My theory as to why we can't LD at will.

Yes, but most people enter REM sleep 4-6 times a night. Giving even experienced LDers plenty of time for normal dreaming.

Well, most of us have probably heard about how dreams keep us sane… And I’m assuming that means normal dreams. So that could be why. There must be some reason for why we don’t naturally LD… Hmm…

/ds

I dont believe dreams keep us sane…if we dont have them - I dont think anything would be different unless we are LDers and often say “I had a dream…”

I ran a Google search looking for research about this. I came up with this link from MSN.

encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/ … e=dreaming

If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the relevant piece.

There are people who can LD on will through wild though :smile:

If you are an experienced lder, you can even induce them in evning, before sleep, though you are not supposed to have a REM period at that time.

If its healthy, i dunno

Tibetan monks think the other way round. They say it’s a waste of time to dream non-lucid. These dreams are pointless and useless, except perhaps for western psychologists. Tibetans want to understand their true nature, and to stay in this state of understanding until the pointless dreaming stops. However, LDing is only a side-effect of their practices and not necessarily product of the will. Ultimately they want to stop dreaming, to stop the illusions.

perhaps in that case we do not lucid dream because if we did, we would not be mature enough as a whole peoples to use these dreams wisely. We would use them for our own fun, sex and adventure instead of using them to discover the spirit and get to know it better and improve ourselves. hence, we have been denied the priviledge of controlling how our dreams run - because if we could control all of them we would only use them for our own gain…

sounds a lot like the real world eh? :neutral: too many people use it for personal gain instead of taking time to reflect and ask “why”? perhaps when we as a race can show this maturity and spirit in real life, dream and astral worlds will not be so “afraid” to open up to us…

I would like to point out one key thing. Lucid Dreaming doesn’t mean you are necesarily in control of the dream or alterting it in any way, it simply means you are aware that you are dreaming. A lot of lucid dreams are probably nearly the same as it would have been if it wasn’t a lucid dream, just with the addition that you are concious of the fact that it is a dream.

And even when you think you’ve got control, how much of it are you REALLY in control of? How do you know that the way it’s happening when you’re controlling it isn’t the same way it all would have happened if you hadn’t have been lucid?

Isn’t conciousness driven by the subconcious? Even in waking life, the thoughts that you think you choose to think are influenced heavily by your subconcious. The same with a concious dream. And therefore, if it was there in the subconcious to begin with, wouldn’t you have been likely to have dreamed about it anyway?

Just a few thoughts to add to the mix.

:smile:
Ed.

I think it’s all about training. We can’t LD at will because we haven’t trained our minds to do that. We’ve trained our minds to “let go” when we go to sleep, to slip into oblivion and forgetfulness. We want to just forget about everything and have a few hours of (seeming) peace. The reason we do this is because of our upbringing. If from childhood, we were taught to LD, to hold onto consciousness throughout the sleep state… who knows what we’d be capable of.

When I have kids, I’m teaching them to LD. :cool:

Good idea, Sage!

:happy:

Ed.

What is wrong with using dreams for fun/pleasure? Dreams are a nice way to get away from the stress of the real world…

I totally agree.im just sick of people valuing things this way.Spiritual; growth,self improvement…so on.Maybe for some its a goal in life but be aware that for other it simply isnt.And that does not make them any worse,less or whatever.Its just a question of personal interests…if you want to go spirituall way in every aspect of your life ,fine,if you just after pleasures that life delivers…fine too.Its all relative and what one should or shouldnt is only up to one:)
same goes for dreams ,obes,eating,religon and sex.
take care

Ah, hello forum. I’ll speak in what little time I now have to speak to the LD forum. Yes, I agree, not only should LD be used for spiritial growth but also pleasure. None of us get the pleasure, or even just to relax. We are all busy doing things, that we created for ourselves!

I read an article that says during Non-REM sleep our brain simulates things that we did in waking life. It is a proven fact that repeated thinking of an action, let’s say a football move you can’t do, will improve your skill by 50%. Now, why would our brain let us waste this ability. So it does it itself. Durning Non-REM sleep it repeats the actions over and over. But in REM sleep the actions change, our brain is now trying out slightly different situations, until the brain tries out something so drastic it leads on to something else. When we wake up, we put together the parts of the dream, not relizing that they were repeated because we can’t. The reapeated action was using the same neuron pathway, trying to secure a link possibly, and so we can’t tell any difference.

Not only this, scientsits discovered that our brain’s neorons go into a state, during Non-REM, that is fatal if left for too long. It is theorised that REM restablalizes this unbalance. Rats that were diprived of REM sleep but not Non-REm died during testing.

