LucidRaider

Reading through a thread on the forum, I came up with a fairly interesting question: if we can be lucid or non-lucid in a dream, why are we usually non-lucid? Why is non-lucid the natural state of dreaming and not lucidity?

We go to sleep and hand over control to a different form of consciousness, our dream selves. These selves are much like our waking selves, except that they readily morph into imagined characters and take on our hypothetical situations like they were real (for the most part). They have fairly short attention spans and even shorter memories. From time to time, they get tired of a certain role or situation enough to become lucid, but generally they get easily fixated on just about anything and forget about the lucid option. In reality, they would be hopelessly comic, if not tragic, figures.

Sometimes beforehand we program our minds to create dream selves that desire lucidity, and will have that as a part of their character. These selves will perhaps periodically check something in their world to determine their status, and then upon realizing their state will become lucid, handing control back over to our conscious selves. Or at some subconscious level we will simply be expecting and used to lucid dream selves, and that is what it produces for us.

And yet, upon gaining control, we too easily lose it again, fading back into those dream characters, lost in our own creation.

So why do we do it this way? Why do we so easily hand ourselves over to fantasy? We could be perpetual gods in our dreams, yet instead we all too regularly decide/desire to be nothing more than simple characters, at the mercy of ourselves. Is there an innate desire to be a character and to lose yourself, only for a bit? We can still act a character out in a lucid state, but it would never be as complete.

Is there an innate need to lose yourself? Would perpetual lucidity drain us?

Or is it that we are just too used to it? Grew up with it, before we understood lucidity, before we even were able to understand the world around us, before we were even self aware, and now it's part of our expectations, part of our understanding of reality: our dreams will always tend towards non-lucidity; it takes lots of work and effort to become lucid regularly.

But could we, if we believed it enough, always tend towards lucidity? Is non-lucidity just a remnant of a feeble infant mind, or do we still gain something from it? Could we just ditch all the xILD methods and say, "I'm just going to always be lucid from now on"? Maybe we would need to first examine why it was we desired to be non-lucid in the first place. It should be possible. I call it the belief induced lucid dream (BILD).

Discuss