主题:Ada Right Wrong LucidityI've noticed that All Day Awareness (ADA) has been gaining in popularity lately, and one tutorial and advisory thread after another has come to accept it as given that ADA is an important, if not essential, tool for achieving lucidity. I have been familiar with ADA for a long time, and understand its value as a tool for meditation, but I for probably one have never considered ADA a useful tool for developing LD'ing skills. Indeed, I have been wondering lately if the rise of ADA's popularity might be moving people away from, rather than toward, consistent lucidity.
So, at the risk of the slings and arrows that accompany contradiction, and at the suggestion of a couple of interested dreamers on another thread, I thought I'd start a thread to discuss ADA, and maybe determine whether practicing it clears or clutters the path to lucidity. I hope everyone will bear with me through this post so we can get a good baseline for healthy discussion. Here we go:
First, what is ADA? Here is the definition from DV's Wiki, which seems pretty straightforward and more than acceptable:
ADA is all about developing a habit of paying attention to details of your surroundings and yourself (awareness) while awake, with the intention of being more aware in your dreams. You can focus on things like the objects in the room around you, your muscles as you walk down the street, people's faces, your own breathing, the sound of the wind, or the pressure you use to hit a key in your keyboard. Everything in your surroundings, including any sensation, can be used to practice ADA.
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Now, this thread is for discussion of ADA, where hopefully LD'er's will offer their opinions about why ADA works or why they think it is not very helpful. Regardless of my stated personal (and still quite flexible) opinion, this is not an OP announcing that ADA doesn't work, so please let's not get into an “Is too, because I said so!” “Is not, because I said so!” sort of argument, because that doesn't help anyone.
It would be great to hear from both experienced LDer's and novices alike. From the experienced dreamers we can get opinions from dreamers who have had more than a couple of successful dreams using ADA, or have found it unhelpful. Plus, because all techniques, no matter how useful, tend to work well a couple of times thanks to the placebo effect, and then are “inexplicably” rendered useless after the placebo effect wears off, it would be nice to hear from novices (aka newbies) who practiced ADA but have seen little to no ongoing success with LD'ing.
Basically there are just two questions to consider:
1. Has ADA worked for you? If so, how and why?
2. Regardless of your success, what is your take on ADA?
If you have any questions about this, or my way-too-brief opinion below, please ask.
So I hope we'll have a good discussion among lots of dreamers, experienced and novice alike, that everyone stays calm and open, and I also hope that I don't get dragged into some electronic public square to be punished for my heresy!
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Here is my take on ADA:
On paper, ADA seems ideal to LD'ing, because it exercises your awareness. On paper. In reality, though, I think it exercises the wrong awareness necessary to successfully LD.
Huh, you ask?
Yeah, that does sound strange, but in truth it is not. And be assured I am not playing some silly semantics game. The sort of awareness we want to develop and have on hand for LD'ing is self-awareness, whose definition and practice lies at the other end of the consciousness spectrum from the awareness practiced in ADA.
Self-awareness is nothing more -- or less -- than being aware that you are here, that you have an effect on everything around you, and everything around you has an effect on you. Self-awareness is the sense that “I am here, and I am interacting with reality” which is also the sense you want to have during a dream. In other words, it is the most “unnatural” state of consciousness, in that we only invented sentience a short time ago, evolutionarily-speaking.
Mastering self-awareness allows a dreamer to know that the universe she is in is a dream, and that universe is of her own making, a part of her consciousness... fairly important things to know for successful LD'ing, I think!
Awareness in this context is the condition of being on one's guard, conscious of your surroundings, or simply knowing that there is stuff going on around you. Awareness is the sense that “the world is here, and I am a small part of it.” Awareness is a primordial function that exists to some degree in every living thing, and always has.
As opposed to self-awareness, which is drawn from biologically unique sentient consciousness (which is the basis for a whole other thread, I think, but ask if you want more about that), awareness is a universally common natural function: all living things practice awareness, with most of them being truly adept at ADA. A mouse, for instance, practices ADA far better than we do, so as not to get eaten. Awareness at this level is fine, and ought to be practiced; we all need to pay attention! But awareness at this level -- which by the way is already built, naturally, into dreams -- is anathema to lucidity. This is so because natural awareness causes a dreamer to believe that the world of his dream is the world that is here, and that the dreamer is but a part of it. ADA, I think, would only amplify that feeling:
ADA teaches you to pay attention to everything around you, every physical impulse you can comfortably absorb. Doing this all day, every day, might eventually lead you to believe that the world is huge, complex, and you are just a small unwitting participant in it “all.” That may all be true, I suppose, but I think it might not be the best cognitive place a budding LD'er necessarily wants to go.
That is because, come dreamtime, though your ADA training will have helped you to notice lots of details in your dream, and possibly has increased your chances of spotting a dream sign or two, there is a better chance that you will believe, from all that daytime observation, that this dream world you are in is much bigger than you, and you are only an insignificant player in it… the dream is not yours.
