Lucid Dreams: Consciousness

I am awake, I am conscious. I am asleep, I am unconscious.

But that it were so simple. Consciousness is analogue, not digital. Consciousness is a threshold.

Awake, your threshold to consciously process external stimulus is lower, asleep it is higher. But there is always some consciousness for everyone when they sleep. If this is not true, we should form a class-action to sue all alarm-clock manufacturing companies for false advertising.

So what happens when a lucid dream dawns? First the threshold of consiousness lowers. Psychologically you become more aware of both your internal and external state. Physiologically you remain in the same sleep state (well... not quite, we'll look at that another time).

So there is consciousness; that is you, now, sitting there reading your computer screen. A 'normal' dream happens to you, you are the 'I' character within it, and you remember it on waking as a dream. In a lucid dream, you have the same mental faculties as you do now.

But that is not the same as the threshold of control. In the pre-lucid state, you believe you are awake. You rise from bed, go about your morning ablutions, eat breakfast, catch the train to work, then suddenly realise... this is a dream! And find yourself back in bed. This is a 'false awakening', and it can repeat, over and over again, the Groundhog Day torment.

When the full lucid state occurs, the consciousness comes with a threshold of control. You are asleep. You know It. You are dreaming. You know it. Will you have total control over the dreamscape? Sometimes, yes. But it depends (I believe) on what your subconscious is trying to tell you.

I don't like the term 'subconscious', it connotes 'lesser'. I think the non-conscious part of mind (the complement to the conscious part) is both larger and more powerful than the conscious part. Non-conscious is the 'thought', the now, directed by the 'thinker' the part that will determine what we will do next. The conscious is the 'observer', which can program the thinker, and to which the nonconscious will subordinate itself; but how often do we invoke this observer, which will manage the direction of the proactive thinker to produce the reactive thought?