Can you use lucid dreaming to solve real life problems?

I know in lucid dreaming you ideally use it to have a lot of fun and go on cool adventures, but I was wondering if you could use it to solve real life problems, or get answers to questions. Since your dream world is basically entirely made up of your subconscious, you could ask your subconscious questions you desperately want to know in your life? For example, could you ask your subconscious questions such as “what do i need to do to be truly happy?” or “what is my ideal job? what is my purpose in life?” Would the subconscious be a reliable source to get those answers? Has anybody had experience with this? Did it give you clear answers? I have been really curious about this for a while.

From the experience and understanding I’ve gathered, I’m going to say no. SC is a part of you, not a separate entity. It’s your thoughts in a raw form, before conscious thinking gets to affect it. Real life problems require critical and conscious thinking. Other people and your own experience will offer more reliable answers. But asking questions in your lucid dreams might still get you interesting answers.

Hmm… thats a good point. It would still be interesting to see what that subconscious mind would say though. And then there is the fact that the subconscious mind usually just says what you want to hear or what you are expecting to hear, so yeah I guess you are right.

Your brain is using dreams to prepare and help itself. Dont see why lucid would not. Lucid can help you overcome fears. Practice muscle memory to become better at something. However in the form of questions you may have to ask multiple times, may not really get a worded answer back that makes sense, so metaphorical events may prove better, you may ask your subconscious to experience something and maybe learn from that.

And dont expect your subconscious to tell you what you want to hear consciously, Your subconscious is far more massive than your consciousmind. And recently the more learned about the human brain appears that more and more we are controlled by our subconscious mind with an illusion of being in control, when in reality our subconscious mind is what controls us.

All we really do is being able to consciously decide what to give attention to in the present moment. More or less the rest of our “conscious” choices has already been decided by our subconscious mind, we are just given the illusion that we are in control.

“Our brain is using the dreams to prepare or help itself.” You’re mostly unconscious in non-lucid dreams. You aren’t really thinking like you would in real life and thus you act differently in dream than in real life. It’s not that helpful at all when you add the fact that you almost immediately forget your dreams if you don’t actively try to remember them.

I believe dreams are formed to make sense from the activity in your brain during sleep. There is a process in one part of the brain working on the new information you’ve gotten. This activity seems random to your subconscious mind and it tries to form something coherent from it.

“Lucid can help you overcome fears. Practice muscle memory to become better at something.” I agree.

"…controlled by our subconscious mind with an illusion of being in control, when in reality our subconscious mind is what controls us. " Well, we can and do shape our subconscious mind and schemata. It’s part of us like I said before. Our experience and desires shape it. It’s not some other being.

Emotions come from your subconscious. You can suppress your emotions if you want to, or you can act on them. If you are acting subconsciously, you would always act on them. When you’re angry and want to hit something, the subconscious mind wants that but it can be stopped if you are conscious and actively modulating your emotions.

"I believe dreams are formed to make sense from the activity in your brain during sleep. There is a process in one part of the brain working on the new information you’ve gotten. This activity seems random to your subconscious mind and it tries to form something coherent from it. "

Not saying your wrong and its only part of the whole, but new studies suggest that dreams of events such as fires, fights, car crashes, sinking ships whatever, Is a way for our brain to mentally prepare if we were ever to end up in such a situation. If you’ve dreamt it, you are more likely to act and not freeze up. Yes this is all stored in your subconscious mind. So when a situation arise that you have dreamt of being in similar (not at all saying dreaming about the exact situation but around the same genre so to speak, need to clarify that for some people) you will act on autopilot faster than you would if you would not have dreamed about it, and are more likely to know what you would do. Im tryin to find the link for this documentary in which it was mentioned. All i remember is that it’s on topdocumentary if you search google and then click in under science, and search for brain. Then after that its previous knowledge on the arts of manipulation, missdirection, basiclly what mentalists/magicians/illusionists use in terms of the psychology of whats going on behind the scences to hijack the processes use it against the audience to fool them.

"Well, we can and do shape our subconscious mind and schemata. It’s part of us like I said before. Our experience and desires shape it. It’s not some other being.

Emotions come from your subconscious. You can suppress your emotions if you want to, or you can act on them. If you are acting subconsciously, you would always act on them. When you’re angry and want to hit something, the subconscious mind wants that but it can be stopped if you are conscious and actively modulating your emotions."

