I understand what you are trying to say (I think) though I don’t really understand what it has to do with the topic. So before I reply to what I think you are getting at. Would you explain how it applies to the topic: killing dream characters. I am not being picky and I think I know where you are going. I am just asking for clarification. I don’t want to misinterpret your words.
Damn, they found out! I’m outta here. . . 
I thank my brother for the “backwards flippy” idea. His TN_Adrom screen name made no sense to me until he said it was: mordant backwards. That kid. . .
someone should make a topic about how how topics never stay on topic, and see how long it takes that topic to get off topic… hmm… that’s a good idea: the off topic topic
anyway, i know i said i was done w/ this thread, but i deemed holy reality’s post worthy of a response, even thought it was a bit off topic 
milod, you asked how holy reality’s thread relates to DC killing, i’m gonna go out on a limb and offer a hypothesis:
perhaps it’s early exposure to violence when we were young and impressionable, that caused us to grow up to think that violence was an acceptable way to solve problems. i’m reminded of growing up watching he-man, transformers, spiderman etc. they were “good guys”, but they didn’t use good negotiating tactics to defeat their opponents.
i may be reaching with that hypothesis and holy reality’s post was just plain off topic… but i’m gonna respond anyway
=> holy reality, i definitely agree that a conscience is a construct of society (unless that wasn’t your claim when you said that children don’t have a conscience yet, in which case i am stating that society creates consciences as my claim) but i definitely do not agree that children will automatically grow up to reflect the environment that they were raised in
example: growing up, i had a friend who cussed like a sailor, his dad cussed like a sailor, and his mom cussed… albeit, not quite like a sailor. my friend’s little sister (who was about 6 or 7)… i’d never heard a single explitive come out of her mouth at all… i always thought that was the most amazing thing.
also, i don’t think it is at all fair to say that simply because kids haven’t devoloped a sense of right and wrong that they are stupid, even if you did put “stupid” in quotes.
also, i think kids some sense of fantasy and actuality, i don’t think you give them enough credit, but then again i’m reminded of another debate i had w/ you when it was revealed you believe everything is causally determined… i think that’s a rather pessimistic view, but now i’m getting really off topic 
it was already being discussed, i just might have been a bit late…
anyways…
oneiromancer: "example: growing up, i had a friend who cussed like a sailor, his dad cussed like a sailor, and his mom cussed… albeit, not quite like a sailor. my friend’s little sister (who was about 6 or 7)… i’d never heard a single explitive come out of her mouth at all… i always thought that was the most amazing thing. "
Did you live with her? Perhaps she was taught that “We are allowed to say bad words but you aren’t…” or she learned it gets her in trouble at school… or maybe through punishment she learned that they were “grown up words” or something…
I mean it’s like, you explain to kids that you are old enough to drink alcohol but they aren’t, and how it’s dangerous for them and can kill them, and well… I haven’t seen very many 5 year old alcoholics.
In an attempt to directly tie this into dreaming, obviously violent dreams can be sparked by violent media… I don’t know whether I’d consider that a problem or not unless they bother you… and well this was just to kind of illustrate how violent content (lucid dream, game, movie) can indeed effect the mind and make you more violent.
Not to blame music but the angsty kids that commit acts of violence never tend to listen to 'N Sync… why is that? You could say they were prone to violence and therefore drawn to violent music… but I mean… I like “violent” music to a degree (providing there is a point to it) and I’m not too prone to violence… so…
You know, you get in the cycle of falling in love with violent media (or in this case going on killing sprees frequently while lucid) and well as I’ve already said I think it can start a downward spiral.
We can’t really apply violent lucid dreams to kids, since most kids aren’t good at LDing and if a kid is violent at a young age, it probably isn’t his fault unless there is something wrong with his brain.
But I made that reply because two other people were already discussing various forms of violence we are exposed to, and the effect it has on children… I saw someone say something about a kid not having a conscience as if it was the kids fault, and pointed out that you are not born with a conscience, it is formed into you by someone or society.
holy reality
Since my early child hood I was a horror / action movie addict. I mean I could probably name quite a few old horror movies that you most likely never heard of and they were actually scary. Now that did not make me go out and commit acts of violence or cause nightmares or any thing like that.
Again in our desperate need to find a reason why violent people act the way they do we look back and say he/she watched “bad” movies so that must be it. I do not buy any of it. TV, games, and music do not cause violent behaviors. Even in children.
Sorry holy reality, I buy your circumstances argument’s. But, I don’t buy the TV and games argument. We (including children) are not that weak willed or stupid.
Yes they are and studies show it.
