Lucid dreams are those dreams in which you realize that you are dreaming. Personally they happen to me with some frequency. Most of the time I wake up within seconds of being aware that I am dreaming. It is something difficult to control. Suddenly I am aware that the reality that I am living and feeling is part of a dream and the cognitive shock It is of such magnitude that I automatically wake up.
However, the opposite is equally astonishing to me, that is, not being aware that I am dreaming, seeing myself flying and not questioning reality. Being able to see the Statue of Liberty from the terrace of my bungalow in Torrevieja and not realizing that this is something completely impossible. On those occasions I wake up and really wonder how it is possible that my mind could not "detect" so much incoherence. I do not understand how it is possible that my consciousness could not question the implausibility of the situations I've dreamed of.
After studying topic 3 of Social psychology Regarding social schemes, I think I have found a possible explanation for the inattention of our mind when we dream.
Social schemes are defined as "Mental abstractions that are activated spontaneously when we encounter stimuli related to them. They also function as a filter that allows us to perceive and remember the most important information and ignore the one that is not relevant".
When we find information inconsistent with those systems we can resolve this discrepancy confirming the schemes that we had previously developed and rejecting inconsistent information.
That is, when something does not conform to the belief system that we have as a result of experience, we automatically discard it. However, this does not happen in dreams. In dreams we do not compare the reality we are living with our stored experience, since if we did it automatically we would be aware of a tremendous incoherence.
Perhaps the explanation for all this is that social schemes do not work at the dream level. The use of these schemes has an evolutionary and adaptive function that is totally unnecessary to occur when we are sleeping.
In our day-to-day life, it is important to know that if we jump from a building we can suffer damage, the lack of this information would endanger our lives. However, in dreams we can dispense with this information since our life is not in danger, whatever the situation. Sleep serves to rest the mind and body, therefore any "extra" work is completely unnecessary and social structures are not put into operation by a mere question of energy saving.
I have read experiences of people who have tried to induce lucid dreams at will. They say that after much practice they have made great strides and managed to increase the frequency. Apart from living new experiences, they pursued other types of objectives such as taking advantage of the time, studying extra hours for an exam within the same dream ... etc..
Even these achievements can be explained from an adaptive point of view: if an organism focuses its attention and efforts on achieving a goal (being conscious within the dream) your attention will descend to other types of situations which are probably more important for their adaptation to the environment. As a consequence, social schemas begin to activate during sleep so that your attention refocuses on what is truly important for adaptation and survival..
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