Properties of Lucidity

Quest for Lucidity General Lucidness
1

The exact nature of lucidity is rather difficult to pin down.

We can simply define a lucid dream by saying we are lucid in a dream when we’re in a dream and we know that we’re in a dream.

Yet, the explanation of lucidity itself is somewhat circular: you’re lucid when…you’re lucid.

If we rely on physiological explanations of lucidity, then we can say, “Well, a person is lucid in a dream whenever certain areas of brain related to self-awareness are activated.”

But how do these areas become activated? Sometimes it seems to happen randomly. Sometimes it’s the result of an effort to remember some task, like a reality check, or some other specific action. Or it can be the plain task of remembering to be lucid.

What I would really like to know is: What are the necessary conditions of lucidity?

Lucidity has a few obvious common properties. Two of them are reason and short-term memory. If you’re reasoning fully in a dream, then you’re probably lucid; if your reasoning is impaired, you’re probably non-lucid. Of course, you can reason fairly well in a dream and still never reach the critical mass of consciousness necessary for lucidity. For instance, you might look in a mirror and notice that your hair is too long. You know you had it cut short last week and yet it’s very long. From there, a few things can happen: (1) you conclude you’re wrong about having cut your hair last week; (2) you conclude that your hair has grown very quickly; (3) you conclude that you did definitely cut your hair, and since you’re never seen hair grow so quickly, you must be dreaming.

So we can have some reasoning power in a non-lucid dream, but if there’s a high enough level of reasoning, we could become lucid.

The same goes for short-term, or working, memory. For instance, in a non-lucid dream a DC might change from being a man to a woman. Without our working memory, we don’t notice this, and thus, don’t become conscious of it. With working or short-term memory we might stop and say, “Hey, a few moments ago you were a man and now you’re a woman.” This might to lucidity, and it might not. We might rationalize the change (because of a deficit in reasoning power). Yet, usually, a certain high level of memory in a dream can trigger lucidity. We remember that character X was definitely a man a moment ago and is now a woman—we know we aren’t mistaken. Or we remember that character Y is a deceased person and that we can’t therefore be “really” talking to them.

Anyway, it’s all well and good to say that reasoning and memory are common properties of lucidity, but we aren’t always lucid when our consciousness has these properties in dreams. We must have enough of these things. Although, again, even in highly lucid dreams we still can misremember things. We can certainly know that it’s a dream, and we can have a deep level of control, and yet we might awaken and realize that our father in our dream looked like himself from ten years ago, not himself today, and we didn’t even realize it.

So what really is necessary for lucidity? How can we answer that question without being self-referential or vague? Reason and memory are common to lucidity, but not totally necessary. Some critical level, it seems, of reason and memory are necessary, but at what point do they become so? Obviously, our awareness must change from being passive to being active. We aren’t without self-awareness in a non-lucid dream, but we do lack the quality of self-awareness in which we reflect slowly and intentionally upon our actions, our environment, our thoughts and feelings.

It’s all so slippery, because in some non-lucid dreams we act intentionally. Intentionality is thought of as a property of lucidity, of consciousness, but of course we formulate and carry out intentions in non-lucid dreams. And we sometimes do so with medium levels of reason and memory continuous with our everyday waking lives.

The answer seems to be, to me, in the combination and intensity of intentionality, reason and memory.

2

Thanks for this topic! I found it very illuminating. I made this Lucid Levels and Axises topic a while back that might parallel, if you’re interested.

Memory and reasoning are the biggest for me, because most of my nonlucid dreams have purpose. Nonlucid nightmares, for example, can be very high in intensity and intention (that is, intensely wanting to get away from the nightmare monster).

On the other hand, I’ve had dreams that I just go along with the flow, that I consider so very very lucid because even without intention, I had this stable default reasoning/memory combination. Semi-lucid dreams where I knew that I was lucid but had no intentions to activate (even though my motivation is high to lucid dream at all, when I’m awake) I attribute to impaired memory-reasoning.

When I read Steve Pavlina’s account of lucid dreaming, he slipped somewhere in there that you will be able to feel your sleeping physical body. That is valid as his experience, if lucidiy consistently causes physically bound sensations to arise, but the way it was phrased it came off as a signpost or requirement for lucid dreaming… and, I had lucid dreams where I knew it was a dream but was only physically attuned or aligned to my dream body.

3

I’ve had lucid dreams where I’ve been able to sense my body. Once I could distinctly feel my cat re-settling on my legs as I slept, even though, in the dream, I was vertical and walking around. Another time I could feel the position of my sleeping body. Several times I’ve been able to hear real-world sounds in the dream, knowing that they’re happening around my physical sleeping body.

Never have any of those things given me lucidity, though. In almost every case, I was already lucid.

Thanks for sharing the link to your other thread. Your levels of lucidity correspond pretty strongly with Ed Kellog’s levels of lucidity, too.

He outlines lucidity as: pre-lucid, sub-lucid, semi-lucid, lucid, fully lucid, and super-lucid.

4

So I was confused about the nature of sufficient and necessary conditions when I first made this post, but I’ve reviewed the concepts now.

A sufficient condition is defined as some feature F being present whenever G is present.

A condition is necessary if, and only if, when some feature F is absent, G is also absent.

In the case of lucid dreams, then, it’s obvious that having intent or reason or memory in a dream are not sufficient to cause lucidity. Why? Because we can have non-lucid dreams in which we have and carry out intents, in which we reason correctly, and in which we remember things correctly—or, at least, in which we do any of these partially.

So, if intent, memory, and reason (by themselves) aren’t sufficient to cause lucidity in dream, what is sufficient?

