In contemplating consciousness, I have recently approached the issue of lucid dreaming. As I have defined elsewhere, dreaming is an activity of the mind while asleep, a collection of mental images perceived by the mind as the body, unless it is sleepwalking, stays largely inactive. Lucid dreaming is a step beyond this: it involves both conscious awareness that one is dreaming and intentional control of one's dream, not just a passive experience of it. This phenomenon is of interest to study of consciousness, the mind, and the will.
In such a dream where one has achieved a "lucid" state, one's dream self could manipulate the images of the surrounding dream environment, conduct a conversation with a dream character, practice a task in anticipation of engaging in that task the next day, do otherwise lethal things without dying, and so on. One could find freedom to discard scientific laws at will. But it is totally untrue to say that there are "no limitations" on what one can imagine or do in a lucid dream, for things which are logically impossible remain both impossible to come about and impossible to conceive of in the mind. A door in a dream can't be open and closed at the same time; my mind can't perceive and not perceive a lucid dream at the same time; I cannot be flying and walking on the ground at the same time. Logical facts govern all of reality, including a dream otherwise totally dictated to someone by his or her own self [1].
One way others claim to have been able to distinguish between a dream and state of awakeness is to attempt things which are impossible while awake, such as pushing one hand through the other. An actual hand would prevent another hand from passing through it due to the properties of matter, but in a dream, a realm composed of mental images and not matter, such a feat could be possible. An action or thought intended to distinguish an experience in a lucid dream from that of being awake is called a reality check. Other examples might include things like coughing without shaking or hearing certain external sounds while covering the ears. The goal is to contrast the occurrences in the dream world, governed only by logic and one's will, with those in the external world we perceive while awake, which is governed additionally by scientific laws like gravity.
The characters in the popular Christopher Nolan movie Inception, a film where characters entered the dreams of other people, have their own type of reality check--they brought little items like tops into the dream and would spin them on a surface. If the item continued spinning beyond a natural length of time, they would believe they were in a dream; if not, they would consider themselves awake. Philosophically and logically, though, neither spinning a top nor any of the other reality checks I mentioned previously actually prove that one is dreaming or awake. It would always remain possible that the dream world behaves much like or just like the real world, rendering many reality checks epistemologically useless. But there is a way to logically prove to oneself one way or the other if one is awake--see a previous article of mine on the subject [2].
Dream characters, also called dream figures, could be fashioned originally or be based upon recalled individuals who exist outside of the dream. I have yet to sort through debates about the role of the subconscious in projecting and animating dream figures. But dream figures do not control lucid dreams; the dreamer does. In a lucid dream, one could behave in a practically godlike fashion--not that the ability to lucid dream actually makes one divine or that powers displayed in lucid dreams translate into waking life in the external world. Of course, this fact could provoke many questions about the nature of reality, metaphysics, epistemology, and general philosophy and theology.
Lucid dreaming indeed opens the pathway to questions about a variety of philosophical and ethical issues. Is having sex in a lucid dream sinful? What does lucid dreaming convey about free will? Does ontological idealism find unexpected support in lucid dreaming? I do not have the time or space to elaborately and precisely answer these questions now, but perhaps I will return to them in the future. Although I have not yet actually attempted to lucid dream, meaning I have not yet been able to experience successful lucid dreaming, I do hope to attempt it sometime! After all, being able to use telekinesis seems fun to me!
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/09/conceivability-is-possibility.html
[2]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html
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