[Liaptoono]

Hey, Ritch.

You raise some valid points here. Especially the one with the "don't wake me now" logic. It's possible to be kind of aware that you are dreaming and yet not become fully lucid to it. It might change the quality of the experience you have, be a bit more in the background, you even might become lucid for a short while, then fade back.

It all has to with habits of perception. I nearly typed that this comes due to this: "Accepting the reality one is perceiving." But that might lead to wrong assumptions from my point of view - I'll qualify it a bit better: "Accepting the reality one is perceiving unquestioningly." You can jump on a skyscraper with that "attitude" and not notice anything unusual. You can find a dinosaur in your bedroom and find a "reasonable explanation" for that. I used to call this "dream logic," but maybe "non-lucid logic" would be better. It runs with whatever the senses perceive and tries to come up with rationalisations to justify the reality it encounters.

I'm not sure what can be done to overcome this tendency, but viewing waking reality through the lens of symbolism can be helpful, in my opinion. I think it takes one to a higher state of processing than usual and might help becoming lucid as well, I assume. I think it helps you to tap what you usually so sorely miss in non-lucid dreams - context! The dinosaur, the sky-scraper jumping - they are out of context. Trying to put them in any kind of context that makes sense would make you run into contradictions. Because when decoding a symbol you reach out to all kinds of connections - and you just might realise something in the process that helps you get lucid.

Even if not, your dreams will at least make more sense. I'd say your waking life and spontaneous OBEs as well.

Cheers,
Oliver