Concepts

Glossary

Reality checks (RCs): A common way to test the situation you are in against reality. Reality checks are not necessary for lucid dreaming, but they may help in your early attempts.

Sleep paralysis (SP): A MEDICAL CONDITION that is not related to lucid dreaming and which you are unlikely to have.

Schema: association(s) between two things, such as a word to an object, or actions and consequences, or other mental pattern(s). These are important to controlling your dreams.

Recall: (n.) one's ability to remember dreams.

Hypnagogia: a "half-asleep" state usually encountered while performing WILD or a WILD-like technique. Hypnagogic hallucinations may appear during this stage, and can use any of your senses, even sight. Think of it as the state where your dreams form.

Dream sign: any phenomenon, object, or event that only, or more frequently, occurs in dreams. When used in the context of "your dream signs," it refers to dream signs which occur frequently in your dreams, best used to help identify dreams (this is the basis of DILD).

Persistent realm (PR): a world in a dream that you visit multiple times, often intentionally.

Omnilucid (Omni):

(adj.) having lucidity in every dream.

(n.) an oneironaut who is omnilucid; someone who is lucid in every dream they have.

Etymology: omni (Latin prefix, meaning "all") + lucid. Originally given to Hukif by Sensei, both well-known and well-accredited in the lucid dreaming community.

Oneironaut: one who explores dreams. In the same way as a random person off the street strapped to the side of a rocket and hurled into space isn't an astronaut, someone who simply dreams is not an oneironaut; rather, you have to actually know what you're doing. Therefore, an oneironaut is a lucid dreamer.

SCAN: SCAN is a name given to a sixth sense you possess in dreams that grants you knowledge of the world around you. It is comparable to using the Force or sensing ki/chi. Unprompted, involuntary, or non-lucid SCANs are referred to as info dumps. (Source: Mortal Mist)

False Awakening (FA): a dream in which you may believe you have "woken up" and are most often in bed. These are tricky and sometimes convincing, and are reported to appear more often following a WILD-class technique attempt.

Reality shifting: a myth that you can "shift" to a different reality by doing certain things. In practice, what is traditionally called reality shifting is actually dream incubation.

Dream incubation: a technique by which you can select or build a dream before entering it. This is most often done to enter PRs or to re-enter the previous dream with DEILD.

Maintenance realm: a basic featureless void that can be accessed as a schema from within a lucid dream. It can be used to give you a blank slate upon which to build a dream scene, a place to breathe, or a way to switch dreams, such as for entering persistent realms.

Railed: a tongue-in-cheek term used to describe being lucid but returning to the existing dream plot (i.e. going into autopilot). When used actively ("I railed"), it means that you returned to the plot voluntarily. When used passively ("I was railed"), it means that it was not voluntary, and often coincides with a loss of lucidity.