Animism and Dreams

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Originally Posted by Coatl

As for the absence of the "aha" moment though, I suppose this is just a difference between the DILD and WILD, because that's the condition how I always perceive them.

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Nah, I'm just not capable of finding the words to accurately describe the nuance between how it feels and "works" to normally have a lucid dream, regardless of induction method, and how it feels and works out that I'm aware of dreaming now. The most significant difference to me is how active and highly conscious the former experience and sensation is in contrast with how subtle and unconscious the latter is. What makes things a bit more confusing than they need to be is the fact that you'd normally associate awareness with conscious attention to and comprehension of reality, so the fact my awareness of dreaming is so subtle and unconscious in function seems almost paradoxical or like an oxymoron in a way.

I definitely agree that making a distinction between lucidity and non-lucidity, along with consciously directing effort toward becoming lucid is pretty much entirely irrelevant, if not in many ways potentially detrimental to developing and fully realizing one's ability to be aware of one's dream and to interact with it. Lucidity vs. non-lucidity is just a false dichotomy. It only succeeds in creating a sharp boundary where one doesn't need to exist and has little utility in being established there. This would logically cause any beliefs or expectations surrounding dreaming to be reduced to gross over-generalizations that make the process of being and becoming more aware of and involved in the dream state more difficult because of how ambiguous the and nebulous the concepts of lucidity and non-lucidity are. Despite the terminology being painted in simple black and white, it really only muddies the waters concerning everything.

Really it almost seems obvious that defining the phenomena that way could only ever really make understanding what exactly "lucid" dreaming is and how to best go about achieving such an experience more difficult. There's always an equivalent exchange involved in everything we do. The potential benefits and costs to doing something a certain way have an inversely proportional relationship with one another. The benefit of the simplicity in defining in very certain, unambiguous terms the state of being aware while dreaming as being lucid and lacking awareness as being non-lucid is too the very detriment to ever understanding the dreaming process on a whole (inclusive of the various levels of awareness that one is capable of experiencing during a dream) in anything other than in overly simplistic ways that are bereft of any significant meaning... or, at least, meaning significant and nuanced enough to be at all effective at helping us do anything.

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Originally Posted by snoop

I definitely agree that making a distinction between lucidity and non-lucidity, along with consciously directing effort toward becoming lucid is pretty much entirely irrelevant, if not in many ways potentially detrimental to developing and fully realizing one's ability to be aware of one's dream and to interact with it. Lucidity vs. non-lucidity is just a false dichotomy.

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I realize as I read your post, that beyond the misleading dichotomy of lucidity, our definition of dreaming is bound to affect our lucidity. In a naive "aha moment," we feel we now have opened our eyes to our state: "I am dreaming!" If we are ignorant about this state, we have barely been made more aware of anything.

If I think about it, the "I am dreaming" eureka moment comes with the realization that "nothing is real; everything is illusion." Sure, that's not false. Yet, the assumption is that nothing is meaningful... And I feel this might be an important reason why my dreams break up upon lucidity (myself not being alone to experience this phenomena). If the "aha moment" is the realization that nothing is meaningful and if the dream is trying to find meaningful connections (as loose as they may be), it makes sense that the dream would collapse. The oneironaut experiences a nihilistic dream crisis.

Shamans dream with purpose. You wouldn't expect a shaman to experience dream nihilism. They think dreams are meaningful. You wouldn't expect their entry in the dream world to be "aha, nothing is real!"

I feel if we plan on realizing that we are in a dream, we must be cautious to know what that means to us. "I am dreaming, swimming in meaning" might be a more constructive "aha moment." Yet, I am not aware of all the negative or misleading assumptions that we make when the flash of lucidity washes over us.

At the risk of beating an already dead horse:

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Originally Posted by Coatl

Well, this may again be the explanation why discerning between lucid and non-lucid is unimportant or even irrelevant for certain (level of) dreaming mindset. As for the absence of the "aha" moment though, I suppose this is just a difference between the DILD and WILD, because that's the condition how I always perceive them.

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I've had about as many DILD's as I've had WILD's, and the "Aha!" moment has been pretty much absent from all of each.

Snoop and Occipitalred have already offered up excellent reasons for an absent "Aha" moment, and I couldn't have said what they said any better. I just thought I would mention that I believe that the "Aha" moment has far less to do with a dreamer's manner of transition to lucidity than it does his attitude toward the nature and consequences of the transition itself (which I think might be what we're really talking about here).