tell you what they will be, because they will be specific to your nature and how you personally navigate your world. For me, LD-wise I have reached a point where things like dream control, stabilization, prolonging, and chaining through DEILD are done without a thought and certainly without any techniques -- self awareness during the dream is more than enough. Sure, I have a long way to go to reach my goals, especially in the memory department, but strong self-awareness has gotten me quite far. And that's just dreaming: waking-life-wise, self-awareness has become an invaluable tool for dealing with interpersonal issues, making conversation, learning new things, finding or at least imagining my "real" place in this world, and even with taking care of myself physically... learning to understand that "you are here," and that everything you do and say has an effect on your immediate reality, and it on you, will do wonderful things for your successful navigation of the mundane world.
And speaking of mystic assholes: Keep in mind that, though I may have shifted things slightly and left much out in the name of streamlining the RRC to a WILD program, absolutely nothing I say here is new. These exercises, these questions, and the importance of self-awareness have been staples of deep thinkers in many disciplines (especially, of course, dream yoga and Tibetan Buddhist and other Eastern mysticism) for uncounted centuries... this stuff is by no means new, and has been practiced successfully in one form or another probably throughout history.
This is an important step for me, really.
It sure is, and just asking the question reflects the importance of that step to you -- congratulations!
tl;dr: This time I got nothin' that will abbreviate these answers -- indeed, they could have been a whole lot longer. Suffice it to say that self-awareness is not a technique, but it is hands-down the most important ingredient in the LD'ing mix. Expect your work to develop it to last many years, but in the meantime use RRC's as a tool, but not the only tool, to help you briefly tap it.
So that's what I got; I hope it helped clear things up. If not, then ask again, and I'll have another go (be warned that I'll probably keep saying the same things over and over) Also, I truly hope that I have not contradicted anything I said earlier, as that was not intended.
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