Lets hope this is the right area since I’m not a member of the cloud area…HAPPY!!! sheesh…
First I need to explain some basic ideas and if you think they are wrong just tell me.
-What is lucid dreaming?
-being awake in a dream/knowing you are dreaming
-and from what i have read, if you are awake in a dream you can access all of your wakeful memories and control your dream, and in order to have ld’s you need to remember your dreams so you know you had one right?
-And you tend to remember stuff better when you are awake, right? so how come, in a lucid dream, whenever you have one, why cant you remember all of it perfectly if you were “awake” and accessible to your wakeful memories?
This raises my main point, and how I explain it is determined by how someone answers, but basically…
So the next part, the important part is…
-How does it feel to have a lucid dream? does it feel like someone just shook you awake and you are pretty much completely awake but your surroundings look a little different?
-Or is it just random that your mind became awake in a dream for a little bit in the night and thus, your mind was still in complete control and you only wake up in the morning and say, “huh, i guess i had a LD last night.”
I could keep going on but not without any feedback, and I’m sure someone out there won’t get this, and just let me know, I’ll be happy to explain.
Well, I can only speak from my own experience… but I have never felt like I was being jerked awake, but it’s not exactly a smooth transition, either. The only way I have ever had an LD is through the method of reality testing. I do reality tests in waking life whenever I think about it, so of course once in a while it occurs to me to do one in a dream. When that happens, I will do the test and if it works… I realize I am in a dream and proceed from there. Hopefully this explanation helps you… however, you would probably get a totally different description from someone who uses a different method, such as WILD.
Every night, people have several dreams. But they only remember 0-2. This is because:
The first few dreams are short because REM sleep is shorter at first.
They aren’t concerned with DR, unlike LDers.
Your memory acts differently during sleep. I can’t really explain this one, but perhaps someone else can.
It’s important to have good DR because what’s the point in having an LD if you can’t remember it?
The sensation is something that varies person to person, dream to dream, and incubation method to incubation method. It’s something you’ll have to explore yourself. One of my friends (who didn’t know about LDing) told me about a dream she had. By the way she described it, it sounded like a DILD. She said that she “popped” into her dream. I made a hypothesis that in a ND, your conscience is in the backseat to your subconscience. When you become lucid in a dream, your subconscience and your conscience meet up and somehow work together to give you control in an unpredictable world.
Thanks everyone. I had been thinking all along that I would probably have to figure it out in my own way, but the only LD’s I have had so far…I only remember them in the morning, and if I remembered them at all it was without control. Like, if ever you have a lucid dream you will have control and be in it…
This is hard to explain sorry, but the best thing I can think of right now is like when you go to sleep at night your dream is a movie you are watching and taking part in. Then you wake up in the morning and remember parts of the movie(s).
Every now and then you have a lucid dream which is equivalent to directing the movie and sometimes having control, because normally you just sit back and watch it with no regard to control.
Well, for me having a lucid dream feels like waking up in the morning and all that happened in the night was that I remember watching a movie where I became lucid. It never felt like I was "directing (or “awake”) in my dream and had control of it at that point in time.
I can’t change the past or future, so how do I control a lucid dream if the only time I even know one is happening is if I wake up and it’s just the memories of the movie/dream.
Note: the whole deal with movies and watching and directing is an anology to better describe the concept I’m trying to explain. Again, let me know if you need me to explain more/better, and any help is appreciated!
You were probably prelucid. It sounds like you were acting as if it was a LD because you were thinking about dreaming, but your subconscience was actually accepting everything around you as reality. Or you weren’t completely lucid and eventually slipped out of lucidity. Or you didn’t have enough control to change your surroundings, so you were lucid but “went with the flow.”
Well, if you were fully lucid, your thought process would automatically be “it’s happening,” instead of the usual thought following a ND “it happened.” Let me turn your analogy back to you. If you’re acting in the movie and controlling the storyline, you know what you’re experiencing as it happens. You gain those memories as you go along. You don’t just suddenly get them when you leave the movie premiere.
A ND where you know that you’re dreaming is an oxymoron… that just doesn’t exist (unless you count a Prelucid as a ND, but I don’t). What most likely happened is that you knew that you’re dreaming, and in those particular dreams, you accepted it. You just said “Hey, I’m dreaming!” but you didn’t really care or make any effort to increase lucidity.
That type of prelucidity has never happened to me before. I think that’s about as prelucid as you can get before becoming lucid. The barrier between prelucid and lucid is knowing that you’re dreaming and using that knowledge to your advantage.
It is, if you know its a dream, and can’t control your own actions and unwillingly go along with plot/story of the dream, it’s still a lucid dream… Because you know it’s a dream…
Lucidity is, by definition, correctly knowing that you are currently dreaming. Control is a separate issue. Lucid is just knowing it, Robin.
In response to your question about how lucidity feels, Fwump, I can only say this: it is INCREDIBLE how close to reality it feels at the time. Your memory of it will fade, but if you take time to appreciate the realism of the dream while you’re lucid, you’ll later remember that feeling of shock. I’ve had a couple of occasions when lucid actually prompted me to begin hyperventilating because I was so astounded.
Basically, your brain will fabricate information to fill in any gaps you notice. Objects will generally have as much detail as you look for. If you wonder what’s behind a closed door, opening that door will generally cause a new room to be created inside. If you see a restaurant on the dream street, pay attention to your sense of smell–you’ll probably get a whiff of dinner cooking.
Fwump, you should try relaxing the next time you have a LD. Maybe if you calm down when you realize you are dreaming, it will help you feel like you are in control in real-time, or you are “directing the movie.”
Robin, can you explain further on why you think it was a normal dream? You don’t have to have control over anything or change anything to make a dream a lucid dream. The only thing you need is to be aware you are dreaming.
I completely agree with Robin. Generally, I say to beginners “a lucid dream is when you know you’re dreaming”, because it’s not confusing and it’s the easier definition to understand.
But I don’t completely agree with this definition and this was noticed too by Christian Bouchet in his philosophy PhD thesis. You can know that you’re dreaming yet it doesn’t change anything in your consciousness and awareness, thus this dream which is theorically a LD looks more like a prelucid dream. On the contrary, you can have dreams in which you’re unaware of dreaming though your consciousness is quite the same than in the waking state. I call these dreams “conscious dreams”.
Scientifically and philosophically speaking, the problem lies in the fact nobody is able to define consciousness. So that scientists or philosophers cannot define a LD by saying: “it’s a dream in which you’re more conscious than usually in dreams”.
And as in 95% of the cases, when you know you’re dreaming, this creates an increase of consciousness, and as it’s easier and easily comprehensible to define a LD by “A LD is when you know you’re dreaming”, this definition is generally admitted.
I think it was just a very very little state of lucidity then. (Talking about one special dream when I was in some kind of big house, like a shopping center, but I thought it was the kindergarden with evil people and I wanted to get out and wake up) My problem is, that I have a terrible state of unawareness in my dreams. I have a good dream recall, I think, but in my dreams, the me is far away from my conscious me. And in this state of being “far away”, the dream character of me that was actually almost another person thought “I’m dreaming”.