In other words, ADA might embed in you a sense that the dream world is real, that all these details you are observing have to be there, were always there, and did not spring from your own unconscious imagination.
Self-awareness, on the other hand, allows you to remember that this dream world, complex and enormous as it may be, is simply an extension of your own mind and everything that happens here is a result of your presence. From that comes lucidity, control, and adventures of your own conscious invention.
Tl;dr: ADA is fine, but you must have self-awareness in order to achieve and sustain lucidity. Enhanced natural awareness may actually diminish your chances of LD'ing because it makes the dream world too important, and it would be especially damaging if you practiced it in place of working on your self-awareness.
That's what I have so far... anyone care to discuss?
Great responses, people; I'm hoping there'll be more!
Here are just a few quick responses; which I'll keep brief so as not to interfere with the cadence of the thread:
Meskhetyw: Great post, and I think you did a much better job describing ADA as a good tool for lucidity (by way of self-awareness), but not the tool; thank you! I'm reasonably familiar with dream yoga, though, and you have to wonder why the yogis don't use ADA (or do they?).
tofur: Since self-awareness is a subject unto itself, it might be best to not go off on such a tangent at this point (maybe later!). But I do talk about it a bit in the first session of my WILD class and in my Lucid Dreaming Fundamentals thread; if you're interested, you might have a look over there, and feel free to post any questions on the WILD Q & A thread or the Fundamentals thread. I hope you do!
JoannaB: I mostly agree, but you raise a question: can't ADA be susceptible to falling into "autopilot" mode, just as RC's are?
Zoth: That was brief? I'd never thought of ADA for dream recall, and honestly still have trouble doing so, though you are a very credible source, even when anecdotal!
Funny, though I've used the term "mindfulness," or direct synonyms anyway, in many of my posts and I think my WILD class, I managed to leave it out here. My bad, I think, because self-awareness and mindfulness go hand-in-hand. But do natural awareness, as tapped in ADA, and mindfulness share the same camaraderie? Of that I'm not so sure -- so, I think, practicing mindfulness (and right-mindfulness, for the spiritual types) is closer to developing self-awareness than ADA. If I'm wrong, be sure to tell me why...
King Yoshi: First, rest assured that I had no idea you had an ADA tutorial, and this is in no way an attack on your work or your opinion. Indeed, your input here is most valued!
I think you and I have very different views of what self-awareness is, as I believe it is not just awareness of your surroundings in a dream (or waking life); it is awareness of your presence in those surroundings and an awareness of the interaction of your presence with the surroundings, and they with you. That difference, I think, is significant. Also, dreamers are generally quite aware of their surroundings in any dream, whether lucid or not. If they weren't, then NLD's would effectively not exist because, since if non-lucid dreamers are unaware of their dreams' surroundings, those dreams would never be recalled (that sounded better in my head).
Also, for what it's worth, I am not a Buddhist and any similarity to my work and words is, trust me, purely coincidental! I also don't see any real religious bent to anything being said here.
I hope you'll share more, especially with regard to how ADA increases control, how it can be used as the only tool for inducing lucidity, and perhaps how, without self-awareness (as I've defined it above) in the dream, you are able to differentiate between actual LD's and NLD's about LD's.:
That's all I dare say for now, guys, and feel free to ignore me if I got in the way of the conversation. Thanks again for posting, and I look forward to more...
^^ Thanks for clarifying! It seems we are indeed on the same page. Or at least the same chapter, which is fine with me.
I will check out your tutorial, I think, because the ADA I'm referring to has been around a very long time, and if you introduced something different here, that is very cool... I do fear that the increasingly popular references to ADA are more closely linked to the DV wiki definition -- and traditional ADA -- than yours, though; maybe it's good you're back?
I recently conducted a survey on my personal forum. We received 470+ anonymous replies. One of the questions is how people achieve lucidity. Interestingly, a large percentage (45% or more) of LDs turn out to be spontaneous, meaning they just happened, not because people spotted something odd or some recurring dream signs. The later case had fewer than 5%.
The above result led us to question the relationship between awareness and lucid dreams. We naturally believe it is awareness which triggers lucid dreams, to the point no one ever questions it. And many techniques are invented based on that belief. Now I'm not saying awareness is not a factor that causes LDs, but I think people should at least treat it with reservation. What if lucid dreams have nothing to do with awareness? If that's a possibility then we may all be barking at the wrong trees.
Back to ADA. It promises to increase one's awareness to a point that when dreaming one can recognize the surroundings being a dream. For this to make sense we need to make a few assumptions:
1. DILDs are caused by a high level awareness and one's ability to identify oddities, dream signs, or other incoherence in a dream.
2. The habit of staying highly aware can indeed be carried into dreams. More generically speaking, it's the assumption that any day-time habits can be carried into dreams.
3. Assuming ADA works, then we should be able to assume it works in such fashion:
- It should produce DILDs consistently, without other aid, such as WBTB, auto suggestion, and so on.
- It should work whenever there is a dream, even during NREM.
King Yoshi:
Hmm. I'd swear I'd been bumping into the practice of ADA, and the specific term, for decades now; I guess I was mistaken. Regardless, I hope that you will allow this thread to move on, based on the idea that the premise set by the OP is ADA as it seems to be understood now -- just observing everything around you -- with the assumption that we are discussing a concept and not a King Yoshi product.
If you can't allow that, and continue to claim ownership of a practice (as I described in the OP) that has been around for centuries, well, then, I guess this thread simply cannot proceed. Too bad, too; it felt like we were on to something.
That would explain, I suppose, why this subject is never brought up -- it would have been nice if a moderator had chimed in that I was stepping on someone's proprietary product; Since I was asked by other members to start this thread, I suddenly feel like the butt of a practical joke.
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^^ Why does everyone always think I'm getting "worked up?" I think I need to change my writing style. In truth I have no emotional ties to this term or its use, and am happy to go back to defining and defending self-awareness in its own right. Elsewhere.
That said, I don't think further input on my part will be helpful, because I've clearly misunderstood ADA as it is used on these forums, and also because I have no interest in commenting on the efficacy of someone else's technique (just as I would never comment on CosmicIron's SSILD technique). That was not my point, but apparently it will be the only direction this thread can go in. Which sucks.
Again, too bad; it's a good subject that may be very misunderstood on these forums.
And again, be assured that I am not "worked up," "angry," "excited," or any other sort of thing. At worst I'm disappointed, and at best relieved that I no longer have to deal with a thread which I really didn't want to start in the first place.
Okay. Maybe it was disgust. And, given that there will be an explanatory note from you regardless of what I say, no doubt starting with a condescending "LOL," I think you're making my point for me while eliminating any chance of useful conversation on this thread, and only making participation here that much less pleasant.
This thread was a mistake, and I offer my deepest thanks to those who (knowingly?) asked me to start it. I really don't have time for this.
Enjoy, King Yoshi.
^^ Nice.
Apparently the disgust was justified.
All apologies to the earlier, less pompous participants of this thread; it was good while it lasted, and I am truly sorry for my own hand in helping trash it. All I can say is I tried.
^^ AND I tried, more than once, to back away from "your" technique (I thought you said it was DV's, BTW?) and talk about that on which it is based. This thread may have been doomed, but it was your childish arrogance that buried it. Thanks.
So much for trying. I'm out.
Originally Posted by tofur:
so what I'm getting from this is that the trick is to involve your self in the awareness work, and not just focus on your surroundings but instead combine the two and be aware of how one is interacting with the world, and that both yoshi and sageous are on the same page there... seems only cosmic iron is questioning the importance of awareness to lucid dreaming altogether which is a little out there for me and will likely stay there without some further input and explanation
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I know it sounds unbelievable, and I'm not throwing out conclusions of any sort. I do hope though people can think about the questions I raised more carefully before dismissing them entirely. After all, lucid dreaming is a phenomena we don't yet fully understand, and there haven't been much significant breakthroughs in recent years.
Originally Posted by JoannaB:
Boys, calm down please, I would like to continue to be able to respect both of you.
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I'm always at peace, JoannaB, thank you! I do get stubborn on occasion, but I'll try to shake it off. Sorry, again, for my contribution to the annoying disruption.
I hope the conversation can continue, somehow.
For what it's worth:
I just read the OP of King Yoshi's ADA/DILD tutorial and it seems it lines up nicely with the ADA as noted in my OP here. Also it pretty much parallels with "ADA" as its been practiced in the form of mindfulness and other meditative practices for centuries; no difference whatsoever, except that it is attached as a technique to LD'ing. So yeah, I guess we were debating, specifically, a portion of King Yoshi's DILD technique... had I known, I would have not done the thread or at least warned you (king Yoshi) of its posting. But here we are, regardless, and after a night's sleep I still think there is much to be discussed...
So your defenses are quite welcome, as they ever were. Only now in my opinion they are directly on topic -- whether I was aware that you coined ADA or not, since it seems I knew exactly what I was talking about in the OP, regardless of my ignorance of the DV-specific history.
As it turns out, we never needed to have that exchange last night ... I should have taken the high road and stopped to read your tutorial then, I guess. My bad; it was late and I was very tired. Water under the bridge?
Originally Posted by Meskhetyw:
Well, I had a part in dragging you into this, so I'll give it a shot.
Perhaps a change in terminology is in order. It has been proposed that "mindfulness" could be used, but this is also a blanket term. Many are familiar with the Buddhist Vipassana meditation and "mindfulness throughout daily activities", but there is a much older and more complete system (5,000 years old) of Yoga (not the exercise), which teaches mindfulness of the environment, the ten senses, the body, the breath, and ever more inward to thoughts, the subconscious, Dream Yoga, and Yoga Nidra. The idea is similar, the moment is observed ever more precisely and things are set aside as being "not self".
I was under the impression that the majority of people here are using a form of awareness that is merely environmental with perhaps some thought observing mixed in, as many posts seem to suggest, so all day awareness seemed an appropriate term for this and for other reasons. Regardless however, I suppose we should be clear in each case which form of awareness or mindfulness we are referring to. Perhaps using the addition "mindfulness of ....." will suffice.
The potential of this thread is to understand the mechanisms which allow for certain of these practices to bring about lucidity or to hinder it, and because of this I hope that people will share their views on any or all of these. I have had most success with Dream Yoga, but I have read Sageous's self awareness method and it seems to work without the need for a constant emphasis on dreaming. Zoth has mentioned mindfulness and seems to think that it has a positive impact on lucidity. I'd be interested in hearing more of this. Why these things work is worth exploring, so that we can as lucid dreamers make our practices more efficient.
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That would be an interesting change of subject, I think, and actually it might help, in that in describing other forms of awareness in a positive vein, we might open make some headway. That said:
As I developed simple practices to build self-awareness, I came up with a sort of reverse-RC (as noted in my WILD class as a RRC). Instead of taking the RC path of asking yourself if you are dreaming, you ask yourself where you just were, where you are, and where you will be shortly, and you do so with a real sense of wonder about your interaction with your local reality as you did/will do these things. I go into greater detail on the exercise here, if you're curious.
Why does this help? Because it establishes a sense of your involvement in reality, that you have an effect on it, and it on you. If you can develop this sense into a sort of intuition, come dream time that sense will help you to intuitively accept the nature of your dream as a part of your self, and from that will come an easier path to lucidity and control without confusing preconceptions. I go into much more detail on this in the class, but essentially I'm saying that if you become intuitively aware of your interaction with reality, and are able to honestly ponder your interaction with it, you will have no trouble recognizing your presence in a dream, and remembering that the dream is you ... the rest is sheer lucidity. That's extremely brief, I know, but I'm pressed for time right now ... hopefully others will chime in?
Regarding changing the term: I think for the sake of argument that King Yoshi pretty much nailed what we were describing with ADA; it would be difficult to use something else, even when discussing the "merely environmental" ADA that seems to be prevalent on these forums. Though mindfulness is a good term, it does have a religious ring to it, I think, and it also encompasses so many different types -- and grades -- of practice, we might do more harm than good using it. Can't think of another term other than MEADA, though!
Originally Posted by tofur:
I re-read your post and when I think back to the couple of lucids I've had so far, all have been DILDS, and they were spontaneous. I didn't see something and think "thats not possible, this must be a dream". It was like BAM, randomly totally awake, and THEN the "holy s#*#, this is a dream". What made me snap out of it I can't say, there was plenty going on there before hand to tip me off and in one I became lucid in the most realistic setting possible in that dream. So basically, the awareness showed up after the random moment of awakening, not before. So I guess the trick is to figure out what causes that change over
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Most if not all of my DILD's work this way as well. I think personally that this sort of "spontaneous" lucidity isn't really so spontaneous at all. Rather, it is a result of your waking-life attitudes (i.e., you're open to being lucid in the first place) and perhaps expectations you might not be consciously harboring ... in other words, you desired lucidity, and your unconscious obliged.
As I think CosmicIron already mentioned, in that the mechanics involved in the forming of this spontaneous DILD are still not too clear, but I truly believe they lie not in mysterious functions of the dreaming mind, but in the nature and attitudes of the waking-life consciousness. Developing that attitude ought to be possible then.
Originally Posted by KingYoshi:
It IS very beneficial. Like I previously stated, I have yet to go 1 on 1 with a dreamer who has not had success with ADA. If you have any problems while practicing the technique, come to me, and I guarantee you we will hammer out success. This thing works. I've proven it with my own success as well as the success of the countless dreamers in my thread and in my PM box. Its not like something that is on the fence about whether it works or not, which is why I see no point in this thread. It works. Period.
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Okay, then let's try to give the thread a point. Assuming that we all accept that your ADA technique works, can you, per Meskhetyw's suggestion above, tell us why you think it works? Maybe then we can get to the core of what works/what doesn't work, and what mental processes are involved... okay, we might at least head for that core!
Should I mention that I'm in my 50's, and have been actively LD'ing -- and researching it from more sources than my head -- for probably longer than you've been alive, King Yoshi? And I swear Zoth is older than me sometimes! We're not all kids here, and to me the "New Age" happened in the late '70's, so you might want to grab another term, so as not to confuse us old farts...
Sorry, Zoth; just sayin'
Sorry JoannaB, I go one more ego burst, as the following must be said:
Originally Posted by KingYoshi:
I'm clearly not talking to or about you. I know how old you are and how experienced you are. So, save these useless comments for the birds. New Age for lucid dreaming was not in the 70's in my eyes. Yours maybe, but not mine. So, I stand by it. And Zoth, is ignorant. Period. Not unintelligent, not stupid, but ignorant by its intended definition. Not by the insult.
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You'd think I would have learned my lesson yesterday... okay, Yoshi, I promise to no longer toss your way any snarky comments, sarcasm, or anything even suggesting humor or -- God forgive me -- speaking to you as an equal. In other words I promise not to speak to you as you do to us, as you seem to take it very poorly. You spoke as if you were speaking to all of us, BTW, not so clearly at all.
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How is a source other than your own experience within the dream, even valid to you? You seriously listen to someone talk about lucid dreaming and believe them without testing their knowledge or at the very least, testing how their knowledge could be true? Sorry, but my head is all I need for sources on lucid dreaming. If you think that is wrong, tell that to the 100s of dreamers who have used my experience along the way.
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Did I say I believe everything I read? Did I say I never test new knowledge against my experience? I don't think so. And, if getting knowledge from places other than your head is no good, why are you here? Surely those 100's of satisfied dreamers should have learned on their own, right?
Sorry again for the interruption, folks; hopefully we can get back to work now.
I think JoannaB and King Yoshi have this pegged, but I had an additional thought:
Originally Posted by tofur:
see but what I don't get is, what is that "you" that hasn't added it all up yet, the "you" that is noticing stuff? I feel like were talking about two different aspects of consciousness here, the part that is witnessing everything, and the other part that wakes up because of the witnessing. So maybe what were doing with the awareness training is stabilizing ourselves more and more as that witness, the observer rather than the doer.
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That may be exactly my problem with "natural" awareness training, because driving you to become just a witness may be an unintended and unwanted side-effect of awareness-only training.
Yes, becoming only that witness makes the dream world more stable, but it also makes it more real, and your dream less lucid. As King Yoshi said, you must remember that the observer part of you and the witness part of you (and the dreaming mind part of you, for that matter) are all you, and must be smoothly combined into one self-aware "You." If you only witness, then you sacrifice the union of all aspects of "You," and risk lapsing back into a NLD or waking up.
However:
sounds like intuition to me, maybe someone who's more intuitive by nature is more adept at LD'ing, picks it up quicker with less effort?
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I think of it less natural intuition than a "sense" built into your consciousness that can sort of put it all together, at least at a very low, almost subliminal level. This sense need not be natural; indeed, I have a feeling that, except in children, this sense is far more often artificially infused through training than it is natural.
Perhaps that is the real value of ADA, as it both teaches you to have a special sense of your surroundings while, thanks to the constant practice with LD'ing in mind, building powerful expectations of having LD's. So, come dreamtime, your unconscious is already hard at work fulfilling your expectations while your ADA "habit" has got your DC "you" paying slightly elevated attention. Then, once the "feeling" is in place, your self-awareness and memory kick in and Bam!, you're lucid.
Hmm... Did I just turn back on myself to accidentally summarize the real value of ADA as LD'ing tool? Seems to all make sense...or am I just babbling?
^^ The evidence is definitely leaning, for me, in the "undetrimental" direction. But I'm still of the mind that there is a hazard to having ADA be the only tool in your belt ... Keep in mind, King Yoshi, that given your experience, you already very likely have a whole beltful of tools on hand (ie, that "feeling" we were all just discussing).
In other words, I'm coming to the conclusion that ADA can be a powerful tool for LD'ing but, like all powerful tools it needs to be handled well and plugged into something... which I think you just said.
Holy crap, are we in some sort of agreement here? Were we always in some sort of agreement? Communication is a helluva thing, isn't it?
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After reading through all the posts, I cannot shake the feeling that some people are making too many assumptions without evaluating them carefully. For example, the assumption that one gains lucidty by spotting oddities in dreams. As I mentioned in my previous post, it appears that LDs triggered in this fashion are actually relatively rare. Moreover, in dreams we don't often possess the full memories, reasoning skills, and even personalities as in waking state. In fact it is not unusual for us to act like another person in dreams. This is actually not surprising because dreams are the language of the unconscious. Often than not the dream ego itself gets assigned symbolic meanings and act according to some predetermined plots. In this case, to the dream ego, there are no oddities in the dreams, just like how our waking ego perceive the so-called real world. Granted there are times our dream ego become detached from dream plots and act independently similar to the awakened state, but that's not the majority.
That is but one of the many examples which led me to question the validity of some of the theories we take for granted. Again I'm not drawing conclusions but I'm kinda hoping this thread will provoke people to think outside of the boxes. Lucid dreams are triggered/improved by awareness, and since some technique improves awareness it ought to work for lucid dreams -- we have heard this line way too many times and it is not even worth repeating or defending anymore IMHO.
I've had uncounted DILD's over the last 4 decades, and I can safely say that I never became lucid thanks to a dream-sign, RC, or other technique related shortcut. It used to drive me nuts when people would say, "This is all you gotta do," when I knew, in my experience at least, you needed something else. I call it self-awareness, King Yoshi calls it a feeling, CosmicIron calls it awareness, but regardless it is a conscous state of "more," and one technique alone just won't cut it.
I blame all this on Stephen LaBerge, BTW, who accidentally popularlized shortcuts like dreamsigns, spotting oddities, and RC's when he published his MILD technique.... but they were only part of a fairly elaborate technique that included much daytime work. Now that I think of it, though LaBerge was desperate for that shortcut, that one step to lucidity, he still hasn't found it... but oh, the trail of debris he has left in his path!
I'm not making any sense -- too tired tonight -- suffice it to say, CosmicIron, that I do agree that any single tool is not the answer, and I also agree that the popular view has come so firmly to believe that a single tool is all you need for lucidity -- just pick one, and you're there. I fear, King Yoshi, that ADA -- through no fault of your own -- has joined the ranks of those perceived single-tool answers.
Originally Posted by KingYoshi:
I agree with this. ADA isn't about spotting oddities at all. Its about creating the awareness to distinguish between the waking state and the dream state, simply because they are not the same as each other. Its about building up a mental "feeling" that causes you to realize you are dreaming simply because you are not awake. I can't think of a better word to describe it because you don't physically feel it, but you kind of get washed over with lucidity. Still not a good way to describe it. Its very hard to put into words for someone who hasn't experienced it before to understand. The best thing I can tell you is to try ADA, specifically for lucid dreaming, so you can experience it for yourself. I do seem to just randomly become lucid, but its a constant thing and I find myself looking at a completely normal environment and thinking to myself, "This is a dream. This feels like a dream." Even if nothing out of the ordinary has happened the entire time. Its not just a sporadic event either, this is how I become lucid 15-20 times per month, on average (a complete guesstimation). It started happening more and more frequently after I started practicing ADA.
I'm not sure you were referring to me with the assumptions thing, but I thought you might be, so figured I'd say this. I don't say these things because I have heard them, I say them because I have experienced them and have helped countless others experience them.
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No I wasn't referring to you at all, Sageous. As for the sudden feeling that one is in a dream and thus become lucid, I suspect it has more to do with psychology than awareness. I can't provide evidence yet and it is difficult to describe for me in English which is my second language. Speaking from personal experience though I honestly do not see awareness playing a key role in gaining lucidity. If awareness is the flame, then lucidity is the spark. The point of dream yoga is not to build awareness so one can achieve lucidity, but rather, to use lucidity as a path to reach awareness at a totally different level. I have not practiced ADA per se but I have experimented with similar techniques so I can at least speak from personal experience without being totally ignorant or prejudiced. In past two decades I have had tens of thousands of lucid dreams and OBE experiences, large and small. They have enabled me to spot the subtle differences among the many states, and even much higher states of consciousness and awareness. Things like ADA, I fear, as you wrote in the very begining, are actually exercising the wrong kind of awareness for both lucid dreaming and spirituality.
CosmicIron:
A couple of quick clarifications/questions:
Originally Posted by CosmicIron:
No I wasn't referring to you at all, Sageous.
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I assume you meant to write "King Yoshi" there, or was there a Freudian Slip involved?
As for the sudden feeling that one is in a dream and thus become lucid, I suspect it has more to do with psychology than awareness. I can't provide evidence yet and it is difficult to describe for me in English which is my second language. Speaking from personal experience though I honestly do not see awareness playing a key role in gaining lucidity. If awareness is the flame, then lucidity is the spark. The point of dream yoga is not to build awareness so one can achieve lucidity, but rather, to use lucidity as a path to reach awareness at a totally different level.
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I'm not sure I'm clear on this. From what I understand, lucidity is awareness, being that a lucid dream is literally being aware that you are dreaming. Yes the dream and sleep yogis use the minor awareness of lucidity to build toward a higher awareness of enlightenment and the transcendent self-awareness necessary to navigate the bardo, but that minor awareness is still awareness.
So let's say I (and the dream and sleep yogis, and LaBerge & Co., and pretty much all of the people who write about lucidity) got it all wrong, and lucidity is not sourced in awareness/self-awareness: where then does it come from? I'm not being aggressive or sarcastic here, though my phrasing might sound so; if you are onto something, or sure of a thing none of us understand, thanks to your experience, it might be a something well worth knowing. I hope you can elaborate.
If I misunderstood, please forgive!
Things like ADA, I fear, as you wrote in the very beginning, are actually exercising the wrong kind of awareness for both lucid dreaming and spirituality.
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Though I am beginning to doubt that ADA as a tool is harmful, I do still firmly believe that using ADA as your only tool for lucidity will likely not give you lucidity.
By way of circular definition: waking-life sentient consciousness, whether we call it self-awareness or a higher awareness, or that feeling, or intuition, or whatever, is necessary to have your waking-life sentient consciousness participate in a dream. The awareness powering ADA (meaning the simple physical awareness of our surroundings, no matter how thorough) is simply not enough on its own to achieve lucidity. ADA may offer some help, but it is not enough on its own. I think we all already agreed on that recently... didn't we?
