i like the idea... it is very good : )

to me though, a lucid walker seems to imply some being that is astral projecting, but is making an energy construct around their projected conciousness...

This brings up huge topics. If we are aware that we are dreaming, then we are lucid dreaming. If we are aware that we are awake... what are we? We have a clear definition of what it is to be dreaming, so being aware that we are in this state we call "dreaming" is something we can wrap our brains around. But do we have a clear definition of what our waking consciousness is? What step would we need to take, or what greater perspective would we need to call on that would induce a similar shift in experience?

I'm thinking that we would need some sort of clarified concept of our waking reality, one that we could step just outside of. For instance, when I think about quantum physics, about the fact that my physiology is mostly empty space, about how everything that I experience as emotion is really just chemical reactions in my brain (etc.) -- from that perspective I can shift into a sense of reality that sees this three dimensional world as an elaborate holographic construct that doesn't actually contain any of the properties, labels, or content we attribute to it... and for a moment there, from that perspective shift, I suppose I could see myself as lucid within my waking life.

I agree with Michael, that theoretically if we were able to make this shift, we would have similar control or impact on our waking world as we do on our dreaming world, since our waking world is just another realm of perception and experience.

Since I woke up this morning thinking about this, I'm going to keep playing with it, even if... I'm playing with myself, as it were.

I've found an amazing number of times in my life where the phrase "as it is above, so it is below" has held true -- where the micro and the macro mirror each other. So, as an exercise, assuming that the relationship between dreaming and lucid dreaming holds the keys to the relationship between waking and lucid waking, where would we start?

In a normal dream, I assume my experience is "real". Regardless of whether or not the events follow the "laws of physics", I accept them and adapt (or at least respond) to them. Things morph continuously and fluidly, and while I might acknowledge within the dream that an event was strange, I still blindly accept it as "real".

And what happens (for me, obviously in this case) when I become lucid within my dream? I know that the experience I'm involved in is not "real". Fear leaves me, because I understand that I can't be hurt there. Since I have practiced, I am capable of some manipulation of myself and my environment that knowingly goes against the physical laws and limitations of waking life. And yet there are limitations. I need to effortlessly will things to happen, I need to keep my thoughts calm and somewhat linear, I need to maintain a line between having the experience and controlling it -- or I will wake up...

How much of this might apply? Perhaps normal waking is dreamlike in part because we accept what we see as being real. The first step in waking lucidity might be to calmly acknowledge that this is not real. In a sense, our consciousness needs to shift so that we become the dreamer -- so in waking life, who's dream are we in? Hmmmm... might be a bit too bold to say we would need to tap into "god consciousness" or something like that to become aware of -- as the Kalahari Bushmen put it -- the dream that is dreaming us. I have read philosophies that describe the mind/soul merging as the creation of a projector, and from that inner point outward, we create our (waking) reality. So perhaps awareness needs to bring to consciousness that part of us which projecting the world that we experience into the field of possibilities that we live in.

One part that doesn't seem to fit for me is that while lucid dreaming, I need to be careful not to actually wake myself. If the goal is to be lucid awake, then the goal is also not to actually wake up completely -- just to remain here but in a super-consciousness state. What would happen if we actually completely woke up? Perhaps somehow we know in our cores that to wake up is to die, so we agree not to. Maybe that's why people who have had near-death experiences are known to have periods of heightened lucidity.


On a sort of related topic -- my mind keeps flashing to the movie The Matrix. The first time I saw that movie I was BLOWN AWAY -- it held such strong parallels as a depiction of the *experience* of lucid dreaming to me, that when I left the theater I swore that if I could break free of my belief systems I could run and jump etc. just like they did. I could *feel* that. When Neo "woke up from his dream" he was somewhere else entirely... I don't think that's where I'd find myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if the place were similarly unimaginable in its own right.