Lucid Dreaming | Philosophies of Lucid Dreaming

All across the boards, you see people post "lucid dreaming is like" or "lucid dreaming is all about"

This is a thread for all the different philosophies, I think that analogies for this can help a lot of people. My philosophy as you might have seen somewhere else on the forum:



Dual awareness

In my opinion, you need three things in order to get lucid:

Sleep

General Dream Awareness

State Awareness



I have used this as the three things that I think are needed to get lucid. You need to be asleep (which we all do anyways), Have enough awareness in a dream to actually be there and think for yourself, and have enough of a grasp on dreams that even on the fly, your mind will think "Dream" when something is wrong or just at the start of the dream.

BB's Ideas, Thoughts, and Ramblings

^^ It is all in this post.



Analogy:

In order to be successful in sports (really anything, going with sports for a narrow analogy) you need to do three things:

play (sleep)

pay attention when you are playing (general dream awareness)

know how to play correctly (state awareness)



If you don't play enough, you can't get good at it.

If you spend a lot of time just playing without paying attention, or without knowing how to do it right, you will develop bad habits in game, (this is where most start at with LDing, so we have to overcome all of our bad habits and that is why it gets easier and easier to LD because you are over all the bad habits)

If you know how to play correctly, but don't play enough you won't be able to get better than you ever were, it doesn't matter if you pay attention when you are playing because you don't have enough experience at one time to get better. If you get experience and don't get it close together, then it doesn't really stack up.



This one is confusing a bit

If you know how to play correctly and you do play often, but don't pay attention to the game, then you will find yourself playing correctly without thinking. This is good in sports but not in lucidity. (This is what some call "false lucidity", technically you are lucid, but in the dream you will know that you are dreaming but not do much about it, or just do random things that you have thought about doing without actually thinking in a dream)



Hope that was written well... I am freaking tired.

Spoiler for Sageous analogy and philosophu:

Sageous posted this:

Quote:

---

In a sense, LD’ing is a 3-legged stool. The first leg is the state of dreaming itself, and the second and third legs are self-awareness and memory. The absence of any one of these legs means the stool topples and poof! No lucidity. It’s that simple. All the machines, gurus, techniques, and supplements in the world would do nothing, I knew, until I mastered these two things.



Of course I haven’t yet mastered either; that might never happen. Although I -- and any successful LD’er, I must assume -- had some grasp of these “legs,” my hold was far too tenuous to seek the things that I knew I should be able to find. But the act of finally making self-awareness and memory a priority elevated my LD’ing experience from one of enjoying the wonders of my dreams as supplied by my dreaming mind to one of real control, creativity, discovery, and growth. Since improving my self-awareness, some of my dreams, I think, have been downright transcendental in the last few years, and I believe it is because I simplified my quest. Now, for those still with me, the fundamentals:



Self-awareness is nothing more -- or less -- than being aware that you are here, that you have an effect on everything around you, and everything around you has an effect on you. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s a lot harder to master than it sounds. Most people are content to live their entire lives without a moment of self-awareness, content to let the events of their world wash over them and to remain unaware of how the things they do and say touch those events…sort of living life like it’s a dream, I suppose. Perfecting self-awareness is simple: pay attention! Unfortunately, humans are naturally wired to not pay this sort of attention, so it takes a lot of work to stay focused and not lapse back into the easy strides taken by those who travel life without ever once checking the path.



Memory is more of a physical issue, because it is “turned off” during sleep, naturally out of reach of dreamers. This is why so many things in your dreams seem so normal and obvious, but in reality are impossible. Turning memory back on is not easy, but it can be done. Indeed, there are many mnemonic techniques available that will help you, but suffice it for now to say that if you can’t remember during a dream that your waking life body is sleeping right where you left it, you might never be able to step above the lowest levels of lucidity. And yes, your dreams are certainly filled with “remembered” images; but these images are awash in a matrix of archetypes and powerful long-term memories. Short-term memory, and active long-term memory (the thing that reminds you that cows really can’t fly), are naturally inaccessible.

---

I hope that this is a thread that noobs can learn from so that they can get a better grasp on what it takes to LD. I think that a lot of them are similar in ways, but it is the tiny differences that I think that make the difference for it to click for someone.

via Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views - Attaining Lucidity http://ift.tt/1fc64hK