Everything affects us. (the question then is “how much”? and it largely varies)
Example, you are listening to a slow boring song on the radio, then something exciting/heavy comes on, you get energized, you feel like speeding, or you do speed.
I’m sure we’ve all been there. I mean the very nature of being alive is stimulus/response, stimulus/response, violent movies affect you, romance movies affect you, documentaries affect you, everything affects you.
There are an equal number of studies that say the opposite.
Many defense lawyers have tried to blame TV when representing defendants who were charged with murder or other violent crimes. They mostly fail because there is no unbiased scientific proof either way.
A person who is intent on committing violent acts will do so. A tv show or a game is not going to cause someone to snap and go out and hurt people.
I think it’s a little shortsighted to stop there. You have to go back a little further and ask the question of what caused them to become intent on committing those acts in the first place. It’s easy to say “that person is just violent”, but I don’t believe anything at all can happen with justified cause. It might not be movies or games that provoke such a detrimental attitude, but it must be something. Upbringing, imbalance of natural chemicals, something.
Form my point of view, it isn’t reasonable to suggest that people will act in a way they weren’t influenced to.
I totally agree with you. I thought we discussed that earlier in the thread. (Maybe it was a different thread there are so many similar topics out there.)
What causes violence ? I think the answer is different depending on the individual. Many people are driven to commit crimes (some times violent ones) do to desperation, and poverty. Some because of repeated child hood abuse/neglect. Drug/alcohol addiction is certainly a factor. But, even that does not fully explain why. There are many people whocome from a similar background yet don’t commit acts of violence towards others or themselves. Some people break the cycle do to an intervention of some sort. Some change on there own.
I don’t think there is any one single thing that we can point to and say, “That’s the problem right there.” If we could we would wipe out violence tomorrow.
You could ask psychologists, historian’s, clergy, philosophers and none would agree.
Unfortunately, the best we have been able to do is look back after a crime was committed and try to put the pieces together but, even then we still do not get the complete picture.
The bottom line is that we are too complicated to figure out.
With all that said. Some of the worst acts of violence in history occurred long before there was tv, or games. If it plays any factor at all it would be a remote one in my opinion. I have worked with people in the criminal justice system. Many who comited acts of violence and in none of the cases was TV or games the cause or even a factor.
Well said, and I completely agree. That’s not to say there isn’t a definitive set of causes for any and every action a person will perform (I believe there is), but I don’t agree that you can pass the blame for inappropriate actions to the media.
Nobody wants to hear it, but people really are natually capable of violent and unethical acts.
You guys are misinterpreting me.
VIOLENT MOVIES AFFECT YOU.
I never said they made you violent.
THEY CAN contribute to it, though, definitely, and the main issue is CHILDREN here.
But I mean, who needs violent movies when you can go to the collosseum and real people are dying in front of you all the time in the olden days?
We are naturally violent to a degree, but obviously this is complicated by our intelligence, very few animals kill for no reason at all, and they know how to maintain balance, we, humans, seem to desire to wipe each other completely out at all times… unfortunately.
Which just is kind of baffling since we are probably the only species that is actually capable of CHOOSING not to be violent, we are separated from our emotions, at least, most of us… so I mean.
The point though is that violent movies lead to violent thoughts. They do “Wow, that was cool” when someone explodes, is a violent thought.
Two days later, reflecting on that act of violence being cool, that’s a violent thought.
The little things we make habits out of doing affect is in so many intricate ways that aren’t really even conceivable to think about… you know? If you like to watch a lot of romantic movies, stop, watch violent movies instead, vice versa, really pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, etc… everything we do from recreation to education, etc, plays an intricate role in shaping our thoughts and behaviors and senses of “reality” etc.
I never said that violent media causes problems with violence, that isn’t really the case, but it CAN, and it DOES INFLUENCE US
That is what I’m saying. Just like my post is going to cause you start thinking about certain things, and perhaps in the long run very slightly alter your views or thought patterns on a particular subject.
Atheist
Of corse. Since the beginning of time man kind has been at the top of the food chain. We have been hunters, explorers and (yes) warriors. Aggression and violence is deeply routed into our being. It is just we chanel this energy differently then our ancestors did. Unfortunately, as you said we pretend this aspect of our nature does not exist. We consider ourselves to be more civilized than our ancestors. But as a species are we really. We posses weapons capable of destroying the world 100 times over. Our ancestors may have been barbarians yet each clan cared for it’s own. Do we care for ours. All you have to do is walk down any street in the seeder areas of where you live to see how well we take care of our own. Visit a nursing home or psychiatric hospital and even a prison. Incarceration has never proved to be a deterrent for crime so why do we still do it to non violent offenders. ( gone off on a tangent )
(Back on point)
I think we are born with both positive and negative aspects of our nature. They are both important and make us who we are. I think it is important to keep these two elements in balance with each other. Some people my find themselves in unfortunate circumstances such as I described in my previous post. ( drugs/alcohol addiction, poverty, abused as children etc) Any of these things can throw you out of balance. When ever this balance is disrupted in either direction a person is headed for potential disaster.
