Being Lucid.
Aware of the waters.
What is lucidity?
The word Lucid coming from the Latin word ‘Lux’ meaning light refers to the concept of clarity in the modern day use of the word. When we are talking human consciousness we usually mean a state in which the observer is integrated into the observation and is aware of its transactions. Dreams can be lucid, visions can be lucid, reality can be experienced lucidly. The state of lucidity is a state of awareness, of being aware of awareness. In a dream when you realize that you are dreaming, it becomes a lucid dream. In reality, when you become aware of the experiencer, you become lucid. When you are watching a sunset, you could be losing yourself in the experience, sometimes, somehow your experience also includes you. You experience yourself alongside the experience, that, “the ‘You’ you just experienced”, experiences. It is as if a camera could photograph its lens.
How can it help us evolve as a being?
Consciousness is all we have.
When all you have is summarized in something, it makes it very special. The value of lucidity lies in this statement. How would you know if you have a car if you are not conscious of it? There could be so many beautiful landscapes out there, and then suddenly you realize that all you really have is a camera. It never takes the landscapes away, additionally, it shows you how the same landscape creates different pictures when you temper with the diaphragm or the shutter speed. Then you find out that you are the actual screen of experiencing landscapes and cameras through photos, and the sole thing you have is the experiencing point, and now you observe yourself becoming aware of being aware of having a camera that takes photos. For the sake of putting it in an article, this endless possibility of zooming out, and out again,… and out again, is contained in the word count of this blog.
Take a digital visual artist into consideration. Before he developed an artistic point of view, he watched movies, lost himself in the depths of the art. Launched into alternate realities. Now, he is still equally enjoying the pieces, with the addition of seeing how the lines curve, what is the pallet of every scene, how did the last frame change into the current one, was it a black out and back in, was it a shift of the angle? This would be an “Augmented vision”. The artist goggles illuminate layers beyond that of an everyday vision. Now the artist is watching their visionary progress on their path, they are watching their eyes becoming more proficient in taking more in, they are aware that they are watching. This is referred to as a “Lucid” experience.
Lucid experiences can unlock certain areas of flexibility on the path to improvement that are not usually accessible when in rigid, or experience bound states. For instance, Sandra wants to teach the violin to herself. She learns the basics and manages to get a few sensible pieces going. Now all the violin music she can take in is either what she plays, or some very advanced recorded music out there (unless she knows her way around the internet or has a musician roommate). The pieces that are too advanced are too high to be grasped, and her music doesn’t have anything new for her. She is coming across an effect called, the “Plateau” effect. She feels like she is stuck on a certain level of skill and has no means of reaching farther. Now, she realizes that she is the point within which music makes sense. It’s her ears that give intervals their texture and enable her to distinguish different tones of sound. She plays some of her favourite tunes and starts playing around with her violins tuning. She experiments with intervals of tones without looking for a specific note. Sandy is exploring the unique nature of music itself. Playing on top of her experience, with this new sense of music, free from an expected way that music needs to happen in. One hour in, and she is there, playing the violin the way she has never done before. This wouldn’t have been possible if the lucid reflection on the experience of music didn’t take place. Instead it would have felt like a lock of expectations woven into the inability to meet them.
While we are in the midst of an experience, whatever it might be, we don’t have the experiencer or any sense of the nature of experience in the picture, and usually, that is how an experience mostly manifests (a microphone doesn’t often record itself). Through lucidity, we get the chance to have a glimpse of the experiencer and observe the processes that lead to an experience.
What are the practical applications of lucid experiences?
When you go for the magazine on your desk, your eyes get excited by the colourful well-arranged visuals and meaningful content. You are experiencing a magazine. Two weeks into your creative production course and your mind starts to notice the structure of the sentences that lead to certain experiences in your brain. You start asking questions you didn’t use to. Why this word and not that? How did the photographer capture that specific colour? You are now in a state that would count as lucid relative to the experience of reading. You are looking through an augmented vision that allows you to see not only the content itself but the way that the content is inducing the experience that it produces.
Writer, artist, architect, chef, engineer, doctor, or simply put: “If you are aiming to work with anything that summons any form of experience, you would benefit from the lucidity of the experience that you are having” — So basically everyone.
A doctor would feel the symptoms of an infection differently, A chef would taste the food with a seemingly out of this universe tongue, and a potter sees the pottery coming into his world all over again when he admires a simple, clay mug.
This is not to be confused with any form of alienation. It might sound like it, because ultimately there is no divorce between the observer and the observed. This is the tiny space through which innovation squeezes itself; The single way out of an otherwise excruciating repetition (That manifests visually if you point a camera to the screen, or put the microphone against the speaker — paraphrasing from Alan Watts here). Inspired by the infinite possibilities, empowered by the already existing experience, it is the door to something that has never been.
What about Narcissism?
If you have an association with the feeling of narcissism in your sphere of concepts, there is no easier way for you to see it in yourself than being lucid. It opens your eyes to all of you, without the regular pitfalls of the subjective truth obscuring its inherent conflicting realities. Chances are if you are in fact a narcissist your brain has already made you scroll through this paragraph, and guess what? if you are lucid, you see your brain scrolling through this section and will get a chance to reflect on it.