Not saying at all its its own being, It goes a little bit deeper than that. What im speaking of is that the second you meet a person, your subconscious has already made up your mind if you will find that person trustworthy, intelligent,beautiful, evil, nice etc. You are biased from the second you see a person with all kind of ideals made up by your subconscious and your conscious will act on those traits given to you.

The psychology of the subconscious mind if you will. More than less people will not realize what behavior they have, because its the subconscious that controls it as you say, but the subconscious is more intelligent than going to a raw and crude form of hit or not hit when acting on emotions. And that is all result from the years of social programming that you have received during your life.

The more research put into the conscious mind and the subconscious shows that the subconscious mind controls more than we have ever thought before in areas we think we are in control of, which is just an illusion cause when we think we have made up our mind consciously, our subconscious has made that up way earlier and is just letting us work towards it. So when your thinking about what clothes you want to wear in the morning, your subconscious has already made your mind up about that, you just think you are looking trough your clothes to the right but will stop when you reach your subconscious decision and end up wearing that.

This process can also be hijacked by outsiders since the subconscious more or less is lines of code. An example of this you can just look at any magician shows really. When the person makes choices but has under the whole time they think they have controlled the choices they made, has actually been hijacked and programmed to subconscious which has then led their “conscious mind” to their predetermined subconscious programing thinking they have been in control the whole time, which has all been an illusion, This is what happens daily to us all. We think we make conscious decisions, when in reality. Our subconscious has already made them for us, and is just giving us the illusion of being “in charge” we just decide where to place our attention.

We are like the mouse on computer, we tell the computer where to focus attention but the computer does it all for us.

You misunderstand me and just repeat the same point you already made. I said that subconscious is a part of you, therefore if it makes the decision, you make the decision. All our experience affects how we think and act. The problem of free will is more philosophy than anything else. I’m not sure where this discussion is going anymore.

I believe that my conscious mind makes the ultimate decision. I believe I act differently if I’m conscious or not. I believe the SC is not some enemy that makes decision that it should not. It’s me making all of those choices no matter how much SC affects it.

SC is an essential part of me which makes me who I am.

Not trying to convey SC as some enemy, and yes I respect that you believe that, but studies show that exactly what your saying here that you belive is what we have thought about humankind to be in control of but such is not the case. The very statement you make about “I believe that my conscious mind makes the ultimate decision. I believe I act differently if I’m conscious or not” and “It’s me making all of those choices no matter how much SC affects it.”

Those statments is how we have fundamentally belived in which is what research into the subject have learned is the illusion we are all under. Not disagreeing with that SC is an essential part of us all. But the SC is totally biased with programming that is not necessarily healthy for us. This is where lucid dreaming can help, cause if you make your subconscious mind part of your conscious mind, you are more prone to be able to consciously react to subconscious behavior/ideas/ideals etc and focus attention on it in an effort to reprogram it for a more “healthy way” so to speak. To redo many of the negative traits and aspects of the SC programmed into us from our surroundings.

Many responses to why LD "why be unconscious during sleep when you can be conscious (Lucid). I mean we are all here in the core because of awareness and its different stages, we aim to be aware and conscious rather than unconscious during sleep. To then be aware of just how much the SC actually have control over and the knowledge to be more conscious about SC behavior and mechanics will drastically improve so many aspects of your awareness and what you are trying to achieve with LD’ing, spanning out to your life, to understand the SC more gives you easier success in many of the things stopping many from LD’ing.

Study of the SC and all its perks traits etc makes you more aware of your own being, to be more aware makes it easier to LD, If you have few LD’s take the ones you get to study your own subconscious and you will be way more frequent to the point of having them every night with no stops or dry spells ever.

I do not identify with my SC cause i know its biased as hell and filled with ignorant programming from my experiences growing up. I consciously do not want to be controlled by programs decided by someone else ideals and prejudices that they have got out into society that has later been programmed into me since the day i was born. I still react with sc ideals and behaviors, but being aware of them I am able to do something about them to place attention to get them reprogrammed. I mean its impossible not to have SC behaviors being acted out by one. Difference is most people are never aware of it being something programmed into them by society. And unaware of it leaves them a slave to the programs.

“What you are aware of, you are in control of. What you are unaware of, is in control of you” - Anthony De Mello

But yes you are right, Subconscious is part of you that makes you who you are.

i’ve used lucid dreaming to help me to rehearse the guitar for performances and also to help ease my performance anxiety.

