LD's drove my friend insane

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:

I just read in my book ‘Lucid Dreaming’ by Celia Green & Charles McCreery, that Lucid dreaming can be of benefit to schizophrenics.

I think it was more likely a coinicidence that he had an interest in lucid dreaming and the mental illness was already there. I hope your friend is doing ok.
I also disagree with n00dle. The idea of lucid dreams and waking life being indistinguishable, to me, is more about a lack of control and not a pleasurable state to be in.

So your friend was hallucinating that he was in a dream. He mispercepted the surroundings…

I agree with everyone disagreeing with me. grins and keeps stirring the pot

It’s a shame what happened, yes. But just remember dreams don’t have to be wacky. And if you were unable to distinguish dream from reality, then you’d have enough control of it to not make a mess of whatever reality you previously believed you had. Upgrading your conciousness doesn’t always mean danger, but sometimes it can be. I hope your friend sorts himself (inside and out). :smile:

Ok, i’m sorry if this is real, which i’m becoming more and more attuned to, and my orginal post was under the thought that you were an attention whore. we get a lot of them at newgrounds, so the transition was weird. I’m real sorry about your friend if this is real, which i’m starting to think it is.

Ok all of those who want to have some understanding about schizophrenia you should check out this amazing movie.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0268978/

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Indeed that is a great movie. I sometimes associate him with John Nash from A Beautiful Mind.

I think your friend was insane, and he happened to also be into LD. LD didn’t make him insane.

I think his friend’s state was the other end of the spectrum from enlightenment. In a dream, you gain full control when you become lucid. When this guy’s barrier between dreams and “real life” dissolved, it doesn’t sound like he became lucid. It sounds like he got his waking life sucked into a state of dreamliness. Now his waking life is out of his conscious control. All lucidity is gone. He’s trapped in a dream, and it’s not a lucid one.

Some door shouldn’t be opened if you’re not ready. If you stare into the abyss, it stares back into you.

Well said, sage. :yes:

From reading the thread…

This seems it coulda been a gift to the guy…

I would like to achieve this state, and maintain myself enough to not Seem like a total NUT JOB to society… don’t wanna be in a cell with padded walls :cool: … Like keep it under-wraps a bit. :wink:

But yeah, Wayne Dyer, talks in one his books in your life becoming Awake, and in the Dream state at the same time.

And totally agree with the observer thing(Wayne Dyer also talks about this). If your friend was just witnessing/observing what was happening to himself he would be a lot more chilled out and would come up with a solution to all of this.

Do you mean that you could be in a constant LD and could control everything but to everyone else it would look as if you were just acting normal?

To say LDs made your friend insane is like saying video games makes people violent.

A lot of people have already said things to the effect of what I’m about to say, so I’ll keep it fairly brief; view this as my drop in the collective bucket of this viewpoint.

It’s important to remember in all this that, although your friend’s schizophrenia was based on LDing, the disorder results from real, physical chemical imbalances in the brain (commonly thought to be of dopamine); as such, if your friend was going to become a schizophreniac, anything could’ve theoretically become the basis for his schizophrenic fantasies. If he had been really interested in something completely different, like, say, the oppression of Tibet by China, and had never heard of LDing, he might’ve instead become convinced that every country in the world was secretely conspiring to take down Tibet and that every government official the world over was in on the plot.

As such, I think it’s fair to say that his schizophrenia was based on LDing, but not that it triggered it; rather, the chemical imbalances present in his brain did. That’s the entire reason schizophrenia is treatable with medication; in many cases, when a schizophrenic is put on antipsychotic medication that regulates the brain’s dopamine neurotransmitter system (and seretonin, in the case of atypicals), their symptoms are frequently diminished, and in some cases disappear entirely. For this reason, saying that your friend’s scizophrenia was caused by LDing is, though understandable, somewhat unreasonable. As previously stated, anything might’ve become the basis for the disorder; but the cause of it is inevitably neurochemistry.