I bet either you’ve felt it, or you have heard it from someone else at least once: Lucid dreaming isn’t that great of a term, and that is my opinion too.
It makes it sound like such a big, far-from-ordinary thing; have you ever heard some new members saying “I had some dreams in which I knew I was dreaming before, but only recently I discovered that they were called this way, etc.”? The term does not feel natural at first glance, it is just so distant to me from the simple experience of knowing we’re in a dream. If i talk about a LD, it makes it feel so much a once-in-a-while thing, and that’s completely different from what we want right here.
And what’s with the “Normal Dream” thing? Of course I know that for most, including myself, they’re much more common than lucid ones, but by calling them this way, we’re only enforcing the conception. They’re called normal, how can it be that they’re not supposed to be the norm in any way?
IIRC, the ultimate goal of any dreamer here is to become Lucid during every night, if not at will; at that point, the so-called ND’s won’t be the norm at all for them; but they’ll still be calling them ND’s, and that’s a paradox to me.
What I’m saying here is, we should really find a different way of calling them; personally, I thought of the terms Conscious Dream and Non-Conscious Dream (CD and NCD); that way, a dream in which you know you’re dreaming sounds much more appealing and commonplace to me, and a dream in which you are not sounds much less excusable and desirable (while still being fairly neutral terms).
What I’m asking is, of course the terms LD and ND should stay, as thinking of entirely substituting them would be pure madness; instead, I’m only asking some more neutral acronyms, like CD and NCD, be added to the LD4all dictionary (their descriptions can even be the same as LD and ND, but thinking of other ones would be fairly easy), so that people here could use such terms and abbreviations without being stared funny or frowned upon.
Of course, this topic is completely open to debate, so feel free to comment and/or suggest different terms for them.
I agree. I mean, I don’t really have a problem with Lucid Dreaming, but when I stop to think about it, Conscious Dreaming sounds much cooler to me Non-Conscious Dreaming could also be called Unconscious Dreaming? Just a thought.
About the ND, that’s true! I’ve been trying to say “physical body” instead of “real body” and “waking life” instead of “real life”, but I didn’t notice how I shouldn’t say Normal Dream for the same reason!
I’ve come to refer to lucidity as “consciousness” in most contexts now, including my dream journal here and it’s simply not a good term: conscience is not an on/off switch, there’s a lot of different states of consciousness, and many of them are involved in dreaming. If I were to have baptised lucidity, I’d have it called “aware dreaming” (a rather unambiguous expression), but more and more I’m inclined to simply using the universal term.
As for NDs/NCDs, I’m against having a special term for nonlucid dreaming: lucidity is one aspect dreaming can have, alongside with many others (vividity, longness, blurriness, frightfulness, freakiness, fragmentariness, disembodiment &c.) electing lucidity as the only modifier (thus reducing all other dreaming to “regular”) makes it sound like only lucid dreaming is interesting and worth persuing; not only is that wrong, it eventually drives people away from our community.
So I’m all for calling aware dreaming “lucid”, but along with other relevant information: rarely ever is there such a thing as “regular”, “ordinary” dreaming, without need or right to any kind of modifier; however, if there’s something really weird about current terminology, it’s the fact that we treat dreaming as a bunch of sure, discrete units: “dreams” now, think about that.
@mattias: Unconscious dreaming makes one seems like he’s fainted and that’s not exactly what one wants to convey with the term
Glad you see it my way, though.
It is very true that the states of consciousness are varied and with different levels, particularly in dreams, but that’s not really a reason not to use the term Consciousness about Lucidness. Many words have very different meanings, yet the context can easily help discerning the meaning. Like when I say “That girl’s hot”, I could very well be talking about her temperature, but that’s not usually the case. Likewise, consciousness in dreams can take many forms, yet we could agree on the term CD by saying, “In the acronym, the term conscious is a synonim of lucid” and leave it this way. The fact I call such a dream “conscious” doesn’t define or limit the meaning of conscious in the slightest, since the meaning in the acronym would just be an agreed convention.
Plus, lucidness is indeed a form of cosnciousness, and even if consciousness itself can be at many levels, we’ve been trying for years to draw a line between lucidity and non-lucidity, and we could just use that line
Besides, Aware dream sounds pretty good to me
That’s kind of my point here: we have vivid/feint dreams, long/short dreams, blurry/crisp dreams, and then lucid/normal dreams? I guess you can easily see what’s wrong with the picture here. If a dream is not fragmented, we don’t just call it “normal”; the same way, there should be no reason to call a dream that isn’t lucid “normal”, and that because lucidness is a property of a dream, just like all the others. We could call it non-lucid, but that sounds really awful to me
Same here, we can strive for vivid, long and/or insightful dreams just as we could strive for lucidity: what I’m trying to express is, lucidness is treated differently form other properties, and part of what I want to achieve is it being treated like any other property, that is, not being an exceprion of sort to the “norm”, but just a connotation to a dream.
People who don’t like the terms CD / NCD can always refrain from using it, and I’m sure they’ll comprehend if some other dreamer uses them
My point, again. If there’s no “normal” dream, how do we keep calling non-lucid dreams “normal”?
I find it hard to believe there is a need in replacing official terms such as “Lucid Dreaming” at the moment. As the rather small community we are, I think it’s best we stick to the international, official terms - as we serve as a form of a wedge of Lucid Dreaming. Only when it becomes a widespread phenomena should slang names be used - in my opinion, at least.
Also, we already have a few slang names, for which official names do not exist - CALD, for instance.
Well, Lucid dreaming is already widely known as Conscious Dreaming too (it even says that in Q’s site guide):
And nowhere in the original post I talked about replacing the terms, only placing new ones side by side with the old ones, so dreamers who don’t like the original terms can use these ones instead in their posts. It’s as small as that, I don’t need any revolution, just an underlining under an acronym different than the usual one.
I’ve always loved the word Lucid, I don’t think I could give that up.
I do agree however, that assigning “Normal” to a non-lucid dream is, at best, merely stereotyping for lack of desire or ability to classify better. We may focus here on “Lucid” dreaming, but how many different and wonderful dreams, and Types of dreams (besides Lucid) might we be able to classify; And I don’t know that I’d call the majority of my non-lucid dreams “Normal”
Non-conscious, and Unconscious, or even Subconscious, all ring for me as un-recalled, formless, slept through the night “without” dreaming connotations.
I might put a vote towards “Unrealized” dream though, to classify all the varieties of dreams in which that moment of Realization, or Lucidity, was not brought forth and maintained… ??
I guess I have to repeat myself, I’m not asking anyone to give up on the existing terms, just allowing for new ones to exist alongside them; I won’t surely be forcing anyone to use terms they don’t like in any manner
Well, “unrealized” is quite the strong choice of words IMHO, and like Bruno said, I don’t want any dreamer here think we despise non-lucid dreams in any way
As for the rest, yeah, we might need a bit of work to find another suitable term for ND’s. Unaware maybe?
All I was saying is that “conscious” is pretty much as biased a term as “lucid” is, at first glance: but, if I understand correctly, the main argument to support calling lucid dreaming instead “conscious” is that it would bear no such bias inasmuch as it’s an agreed-upon convention — why, so too with “lucid”!
The argument thus begs the question of why, then, we should change a harmless convention for another: and harmlessness here is in the eye of the beholder; in fact, knowing our community and its favoured terms, I think Tosxychor just argued against himself: let TwilightDreamer be an example, he just went as far as call “lucid dreaming” an “international, official” terminology!
