LD's drove my friend insane

I think LDing could be a possible trigger for unlocking mental disorders because you are always questioning reality.
I guess you should pick questions that you will only get a positive response with if you really are dreaming. I am not too worried about this though. I suppose for some people LDing could suppress mental disorders but that is just speculation.

Wicked! :eek:

Poor guy… I feel so sorry for him… :sad:

Yeah Dreams give you raw material to question reality, but this in time leads to depression, The human mind is not capable of thinking deep over and over. You have to have a break from time to time, to recover from the depths of lifes meaning etc. :smile:

Sounds like something out of one of those “NightMare on Elm Street” Movies

Magic

This is actually the first time I come across a truly negative side-effect of LDs on a person :eek:

That seems very plausible… Makes you ponder about what you’re doing, and the things you might be setting in motion but which effects will only be visible after quite some time.

I hope the guy will be allright…

He’s fine, it was more like an episode. I think he may get it again if he quits taking the drugs.

I don’t think anyone will get schizophrenia simply from LD-ing and questioning reality, but if the illness was going to happen later in life anyway, LD-ing may in fact trigger it sooner.

this is the main reason.
psychoactive drugs like LSD and Psylocibin Mushrooms have been proven to unleash such mental illnesses in patients who would have developted it later anyway (Syd Barrett, for example. Poor guy, trapped in a dream world!).

Please don’t mind me if I sound like a n00b, but what was schizophrenia again?

Wow, poor guy… thats creepy :confused: hope it won’t happen again!
Even thoug i must say that it sounds odd… he was so confused that he thougt that his RC’s failed? (or how was it?)

I may have gotten this all wrong, but isnt schizophrenia when you think that you’re multiple persons? I saw a TV show about that once… also very scary

You mean medicine by drugs, right? Because otherwise, that would have sounded really wrong.

schizophrenia is when u see or hear stuff that doesnt really happening…

as i always say, once you believe something - its happen…

he must tought for some reason that he is LDing and believed it so hard that his mind has been twisted itself.

let’s see what the wiki has to say on this…

effectively, someone with said disease has a completely busted view of the world around him.

as for your friends “insanity” or whatever you want to call it, i would’nt worry about it. i seriously doubt it could be common enough to happen to any more of your friends/relatives. i have, until this thread, never heard of anyone having ended up worse off from LDing than when they started. i would’nt worry too much about it, if i were you. if dreams could make you go bonkers, then we would all be hospitalized and doped up with weird drugs. and the fact that we arent, means they are safe. most likely this was caused by something else. i think…

Yes, your friend’s clearly delusional, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s schizophrenic, and it absolutely doesn’t mean that his condition is caused by practicing lucid dreaming. How old is he? Could it be that your friend suffered from severe sleep deprivation? Were any drugs involved? There are too many factors that could have caused that kind of behaviour. Also, people are often misdiagnosed for schizophrenia, as there is no objective biological test for this illness. Usually you need an agreement between at least two psychiatrists to apply this diagnosis. I really do hope he’s diagnosed and treated by professionals.

In my personal oppinion, I believe he just couldn’t handle the truth. In my life, i have been striving to access my subconcious and concious control so that I can achieve a state in which lucid dreams and waking life are indistinguishable. After 7 months of intense work on this project, i was able to close my eyes and enter the lucid world, and then open my eyes into the waking world - both were almost exactly the same except the lucid world was like the negative of a photograph. Black and white, where white should be black. The ultimate state of living is one in which a person has ultimate concious control and can design thier reality as they fit. They essentially become god. In essence, I have been trying to end up where your friend is. I have wanted to seek out a psychiatric ward and ask if i can come in and spend some time with individuals who claimed they could fly, so that they could teach me how. We lock up the people who can control thier destiny, yet those who really are in the jail, are the business men and women who have no control of thier reality and walk around answering thier phones and going home to thier kids every day.

The real problem here in my eyes is that he went into this state unknowingly and thus was not prepared for it, or had doubts about entering a state of total control.

In ways, I envy you friend because he came close to becoming the god of his reality. It is just a shame that he had not the right state of mind or experience to go “right, I understand the situation I am in, so I will make the best of it.”

A person who has had experience with psychedelics will probably empathise. The first time you take them, everything shocks you because you couldn’t believe it was happening. But after you unlock that door, and understand how things can change so rapidly, you begin to control the integration of these factors, and suddenly you can walk around, do the shopping, play with the kids, etc, in your altered reality, without appearing any different to anyone else, as you accustom to the effects of the altered state.

It is a shame your friend tried to deny his altered/new-found state, which ultimately ended up in him forcing his reality into a ‘bad trip’ in which he believes will not end. I encourage him, once he has grounded himself, to keep lucid dreaming, but only after serious introverted and extroverted conversations to define where he wants to go, his limits, and to obtain the headspace that if something unexpected happens, it is better to be calm and understand it. Fear is only the lack of understanding.

whoa dude :eek: that awesomely rocks!

