This is something that I posted to the lucid dreaming subreddit a few days ago and it had a pretty good response, so I thought that it might also do some good on Steemit, as well. If you want to see the original post, click here. Otherwise, enjoy!
It seems that the question of whether or not a dream was lucid has confused quite a lot of people over the years. If you're one of the people who are confused about what lucidity is or isn't, don't beat yourself up. It's not your fault, it's more to do with how people present lucid dreaming.
When you're telling someone about lucid dreaming for the first time, you need a hook. Basically, people want to know why they should care or they will tune it out immediately. The hook for most descriptions is "you can control your dreams". The definition of lucid dreaming being so close to the hook in these statements tends to confuse people into thinking that in order for a dream to be lucid, one has to be able to exercise control over the dream. This is not so.
What is a lucid dream?
It's a dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming. That's all. Let's go through a few scenarios and we'll discuss if these dreams were lucid.
Q) I realized that I was dreaming and woke up immediately. Was it lucid?
A) Yes.
Q) I realized I was dreaming and couldn't control the dream. Was it lucid?
A) Yes.
Q) I questioned whether or not I was dreaming. Was it lucid?
A) Ah, now we're getting closer to something interesting. Let's talk about lucidity with more nuance.
So the first thing to know about lucidity, in common terms, is that it's either a 1 or a 0. A Yes or a No. You had a lucid dream or you did not. For the most absolute bare-bones understanding of what lucidity is, it's correct in this culture to say that a dream is only lucid if you have the meta cognition realization that you are in a dream and says nothing about whether or not you actually acted willfully within that dream.
This means that you can know that you are dreaming, making it lucid by the standard definition, yet have such low awareness that you can't even actually move your body willfully in a dream. The lines can seem blurry, because you can realize that you are dreaming, making the dream lucid, but lose lucidity or the realization doesn't really hit home (ie. the right parts of your prefrontal cortex might have just become active for a split second). So you had a lucid dream in this sense, by definition, (because you realized that you were dreaming) but it wasn't really necessarily what most people would consider an actual lucid dream, because you didn't get to do anything that you might have wanted if you were fully "online", as it were.
It should be noted that acting willfully is not control. If you're confused by my terminology of "acting willfully" I mean that you are able to move and act intentionally, as you do in waking life.
Stay with me now, because things are about to get weird
Is it possible for you to have a dream in which you act willfully, yet have not made the realization that you are dreaming?
You bet your sweet bippy it is.
In this sense, you would have not had a lucid dream by the standard definition, however you would have had a lucid dream in nearly all the ways that matter. This can get confusing because you could say that you acted willfully in a non-lucid dream, which is somewhat true as you are wrapped up in what you are doing in your dreams every night and don't realize that you're dreaming. However, there is a distinction between the average dream and, say, a false awakening.
False awakenings can be, I believe, a contradiction. You can wake up and go about your morning with as much lucidity as you have in waking life and have no damn clue that you are in a dream, until you wake up for real. Was it lucid? I say yes in the ways that matter, but no in the clear definition.
Although, I should say that "the ways that matter" might be a flimsy term here, but I'm trying to explain as best I can. Some may argue that "the ways that matter" are having the realization so you can get down and dirty with some real physics bending dream shenanigans. And I say, hell, let's have that discussion if you're into it. But, for the sake of this explanation, that's the term I've used.
So what we're actually dealing with here are two categories:
Category 1) Having the realization that you're dreaming.
Category 2) Being able to act willfully in the dream.
You can have experiences that are just one of these categories, or both. Typically what someone seems to mean when they have had a lucid dream is that they have met the criteria from both categories, but how lucidity is defined completely neglects the aspect of acting willfully. Hence confusion.
Now, bringing control into the mix, this is more to do with when you have met both criteria from these categories.
When you become lucid, you are no longer dealing with a yes/no question. You have now entered into another territory, which is more a spectrum of lucidity
What does this mean?
Basically, once you're lucid, you are now dealing with the quality of your lucidity. This can be visualized as a line as follows:
Lucidity:
Low awareness ---------------------------------- High awareness
(Every lucid dream will start somewhere along this dotted line)
You can improve awareness with stabilization. The higher your awareness generally means the easier it will be to control the dream. This rule isn't absolute, you can have low level lucidity and do some crazy cool shit, or have high lucidity and be unable to do much of anything spectacular.
There are other factors for control
Generally, I think this has to do with belief, intention, expectation, etc. Knowing that you can do it, being confident in it, and so on, means that you are more likely to actually control the dream. How you build this can be different per person, but the fact remains that success in dream control is pretty much synonymous with confidence that you can actually control the dream, when you're already lucid.
As well, you can have mental blocks, or some other weird subconscious shit at play that might make control hard in a particular dream, or over a series of dreams because, hey, you're a complex person with a wide array of thoughts and beliefs that might need to be aligned a bit better for this to start working out in your favor. Work on it.
When determining if your dream was lucid, you have to take into account what you mean by lucidity
So if you know that you are dreaming and the dream goes on without you, yeah it was lucid, but it kinda sucks.
If you don't know that you're dreaming, but you act willfully within the dream, then you were (in my estimation) lucid outside of the regular definition, but yeah it kinda sucks because you can't really take advantage and spend your dream buttering your morning toast that you won't even get to eat before you wake up.
What most people mean when they say they were lucid is that they realized that they were dreaming AND acted willfully within that lucid dream
THIS SAYS NOTHING OF CONTROL
Control is just a feature of the state, not at all included in the definition.
I hope this has helped make things clearer for some of you.
Also, I just want to say that the more you experience lucidity, the more broad your definition of lucidity can become. Basically, we aren't dealing with one singular state of awareness, but a spectrum of awareness that can be very different from dream to dream. You'll even have some experiences that are still hard to classically define within the normal parameters, because consciousness is vast and strange and varied and we still don't even know what it is.
Thanks.