So in short, I’m saying REM dreaming isn’t essential but is VERY impoartant to sleep.

Sorry for yapping on and on. I will keep an eye on this part of the forum when I can.

I’d hate to point out the obvious here, but lucid dreaming doesn’t replace REM sleep, it occurs at the same time. Sure, you can’t live without REM sleep, but when you LD you are experiencing REM sleep. Regardless of whether you’re conscious or not, nothing is being missed out when you convert a normal dream to a lucid one.

I don’t think normal dreams are essential for our mental health. Instead, we simply develop such a strong routine to sleep normally that it takes us quite a long time to retrain ourselves to sleep differently. Some people develop and hold on to this ability from an early age (we call them 'naturals), but most of us simply ignore the potential until much later.

I have to disagree. What if dreaming is used to simulate RL experiences. Then your brain would be missing out on a vital function. But even if you LD a couple of times per night. You still get normal dreaming, so it doesn’t matter. lol.

But ultimately, aren’t dreams a sort of simulation of RL experiences?

Why is nobody looking at this from an evolutionary point of view?
That’s how homo sapiens came to be the way they are…

It’s fairly obvious that being able to go lucid at will would allow you to escape somewhat from confronting the never ending drives, desires, urges, emotions, fears, responsibilities etc. of waking life, all the things that with their pains and rewards, cause animals to ensure the survival of their genes.

Any individual lucky enough to have LDing genes would be unlikely to be a slave to the spread of their genes, so the LDing trait would never become common.

Ed, I don’t think I understand you. I’ve never had a lucid(conscious) dream where I wasn’t in control. Are you talking about just very vivid dreams maybe?

Conscious dreams do occur during REM sleep, but areas that are recovering during normal dreams are active during conscious dreams. As far as I know no one has researched what affect this has on you, but in theory too much conscious dreaming w/out supplemented normal dream cycles could be unhealthy.

Sorry, I can’t remember what I read and can’t be bothered to read it, so I don’t know either.

:wink:

Ed.

nice topic i wonder why i didnt stumble here before.

ummm a few things. we DO need sleep. well actally it isnt sllep that we need but it is rem that we need. and whyy doesnt this topic view go abck through the pages bah oh well.

we need REM full stop and it isnt just humans. as was posted before rats die with out it and i wont go into an of the real detial about this it would lose track of where i am actally going. Humans act diffrent to animals when we are deprived of rem. animals become panic and all that but humans ii guess our brains are a littlre more… defined :eek: any way. we see things, speach slurs we become angry after many days and soon taht wares off and we just go compleatly well blank. our blood pressure drops along with our body temp. when we actally do get some rem back into us we have rem rebound where our brains catch up on waht we have missed out on. after waking, our mind is very much diffrent depending on how long we went with out rem. mostly we become more angry cant think straight and tend to make poor choices in important matters. when before we might have been very good at all that.

we do dream in non rem sleep. ok that sounds strange. in NREM we still dream it is just not as active. in REM it is just as if we were awake. we are all actally dreaming right now. and you can try your RT if u want :smile: but the point is we are. behind our thoughts we are dreaming. we have little images flitter past. a day dream i guess is us just focusing on it.

So that makes me think, our dreams are our thoughts. ok that is simple enough, and our logical part of our brian switches off for most people in their dreams, so that could explain why we have such strange dreams and we dont notice it. but could it be that natural lucid dreamers keep their logic part of their brain active? hmm could be an idea for a device to induce lucidity.

For a long time i wanted to have a lucid dream in every rem stage. so i trained. the closer i got to y goal teh more scared i got, the more that i was held back by somthing. and to this day i still have no clue waht wass holding me back. but i gave it up. now i aim for two a night not 6.

i am not sure about this but the first period of rem is very diffrent from the rest, the brain acts diffrently and is more… chaotic. as the night progresses it smooths out and the dreams last longer and all that. i have been lucid in the very first stage of rem and i found it very strange, the world was incompleate. it felt diffrent and empty. has any one else ever had this and could this be a reason why we dont go lucid in everydream? for we need that time for our brains to shut down, so we dont experince somthing like that. like trying to remember a great deal of pain, our brains block it out, do our brians block out our lucid abilty on the main for dreams that are not compleate where our mind is acting diffrent to the rest of the dreams tha we will have through the rest of the night.

ok now that i have totaly lost where i was going i am gonna post that :content: i hope it makes as much sence to you as it does me. and i bet my spelling is going to make it that much eaiser too :tongue:

cheers

Richard