Yes, my drugs I mean medicine, sorry to confuse you.
I’m not saying that just lucidly dreaming can cause schizophernia or other mental illnesses. I’m pretty sure it would’ve happened eventually anyway.

Actually, one of the main effects of schizophrenia is believing that you are the main character in a major phantastic plot, that everyone around you is scheming something against you.

and n00dle, i don’t think he could have taken advantage of that state. He was totally screwed up, he couldn’t thing straight. His problem was that the fake lucidty he was in didn’t end. Ever. Schizo doesent only affect your perception, it’s a total mind-f**k.

Also, I want to LD, but I don’t want to just base my life on LD-ing.

schizophrenia, yes, is the negative aspects of that state of mind. however, everything in life is a tool, and tools can be used wisely or inappropriately. sometimes tools break. he tried to use a tool and it broke. that is unfortunate. however, with more experience he will be able to judge the strength of his tools, and anticipate when he needs to strengthen his tools. knowing how far the ‘steps’ apart are, and being prepared to take them, are worth more than the actual experience, as proved here. blind faith leaps 9 times out of 10 fail.

my life isnt based on LD-ing. my life is based on the fact that we are gifted with the ability to percieve a reality, but most of us choose to go along with the subconcious flow. excersizing control of this subconcious and concious allows one to -improve- quality of life. it is unfortunate when it doesn’t, but this generally happens when the individual is unprepared. when i achieved my state of dual-lucid/waking life reality, i expected it. I came out of the experience grinning, and able to tell my friends that i was able to fly. nobody ever douted that i never achieved that experience, that i did fly. if one chooses to not be able to seperate lucidity and collective conciousness is when one is deemed ‘in trouble’ and usually sent to the funny farm. this is because they achieved it in purity, which those who are not in that state cannot understand and fear it. if you can wake up one day, and realise you control everything, like i did, but then go ‘right, that’s cool, so i’m going to sit at this level of collectiveness for now, and eat a hotdog and tell my friends about how i can do these things’ and be sociable, whilst maintaining control. becoming ‘god’ for lack of better terms, is incomprehensible if you take the experience to total purity. it is possible, if you have the experience and control, to keep your godliness as your personal experience and personal tools, and thus appear sociable and not ‘insane’. When you become equiped with the power to control conciousness, the energy that you realise you possess, usually drives people insane. It requires careful consideration and immense experience of control to go ‘okay, so i’m the master of the universe, so i’m going to choose to accept that fact, but maintain certain rigidity of collective conciousness’.

becoming god does not mean you must destroy everything that you linked to collective conciousness. the god that i am of my conciousness, i have defined as an observer, and occasionally a changer of events to help better my close friends quality of living in the collective.

It’s all about balance. Internally, externally, conciously and subconciously. If you cant keep those in balance, you usually end up sedated and restrained, which is unfortunate.

I’m going to go against some of the comments here and say that if your friend was diagnosed with schizophrenia, he probably had some symptoms before. I disagree with the comments saying that he had some control over what happened to him and that his problem can be solved just by “moderating” his lucid dreams as schizophrenia is a very real disease of the mind that can’t be solved simply by “controlling oneself.”

I also don’t think his lucid dreams “caused” his schizophrenia. Since schizophrenia is based on the grounds that the person has trouble distinguishing between whats happening in his mind and whats happening in the real world, it seems very likely that to me that when he would think he’d be lucid dreaming in the real world.

First, I think LDing can actually help to distinguish between dreams and reality. I mean, what you do when trying to LD is to repeatedly decide whether you are dreaming or not. I don’t think your friend’s attempts at LDing caused his schizophrenia. I guess in the day you described, he felt something was wrong. As a lucid dreamer, he probably did RCs when his perception of reality became strange, and because of his illness, those checks failed. The only explanation he had for this was, of course, that he really was dreaming, and it probably looked like that to him.

Well, second, I want to disagree with nOOdle. While it is true that, philosophically speaking, we all live in our private universe created by our perception and imagination, this private universe should match the “real” one as close as possible. Fooling yourself by overlaying your perception with your imagination won’t help yourself any bit in the real world. Retreating into an imagined world may be a last resort for people without hope so they can still be happy, but most people will prefer improving reality over ignoring it.

I hope that didn’t sound too wiseguy-ish, but this kind of thing can really lead to mental illness. If you want to go mad (which is exactly this - retreating into a fantasy world), it is your choice and I won’t stop you. But please don’t tell everyone that this was desirable.
Just my two cents out of my private universe.

MedO

but he could have had a really normal dream in the dream-world and because of many other problems he had or some other factor, he could have got confused between a normal day with he actually experienced as a dream or LD and RL which seems so unreal he did an RC and thought it was unreal.
Then when somebody tried to explain this all to him IRL he got serousily confused and couldn’t work which he belonged to.

That sounds possible.

I agree, Med0 :good:

I read that Schizophrenia is in fact an umbrella term for quite a variety of mental disorders.

To quote Patrick Holford in his book, Optimum Nutrition for the Mind: