Introduction
Back in 2006 I started getting into Lucid Dreaming. I bought books, and started a daily dream journal which I would keep up diligently for half a decade. I joined an online community which quickly became a major influence on many aspects of my life - artistically, spiritually (until I parted with esotericism in the early 2010s), philosophically, politically; I watched and participated in countless debates on the nature of conciousness (on good days), on whether you can actually leave your body (on worse days) and on my own basic human rights (on really bad days). As I met more people personally, my focus slowly drifted aways from Lucid Dreaming itself, naturally, as there is only so much to discuss technique-wise, until you hit the barrier of "yeah it kinda works differently for everyone".
This spring, I finally decided to leave. I really feel like I have outgrown the place. Instead of taking/sharing inspiration, exchanging expertise, helping newbies, all I did was getting drawn into debates, most or all not really worth my time. In the last 15 years, I moved significantly to the queerfeminist left, while the community stayed firmly liberal-centrist, with the occasional leftists, but also occasional far-right "just asking questions" trolls. Add to that the covid-skeptics, anti-vaxxers, creepy misogynists, and just about every flavour of esoteric believers... while certainly entertaining at times, ultimately it ended up a waste of time and energy.
Reboots
I will admit, the last half year has been kinda rough. My physical and mental health went down and my wrists still make it impossible for me to play piano, amongst many other things. But while all that was going on, I made huge progress elsewhere. With writing one of the few things my wrists and my depression consistently allowed me to do, that is where my focus went.
I was unhappy with my world-building for a long time. I was constantly holding myself back in fear of other´s reaction, and there was all this "leftover energy" from not really having a good place anymore to let myself go wild into surreal/metaphysical thinking. Finally, I had enough. Screw this, I told myself, I'm doing what I want, and if people don't like it, or think that I' losing my sanity - so be it.
}{ was born, the anti-world, where no rules of conventional worldbuilding apply other than "everything can happen". I won't go into detail here, I'm just mentioning it because this project was like the bursting of a dam. I don't think I have ever been more productive in my worldbuilding than the last months. I seemlessly went from writing absurdist meta-commentary of my own life to world-building my main fantasy worlds, and from there to a new, more fluid understanding of who I am and what I want. And with that came the realization that I needed to stop wasting my time on people that weren't coming with me anyways.
Go forward, don't look back too much.
Square One
So here I am. Lucid Dreaming.
["Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor, und bin so klug als wie zuvor..."]
Yesyes, thank you Mr. Goethe! Anyways. I am interested to see whether I can get some of that fascination back that had gripped me back in 2006, when it felt like I had basically discovered an actually working magic. The promise of "endless possibilities" faded away soon, met with the realization that endless possibilities, by definition, also included "kinda mediocre, boring experiences". The worthwile lucid dreams were spread out far between tons of false successes - where I did become aware of my dream-state only to quickly lose control, be dropped in ever-new variations of the same boring empty dreamscape (usually the house where I grew up in), or just in a dark void.
If I have learned something from the last months of worldbuilding, it's that it is always a good idea to check where I am; trying to figure out the issues I am having as precisely as possible. So that is what I want to try next. And while I'm doing that, I might as well see if I can give some basic introductions into LDing for people that have no experience. That is also a good way for myself to find out what I don't know or have never understood properly. Let's see.
Lucid Dreaming 101
So, for all the newbies: What even is lucid dreaming? :)
Well, the basic definition: A lucid dream (LD) is a dream where the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming, and have some control over the dream.
This isn't the only way to define it. Some people consider being aware of the dream-state to be sufficient in order to count as lucid, some people go way farther on the control-side. German pioneer Paul Tholey´s criteria include being able to have full sensations (being able to see, hear, smell, ...), having a good memory of what happened, or even understanding the meaning of a dream while dreaming. ["Klarheit über den Sinn des Traumes"] That last point of course raises the question: Do dreams even have meanings? And if so, what do we mean with that?
I'd say that there is some consensus that lucidity exists on a multi-dimensional scale: One can be fully aware of the dream-state while having poor control, or vice versa be able to navigate through a dream effortlessy while not even thinking about it as being a dream.
Abbreviations
Lucid Dreaming communities have come up with a lot of jargon and acronyms - far too many, honestly - and I'm not sure if I want to use them here. If I force myself to avoid commonly used language it might even drive me towards a better understanding, since often, if you have learned what a word means, you fall into the trap of also thinking that you know a lot about it.
So, just for the sake of giving sort of the minimum, the most common distinction being made is whether one enters a dream directly from waking state (ie staying lucid during falling asleep) or gaining lucidity during an ongoing dream, whether through some kind of sudden realization, or gradually.
The first one is called WILD (wake-initiated lucid dream), the latter DILD (dream-initiated lucid dream). Those terms, as far as I know, were coined by dream researcher Stephen LaBerge, who was also (one of) the first to prove that LDs are actually a real phenomenon to the wider scientific community. Paul Tholey used a similar dichotomy, he wrote about Klarheit bewahrende Technik (technique of staying lucid) and Klarheit gewinnende Technik (technique of becoming lucid).
From there, language evolved over the years, so nowadays a verb to wild could just mean to be in the process of (attempting to) entering a dream-state (and not refer to to be dreaming a dream that was entered directly from waking-state) I should also add that the "directly going from being awake to being in a dream" is something that many dreamers don't actually experience that literally; it can also be about staying just aware enough that you can regain full(er) consciousness when the dream has formed.
And now?
This state of in-between is currently the one that is most interesting to me to pursue - in part because I sometimes only have very limited time to dream between one louder snore of my partner to the next. :D
Another goal is getting access to earlier dreams, the ones that happen when I am still very much asleep, and therefore less at risk of just randomly waking up over and over again.
Lastly, I have to figure out a way to deal with memory. I have a major handicap in that I am quite literally unable to keep a written dream-journal (even if I was super-motivated, which, honestly, I'm really not) because of my wrist issues. That almost forces me into a position where my main focus is the actual dreaming and not so much remembering it. From a journaling, analyzing and re-living perspective that sucks. But I'm gonna try make the best of it, because, in principle, I actually like the idea of putting the focus right there, on the actual thing.
That's it for now. As usual, I cannot promise that I will continue this, but as I have explained, I'm kind of out of places to go with this one interest of mine, so if I have something to say, I might as well do it on a blog - a space that I have more personal control over. Dreams are pretty personal, after all.
J C
I would like to note: I don't snore. - SMR
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