Originally Posted by Sageous:
CosmicIron:
I assume you meant to write "King Yoshi" there, or was there a Freudian Slip involved?
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It could well be the later, LOL.
Originally Posted by Sageous:
I'm not being aggressive or sarcastic here, though my phrasing might sound so;
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No worry, I can tell the difference between healthy discussion and hostile arguments. Let me try to elaborate a little bit on the point I was trying to make. First on the subject of minor awareness sparking lucidity. Assuming this is true, and assuming such minor awareness can be gained upon the very earliest dreams in our sleep cycles, then we should be seeing much more frequent DILDs during the early part of sleep. Unfortunately this is not the case, even for experienced dreamers.
Let's modify our second assumption -- maybe we do not gain such *minor* awareness until we reach the later stages of our sleeps. For this to be true, we have to also assume that we have little to nil awareness during the early part of our sleeps. However that is clearly not the case! That brings us to another hypothesis -- maybe there is some fundamental difference between the awareness that powers our early dreams and the awareness that's gained during the later stage? If this is the case, then for ADA and similar techs to work they have to exercise the later kind of awareness, not the former.
Now what kind of awareness is this, exactly? One naive theory is that it's the kind of awareness we posses during the day. It assumes that we become lucid by becoming aware of the surroundings and somehow able to distinguish it from reality. Now we are back to square one because the ability to be aware of the surroundings certain existed during the early sleep stages as well. Another possibility is that we are talking about self-awareness. Basically that means we should know exactly who we are, where we were, and so on. This essentially means we replace our dream egos with the day-time ones, or, the "real" ones. (In Buddhism this is seen as a form of attachment, rather than enlightenment... just as a side note). Experienced WILDers or practitioners of astral projections know that upon entering a dream, no matter how conscious you are at the moment, that consciousness quickly diminishes and it takes great will power to maintain it. This is not surprising because just like everything else in the dream, our dream-self takes part in the dream plot and gets assigned certain symbolic meanings. It simply cannot be equal to our waking egos in order for dreams to function properly. The point I'm trying to make through this is that it takes a great deal for this type of detachment to occur, and even greater amount of effort is required to maintain it. As such, regardless of what it is -- awareness or not, there is nothing "minor" about it.
This kind of detachment do occur sometimes spontaneously though, and I suspect that's all part of the dream plot. A common scenario is that during intense nightmares people tend to either wake up, become lucid, take on a third-person perspective, or the dream itself turn into narrative form. My suspicion is that lucidity, in its more primitive form, is nothing but a built-in mechanism of our dreams, sort of like a safe switch. Sometimes it's for protection, and sometimes it's needed by the unconscious as part of the dream plot in order to tell its "stories". And this is what I meant by saying lucidity may have more to do with psychology than things such as "awareness". Granted there are exceptions, as demonstrated by our survey -- approximately less than 5% of LDs are triggered by people recognizing incoherence within the dreams. I feel that ADA and similar techs probably can help in this case, but do not serve as determining factors.
Originally Posted by JoannaB:
I would argue with that statistic. I would say that all you can say is that less than 5% of LDs are triggered by people recognizing incoherence and knowing consciously in hindsight that that is what caused them to become lucid. My argument has been that I think that a very likely explanation for the "feeling" that it is a dream is that a trained observer has recognized a pattern of incoherent details subconsciously or not quite consciously, and does not know which incoherences triggered the lucidity and actually does not quite know whether or not it was incoherences, but I think given that this is more likely to occur after successfully practicing ADA, noticing incoherences is a valid theory for what causes this dream feeling, but statistics of what people report caused lucidity would not represent this because in those cases the dreamer does not know consciously that this is what caused the feeling of dream. Also such noticing incoherences would require one to become a very experienced observer in waking life, and thus a lot of effort, something most would be lucid dreamers would not be up to, and I think it is more likely to occur with more advance lucid dreamers who practice ADA and or ther self awareness techniques during the day. I still think that doing ADA right one needs to put self awareness into it. However, given how this dream feeling would only be something that some lucid dreamers get, and even those who get it will likely not be able to report whether of not the dream feeling was caused by observed inconsistencies, so the proportion of those who responded to the survey who experienced this and identified it as due to inconsistencies observed would be small, but that would not mean that inconsistencies observed could not be the underlying reason for this dream feeling, and that becoming an experienced observer is not a good way of reaching lucidity.
If I do not make enough sense, please forgive me, I just experienced major brain fry activity at work, so I may be less coherent right now, but I hope I am coherent enough.
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The survey actually included people of all levels of proficiencies... But then again anything is possible, and I'm not drawing conclusions.
Originally Posted by CosmicIron:
Let me try to elaborate a little bit on the point I was trying to make. First on the subject of minor awareness sparking lucidity. Assuming this is true, and assuming such minor awareness can be gained upon the very earliest dreams in our sleep cycles, then we should be seeing much more frequent DILDs during the early part of sleep. Unfortunately this is not the case, even for experienced dreamers.
