What is lucidity? It's remembering who you are. That euphoric feeling, like trumpeting angels. For example, like the feeling I used to get whenever deciding to go ahead with the divorce. Though I had to give that habit up.

I'm tired of the worn-out old 20th century assumption that lucidity is "knowing that you're dreaming". That's just official  lucidity. Like the fairy-tale difference between OBE and LD; it's just something you say in conversation to keep from starting an argument: "I got lucid last night," and everyone knows you realized you were dreaming. Or, "It was just a lucid dream," so no one will accuse you of not 'getting out of your body.' Do you think the currently standardized definition of lucidity--to realize that you're dreaming--is going to be worth anything in 100 years when unworlding is taught at your local community college and kindergartners compare dream stories over graham crackers and milk? I feel pretty darn lucid when I'm in a dream and "realize that this is really happening" but decide it's not a dream because it's obviously real. And philosophically speaking, it isn't a dream; it is real. So how about a scale of lucidity instead of a black/white designation as childish as lucid vs. not lucid. All dreams respond favorably to Attention. All dreams deserve credit. If you even remember dreaming at all, that is the seed of lucidity.

Lucidity is something to care about, something to gloat about when I make a score. Here's a simple chart to peer at:

By peering at the chart, what becomes apparent is that lucidity is a scale of something. A score. You might try to say that lucidity is how much awareness you have at any given moment. But this wording grates on me because I do so like my notion that pure awareness or oneness is indivisible. If it's indivisible, then how do you quantify it? By calling it fourness, the 4th harmonic of awareness. Now I can quantify to my heart's content, because playing to win is to basketball as fourness is to unworlding. Do any of the items on the following list describe a dream that is more lucid than average? I think they do.

I don't want to give the impression that I think lucidity is just another reflection of 4ness. For example, another attribute of lucidity is a good memory, and that's a reflection of 3ness. So is seeing stuff you like in the dream, that's a great way to get your Attention. And knowing who you are, one of my favorite descriptions of lucidity... identifying yourself as the person who lay down in bed earlier... that's twoness. Really it's a combination of 2ness and 3ness because identity is 2ness and making the connection or Chaining awareness is 3ness. So really what I'm getting at is that lucidity is a special adjustment of the 2-3-4 Body/Mind/World such that it is neither unforgivably solid as in the waking state, nor comatose as it often is at the borderline of sleep. Lucidity is the result of balancing the 2-3-4 so it can be used as a tool, not a toy. The Dayly Dreame is the other way around, it's a matter of using the 2-3-4 as a toy, a bottomless bag of candy, an overindulgence in the unique things that Earthville advertises such as stability, predictability, chocolate, and capitalism.

This leads to a constant theme of the Synfonemia philosophy, which is that we don't leave our bodies and go to other worlds and experience altered states of mind; we are our bodies, minds, worlds, simultaneously and for the same reason: depending on how much energy is being fed to each of our seven dream bodies (and each of their seven dream bodies, and each of their seven dream bodies...). Slimming down the normally gluttonous 2-3-4 Body/Mind/World doesn't get us out of anything except a habitual adjustment that can easily be changed. Trying to get out of your body seldom works unless you already know how, because you're trying to do the wrong thing. All you have to do is adjust the seven harmonics of awareness in a certain way, and you find that way by feel and by experience, not by memorizing some two-dimensional map. Once you've experienced the route there, you feel your way there with greater and greater confidence.

One nagging question is, why does lucidity so often coincide with waking up?

Because they're almost the same thing, in the sense that you go the same way to get to either place. It's just that, if you don't want to re-enter the Dayly Dreame, you have to jump off the train before it pulls into the station. The many useful descriptions of relative lucidity such as remembering who you are in what would have otherwise seemed like nonsensical, random mindplay  versus landing in the Dayly Dreame, forced to take up your physical burdens where you left off are almost the same thing due to the near-identicalness of the way there: waking up. Minus a good deal of the euphoria in the latter case, understandably enough, since it's necessary to rob the Uppers of their fair share of your energy in order to pump the 2-3-4 up to the point where its manifestations are durably solid in accordance with a consensus belief system. But in general, whether you Wake-Up-Right and end up in the Unworld, or wake up the usual way and end up in the Dayly Dreame, what has happened is just a case of having re-adjusted the 2-3-4 and ending up somewhere. By a considerable focusing of the volition, you can become more lucid than usual, earlier than usual, i.e. Wake-Up-Right, thereby offering energy to the Uppers who live in the Unworld and know how to get around in it. Or by taking the easy way out, letting the default configuration impose itself, a prisoner you shall be until the next time you go to sleep.

The only difference between Waking-Up-Right and waking up in the Dayly Dreame is that waking up in bed at the same time you become lucid in the Unworld is a grabby move on the part of the 2-3-4 to take back what it considers to be its own. But the 2-3-4 mind can be trained to detach and let go of the controls so the Uppers can work their magic, resulting in experiences beyond the ability of the 2-3-4 to purposely create or sometimes even comprehend.

Now, what is it about Chaining that makes it relatively easy, even for more experienced unworlders who could take their pick of techniques? Take a look at the time it happens: the "DE" in DEILD. Dream exit. What were we just talking about? The beginner's lucidity curse: waking up and becoming lucid at the same time. So easy and natural for beginners to make this mistake over and over. Because once those sliders are moving on the graphic equalizer that will determine what place or state you end up in, that is the 2-3-4's big chance to grab the already-moving controls. Similarly, Chaining back into the Unworld which we just left, because it takes place at the end of a dream when we wake up, takes advantage of commonly existing circumstances that don't have to be concocted, forced, imagined, memorized, affirmed or wished into existence. Not that some of the urgings just named don't help sometimes. But the fact is, we already wake up after each REM cycle, whether or not we remember doing this.

This is the perfect recipe for a natural entry into the Unworld. While the experts assert that Chaining/DEILD is a special case of doing WILD or doing it the "cheap and easy way," I assert that the facts are being skewed, maybe due to the fact that the WILD description existed before the DEILD description. People grow fond of their existing descriptions, so instead of retooling the Factory of Factoids by just canning outdated terminology such as all the -ILDs, OBE, the word "dream," the word "real" and all the other auto-fill groupthink adopted whole hog at the dawn of time and then never changed, new terminology like DEILD is squeezed in amongst the grandfathers. The grandfathers, fortunately enough, have veto power over those newly arrived geniuses of image which want to change things in favor of maximizing a profit margin due to the encroaching commercialization of unworlding as a form of entertainment. So we have DEILD and WILD and whole internet forums full of experts arguing over what is supposedly meant by the bad terminology that we're stuck with, while no one is teaching anyone how unworlding actually works because, due to the fact that our terminology came from the dark side of the moon 100 years ago, nobody knows how they do it, and if they do, they can't describe it since accurate terminology doesn't exist.

So next time you realize, believe, or assume that you're waking up in your bed, remember to Just-Get-Up NOW. If you promise yourself to do this every single day at least once, I think you'll find that in a month or so, you'll actually attempt it. Assuming that it doesn't work the first time, because you bathed yourself luxuriantly in doubts before taking that leap, the next step is to actually Just-Get-Up from an Awakening, every single day at least once. I know we hate to wake up, but isn't waking up what lucidity is all about? And doing it voluntarily is kinda the main point.