This is further backed up by the idea that those who don’t like any new terminology can simply not stick to it: humbug, a rookie is not informed enough to make this kind of decision, and on the other hand our choice of terminology affects the rookies the most — no practising onironaut will have a problem pointing out what’s generally wrong with the expressions “lucid”, “conscious” and “practising onironaut”. If we are to choose one terminology over any other, we should ground ourselves on clarity and appropriacy: that is the only way to convince others en masse to change their way of speaking.
Finally, on the question of opposites, Tosxychor made a slight mistake which is nonetheless crucial to his point there: vivid is the opposite of feint, long is the opposite of short, blurry is the opposite of crisp, but normal is merely the absence of lucid.
Just like “normal as opposed to long” dreaming doesn’t imply “short”, “normal as opposed to lucid” dreaming means that the dreamer neither questions the realness of their situation (“lucid dreaming”) nor leaves it unquestioned in spite of, hell, alien cows dancing the cha-cha (let’s call that “moogle dreaming”, for no particular reason ) — my point being that no dreaming should be orfinary enough to deserve being called “normal” as opposed to anything, and that is quite a different point from the one Tosxychor is trying to make, if anything because it implies I already don’t call nonlucid dreaming “normal”.
This post totals seven sentences (this one included): that’s what happens to the average length of your sentences when you major Ancient Greek.
Repetita iuvant, what I’m looking for here is not at all the replacement of the term Lucidity, but rather putting a new term side by side with it: there’s no “instead”, only “also”
The term lucidity is in fact widely used, shared as a definition, and it should definitely stay where it is; what I’m saying is, conscious as referred to dreams is also a widely known definition, and I would be glad if it was recognized as such inside the forum too (with the proper acronym recognition)
Actually, that’s kind of my point here.
To be honest, I’ve get pretty used to the terms myself, and I know by the time I’ve passed here that they’re just acronyms, and not much else, to the point even if some of these terms are accepted too, I’ll continue calling my DJ “My Lucid journal”, since I like how it sounds.
But to the beginner, they can pretty much define what they’re looking for, and set the bars for the percieved difficulty/average frequence etc.: in this sense, they’re not harmless at all, and that’s the exact reason why I’m trying to get some more neutral terms in use too (especially something in addiction to ND), so that the transition torwards successful LD’ing can be smoother.
You can see I decided to become a Scribe pretty fast, and the reason was the obvious one: there’s people to inform out there, and I wanted to help. In the same spirit, I’m asking for these terms to come into use.
What I know is, when I was much more inexperienced and came to this forum, if I had seen terms like Conscious and Non-conscious Dreaming used in some DJ’s (not every DJ, mind you ), I could have got a different viewpoint on things from the start, that lucid dreaming is not a big and complex thing as it sounds at first, and you don’t get ND’s becuase it’s “normal”, but just because you weren’t aware, and that’s it. It may sound silly, but at a subconscious level, the way you see things can be greatly influenced by the way you call them (remember He-who-shall-not-be-named from Harry Potter? That name only fueled the fear torwards the man even more), until you learn to see them with the right angle, using your own experience. But before the experience came, I would have been very grateful to see such terms in use too, alongside LD and ND, to get a clearer idea of things.
And since I think it would have been useful for myself, I guessed it could aid other members too, just that.
That’s what I was trying to convince people in the first post about: there are indeed several good reasons IMHO why terms like CD and NCD should be used too.
I’m sorry, but I should call out your error instead.
Lucidness, like all other properties, has various levels, and we’re able to call a dream “lucid” or “non-lucid” just because we’ve been trying for years to draw a definite line on this. I bet that if we tried that hard, we could draw lines like that about any property of a dream, and call it fragmented or not, blurry or not, and such. Moreover, IIRC, lucidness is a form of consciousness, and you said too that consciousness is not an on/off switch.
What you’re saying here is, we call something by a wrong name, just because it’s convention? I bet we could do a little thing about it, as little as giving people a synonym to use, if they like so, that has a much more neutral implied meaning.
I think it’s an issue with the conception, every LD is a ND.
