Lucidity
Lucidity is the ability to see the obvious.
It is the one topic that cannot be discussed: People who do not see things that are obviously there are stupid; people who see things that are obviously not there are crazy. Each of us is therefore trapped in his own level of lucidity, and everyone else is either stupid or crazy.
Lucidity is a problem for all awareness, and perhaps the core problem.
When we are dreaming, we are nearly always obviously dreaming because of magical events or mismatches with our waking reality. It is the lack of lucidity that allows us to ignore these obvious signs.
In waking life, it is the lack of lucidity that allows us to find virtue in working against our own well-being.1 We stay in toxic relationships because we believe we ‘ought’ to. Even though wage theft is more common and more costly than shoplifting, and even though it is committed by those who have most against those who lave least, shoplifting is considered the greater crime.
When exposed to the concept of lucidity, people usually get enthusiastic about increasing their lucidity. How do we go about it?
How indeed. This question disregards the core concept of lucidity: Something is either obvious or it isn’t. If it is obvious, there is nothing to work on; if it isn’t obvious, there is no reason to believe there is something to work on.
If you are dreaming that you are on a ship that is sinking, but no one else is reacting to that, you cannot stop seeing the ship sinking; everyone else is simply crazy.
It is logic, not will, that hinders the development of lucidity.
The one thing we can do is to recognise, when faced with an otherwise unworkable situation, that we might be in a lucidity quandary. For example, if no one is reacting to a sinking ship, what are they attending to? That might be your entry into their dream. The hardest part about moving to a higher level of lucidity is habit. We have unquestioned ways of perceiving things, of reacting to them, of narrating them. In science, theories are discarded not because they are false, but because there is another theory that works in more cases. It is exactly this kind of brutality that is required to go to the next level of lucidity. The pursuit of lucidity is the most ruthless undertaking imaginable. Every habit incompatible with it must be destroyed, and it may be destroyed only by its husband.
1.An example of working against your own well being might be working in a factory 12 hours per day in unsafe conditions, instead of going on strike. The longer you continue, the less likely that you should ever break out, because your employer amasses the wealth necessary to crush any future strike.