Let's modify our second assumption -- maybe we do not gain such *minor* awareness until we reach the later stages of our sleeps. For this to be true, we have to also assume that we have little to nil awareness during the early part of our sleeps. However that is clearly not the case! That brings us to another hypothesis -- maybe there is some fundamental difference between the awareness that powers our early dreams and the awareness that's gained during the later stage? If this is the case, then for ADA and similar techs to work they have to exercise the later kind of awareness, not the former.
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I agree, if we're talking about the natural awareness as espoused in ADA (which, once more to be clear, I feel will not help much in firing that initial spark of lucidity anyway) . I hadn't given much thought to limited DILD's early on, but don't doubt it's a fact. But couldn't that be the case for other reasons as well? Perhaps there's some primitive switch that holds us in sleep, awareness-be-damned, for the first couple of hours, since back in the tree-hanging days we may have only had those hours for the restorative part of dreams. Also, since REM periods are shorter and more separated earlier in the night, it makes sense statistically that there would be fewer DILD's then. But yes, some basic natural awareness must be present in all dreams, or the dreams literally would not exist, so that is an interesting point.
The point I'm trying to make through this is that it takes a great deal for this type of detachment to occur, and even greater amount of effort is required to maintain it. As such, regardless of what it is -- awareness or not, there is nothing "minor" about it.
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True. Perhaps "minor" was the wrong word. You need a push of self-awareness to become lucid at all, and that push may need to increase in order to maintain awareness and control or explore the dream. Not so minor, really (and again, even then you need that something "more" I mentioned above). I guess what I was trying to say was that there is an initial moment during the NLD where you come to realize that "you" are in a dream. That initial moment might be little more than a niggling sense, or, as I think you mention, and emotional response to stimuli in the dream, like a nightmare. After that feeling occurs comes a more solid sense of self-awareness and the LD ensues, hopefully with self-awareness increasing steadily. So, relative to the subsequent LD, this initial moment would indeed be minor; but no, relative to the normal non-existence of self-awareness in a NLD, this initial moment would be huge. I hope that clarified my thought, because we do agree on this. Now to the non-agreement part:
This kind of detachment do occur sometimes spontaneously though, and I suspect that's all part of the dream plot. A common scenario is that during intense nightmares people tend to either wake up, become lucid, take on a third-person perspective, or the dream itself turn into narrative form. My suspicion is that lucidity, in its more primitive form, is nothing but a built-in mechanism of our dreams, sort of like a safe switch. Sometimes it's for protection, and sometimes it's needed by the unconscious as part of the dream plot in order to tell its "stories". And this is what I meant by saying lucidity may have more to do with psychology than things such as "awareness".
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Interesting idea, but it's one that runs completely anathema to my own view of the nature of lucidity.
My opinion is that there is no such thing as primitive lucidity. Lucidity, for me, is a side-effect of sentience, and it could not exist until we were able to take a moment and say "I am here." Indeed, it must have been disconcerting indeed for the first sentient cavemen to notice their presence in dreams (the source of much mythology and nascent religious tenet, I would imagine). I also believe, though in no way can prove or even qualify, that nature (as in evolution) never intended for us to be sentient; self-awareness was an accident of the extreme evolutionary development of our brains.
So it doesn't make sense to me that we would have had a pre-sentient mechanism that triggered lucidity, since lucidity could not exist yet. Also, it wouldn't be much of a defense mechanism, because if something bad were happening, wouldn't it be better for that primitive sleeper to just wake up, via the reticular system? I suppose that since then we may have developed a mechanism that smooths the flow of communication between the conscious and unconscious mind during dreams by unconscious triggering of self-awareness to make sure some dream message is understood... but I also believe that in the extremely extensive psychological work done in the last century that a process that obvious would have been discovered quite quickly and become a standard for therapy -- yet it has not.
No, for me lucidity cannot be sourced in the natural functions of the brain and dreaming; indeed, LD'ing is a fundamentally unnatural act (which is why it can be so hard to do). I could be wrong, and I have no expectation for you to agree with me, but I figured I'd share, even if we may need to maintain friendly disagreement on this.
Granted there are exceptions, as demonstrated by our survey -- approximately less than 5% of LDs are triggered by people recognizing incoherence within the dreams. I feel that ADA and similar techs probably can help in this case, but do not serve as determining factors.
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Again, agreed. But I have to wonder how many of the ADA and similar tech users are noticing that incoherence because of the tech, or because all that tech work has prepared their minds -- fired up their self-awareness -- for the event. Perhaps the difference is irrelevant, as long as folks are getting to lucidity anyway?
Originally Posted by VagalTone:
So, to practice ADA alone is, IMO, mainly an intention technique, which will only be helpful if you think so.
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Well said.
^^ Well, I guess I can't help but agree with those last two posts!