In my Grant Imahara dream yesterday, I saw and talked with him while also knowing he had recently died. It wasn’t weird at all in the dream, and it seems that this is quite common. In our dreams we do and experience things that doesn’t fit with the “rules” of waking life and we are fine with it.
Why are we so at ease with the different rules within dreams and waking life? My sense, from my own experience, is that a part of me knows I am dreaming while I am dreaming. Lucid dreaming may be a spectrum and all dreams may have some element of lucidity even if it usually is at a low level.
What we conventionally call lucid dreaming may be lucid dreaming turned up to 9 or 10, and most dreams have just enough lucidity so we are OK with the dream logic.
This seemed especially clear in my dream from yesterday. When I saw and talked with Grant Imahara, I wasn’t very aware that he had recently died. That remembering came in when I saw he was moved and cried, and I wondered if he was sad because he had died. At that point, I was more aware that there were different rules in this experience than in waking life, and I was a little more aware that it was a dream. It was as if the lucidity factor was turned up slightly so I would be OK with the difference between the dream and waking life.