Huh. This is interesting. In multiple intelligent agent designs I know how to create this improved lucidity would come as a consequence of estimation of values not needing to be short-circuited due to intractability. One design has this happen because the limit of the monte carlo rollouts converges to the accurate result due to reduced computation time. The other design has this happen because it stops taking the limit with respect to a value near but below one such that the limit of future expectation gets discounted to nothing. A final design, which is far less optimistic with respect to recovery from this, just has literal cached values for end of life scenarios.
It would foreshadow death because the world modeling suggests that death is happening and is still functional. It would produce lucidity because the erroneous heuristic functions wouldn't be relied upon as heavily as the world model's actual results. Or in the final case... it would have been precomputed before reaching that scenario and didn't decay but it was cache lookups.
Do you happen to know if putting the non-lucid people in life threatening and novel such that they would not have anticipated them situations - for example, standing near the edge of a cliff on a windy day - tend to increase lucidity?
Now that I'm thinking about this I notice that free soloists have been claiming that they gain increased lucidity during their climbs. So my model that predicts non-lucidity gaining lucidity actually successfully predicts an improved lucidity in free soloists too, which is not something I realized before I started thinking about this.
I am not a neuroscientist so I don't know how biologically plausible this is as an explanation goes.