So true! Though I don’t think “I” would’ve said IWL or not dreaming, but you bring up the good point of the meaning behind the words; More-so valid I think from being on an international forum where many readers translate first one tongue to another, before ‘feeling’ that ‘meaning’ behind the words. BUT that road is a two-way gambit, whereby we also assign meaning, based on the words, which I think is the heart of this topic.
I’ve also found an immense probability that things/scenarios in the dreams very often hold similarly or symbolically true on more than one level. While illustrating some of the difficulty in achieving Lucidity, that short dream-scene also interprets into (at least) 2 other more personal situations.
I’ve often heard of dreaming as the brain’s ‘filing system’, and I think often the ‘feelings’ associated with different life events are more the core in dreams, and the ‘meanings’ are often ambiguous or poetically similar and all valid.
*Therefore, I think finding, at least personally, a set of words to disambiguously describe some of the concepts we’re working with helps internalize a more precise feeling/meaning associated and essentially gives us better Tools to work with.
As for Reality Test v. Check, I’d have to agree that Test would be more appropriate for the techniques, but in practice, you don’t want it to take over the dream, and you do want it to (at least eventually) be a “quick check”. BUT I suppose it’s different for everyone as far as what’s needed and “better”, as results are what matters.
For me, the whole concept of the RC is just a Trick to get your consciousness aware of it’s surroundings, and though I’ve had minimal success with the nose pinch technique, I’ve also had as many ‘failures’ (another point I don’t like being associated with the RC method, hoping to have an RC Fail seems a reinforcement of a negative to be a positive…) result in a failure to become lucid.
In the past, when I wasn’t often trying to consistently Induce LD’s, most often would come a moment best described as “?” from which I would assess an internal Feeling gauge as to being in a dream.
In practice over the past 2 months, I’ve had some success with many different techniques, but am still searching for what I believe to the core of the matter; Accepting that I can Lucid dream often, and when I choose to. and That, I think I can only overcome through consistent efforts and successes, overcoming decades of inattentive and contrary self-conditioning.
*I think more precise language can help, myself and others; For each new experience, if we have a different word to help describe that particular, we can more consciously influence our dreaming habits. To someone with no Lucid Dreams in their memory, the term itself draws a ?? for their personal meaning; To someone with 1 or 2 “low-level” LD’s, they may know they have lucidly dreamed, but ?? the difference with being in a dream with their reasoning, or a higher degree of awareness, or a stronger means to control themselves, or their environment.
Especially for someone working heavily with phrases like “Tonight I WILL have a Lucid Dream”; repeating that as they fall asleep; If words:“Lucid Dream” = meaning:“Low-Level Lucid Moment followed by FLD with minimal awareness” it may take some experiential retraining, and more importantly, the Knowledge that there IS a difference.