Noticeability

I do not want to forget the topic of noticeability, so I’ll make a stub here.

Seeing something and noticing it are two separate phenomena. 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. Sometimes a character appears out of no where, but not blinking into existence like on television. Somehow the character was always there, and simply became noticeable. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that dream characters that appear and disappear do not blink in and out of existence. If their appearance changes, it is never a shift, but rather that you can report a change after the fact. The magic here lies in your attention, not in anything they do. The more lucid you are, the less magical they are.

One common circumstance of my dreams, and in many of the dreams reported to me, is that the dreamer notices a character, and the character reacts to being noticed. “Oh! You can see me? How splendid!” I find this a quite remarkable feature of dreaming.