For some reason, we have the feeling of LDing being something distant and hard to reach.
There are two kinds of people in this case,
The first kind is the people who WANT LDs, who percive LDs as a rare and a struggle needed experience.
And the second kind, is the people who GET LDs, (the neturals) who percive it as a ND.
Actually, when you go to the definition of LD, it can be a situation when you just say - “Wow, what a spooky dream I’m having right now.”
Isn’t that a normal dream?
If we want to get LDs, we should act and think like people who GET them.
And if a term will help that, so lets go for it!
ND = A dream, Lucid or not - doesn’t matter.
One quality of a dream can be lucidity, consciousness or awareness.
If that specific quality doesn’t exist in a particiular dream, we can call it NL, NC or NA. (Non-Lucid, etc.)
The problem is not the word “normal”, but its use: having “nonconscious dreaming” instead of “normal dreaming” makes next to no difference, if your dream journal still sees conscious as the only class of dreaming worth pointing out all else being “nonconscious”, not even a treat, merely the lack of one which in turn makes “conscious” the only interesting treat dreaming can ever assume.
What I’m saying is, ideally people would never call a dream “normal” simply because there’s more to it than its being lucid or not: what you propose, then, that we substitute “nonconscious” for “normal”, doesn’t resolve the problem that those will be the only two labels people will ever care about nonconscious will be your new normal!
As for the rest, I don’t know… I for one ain’t joining your change until you actually make it sound urgent and useful. What I’m afraid of is that no-one in this audience will choose to switch if given a choice and hey, we’re all grown ups here: we know that no matter how successful you are, many people won’t join you. So why don’t you try to convince us instead of repeating how you’re not forcing anyone to do anything? You might as well get more people to join you this way, you know?
I agree with Chor,
The SC is a really powerful factor in dreams, and if the SC classifies LDs like something hard they will be hard to achieve. In terms LD and ND you make them opposites, when, rather they should be thought as a choice. Using the terms CD and NCD ,or non aware, you remove that SC suggestion that they are hard, and implant to see them as something both normal that you can choose to have, and remove the thought of them being opposites - which ,in fact, makes them harder to achieve.
As for impact that use of them could have on community, there isn’t anybody that can for them to use that term. Maybe there’s no need for acronym descriptions yet, but, Chor, no one can force you or me to not use that terms, all we have to do is put a header note in posts or DJ that for reason this-and-that we will use CD and NCD in place of LD and ND. If community will like it then the acronyms should get a description.
All of what everybody spoke of here is 80% the same, there are this-and-that differences but you all fail to see the point that we strive to make LDs easier. There’s no need for intellectual duels that you did here, we are not at war.
For the end i would like to say that both sides are right in their own way, the problem we need to discuss is harmless intergration of terms-of-choice, and if, in the first place, there is any need to intergrate them. IMO there is only need for individuals to use the “new” terms, and no need for all of the community. If someone wants let him use them, if not, nothing happens. You must take in account that acronyms LD and ND have very strong positive impact on SC of seasoned dreamers, while CD and NCD could help only newbies in getting the right mindset.
Well, I already said in various topics that I prefer writing down my ND’s on pen and paper, for various reasons, and copying them on my online DJ would take 1 more hour a day (and I already make very long posts); besides, I posted various interesting and/or enlightening ND’s of mine here and there; I could explain all the reasons, but there’s no real need to talk about it here.
That’s where I wanted to end - if people call their non-lucid dreams “non-conscious” (only if they want, of course), they could still be their norm, but they won’t feel like the norm, and so they will be more motivated torwards getting what they strive for; what I’m trying to acheive with this is simply a further push for those who want to get to lucidity among us.
As for
and
: That’s the reason this topic was created in the first place, to discuss the reasons why these terms should be a valid choice to use, and to get people to understand those reasons. If I wanted this for myself, I could have just started using it in my DJ and posts, and leave it at that. I want people to understand, and that’s why this topic is here: I’m explaining the reasons, to which people will be free to agree or not; and if enough people in the community will agree to this, only then there will be a valid reason to use these terms.