Again, I think it’s all about the intensity of these things, and perhaps especially the combination of them. The key to understanding what causes lucidity is understanding that these things come in degrees. Increases in reason, memory, and intent are associated with increases in lucidity.

5

So, to refine this, how would you categorize:

  1. The so-called “false lucid” dream?

Your reasoning is tied in with the dream, as in, you fly because of course everybody can fly. And you escape the nightmare monster. However, even though you are more empowered in this dream because of dream-reasoning, you did not dismiss the nightmare monster as a dream of yours.

  1. Lucidity-themed nonlucid dreams.

People are often puzzled when they dream of, say, realizing that they are in a dream, but not acting as if they realize that they are in a dream. So, they don’t even fly.

In gray area lucid dreams like that, I have a simple litmus test: did you wake up feeling empowered? If no, then it was not a lucid dream. If yes, then it counts as a lucid dream.

6

What you’re calling a “false lucid” dream I would simply call a “control dream”—a dream where you have a high degree of magical-like control, but no lucidity.

Really, I don’t like the term “false lucid dream” because it implies that lucidity is black-and-white, either you’re lucid or you’re not. But that’s not true; there are degrees of lucidity.

In my own experience, what I would call a “false lucid dream” is a dream where I was grossly mistaken or confused about what I thought was true in the dream. For instance, sometimes I’ll have false awakenings which turn into lucid dreams, but the FA is not set in the place I’m actually sleeping in. Yet, I don’t notice this. In the dream, I assume that I was sleeping wherever I find myself to be sleeping in the dream. So there’s (what should be) an obvious falsehood in the midst of my lucidity.

However, I don’t usually categorize these as non-lucid dreams, because in those sorts of dreams I’m most definitely lucid (I know I’m dreaming and I act on that knowledge). The “false” part is that I’m wrong in my thinking about certain aspects of the dream, or else big discrepancies go unnoticed.

If you realize you’re in a dream, you’ve at least had a sort of lucid dream, I think. Whether you act on your knowledge that it’s dream doesn’t always correlate with how lucid you are. You can be quite lucid and just go along with dream.

I’ve noticed, though, that going along with the dream tends to weaken lucidity. But this effect, I suppose, isn’t any different than your waking awareness being obliterated by a daydream. You can get so swept up in a daydream or fantasy that you actually cry or laugh out loud, even though “none of it is real.” And, of course, you can quite forget your physical surroundings in a daydream. Likewise, when we’re lucid in a dream, and go along with the dream, we become emotionally involved, and forget our physical circumstances—that we are actually asleep and dreaming.

Like Ed Kellogg, I do differentiate between types of lucid dreams with how much willpower I exerted. But I don’t blur lucidity and control together. It’s just that awareness and control are related. If you do something uncontrollably, you do it subconsciously. To do something consciously is to do something with control.

Here’s the expanded explanation of pre-lucid, sub-lucid, semi-lucid, lucid, fully lucid and super-lucid as I think of them.

Pre-Lucid
You are questioning the feasibility or reality of certain elements in the dream. You might be thinking, “How is this possible?,” or “When did this change?” But your questioning never leads to lucidity. Instead, you rationalize away whatever strangeness you’ve encountered.

Sub-Lucid
You know that you’re dreaming, but you don’t act on the knowledge in any way. You know, “in the back of your mind,” that you’re dreaming.

Semi-Lucid
You know that you’re dreaming and you do something about it once or twice. For example, you’re running away from a mugger and you think, “Wait, it’s OK, I’m safe, it’s a dream, and what I need right now is a gun!”, and presto, a gun appears in your hand and you carry on with the dream.

Lucid
You know that you’re dreaming and you continually act on this knowledge. However, some little discrepancies may escape your notice. For instance, you talk to friend, but fail to see that they have blonde hair instead of brown. Or, you have forgotten where you’re actually sleeping. Or, you run from a shadow aspect, thinking that it’s “real.” Or, you miss a sudden change in the dream environment, like a switch from day to night.

Fully Lucid
You know that you’re dreaming, you act on that knowledge continually, and you easily perceive most of the discrepancies you encounter. For instance, you can recall layout of buildings and are aware of examples of impossible physics (as per waking physical reality). Or, if you looked in a mirror, and were wearing glasses (when you don’t normally wear glasses) you’d notice that the glasses didn’t belong. Also, you have better control over your emotions. You can face down dream monsters without much fear, and can come up with creative solutions for dealing with them.

Super Lucid
You know that you’re dreaming, you act on that knowledge continually, you easily reason and ferret out discrepancies and changes, and you have additional insight that you lack while awake. This additional insight can take many forms, but most commonly it’s a kind of inner honesty or clarity. You understand yourself, and your life, in ways that you didn’t consciously understand before. You communicate with an inner consciousness that can make you more aware than before. For instance, once in a lucid dream, I visited the “Museum of Lost Memories” and heard myself recount a situation from childhood that I’d forgotten about.

**

Add:
Some people seem to have a lot of “control dreams,” and it’s confusing to talk to them as a lucid dreamer. At first, it seems like they’re a natural lucid dreamer, and that they have lucid dreams all the time, because they talk about controlling their dreams every night. But, usually, if you keep asking them questions, it becomes clear that they have a lot of non-lucid control dreams, or a lot of semi-lucid dreams (in which they realize they’re dreaming and act once, or intermittenly, to magically change the course of the dream). Most “natural lucid dreamers” that I’ve talked are usually frequent semi-lucid dreamers, or non-lucid control dreamers (by my terms).