SUB-concious/UN-concious mind???

the prefix SUB means ‘less than’, ‘beneath’, or ‘inferior’.
UN means ‘not’

so SUB-concious means inferior conciousness and UN-concious means not concious.

i belive the idea behind lucid dreaming is to make the two conciousnesses ‘one’ by making them equally important. but by using these words to describe the state of our minds while we sleep defeats the entire purpose.
it may aid us all in lucid dreaming (experienced or not) if we were to refer to this state of conciousness as ‘Dreaming Conciousness’ from now on as a little baby step in the direction of making our minds understand that our dreams r important to us and that we want to ‘experience them’ while we r having them…not just wake up and ‘remember them’.

just a thought

I think the point is our sub/unconscious is the director, and we are but one actor in his plays.

When we are lucid that changes to a degree, but he still has to cooperate with you, it’s harder to imagine something in explicit detail and force it into the scene than it is to use trickery to make your mind think it’s already there and let it fill in the blanks and do the hard parts for you.

and even if you are all lolligagging about lucid a character can still appear from nowhere to try and persuade you to do something else.

So… I’m not really sure what you get at… the unconscious mind creates the dreams for us and sends them to us, being, the conscious mind.

A split awareness of both minds simultaneously would be very nice, I suppose it could be possible.

" but by using these words to describe the state of our minds while we sleep defeats the entire purpose"

I interpret this to saying that OUR minds are unconscious while sleeping, this is not so in the case of some dreams, granted there are periods of sleep where we are largely unconscious, and the unconscious is just doing stuff, but eventually we do become a part of that in interactive dreams and whatnot.

So I don’t see it harmful as saying the subconscious makes dreams, it does, unless we become lucid, then we can work with it to make dreams.

It’s just a theory anyway… I do believe that there is some sort of split mind effect going on inside my head though, based upon where it generates the dreams and voices and images from, and whatnot, it feels like sleep turns you off and turns it on.

a bit OT but will someone corect me here? Isn’t the freudian model the conscious, the pre/subconscious, then the unconscious?

The pre being just below the surface and possible to tune into, probably what gives you the dreams and voices and whatnot, the unconscious being something not really accessible for deep storage of things and control of bodily processes?

I wish my memory was better… I remember the iceberg diagram though

I am not sure I see any advantage or disadvantage either way. It is still the same state. All you are doing is changing the language. A rose by any other name …

I think SUB is meant to refer to the fact that it is an underlying consciousness beneath what we normally are aware of.
Thus the ‘beneath’ - beneath our awareness, not beneath us in the arrogant form of the word.

Well the way i see it the Unconisous mind is the part of the mind that controls the basic bodily fuctions such as heartbeat etc.

The Subconcious is a bit harder to describe, it is the part if the mind that you are not normally aware of but it can sometimes be brought to the consious mind.

the point i was trying to make here was that the mind takes and interprets everything we say and do. thought we may conciously think of our subconcious and unconcious minds as important things, giving them such titles not only dergades their importance on a logical level (which is what i was pointing by defining the prefixes of each word) but also creates a boundary or an accepted seperation of these states of mind from our waking conciousness making them either more or less important to us, and either way that would no be very productive.

i was simply suggesting equating the imporantance of both states of conciousness to ourselfs to attain cleartiy in both.

I think that LDing is a way to control both the subconsious and consious states of mind . You know , full control of the mind

really?
from what i’ve read tibetan monks use them for that exact purpose, trying to equate and balance the mind through ‘dream yoga’.

from wut i’ve read in the dream journals on this site and others, it appears that we in the western world use lucid dreaming mainly for pleasure and wish fulfillment as opposed to self imporvement (however am sure there are some that do use lucid dreaming to improve themselves).

you say that like pleasure and wish fulfillment are bad things

if i may highlight 2 words from that:

=> tibetan MONKS

you’re reading about people who devoted their WHOLE lives to spiritual refinement–which is a very fine aspiration, and more power to them–but look around on this forum… i think it’s safe to say that we’re all layman here.

forget making this about east and west, i’m certain there many eastern layman who would be just as quick to use LDing for pleasure and wish-fulfillment as a western layman. you can’t look to a group of ascetics (an ascetic being an exception rather than the rule) and think they represent the east as a whole.

do you think this forum would have 1/6th the members that it does if lucid dreaming were presented as a strict spiritual discipline rather than a way to have sex with your favorite celebrity ???

pleasure and wish fulfillment are very fine aspirations too. why ??? because now we can explore how lucid dreaming can help the layman, instead of only the ascetic–can benefit the many instead of just the few

sighs

im not trying to start a religion or tell ppl what ‘they’ should be doing with ‘their’ lucid dreams. not my business. i was merely suggesting a way to make the experience more vivid and common.

the stuff about the tibetan monks and the differences between the eastern and western worlds was a simple side-note unworthy of recognition, as well as MHO.

i’m not telling anyone to shave their heads and go to tibet to strengthen their LDing ability. i’m saying u might want to take some of their advice on the topic…they r one of the few groups of experts on this topic in the world, i’m pretty sure we have something to learn…us being laymen and all

right

I am not sure what you mean by this. Do you think that by treating lucid dreaming as more spiritual endeavor would somehow make it more popular? Or that it would make it easier to do? If it is the later I think it would have the opposite effect. By looking a lucid dreaming as a spiritual process I think you will make it harder to do. You want to look a lucid dreaming as a simple skill that anyone can learn. Granted there are a lot of different uses for this skill but I think they are all equally important. I do not think the person who uses lucid dreaming for spiritual fulfillment is any better/worse than some one who uses it to indulge in fantasies. After all wish fulfillment has a balancing effect in its own way.

Also, I remember reading a few commentaries on Tibetan Buddhism and from what I remember they did not only use lucid dreaming for spiritual purposes. They also indulged in wish fulfillment.

Yes they are experts on the topic but are by no means the only ones:

=> Stephan Labarge
=> Patricia Garfield
=> Paul Tholey

Just to name a few. I would not consider them layman

i would have thought sub consious meant below consciousness.
therefore not conscious either.

note that these are names given to parts of the mind.

not states of mind. hence “conscious” rather than “consciousness”…

…making this a misinterpretation.