Hey everybody,
I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming and dreaming in general for a while now. I’ve kept a dream journal for around 160 days so far to improve my recall, and now that it has gotten much better, I want to move into lucid dreaming. I’m a sophomore in highschool, and I take psychology. My psychology class just finished our segment on dreaming, and because I had been studying dreaming so much, my teacher often gave her opion on questions that the other people had, and then asked me what I thought about it. One interesting question that came up was the concern that training yourself to lucid dream might make you lose the ability to dream normally. Is this possible? I can imagine how it might be; if I trained myself to become lucid by doing RCs, it might become such a habit that I do it every night in every dream. Is this actually possible though? I’m not really worried about it, because I’m going to attempt to gain lucidity by using the MILD technique, but I’d still like to see what you all think about this. After all, I don’t want to stop having normal dreams - I like to be surprised.
Even if its possible, (I would bet my life on that its not) I wouldn’t see the problem, since lucid dreams are that much better then normal dreams (useally).
Also…in a lucid dream, its really easy to just “go with the flow” and let the dream take over. So, if you were a total lucidity master i’m sure you could use you’r powers for good (as in forcing you’r self to have a ND)
But…I would like to hear Stephen LaBerges opinion on this, as i’m sure he can lucid dream everynight.
Never heard of loosing it.There are people(we call them naturals) who have lds on will or all their dreams lare lucid.
But this comes from something else and is kind of disorder.Even then its so rare that almost non existing.
Also remember that theres no 100% control in a dream- they will allways hold an element of suprise- and this is actually one of main things im into them.
Surprisingly enough it IS possible to lose the ability to have any kind of dreams. However, that only happens on the rare case of damage on certain parts of the brain (Front Lobe, I think). Many people who have damaged those parts in accidents, have lost them or weren’t born with them due to some anomaly don’t dream at all. (I got the info from a Scientific American magazine… I can find it and give more details if you want).
Apparently, other than that, there’s no way to “lose” the ability to dream.
I don’t think lucid dreaming can lead to make lose the ability of dreaming normally. Or at least, if it’s possible, it’s not easy at all. When you stop the practice of lucid dreaming, you generally lose the ability of having lucid dreams. And since you have to be very motivated in order to have LD’s, you often lose it very quickly. For instance, Pr Stephen Laberge said that as soon as his thesis was finished and he did no more need to have LD’s, he had very few LD’s. Moreover, even if you could have lots of LD’s, that is perhaps 20 per month, they just last about five minutes each night. Thus even a very good lucid dreamer continues to have more normal dreams than lucid ones.
Some people try to lose the ability to dream normally, because they think it’s not an ability but a conditioning. Those people are the tibetan buddhist monks. In their opinion, dreams are just the result of what they call “capture” or “catching” (I don’t know the correct term in english) i.e. the conditioning which make us associate thoughts and emotions with perceptions. According to them, in a natural state, we should dream of nothing and visual dreams are the proof that you continue to “catch” things because you don’t practice meditation correctly. If you continue to dream, then when you’ll die you’ll be trapped into the bardos of death and you’ll reincarnate. Thus they use dreams as a sort of test. Very few meditating people can reach this state where you don’t have dreams, even if they are very good lucid dreamers and very good meditation practicionners.
That’s the reason why I think it’s not easy at all to lose the ability of having normal dreams!
