“But why are people interested in learning to be conscious in their dreams? According to my own experience, and the testimony of thousands of other lucid dreamers, lucid dreams can be extraordinarily vivid, intense, pleasurable, and exhilarating. People frequently consider their lucid dreams as among the most wonderful experiences of their lives.
If this were all there were to it, lucid dreams would be delightful, but ultimately trivial entertainment. However, as many have already discovered, you can use lucid dreaming to improve the quality of your waking life. Thousands of people have written to me at Stanford telling how they are using the knowledge and experience they have acquired in lucid dreams to help them get more out of living.”
Stephen Laberge, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, Page: 4
“If you are having a dream and you think it’s real, it can get very scary. Say you are dreaming you are tightrope walking across Niagara Falls. If you fall off, you plunge to your death. So you are walking very slowly, very carefully. Then suppose you start lucid dreaming, and you realise it’s all a dream. What do you do? Become more cautious and careful? Noo, you start jumping up and down on the tightrope, you do flips, you bounce around, you have a ball – precisely because you know isn’t real. When you realise it’s a dream you can afford to play.
The same thing happens when you realise that ordinary life is a dream, just a movie, just a play. You don’t become more cautious, more timid, more reserved. You start jumping up and down and doing flips, precisely because it’s all a dream, it’s all pure Emptiness. You don’t feel less, you feel more – because you can afford to. You are no longer afraid of dying, and therefore you are not afraid of living. You become radical and wild, intense and vivid, shocking and silly. You let it all come pouring through, because it’s all your dream.
Life then assumes its true intensity, its vivid luminosity, its radical effervescence.
Ken Wilber, The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader., Page: 33
This quote by Wilber demonstrates the approach to lucidity favored by IDL. Learning to lucid dream can be interesting, educational, empowering, build self-confidence and self-esteem. It is also an important realm for interviewing dream elements, just as IDL does in waking life. However, who you are in your lucid dreams is your waking identity; it just knows it’s dreaming. This is why Wilber and IDL both stress the importance of waking lucidity. As you wake up in your waking life, you take that expanded sense of self into your dreams as well, lucid or otherwise. You start to understand that there are many forms of lucidity, such as exiting drama and recognizing your emotional, logical, and perceptual cognitive distortions. This is why IDL recommends the broad-based approach to lucidity that it describes in Waking Up.