( trying to get it back on topic and relate it to lucid dreaming)
I think it can healthy to (select negative action) once in a while in a lucid dream. It can help you plow off steam and bring yourself back in balance with your self. You have a safe forum to Chanel your excess negative feelings so why not take advantage of it. I believe that you can even grow and learn from it.
I’ll end with my caveat that though I believe it is perfectly healthy to (negative action) in a LD. Be sure to keep things balanced with some positive dreams too. 
I was not going to post again on these 2 threads (you can’t reason with some people so I’ll just ignore them as I don’t have time to waste anyway) but I found this.
I found a very interesting news article which talks about the problem of violence - very much related to what I was posting in these 2 threads.
Nick Berg’s executioners all too clearly enjoyed beheading him
By Theodore Dalrymple
(Filed: 13/05/2004)
One thing that unites the men who beheaded the American Nick Berg in Iraq, the soldiers who abused Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the Palestinians who have held on to Israeli body parts in Gaza City and the murderers of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan is that they all enjoyed what they did, and enjoyed it immensely.
There is almost no greater pleasure known to man than to commit great acts of cruelty in the belief that the cause of right and justice is being served. Anyone who has observed rioters will know that they are having a wonderful time: could there be a greater joy than vandalism with a social purpose?
I used to wonder how it was possible for ordinary men to commit evil acts, and to do so en masse. I was thinking of Nazi Germany at the time, but I might just as well have been thinking of the Soviet Union. More recently, we have the example of Rwanda, where perfectly ordinary people who had been living in apparent conditions of friendship with their neighbours suddenly turned on them and hacked them to death with machetes.
There are a few exceptional human beings who seem to delight in evil all their lives. It is as if there is some inherent or acquired defect in their brains that renders them unable to learn the decencies of life or conform themselves to the canons of civilised behaviour.
From the earliest age, they stand out by their capricious and cruel wilfulness. They delight in torturing animals, dousing them in kerosene and setting them alight, or putting them in the washing machine; they lie and cheat for preference, even when there is no advantage in doing so. They are indifferent to the opinions and sufferings of others, and never learn to modify their behaviour from their own experience.
They are what the 19th-century alienist J. C. Prichard called "morally insane’’: they are neither deluded nor hallucinated - they may even be of good intelligence - but they are incapable of internalising a moral code and of conforming their conduct to it.
Such people are comparatively rare. They might be called evil by nature, although whether someone who performs evil deeds because he is neurologically incapable of performing good ones can be blamed for his behaviour is a puzzle that I leave to the moral philosophers.
Such people are, in any case, few. In the course of my work, I meet them from time to time, and they make your blood run cold. But most evil is not committed by the morally insane, or psychopaths in the Hannibal Lecter mould: it is committed by ordinary people, the kind of people who pass you in the street every day.
My vision of humanity has darkened, not since I read about Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, which seemed to me exotic and distant, culturally and politically, but since I began to investigate the lives of ordinary British people in modern conditions. I have come to the conclusion that the default setting of man is to evil and that, if not all, then many or perhaps most men will commit evil if they can get away with it.
Where there is neither social nor legal pressure to behave decently, there will be a festival of evil. We have created a society in which often there is neither such pressure; as a consequence, I am confronted every day in my work by new evidence of man’s propensity to evil, in the conduct of my patients or that of the people with whom they consort. The gratification that people derive from inflicting suffering on others is unmistakable. Furthermore, it is quite obvious that evil exerts a fascination and attraction for others who do not themselves indulge in it.
For example, it is clear that many young women prefer evil young men to decent ones. Indeed, they are attracted to men with evil written on their faces, as it often is. And the evil that these men do, the violence they commit, is often performed with a simulacrum of an excuse or moral pretext.
A man beats his girlfriend because he alleges that she is two-timing him, but really because there is no better way of keeping her in line, and because beating a defenceless woman is such fun. The sensation of a smashed glass meeting the face of a supposed or pretended enemy is balm to the soul of someone who feels himself to have been wronged all his life.
The experiments of the psychologist Stanley Milgram, published 30 years ago in a book entitled Obedience to Authority, showed how far ordinary people were prepared to inflict pain and even danger, in the form of a simulated electric shock, on a fellow citizen, merely at the behest of a stranger. They had no special reason to do so, beyond a desire to please the stranger and allegedly to further the cause of science.
