I had my first instance this morning of a semi-lucid dream, and I have a couple of questions about the experience.
First, I dream in a very ‘conceptual’ mode, for lack of a better term—my dreams don’t give me detailed sensory data, usually I get concepts (eg. ‘I am now standing on a balcony’) and then a brief flash of an image supplied from one or more memories. I almost never get sound or smell, and I don’t remember ever having gotten touch or taste. I also don’t usually get much in the way of emotions. Does anyone know how to get more immediate sensory data? It seems like most of the benefits that people talk about from lucid dreaming come from feeling like they’re fully embodied in the dream.
Secondly, in hindsight it felt like my conscious and subconscious were duking it out, and I’d be interested in techniques for increasing conscious control/awareness. I realised I was dreaming and thought that I should try flying, and my dream obligingly teleported me up onto a balcony/rooftop so that I could take off, but then my subconscious kept trying to add extra elements—it tried to put a railing on the balcony, it made the weather change to rain, that sort of thing.
I’ve been trying to self-experiment with very similar questions since some point in 2012, though motivation to keep it going consistently has been lacking and I don’t have much in the way of data, so I doubt this will help much.
The sensory bit is one I put a lot of attention on, and whenever something strange happens with senses, I usually add it to my dreamstudy file (I keep two files running in parallel: one for me to record any dreams I want to remember, the other for trying to make sense of them in terms of lucidity/experience/abilities/etc). My vision declined greatly starting in 2002, but visual detail in dreams was much slower to decline, and did so in a unique way that is hard to describe, until the present where there rarely seems to be any visual element at all. I set as a goal to better understand, and if possible, improve dream-vision, and my results have been spotty, but not altogether useless.
My findings seem to indicate that I can get poor-quality visuals when lucid and I try to force them to happen, but better quality visuals show up on their own if I’m in a situation where visuals are the most obvious solution to the problem at hand. I haven’t experimented enough with this particular hypothesis, but if I had to recommend a particular strategy, I’d start with putting yourself in a situation where sensory information seems the only obvious solution to the immediate problem.
As for overcoming my subconscious, this feels like something that takes a good understanding of the sorts of things your subconscious pulls, when, why, and how you’d rather it didn’t. I’ve found fear of it going wrong to be a pretty dangerous approach; it sort of works best when you expect things to turn out a certain way (which feels a lot like making a deliberate effort to believe something, which I’m pretty sure gets you into Rationalist Hell), but after a while, it feels like I have enough of an understanding of how my mind tends to work in dreams to overcome the conscious vs subconscious problem. It works best with constant practice, though. I can’t really get more specific on that front, since I usually wind up lucid in situations where I would prefer not to break the immersion (I’ve actually thought the phrase “I don’t want to break the immersion” in dreams), so it’s very rare that I try to assume total control. Actual lucid dreaming guides will recommend you have a plan before falling asleep. I haven’t tried that often, but it’s only worked once (the attempts have been spread out over more than a decade; the successful one was the most recent). Most of the guides I’ve come across all use similar instructions, though I don’t think any really address your questions in particular. They mostly recommend keeping journals, usually justified as a means of remembering. I use them as a means of untangling what my mind was doing and why, and then making efforts at using those patterns to my advantage. I can’t say if any patterns I’ve noticed in myself will be applicable to anyone else. (I could try cleaning up and posting excerpts from my notes if desired, though they’re not really written for general consumption so that might get a little messy.)
I had my first instance this morning of a semi-lucid dream, and I have a couple of questions about the experience.
First, I dream in a very ‘conceptual’ mode, for lack of a better term—my dreams don’t give me detailed sensory data, usually I get concepts (eg. ‘I am now standing on a balcony’) and then a brief flash of an image supplied from one or more memories. I almost never get sound or smell, and I don’t remember ever having gotten touch or taste. I also don’t usually get much in the way of emotions. Does anyone know how to get more immediate sensory data? It seems like most of the benefits that people talk about from lucid dreaming come from feeling like they’re fully embodied in the dream.
Secondly, in hindsight it felt like my conscious and subconscious were duking it out, and I’d be interested in techniques for increasing conscious control/awareness. I realised I was dreaming and thought that I should try flying, and my dream obligingly teleported me up onto a balcony/rooftop so that I could take off, but then my subconscious kept trying to add extra elements—it tried to put a railing on the balcony, it made the weather change to rain, that sort of thing.
I’ve been trying to self-experiment with very similar questions since some point in 2012, though motivation to keep it going consistently has been lacking and I don’t have much in the way of data, so I doubt this will help much.
The sensory bit is one I put a lot of attention on, and whenever something strange happens with senses, I usually add it to my dreamstudy file (I keep two files running in parallel: one for me to record any dreams I want to remember, the other for trying to make sense of them in terms of lucidity/experience/abilities/etc). My vision declined greatly starting in 2002, but visual detail in dreams was much slower to decline, and did so in a unique way that is hard to describe, until the present where there rarely seems to be any visual element at all. I set as a goal to better understand, and if possible, improve dream-vision, and my results have been spotty, but not altogether useless.
My findings seem to indicate that I can get poor-quality visuals when lucid and I try to force them to happen, but better quality visuals show up on their own if I’m in a situation where visuals are the most obvious solution to the problem at hand. I haven’t experimented enough with this particular hypothesis, but if I had to recommend a particular strategy, I’d start with putting yourself in a situation where sensory information seems the only obvious solution to the immediate problem.
As for overcoming my subconscious, this feels like something that takes a good understanding of the sorts of things your subconscious pulls, when, why, and how you’d rather it didn’t. I’ve found fear of it going wrong to be a pretty dangerous approach; it sort of works best when you expect things to turn out a certain way (which feels a lot like making a deliberate effort to believe something, which I’m pretty sure gets you into Rationalist Hell), but after a while, it feels like I have enough of an understanding of how my mind tends to work in dreams to overcome the conscious vs subconscious problem. It works best with constant practice, though. I can’t really get more specific on that front, since I usually wind up lucid in situations where I would prefer not to break the immersion (I’ve actually thought the phrase “I don’t want to break the immersion” in dreams), so it’s very rare that I try to assume total control. Actual lucid dreaming guides will recommend you have a plan before falling asleep. I haven’t tried that often, but it’s only worked once (the attempts have been spread out over more than a decade; the successful one was the most recent). Most of the guides I’ve come across all use similar instructions, though I don’t think any really address your questions in particular. They mostly recommend keeping journals, usually justified as a means of remembering. I use them as a means of untangling what my mind was doing and why, and then making efforts at using those patterns to my advantage. I can’t say if any patterns I’ve noticed in myself will be applicable to anyone else. (I could try cleaning up and posting excerpts from my notes if desired, though they’re not really written for general consumption so that might get a little messy.)