Hi, I wanted to make a thread where I compile some of my insights toward engaging in mindful awareness and directing, controlling, and maintaining my attention--whether it be in waking life or while lucid dreaming. I was hoping that anybody else that has a different approach or perspective could also share and we could exchange ideas. I know there are already plenty of All Day Awareness technique threads and whatnot, but I hope that this one is a little bit more open forum and that we can get a good discussion going. I'm hoping it'll be a great chance for learning and we might surprise each other with the ingenuity of some of our techniques and habits, or the unique angle some of us might approach this with.
Attention, Awareness, and Mindful Awareness
To begin with, I think I'll make the distinction between attention and awareness as I see it.
Attention specifically refers to the act or process of directing and focusing one's conscious awareness on something.
Awareness is a more nebulous term; at it's core, awareness just refers to a conscious entity/being's ability to recognize and react to a given stimulus or set of stimuli (of course, understanding is a reaction in itself).
The purpose of adding the modifier "mindful" to the concept of awareness is to encapsulate the idea that one is not simply at the base level of awareness to be considered conscious and awake, but also attentive and maintaining a balanced awareness of one's external reality, environment, one's own body, and one's internal reality as well.
In-Depth Perspective on Being Mindfully Aware and its Relation to Dreaming
Most of my habits and techniques revolve around finding ways of almost unconsciously triggering what basically amount to reality checks. The only difference is I'm not actually performing a reality check. Personally, reality checks do almost nothing for me. Any time I get to the point of performing one in a dream, I already know I'm dreaming, and I'm simply performing the RC to verify that I am, knowing full well that the results don't really matter and do little more than make me doubly sure I am in fact dreaming. Reality checks as a practice are only useful, as it pertains to me, for becoming more aware of one's own thought patterns and developing good habits and techniques for maintaining mindful awareness once in a lucid dream.
Think about how often you find yourself spacing out, day dreaming, or otherwise letting yourself run at 50-75% autopilot while going through your daily activities. This tendency to be lost in thought is directly related to the tendency you have to lose awareness and lucidity in a dream. Given you're in an altered state where frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex activity is mostly inhibited (the areas most responsible for or at least heavily implicated in executive functioning, decision making, logical reasoning, and attention/awareness), this tendency to slip into lower states of awareness is going to be exacerbated, even. It's not quite as exacerbated if you've become lucid in a dream, but it's still going to be amplified to a certain degree and means loss of dream control and possibly lucidity altogether.
So, if you develop habits to keep yourself on track for several 20-30 minute spurts several times a day, these will translate somewhat during non-lucids hopefully,
but the greatest impact will be in your ability to maintain the greatest level of lucidity and control once you've already become aware you are dreaming.
My Way of Being Mindfully Aware
One thing I usually have to be mindful of is that practicing any one thing often enough means it will eventually become a routine, mindless habit. Your efforts to remain aware once establishing a routine are going to be very... multi-tiered, let's say. For example, let's go through my own routine now that I've already established some decent groundwork and developed some habits. I catch myself not having really been paying attention to anything in a while, so I continue what I am doing but do a scan of pretty much everything. I think about where I am, what I'm doing, the fact I'm in a building and in a chair, I notice what it looks like from my first person perspective while taking in the whole picture, and start relaxing my body a bit while making my breathing more regular and controlled. I don't actually think especially hard about any of these things, I focus more on the feeling while keeping my thoughts going more or less the same as they already were before I started the check. I pay attention to how exactly someone speaking sounds and the type of motions they're making, etc. All while taking in these little details, I make sure not to actually get lost in any of them. I'm constantly, yet in a very relaxed and natural way alternating my attention to all these different things almost simultaneously.
The process I take itself has become routine enough that I no longer have to think about the process and I am free to focus my attention on not becoming overly aware of any one thing while still being as aware of all that I can as possible in a fluid, passive yet directed manner. It's like I'm looking at and experiencing the small, medium, and large level details of everything while simultaneously keeping the big picture in mind.
I used to attempt awareness at things and it was very mentally exhausting or otherwise too taxing to keep up for more than 5 minutes. It was like I was trying to brute force everything and I kept going down the rabbit holes of paying attention too much to any one or one group of things. Now it's a process that occurs very naturally on its own and only requires small guiding nudges to maintain... just the proper thought here or there of a new way to experience what it is you're already experiencing. It allows me to continue participating in any activity I'm already engaged in, because the process is unintrusive/not mentally taxing.
