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

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. :cool:

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.

this subject is iffy to me :-/ i think that u can have a LD without reg dreaming.

well it wouldnt be that hard to devise an experiment…i mean, we now can tell when someone is in a lucid dream, right? by monitoring the brainwaves ect? so they should do an experiment where they wake someone up everytime they have a regular dream, but not when they have a lucid dream…of course you’d need to use people who have a lot of lucid dreams, otherwise it would be pointless. but it would be one way to find out if we really do NEED non-lucid dreams. simply deny a subject non lucid dreams for seven days or whatever, and see if the lucid dreams are enough, or they decent into nervousness, hallucinations, ect, like ppl do when deprived of REM sleep :smile:

EEG doesnt discern between lucid and non-lucid dreams. However lucid dreamers can give eye signals to signal that they are lucid (as done by Laberge). Further I think this experiment is already done, since there are several people around on earth (perhaps on this forum too, but at least some eastern monks) who can and are lucid for extended periods of time without loosing it. As far as I know none of them ever reported negative effects of losing ND’s.

It’s my understanding (feel free to correct me) that those meditative traditions that are familiar with LDing (all of them) generally favor non-interference with those dreams, at least most of the time, with the possible exception of certain mental/spiritual/meditative excercises.

Ie. The focus is on being “lucid” all the time, waking or sleeping, dreaming or not.

It has also been noted that there is a difference between REM deprivation and dream deprivation. REM is not a result of dreaming… but dreaming appears to be a behaviour that is parrallel with REM

Some points, in no particular order.

  • If lucid dreaming should significantly interfere with neccesary sleep or mental function, I would expect the mind/body homeostatic mechanism to compensate as neccesary, presumably by increasing the amount of non-lucid REM dreaming, just as it produces a REM-rebound when deprived of sufficient REM-sleep due to other causes.

  • It’s not Lucid Dreaming that gets ignored by our culture – it’s all dreaming. Dreaming has long been considered suspect, dangerous, untrustworthy and undesirable.

  • Institutionalised (western) relegion has historically seen it as a tool of the devil, charletans, witches, heretics, and dabblers in the occult. In rare, church approved cases, saints and prophets dream, but you and I should not presume to tread such soul-imperiling paths.

  • Western science – perhaps understandably considering its long battle against superstition – also has long viewed dreams with distrust or disregard.

Unfortunately, in the early days of scientific investigation of the psyche, these twin influences seem to have reinforced each other, and the first major figure in the pschology of dreams, Freud, decided that dreams were a manifestation of neurosis or other repressed, unresolved problems, and that truely healthy people did not dream at all.

  • Dreams also are relegated to the purview of “sensitive” (often code for “feminine”) temperments and “artistic” endevours – that is to say, to the realm of the impractical and unreal. Certainly not to the practical world of business, statecraft or science (except occasional in the case of those inexplicable, mysterious figures given the sectarian equivilent of sainthood – ie. the label of “genius”).

  • Even today, we use expressions such as “I wouldn’t even dream of it”, “In your dreams, fella!” and the like.

  • Children are very aware of their dreams, and often need guidence in learning to distinguish between dreams and reality. But almost as surely, they are also taught that dreams are not only “not real”, but not worthy of attention, and so they usually learn to not even remember them.

  • It’s pretty hard to learn to pay attention to something, and control how you do it, if you can’t draw on previous experience to do so. It seems to me that most “natural” LD-ers are people who somehow have retained the habit of paying attention to and remembering their dreams.

  • And additionally, I definitely know of people who pay attention to their dreams, habitually record several dreams per week, and consider ‘lucid dreaming’ to be an illusion of people who have trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy. At best – according to such people – we can only dream that we are lucid. After all, ‘sleep’ and ‘dream’ are by definition unconscious activities. :roll:

I hope this doesnt go off topic, but I think that dreaming is very important for one’s well being. I have had many non-lucid dreams which stay with me. Slowly they drift away, but while they are there they have an undescribable surreal beauty to them, something that just can’t be put into to words. I’m sure everyone here knows what I’m talking about. That’s why I came here, because I wanted to experience this even more. I just started, but I think that dreaming is very important. Some people choose to try to expand thier mind with drugs, but what are drugs? They are simply poisons which eat away at us, while giving us a few hours of alternate reality. But what people don’t understand is that all drugs do is open a part of your mind that has always existed, and you don’t need the drugs to get thier. In fact drugs are a cheaters way out, and thus the experience is not as good. But being able to try to expand your mind naturally and realize it’s full potential and get more spiritually connected? That’s even cooler. Needless to say, if I do get lucid dreaming, I doubt I will be avoiding personal pleasure. I mean, face it, I’m pretty sure the first thing that crosses everyones (everyboys) mind is sex. But still I plan to try being more spiritual in dreams also, because I heard that prayer is a great experience in lucid dreaming. Just my 2 cents :razz:

EDIT: I also forgot to mention how I think dreams can make us realize how beautiful life is. I mean dreams are great, and occasionally I catch myself pining away for a really beautiful one after I wake up, but real life can be a million times more beautiful if you know where to look.

I think it’s just something that needs to be learned or practiced like a new sport or musical instrument. Sometimes people are just naturally good for whatever they’re doing.

If you do that, then i’ll teach my niece and nephew to LD young. Who know what they’ll be capable of in LD’s?

Actually, i heard that we only stop learning as we get older because we hear it. Damnit, now i have to reprogram my subconcious to belive that.