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.
I want to describe noticeability here, for completeness’ sake, although I’ve written about it at length in The Wraiths of the Thames. Seeing something and noticing it are two separate events. They are separated by lucidity. Imagine that you are looking for a friend in a crowded railway station. Suddenly, there he is, right in the center of your field of vision! You had seen him, but you hadn’t noticed him. In dreams, this takes on magical qualities, allowing some characters to appear and disappear, or to change their appearances. Rest assured the magic here lies in your attention, not in anything they do. The more lucid you are, the less magical they are.
In waking life, it is the lack of lucidity that allows us to find virtue in working against our own well-being. 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 have least, shoplifting is somehow considered the greater crime. Lucidity is the ability to see the obvious.
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.
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. If you are dreaming that you are on a ship that is sinking, but no one else is reacting to that, you are in a lucidity quandary. You cannot stop seeing the ship sinking, yet all the evidence is that you are not in that dream. This is a hard problem.
There is something obvious that must be said here because it is seemingly nevertheless controversial: Nightmares are elective. Nightmares are optional and there can be no other person choosing than the dreamer. I do not see the opportunity for controversy here. In the end, anyone who does not want to continue a nightmare may wake up from it. Any argument against this is an admission that lucidity matters.
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. You get the idea that the ship is sinking, and all your attention goes on whatever constitute evidence of it. In dreaming, this is a self-reinforcing reality. If you see that you are in a lucidity quandary, put your attention where other people are putting theirs. Evidence of disaster should mutate into something else, as long as you can resist the urge to panic.
In waking life, the situation is similar. You get the idea that foreigners are destroying your civilisation from the inside. Your attention goes on any evidence that might support that idea and it glosses over evidence that might contradict the idea. If you see fellow citizens treating foreigners kindly, you are in a quandary.
This happens so very often in waking life that I would claim that this is nearly all that goes on in waking life. One subscribes to narratives about what is going on, and then services the narratives to the exclusion of everything else. Narratives override reality. It is no wonder then why so many people have dreams that seem crazy. Crazy dreams are the result of predilections and mental habits.
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.