I need some time to gather some more of my thoughts, but I certainly have more I can expound on (I may edit them in, or I might make it a separate post); I'm too tired after work to keep writing, sorry lol. If anyone has questions for me specifically feel free to ask, and I hope we can get some great ideas shared. Please, if you guys have anything you feel like might be helpful for somebody else that you've found to be helpful for yourself, share!
Attention, Awareness, and Mindful Awareness
To begin with, I think I'll make the distinction between attention and awareness as I see it.
Attention specifically refers to the act or process of directing and focusing one's conscious awareness on something.
Awareness is a more nebulous term; at it's core, awareness just refers to a conscious entity/being's ability to recognize and react to a given stimulus or set of stimuli (of course, understanding is a reaction in itself).
The purpose of adding the modifier "mindful" to the concept of awareness is to encapsulate the idea that one is not simply at the base level of awareness to be considered conscious and awake, but also attentive and maintaining a balanced awareness of one's external reality, environment, one's own body, and one's internal reality as well.
In-Depth Perspective on Being Mindfully Aware and its Relation to Dreaming
Most of my habits and techniques revolve around finding ways of almost unconsciously triggering what basically amount to reality checks. The only difference is I'm not actually performing a reality check. Personally, reality checks do almost nothing for me. Any time I get to the point of performing one in a dream, I already know I'm dreaming, and I'm simply performing the RC to verify that I am, knowing full well that the results don't really matter and do little more than make me doubly sure I am in fact dreaming. Reality checks as a practice are only useful, as it pertains to me, for becoming more aware of one's own thought patterns and developing good habits and techniques for maintaining mindful awareness once in a lucid dream.
Think about how often you find yourself spacing out, day dreaming, or otherwise letting yourself run at 50-75% autopilot while going through your daily activities. This tendency to be lost in thought is directly related to the tendency you have to lose awareness and lucidity in a dream. Given you're in an altered state where frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex activity is mostly inhibited (the areas most responsible for or at least heavily implicated in executive functioning, decision making, logical reasoning, and attention/awareness), this tendency to slip into lower states of awareness is going to be exacerbated, even. It's not quite as exacerbated if you've become lucid in a dream, but it's still going to be amplified to a certain degree and means loss of dream control and possibly lucidity altogether.
So, if you develop habits to keep yourself on track for several 20-30 minute spurts several times a day, these will translate somewhat during non-lucids hopefully,
but the greatest impact will be in your ability to maintain the greatest level of lucidity and control once you've already become aware you are dreaming.
My Way of Being Mindfully Aware
One thing I usually have to be mindful of is that practicing any one thing often enough means it will eventually become a routine, mindless habit. Your efforts to remain aware once establishing a routine are going to be very... multi-tiered, let's say. For example, let's go through my own routine now that I've already established some decent groundwork and developed some habits. I catch myself not having really been paying attention to anything in a while, so I continue what I am doing but do a scan of pretty much everything. I think about where I am, what I'm doing, the fact I'm in a building and in a chair, I notice what it looks like from my first person perspective while taking in the whole picture, and start relaxing my body a bit while making my breathing more regular and controlled. I don't actually think especially hard about any of these things, I focus more on the feeling while keeping my thoughts going more or less the same as they already were before I started the check. I pay attention to how exactly someone speaking sounds and the type of motions they're making, etc. All while taking in these little details, I make sure not to actually get lost in any of them. I'm constantly, yet in a very relaxed and natural way alternating my attention to all these different things almost simultaneously.
The process I take itself has become routine enough that I no longer have to think about the process and I am free to focus my attention on not becoming overly aware of any one thing while still being as aware of all that I can as possible in a fluid, passive yet directed manner. It's like I'm looking at and experiencing the small, medium, and large level details of everything while simultaneously keeping the big picture in mind.
I used to attempt awareness at things and it was very mentally exhausting or otherwise too taxing to keep up for more than 5 minutes. It was like I was trying to brute force everything and I kept going down the rabbit holes of paying attention too much to any one or one group of things. Now it's a process that occurs very naturally on its own and only requires small guiding nudges to maintain... just the proper thought here or there of a new way to experience what it is you're already experiencing. It allows me to continue participating in any activity I'm already engaged in, because the process is unintrusive/not mentally taxing.
I need some time to gather some more of my thoughts, but I certainly have more I can expound on (I may edit them in, or I might make it a separate post); I'm too tired after work to keep writing, sorry lol. If anyone has questions for me specifically feel free to ask, and I hope we can get some great ideas shared. Please, if you guys have anything you feel like might be helpful for somebody else that you've found to be helpful for yourself, share!
via Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views - Attaining Lucidity http://ift.tt/2oe73Kv
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