(February 16, 2018 at 12:58 pm)Mr.Obvious Wrote:(February 16, 2018 at 12:31 pm)emjay Wrote: I understand you could be skeptical if you've never experienced one, cos it does sound kind of wooish, but if you're interested in any of the research on it, the book I mentioned above describes it... where for instance the dreaming research subjects have a pre-arranged signal... moving their eyes... to inform the researcher that they're in the lucid dream state; so that's people under clinical observation sleeping, communicating with the outside world from within the dream state, using the limited physical actions available to them in that state. That demonstrates at least the lucid part... of having wakeful lucidity in the dream state because it not only requires a conscious decision to make that attempt to communicate, but also requires remembering something from waking life... ie the pre-arranged signal. But as to the actual control over the content of the dream, I guess that's not something that can be as easily demonstrated, so again, if you're skeptical, I guess it's something you won't truly believe until you experience it for yourself. All I know is that it's the coolest thing in the world to me, but I understand you can't take my word for it
Oh no, i've had one or two. I just couldn't tell if they were truly lucid or if i dreamt i was having a lucid dream. Iffen that makes sense
Ah right, I see (I think
). That sounds kind of like a Descartes type question... an extension of how can you tell the difference between waking life and a dream, and ultimately can you? But applied to lucid dreams vs normal dreams, I think one of the techniques the book teaches might be helpful in trying to identify what the differences are: one thing the book suggests is to keep a log of your normal dreams and from within that, identify certain 'dream signs'... which you then try to turn into a conscious habit to look for in waking life, in the hope that that habit persists when you are asleep and dreaming; in other words the equivalent of learning a habit of reality testing saying essentially 'am I dreaming?', which if answered in the affirmative in the dream would make you lucid. Another more generic example of a dream sign would just be things like the fact that numbers never stay the same in dreams; look at your watch twice in a dream and it would show completely different times, but not so in reality. So, that's one difference between the dream world and the real world... consistency. So from that it seems to me that the difference between reality, normal dreams, and lucid dreams is not in your consciousness per se (ie if the only difference between a normal dream and a lucid dream is that you're aware it's a dream)... in all of them you have your conscious faculties in operation but in the first two, you take your environment for granted, but in the latter you don't. That seems a pretty good way of differentiating it to me; in the first two, you take the world you're presented with as real and external to you (ie outside your control) and thus think and act within its constraints... after all, you don't question whether reality is a dream either (unless in Descartes mode ) so if a normal dream is likewise taken for granted, there'd be no reason from within the dream to question it either... so the only difference then is the possibilities opened up by becoming aware it's a dream; the same conscious awareness and thought processes in play as in the other two cases but with the added knowledge that it's a dream and the implications of that.
