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

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.

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 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 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 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

cheers

Richard

I don’t think “normal” dreams are any different from LD’s in that sense. They ARE different in many ways but I think someone could have 4 LD’s every night for their whole life and not come out any worse than someone else who doesn’t. Infact, most LDers should come out a lot better if they use their lucid time to good use! I do see why people would believe that normal dreams are needed but it’s just my opinion that they aren’t. Just the way I feel.

I think the only reason our “normal” dreams are the way they are is because we AREN’T lucid. Almost like a signal being sent to you but you have no way to decode it. Becoming Lucid lets you finally ‘crack the code’ and start using dreams for what they are intended to. In this theory, our “normal” dreams are actually abnormal and mere side effects of a failed exercise, like running a program on a computer that can’t read that particular coding language.

Well if that’s the case, then wouldn’t most of the population be able to lucid dream? Or at least, more people than can now, anyway.

I’m pretty sure that dreams do something for our psychological well-being, although I’m not sure what. Or maybe it’s a necessary side-effect of the neurological structure of our brain. Whatever, I think lucid dreaming stops dreams from doing what they are supposed to.

Yay, I now have more than 300 posts (I think).

I agree with you sage that makes sense, i mean the mind can do amazing things and if trained can be a powerful tool to get us to worlds and other places that we cant imagine, i believe that knowledge is only the start.

I’m in agreeance, it’s best never to fight the mind… if it wants you in a normal dream, don’t keep forcing yourself into paralysis to enter 5 minute boring LD segments, wake up, go back, wake up, go back… just give up and let yourself sleep normally.

Trying to force yourself to stay lucid when your mind doesn’t want to can certainly leave you feeling very fatigued upon waking… this usually doesn’t matter at all to me anymore since I usually do most of my lucid dreaming within the last few hours of my very broken sleep cycle

(i wake up seemingly every time I exit REM… I think)

I’m in agreeance, it’s best never to fight the mind… if it wants you in a normal dream, don’t keep forcing yourself into paralysis to enter 5 minute boring LD segments, wake up, go back, wake up, go back… just give up and let yourself sleep normally.

Trying to force yourself to stay lucid when your mind doesn’t want to can certainly leave you feeling very fatigued upon waking… this usually doesn’t matter at all to me anymore since I usually do most of my lucid dreaming within the last few hours of my very broken sleep cycle

(i wake up seemingly every time I exit REM… I think)

“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?”

Well… the only time I ever became lucid in my first stage of REM (or it could have been NREM i suppose… I’m not sure what NREM dreams are like… I assume t hem to be the hypnagogic like mindless and detached kind of “remote viewing” sessions)

but it was one of the longest lucid dreams i had had at that time in my life… and eventually lucidity faded and I continued on dreaming for quite some time… it was really very nice… it was on the average level in terms of abstractness, but my most bizarre and insane LDs are definintely in the morning…

the way i had that one was by doing a reality check while drinking water, I never made a habit out ot if (i only do a reality check if i’m worried i’ve had a false awakening, i don’t really need dream cues) and so I guess I just thought about reality checks while being really thirsty in my dream and it was very nice, like experiencing lucid dreaming in a new light, exploring the dreams that normally get forgotten because i have them so early in the night.

Not to discredit anyone, but the reason I think we can’t LD at will has nothing to do with any biological reasons, but because our subconcious is running the show and every in the dreams is created by the subconcious so of course everything seems pretty normal, real and plausible to the subconcious. If our concious was in charge when we dreamed we would be lucid every night all night.

You know, one of LaBerge’s theories is that the reason why LDing is so hard is that we dont learn early. He attributes it to language: how many of you find it hard to learn a 2nd language fluently in your 20s or 30s? We arent exactly taught from birth how to lucid dream, and thats why the basic assumption is that dream control is impossible. Teach lucid dreaming to your kids.

And, just because REM sleep is important doesnt mean that LDing is bad for your health: LDs occur during REM sleep, and, except for the fact that you know you are dreaming, LDing is the same (biologically) as a dream. So I dont think that LDing interferes with normal REM sleep. In fact, it enhances it.

I have read somewhere in a science article that normal dreams are essential to good health. Also, it is true that REM deprivation can lead to inability to reason and rationalize and eventually insanity.

Torture methods used by almost every country in the world including the USA is sleep deprivation. It is very effective and is often used by Intelligence and Law enforcement agencies to break a persons spirit and to force them to confess to just about anything they want the subject to confess to.

Unless… somehow… you lack the ability to have a dream, then you can LD at will. Anyone can LD at will, different people are able to achieve this in very different ways and it’s all down to the person. Surely everyone agrees it is possible to LD. Therefore it is possible to get so good that you have higher chances than before? SO surely you can reach your peak which is LDing at will. Coz when it comes down to it, having 100 LDs takes the exact same methods and will to have only 1 LD. If oyu can LD then you can LD at will. You just have to find your way to do it. Nobody should place barriers over certain amounts or sizes when it comes to the mind. All they do is hold people back.

1- in regards to controlling LD, I have found a variations in the level of control that I can exercise in LD. For example, I can’t instantly change from city to countryside but I have been able to project that around the next corner there would be a forest and there was, or that I was in a house and the next door would get me out of it, and it did. It’s as if I was helping my mind to change the set in the dream by working with what was there already, Yet I have had LD with less control, where I could not change, or even plan on changes around the corner or such. Control does seem to vary, or the intensity of lucidity… but regardless of the level of control, I was conscious of being in a dream, therefore, LDming.
2- Caution with the use of the word NORMAL.
3- The mind, the body, we have enough experience to say that in some cases it need to be left alone, and in other cases, it needs a bit of a push, discipline even, exercise, and if we are aware enough, we know when we have bushed enough, or to much. All that is also about the learning process. I have found that even attitude in my LD will give me more or less control. It’s all part of the learning process.
4- I have experienced with the waking up twice a night, and when I got exhausted, I just stopped, it stopped, and got back the balance in my sleep. Well, more or less…
So I would say, go for it, try what You feel good with. when it gets out of balance, you’ll know… as for what is normal, well, open the windown and tell me, what’s normal about what’s out there…

[quote=“KirbyMeister”]
You know, one of LaBerge’s theories is that the reason why LDing is so hard is that we dont learn early. He attributes it to language: We arent exactly taught from birth how to lucid dream, and thats why the basic assumption is that dream control is impossible. Teach lucid dreaming to your kids.

I LIKE THIS ONE. So true, LD is not part of the kinder garden curriculum, or even general western family practice, but it would apparently be to the aboriginals of Australia, and the Inuit’s of the north American continent among others.

The needed effort invested in LDming might well be the result of learning late in life, or of having little or no tutoring when it did come to happen to us. Many of the first timers where quite young in fact. And if Mom and Dad knew and practiced LD, we might all be LD-ing half the night with out the fear of problems of any sorts.

SO now we have to work a little harder at it. We might not want to think of it as fighting the mind, but rather playing with it, like kids discovering something new… No stress, just the joy of experiencing it. I don’t mind the spiritual view of it, but I would add that there is nothing more spiritual than the play like attitude of children, IT is the greatest learning tool, “PLAY” that is. Play, was also taken out of the curriculum a long time ago, but that’s an other subject.