Well, it’s not necessarily in a lucid dream. But I think that doesn’t concern your question.

This has been and is done a lot by lucid dreamers who seek for specific answers to questions regarding themselves or their lives. Depending on what you expect, I think you could say it works sometimes. First: How would you go about it? Would you ask a random dream character? Would you seek or create a character (or object) that is supposed to represent some part of yourself or a person from waking life? Or would you ask yourself/a copy of yourself/your reflection/a picture of yourself? Or just ask the dream itself, that doesn’t have to be present in any physical appearing way? That’s the variants that I’ve heard and read about. The results seem to be different depending on the way you approach this. Dream characters often react like you’d expect from a real person. Responses from a voice that appears out of nowhere, or a telepathic answer, when you have asked the dream or subconscious itself, seem do be more often god-like.

So, an answer that might help to come to a realization might be: “I have set you an important task to help change your life for the better. But so far you have not been brave enough to face it. Stop putting off the evil day.” While a dream character might say: “Stop acting like a conceited ass at work!”
Whether such an answer helps you to solve a problem or change anything for the better depends on what you make out of it.

At least as often as answers like the two above people seem to get no or no helpful reply.

Those are very specific questions, but only if you assume that “truly happy” and “ideal job” are well-defined and that there is a single purpose of your life. I don’t think the three questions have simple answers. For example, would a job be ideal if you’d get a lot of money so that your life gets easier and more luxurious? Or does it have to be a job that is fun, that almost never gets bugging or boring? Or does it have to be a job where you only work ten hours a week so that you can become truly happy during the rest of the time? Or is it important that you make a difference in the world with your work? Those are all conscious decisions you’d have to make beforehand. And after them there will be more questions to answer and decisions to make in order to specify what you exactly mean by the question. By the time you are through that, you probably already have answered your question to yourself. But I understand that’s not what you mean. Letting your subconscious answer the question entirely seems easy. You might get a response from your dream and it might even make sense, maybe even still after you thought about it while awake. Then you might go and pursue it, if it doesn’t seem to hard to reach. But how do you know it really was the one answer you were looking for? It might as well have been an answer composed of input from your previous day, thoughts you already had in waking life and some random things. Considering how often that happens in dreams, that’s even pretty likely, if you ask me.

I’ve read and heard of quite some attempts of getting a dream to answer questions like “What is my greatest fear?”, “How do I turn my life for the better again?” and “Why am I disabled?”. From these three questions, the first one is easier to answer. And it’s also the one to often get specific answers from a dream (it’s usually asked to a mirror or other reflection). This is often used as proof that dreams can give answers that the dreamer isn’t aware of but that are true. I think it’s not surprising, but not too helpful either. For the other questions, though, getting a meaningful answer seems to be much more rare. I can’t think of an example right now where I think the dreamer got a specific answer that really helped them. To me it looks like what you can expect is confined to abstract answers that may make more sense after you think about them and connect them to your life or your problem. So it’s kind of like dream interpretation. In general you can find answers to the questions by asking yourself in waking life as well. I think how to go about it is a matter of personal choice. You can make a mind map or try to find an answer by collecting structured data and evaluate it, you can meditate about something, you can talk to friends and reflect about your question together with others, or you can ask a dream. No way is guaranteed to give you “the one correct answer” to an abstract question. But there are a lot of ways to get inspiration or a different viewpoint that can help you to get to a realization. I believe asking a dream or somebody in a dream can be helpful in this regard, but I don’t know.

If you find this research again I would appreciate a link in this thread very much. I’m not sure if I understand what you mean.

So, you are saying the SC is a computer program? What do you base this conclusion on? It seems to be more than a simplification.

Nice metaphor. If you didn’t make clear what you mean before, I think this explained it in a very simple way. Maybe it’s going too far, though. You say you don’t want to convey the SC as some enemy. But it sounds to me like you do. At least you’re saying it’s a seperate entity. Maybe that’s not how you meant it. But it’s hard to discern concrete, rational statements from what you say about the SC. I know personifying rather abstract matters is a common and sometimes useful way to talk about complex issues. But it requires all participants to have a similar level of understanding of the matter. Since we disagree about the fundamental understanding of how the SC works, or have different states of knowledge about it, I think it would help the discussion if you’d explain more detailed what you are trying to convey.