LD and ND: a terminology analysis

[tosxyChor]

@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.

@bruno:

@Bruno

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.

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

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.)

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

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;

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.

not only is that wrong, it eventually drives people away from our community.

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

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

My point, again. If there’s no “normal” dream, how do we keep calling non-lucid dreams “normal”?

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.

I was well aware of the issue, as one of my earliest posts can show