Sorry I’m late. I took a small vacation. I’m very pleased to see what has happened with this thread.
First, the definition of Lucid Living. I put one up about a year ago and I have recently been thinking about rewording it (all of this board’s definitions are on the “Lucidity Intro” forum). The concept is: whatever feeling you get when you are Lucid Dreaming should be recreated in waking life. (It may be that the feeling is so varied from one person to the next that a precise definition isn’t possible.)
In trying to define and understand lucidity I’ve found it very valuable to try and understand exactly what it is that I am doing in an LD. And for me it seems to always come down to a unique control of my awareness/attention/consciousness/perception. The more I understand it the more exactly I can duplicate it in waking life. For me it isn’t anything vague. I know exactly how it feels and I know how closely I am duplicating it.
Xetrov: As far as “free will” goes, I am going to assume that it exists. Some people who haven’t had a Lucid Dream don’t believe LDs exist. I’ve used my free will so I know it exists (I really like that psychology experiment I talked about in my opening post that suggest the power of choice is different from our thoughts and feelings).
Æzen: No, not read the book, but will check it out. I like the title.
foolish: Since you haven’t had an LD yet you’ll just have to work with the descriptions that everyone else gives. One of them will give you that “ah Ha”. (you will find mine in Part I of this topic).
SpiritualLucidity:
Exactly, when you are controlling your emotions you are deciding what to feel or not feel. That is power of choice, free will. I am finding more and more that most of the thoughts and feelings I have are pretty useless. As I’m worrying about how much money I have in the bank I find myself asking: “Do I really need to be thinking about this?” (ps. I really like your user name!)
For me a very critical component of lucidity is maintaining a level of self-awareness, and by that I literally mean that I am aware of myself as I am doing whatever. One of the exercises that I like to do is look in a mirror (that’s me, looking at me, looking at me). I get a strong sense of pure “self” when I do that, I’m aware of myself but without thoughts or feelings. In my recent LL practice I’ve found that this sense of self is more important than I had first thought. Originally, as a rough estimation, I felt about 10% of my awareness was focused on myself with the remainder focused on the environment. It seems more like a 50/50 split now (but that may be because I haven’t been working at it for a while).
Another factor that may come into play is “levels”. There is a general consensus that there are different levels of lucidity in dreaming and this should also be true for LL. It may be that as different levels are experienced the components and the definition may change. Something to think about.