"These days I am convinced that any dream which includes me, the dreamer, engaging in activities, or having thoughts and feelings that I would simply never have or do in waking life is an 'experientially lucid' dream"
Spontaneous lucid dreaming is an experience of great potential interest and importance. Recognizing without waking up, (and without having undertaken any particular conscious incubation exercises to bring it about), that
in this moment I really am asleep and dreaming
is most often a symbolic confirmation that the dreamer
has achieved a new plateau of awareness and acceptance of self in waking life. This kind of spontaneous dream lucidity is an archetypal symbolic reflection of the increasingly conscious clarity and rush of creative energy that is associated with withdrawing previously unconscious projections that clouded and limited my relations with others, and limited my ability to act affectively in the world without my even realizing it. Although it is certainly possible to consciously cultivate dream lucidity by engaging in various kinds of waking incubation activities and rituals, (the Tibetan Buddhists, for example, have done it for centuries), my experience is also that the dream lucidity that results from such efforts often does not accompany, or even encourage the corresponding deeper understanding and insight into waking life that spontaneous lucid dreaming almost always indicates. (Patricia Garfield's Creative Dreaming remains one of the best general introductions to the world traditions that have placed great value on lucid dreaming.)
Unfortunately, the current accepted definition of lucidity is that a dream is only truly lucid when it includes some sort of verbal statement in the dream narrative like: "this is a dream..." or "I must be dreaming..." etc. It is my experience that confining the universe of discourse about lucid dreaming just to these "linguistically lucid" dream experiences is limiting, distracting, and ultimately counter-productive.
These days I am convinced that any dream which includes "me, the dreamer," (the aspect of the dream that is usually referred to as "the dream ego"), engaging in activities, or having thoughts and feelings that I would simply never have or do in waking life is an "experientially lucid" dream.
Such dreams often carry deeper and more valuable information and insight than the more easily recognized linguistically lucid dreams.
I would say, for example, that any dream in which the dreamer flies without mechanical assistance is a lucid dream, whether or not that dream also includes any linguistic statement such as "Oh! I'm flying - this must be dream!" By the same token, any dream in which the dreamer experiences his/her dream from the perspective of "a disembodied observer," (often also flying or levitating above the scene), is also experientially a fully lucid dream.
It is currently fashionable to call such dreams "pre-lucid." The main problem with this designation is that it sets up a hierarchy of dream experience with the linguistically lucid dream at the top and all the other "pre-" or almost-lucid dreams as falling short of this mark. In my experience, as the ability to recognize that I am actually asleep and dreaming deepens, it leads to more conscious awareness within the dream itself of the symbolic significance of the events and characters, particularly as they relate to and illuminate understanding of waking life.*
One way of talking and thinking about this natural evolutionary direction of lucid dreaming is that it is moving us away from our rationalist, materialistic habit of emphasizing the differences between the dream world and the waking world, and toward the increasing realization that both waking life and dreaming are profoundly valid ways of viewing a single living and lived reality.
Deeper awareness of this evolutionary aspect of spontaneous lucid dreaming is blocked and potentially limited if we look only at those dreams where the notion of "dreaming" is emphasized, opposed to, and separated from seeing the "real world awake." What lucid dreaming is inviting us to do, is to see our interior lives, awake and asleep, as unified by our deepest authentic character and personality - in a very real sense, "character is destiny." In fact, the tension that separates waking consciousness from dream awareness is at the heart of the human condition itself.
I believe that lucid dreaming has a general evolutionary purpose. This purpose is to help us move into a broader and deeper awareness of the unity of our interior and external lives. Lucid dreams point to this unity of our experience awake and asleep. Definitions of lucid dreaming that emphasize the difference between waking consciousness and dreaming awareness tend to obscure the deeper truth that they are both the products of unconscious projection. This growing awareness of the unity of our waking and sleeping lives leads to intimations of the deepest meanings inherent in human life, individually and collectively.
*For a more complete discussion of the way dreams use all associations and implications of every word, image, color, number, character, etc., particularly including ambiguous meanings of the word "dream" and its implications for the current definition of "lucid dreaming," see Chapter 10, "Dreams and the Evolution of Human Consciousness" in my 2009 book The Wisdom of Your Dreams.