And even if it they’re accepted, probably a lot of users will continue using LD and ND, and that’s their right, and I completely agree about that; the only thing that I want to see is, a simple, alternative, recognized point of view about what Lucids and Non-lucids are, so new people could get a better view on the whole thing.
Tosxychor, I really like your idea, especially because the terms you suggest aren’t neutral by any means - you made a point youself in the 1st post that they’re supposed to make having CDs a much more “desirable” thing than just having “abnormal dreams” (subconciously, of couse).
I’ve read the whole topic, but excuse me if I’ll not mention every single point. I’d just like to address a point that I found missing from the very 1st post: Bruno said conciousness is a better word because it implies degress, not just an on-off switch.
Tonight I dreamt of being alone in a party, I wanted some company and then I thought “heck, this is a dream, I’ll just approach anyone and start a conversation”. Believe me or not, it wasn’t enought to get me truly lucid. So I think, the two terms (CD and NCD) aren’t enough.
So, we can’t change “lucid” in this sentece to “concious”, because I was concious in my dream and it wasn’t fun at all in comparison to true lucidity. As we can’t change the meaning of LD to “100% conscious CD”, I suppose we would need a new term: CD, NCD and maybe SCD (S for super) or ULD (ultra), etc… This way we could describe three theorical possibilities of concious dreaming:
NCD (0% conciousness)
CD (1-99% conciousness)
SCD (100% conciousness)
I guess I made my point. I’ll leave the definition of the new term up to you guys, SCD and UCD aren’t very good. But, Tosxychor, I really like your idea, and if anyone add this to the cool ld4all forum’s dictionay (you, that automatic-underlined-mouse-over cool things), I’d try to use them. And if I’m writing this, surely there are several others who also would but who are keeping quiet.
tukkek, I see your point, and I’m very glad to see my view was shared by some afterall (I guess I gotta thank mattias, Phoenyx, Spider and Leeh aswell ^^), and about the lucid-conscious comparison:
Lucidness have various dregrees, as many have percieved themselves, and the fact the lucid is used as a precise description, only for particular dreams, is mainly beacuse we forced the meaning to do so: we wanted a clear distintion about if a dream is lucid or not, and that’s what we mostly got, with its side effects of course, like the one you mentioned (we know it’s a dream somehow and we still can’t call it lucid).
In this sense, if we accept the word “conscious” in the context as a synonim for “lucid”, the I’m sure the words will be surely interchangeable, since this way “conscious” would be referring to a particular state of mind too.
Moreover, we still do classify various degrees of lucidity, calling them semi-lucid, low-lucid, high-lucid, and everything inbetween; in the same way, there would be nothing to invent all over if we apply the same principle to the term “consciousness”.
What I meant is that if we’re gonna trade LD and ND for only CD and NCD, I’d rather stick to the first pair, because it gives us a higher standard to hope for (better to hope for a “true lucid” dream than to a mild-to-poor conscious dream as mine). What I liked most about your idea is how it can positevely subvert a begginer’s mind. If we don’t have a third term I think there’s no much use in adopting new terminology, or that maybe it even does worse (subcounciously) an effect to the begginer as the actual common terms do.
I’m perfectly fine about that, what i wanted is for both terminologies to coexist
Besides, I didn’t really understand the second part of ypur post. Could you please elaborate?
Sweden needs a new word for Lucid Dream. Right now its Klardröm, direct translation= Cleardream. I disliked it since the first time i heard it (the word, i love LD’s ).
Non-Conscious Dreaming could also be called Unconscious Dreaming? Just a thought.
and that’s not exactly what one wants to convey with the term 
) — my point being that no dreaming should be orfinary enough to deserve being called “normal” as opposed to 