Lucid Dreams: The Lucid Dream Within A Dream

Sometimes I have a lucid dream within a dream, which is a bit different from a lucid dream per se.

Last night I dreamt lying in bed - not my real-world bed, but 'my' bed in the dream - watching a tape of some episodes of a documentary. More correctly, I was listening to the documentary as other things happened within the dream. Because some things being said didn't make sense without seeing the TV I tried to turn towards the screen but couldn't, which is where the dream lucidity within a dream began.

A common pre-lucid state is when you attempt to move your body, and when you think it is in it's new position you find it back where it started. This is a 'confusion' between the real, physical position of the body and the psychological model of it which normal separate during dreaming. In this case, aware now that I was within a normal dream, it's the same confusion but between the 'physical' position of the dream-body and it's psychological representation.

In fact, I was able to move my dream body around just not my head, leading me to fall out of my dream bed as though in a drunken stupour - in a (pre-) lucid dream proper I am unlikely to be able to move any part of my body, a stage of so-called 'sleep paralysis'. I even attempted to hold my head with my hands and move it around to no avail, something I couldn't normally do in a lucid dream. My head was simply anchored to the floor like a rock sitting there.

After a short period experimenting to see if I could do anything about it, I decided to return to the dream and had another longish dream after that, both of which were more 'present' than a normal dream but not lucid. When I awoke I had been sleeping for about 4 hours.

Two tell-tale signs that some sort of lucidity was coming; I was able to switch back and forth between my conscious thoughts and hypnogogic imagery at will, re-entering either at the point I left off several times, and hearing conversations in the background during the hypnogogic state.

The talking sounds like muffled voices in the next room, or the background hum of a cocktail party with odd phrases discernable here and there. When I focus in on it the speech can become quite coherent although tonight it was in French. I only know very little French so I should say "had the structure of French", but as I concentrated on it the voice transitioned to German. I can sometimes pick up at least the gist of what's being talked about in German, but as I caught the switch I went into the dream.

It's a little difficult to place this one on the lucidity scale; as a lucid dream it would be around 25%, but as a dream within a dream it's around 5%. Taking dream control of a lucid dream, or becoming lucid within a dream? Hard to say due to the extent to which the normal dream continued through the lucidity.

EDIT: The nice thing about blogging is that you can bash out your thoughts as they happen and have them there to reflect upon until a better way of expressing them occurs. Here's a little clarification (or maybe reambiguation...) of what this post is about.

It is quite common, almost the 'usual' way of having a lucid dream to be dreaming normally, become aware you are dreaming, and thus take conscious control of the dream - become lucid.

What I am trying to describe here however is dreaming about having a lucid dream, so the consciousness that occurs is within the normal dream, not strictly the 'waking consciousness' that is dream lucidity. By analogy, you might dream about being drunk and so within the dream you are drunk, but this is not quite the same as being drunk in waking reality.