Conscious awareness in a WILD lucid dream

[DylanBizarro]

I have yet to have a WILD lucid dream yet and plan to try this week until I get it to work. I was wondering, how consciously aware are you in a lucid dream? For instance, in waking life I can think of past memories, think of things and people that I like, think of song that I like, think to myself, and everything feels exactly real. In all the dreams that I had, this thinking ability is impaired. In my lucid dreams it is also hard to remember things if I even do. In a WILD lucid dream, are you able to think and all that like in real life?

[Zoth]

A lucid dream is just like any other dream, with the difference that you know that you are dreaming. As such, this particular awareness can vary greatly, from having a vague idea that you are dreaming (thus, still being influenced by what's going on around you) to a high degree of lucidity, that you understand what "being in a dream means" and can behave solely by your own will and desires. And here it gets trickier: even though you know that you are dreaming, you're still asleep, and being in some sort of "middle-ground" between sleep and wakefulness, your cognition ( the set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory and working memory, judgement and evaluation, reasoning and "computation", problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc) might be operating differently. For example, you might be unable to remember certain facts or events that happened in your life, what day of the week it is, or what football game is happening tomorrow. At the same time, your own perception is skewed: since you're not receiving sensorial inputs (for example, you don't feel the warmth of the sun, your brain is actually simulating that feeling by a different process, almost like a reverse pathway I believe) like you would if you were awake, so your senses might feel different. In a simpler way of speaking, all the weirdness from normal dreams can also occur in lucid dreams. But there's good news! Although we're ignorant towards many nuances of dreaming, we do know that it is possible for the dreamer to influence it's experience: we're talking about dream control. Dream control begins when you become lucid, and it goes way beyond the simple manipulation of the dream. Stabilization is an example, but many actions actually influence the experience, being one of the most classical examples the occasional reality check we use to maintain a degree of self-awareness inside the dream (as to not let us loose track of ourselves), or setting up goals for when you become lucid. These small actions allow you to more naturally tap into your cognition, just like they would if you were waking up. In extreme cases, being in a state too similar to the waking life might wake you up, so people tend to direct themselves towards the middle ground, controlling their emotions but still maintaining an assertive attitude regarding what happens in their dreams. So how will you naturally find the balance? Experience, experience, and experience. Lucid dreaming is an art in itself, but while each dream may seem radically different than the other, with practice you become better at approaching a state of wakefulness without actually waking yourself up. Don't mistake yourself: at first we all become a bit afraid that we can't go beyond the "drunken state" in our lucid dreams, but that's actually an obstacle you tend to overcome after getting used with the experience Edit: Moving this to Attaining Lucidity, since the topic pertains to any type of lucid dream ^^