NDs, id say roundabout… 65%
But since ive been trying to get vivid dreams, as i wasnt happy with not getting them! [after reading certain accounts of people saying their dreams were clearer than real life…¬¬] Id say its gone up abit. I used to have 40-50% on LDs,
But i had one where i solely tried to get vividness… and id rate it 100%+
Usually, I’d say my dreams are around 40-80%, I guess that’s a wide range. Lucids are usually between 70-100%, mostly closer to 70%. Recently I had a lucid that was 100+% which was very exciting. That one really reminded me how awesome lucid dreaming can be.
Obviously it varies based on how good the recall is but I’d say the typical ND is 70-80% with most LD’s at 90% or better.
@ viscount slurpee - Low vividness is typically caused by poor recall, if that improves you will probably start remembering dreams much more vividly.
I think what Lucidity_Master is trying to say is, that you actually might experience the dreams in vivid reality but you just cant recall it.
You compared your dreams to a 20 year old memory - What you’ve experienced differs from the memory though in vividness, doesnt it? I mean, back then, it felt like reality… Do you know what I mean? 
Cheers
Nick
viscount: i was the exact same… they were crap vividness, i wasnt even in my own body… i hated it… then i made it my ission to get vivid dreams… and it really did work! this was only recently though, so ive only had one. but hell it was worth it!
I hope you hsve the same luck. And your not the only one.
My vividness improved with dream recall. On the scale I’d say my ND’s are around 70-90% of reality’s vividness, depending on the dreams themselves. More often than not it’s VERY close to reality. I’ve only had one really long Lucid Dream, and it was extremely vivid.
But as you can see from my Dream Journal, sometimes I can remember quite a large amount of detail in normal dreams too. Usually I remember even more than what I write about, though. Sometimes I can recall texts on signposts, the way something smelled and sounded, how things fit together from other dreams that I’ve had etc.
Heck, if I was any good as an artist I could probably draw you a map of a random city from a random dream right now. Sometimes I remember every house and every tree and I have a near-perfect mental image of various dream scenes.
But I can tell you one thing: I didn’t start out like that. It took me a few weeks to get my recall to the level it’s at now. So don’t worry, you’ll get there in time.
I felt the same way viscount, i hated LDs cause people were going on about how theirs was SO like real life… and i was just like… yeh mine are blurry and crap … 
But it changes in my LDs where i expect vividness. Otherwise my NDs are pretty crap.
Thank you, that is exactly what I was trying to say. Lets say you fall down and break your arm, an hour after that you can still vividly and strongly recall what it felt like, a few weeks later, however, you might remember some of that pain but it won’t quite seem like reality. Try to recall the incident 5 years later and it will be little more than a vague impression. Essentially if your dream recall isn’t “sharp” you will remember dreams more like 5 year old memories as opposed to minutes old.
To continue illustrating this imagine if I had you look at a scene for 5 minutes. Then a minute later I asked you to think about it and tell me about it things would be fresh in your mind and you would clearly be able to picture the scene. If I came back a year later though, all the details would be gone and you might just have a vague impression of what that scene was.
I can almost assure you that this is the cause of your lack of vividness in dreams. Remember, when you dream your brain attempts to model the world, however, it has little to no active sensory input to work with (this is what causes the randomness of dreams). As such, it can only rely on what has been experienced in the past. Therefore, unless you are a very unique person, the world it models will be an attempt at the real one which is quite vivid.
I would agree that vividness has increased with an improvement in my dream recall. But there is still also a sense in which it feels like my brain doesn’t populate my ND’s with as much detail as an LD. Because I am focused on one thing in my dream it seems like it neglects all those details which I am not interested in.
When I had my first (and only) LD it felt like my senses expanded dramatically, to full vividness! It is this sensation as much as anything else that has me pursuing my next LD.
Normal dreams - 25 %
Once i realize I’m dreaming - 110% or more
For a time back in August and September I had a lot of sort of “old film” dreams, that had kind of grainy-overexposed visuals and no other sensations. One of them was even an LD.
Either my normal dreams are usually very vivid, or I’m freakishly hypersensitive, and that’s not always good. I can dream of smells (I read somewhere that according to Freud we can’t really do that,) feel pain (folk psychology says we can’t really do that, either-- geeaaaugh, nightmare red needle-worms rasping through the soles of my feet, I disagree!!) even recently got slapped by a rain of dead fish and rotting shipwreck debris. Did I mention I can dream smells? (That last dream was both lucid, and vivid. And-- Eeew.)
I wonder if it’s easier to raise vividness, or tone it down… if it’s the former,
Viscount, I kind of envy your ability to detach from SC-ary dream stuff 
There isn’t a big difference between the vividness of my NDs and LDs. Both are very vivid. So I never get that leap in vividness when becoming lucid that many dreamers report.
Vision and touch are very high, followed by sound. Then taste and smell are lower. But it’s probably how I use the senses in RL too.
I wonder if dreamers who have low vividness in NDs are more likely to recognise that it is a dream? A dream feeling?
I haven’t found that to be the case for me at all. 
I have been having some trouble going from unquestioningly accepting everything that happens in my dreams to being more critical of reality. So far the few things that have made me stop during a dream and think, “this is weird” have been mainly circumstantial and not experiential.
I got one general question, do you actually count “emotions” as a factor of vividness?
Well, yeah, obviously.
There have been dreams in which I’ve felt very powerful emotions (fear, regret, sadness, joy, anger, excitement, everything). About a year ago I had a dream where I killed two pilots by smashing their planes against each other in mid-air using telekinesis (non-lucid dream BTW) and after I did that I started crying uncontrollably, wondering how I could be so cruel.
So yeah, they can definitely play a huge part in vividness and “realness”.
I have a very similar experience to you, viscount slurpee. Particularly this part…
And also I have similar experience in regards to emotions in dreams. The dream may be dull in terms of senses, but I experience a wide-range of emotions (sometimes heightened by the dreamworld I suspect).