Very few actually resisted; and if these ordinary people had had a cause for hatred, or had been persuaded that they had a cause for hatred (which often amounts to the same thing), of the person on whom they thought they were inflicting pain and suffering, such minimal resistance as they demonstrated would have evaporated. There is nothing they would not have done.
If the Kingdom of God is within you, so is the Kingdom of Evil. I know this from my experience of myself. When I was about nine, there were often ants’ nests at the base of our house. I used to love pouring boiling water on the ants, seeing them transformed from living beings into little boiled black dots.
How easily I persuaded myself that, by killing them, I was defending our house, preventing it from being undermined! Yet even as I told myself this, I knew that it was the killing I loved, not the structure of our house.
Both self-examination and my experience of others tells me that evil lurks within all of us, waiting for its opportunity to spring. Civilisation may be a veneer, but it is the veneer that separates us from barbarism. Never forget Original Sin and its consequences.
Theodore Dalrymple is a prison doctor
Source was the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/05/13/do1301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/05/13/ixopinion.html
has anyone every killed a recurrent dream character and then noticed that they hadnt appeared after you had killed them in later LD’s?
- Silva
clark kent please shorten that link by making use of URL tags… it’s completely ruined this page.
I would like to chime in on the “it makes you feel good to release stress on DC s” thing… well…
Maybe I’m just really different/pacifistic, but I recently had an LD, and some girl I didn’t like was mouthing off to me, I had just attained lucidity, she callled me an idiot or something… and I grab this chair, and I start running at her…
and then I can’t hit her… I just can’t make myself do it, she’s just standing there, the leg of the chair is right next to her eye… she’s lifeless… more or less… so am I.
and I woke up, feeling quite bad, although I had a rush.
Would I have felt good if I gave her a beating? Well, probably, but suffice to say I couldn’t bring myself to do it… maybe shooting her would have been easier I guess, but guns don’t have any real dream affect, nor do swords/knives/etc in my dreams… .it’s all in beatings or magic.
I just thought I’d share that… it’s fitting I guess ince one time in real life I almost hit her (she hit me becuase she thought I knocked a stand over on her) and then I sort of “stopped” halfway in motion and looked like a retarded idiot who didn’t know how to punch people… everytime I’ve tried to punch someone out of anger I’ve never been able to succeede come to think of it, unless I’m already being wailed on, but that’s more like just if a friend is hitting me in the arm or something, it’s not an I want to kill you punch.
Maybe managing to go ruthless on a real life resemblant DC that made me angry would be good for me … I don’t know.
most of the DCs i’ve fought/killed weren’t recurring DCs… though that question is interesting… perhaps you simply don’t expect to meet a DC you killed, because… well… he/she’s dead… perhaps you should try to conjure him/her back up
that’s happened to me a couple times, i usually have a good handle on my beast but sometimes i gotta break out the choke collar 
silva
I seldom get recurring DC in my WILD lucid dreams unless I summon them. But, in one of my DILD I killed recurring DC and he did reappear in future ND and DILD. However, there was one DC that I banished from my dreams and she never appeared again. I never thought about that until now.
oneiromancer
That makes sense to me. I knew the DC I killed was not really dead (I was lucid and it was just a dream)so he returned in future dreams. When I banished another DC I must have sent my subconscious a clear message that I did not want that person to return.
holy reality
I don’t know if it would help you or not. Only you can decide what is right for you.
In my opinion I think it is a perfect example on how, even though we are just dreaming we some times forget that and behave according to waking life morality, ethics etc. In our society, men don’t beat women. However, if you really feel a need to vent some frustration on this person you could transform her into a Xena type character there by giving yourself the illusion of it being a fair fight.
it didn’t have to do with not wanting to beat women (i believe women deserve to be beaten in some cicrumstances, you shouldn’t let them get away with hitting you whenever they get mad, but there’s no need to use excessive force… i just hate the way girls think they can hit and kick and scratch and throw things at guys and get away with it, they shouldn’t get away with it as far as I’m concerned!)
it just had to do with I wouldn’t normally bash someone’s head in with a chair for them making fun of me, even if I hated them, so I felt bad about it.
If she were attacking me I probably would have, though one time a baby was attacking me and I was going to slam it’s head into the wall multiple times but I couldn’t… it’s harder to attack a baby though than a woman…
But anyway the other day I hit her in the face with a basketball numerous times, it wasn’t really “her” though but… oh well… it didn’t make me feel bad or good, and I think I apologized afterward maybe… the dream was set up to make me want to do it though, since she was just randomly there for some reason, so I was probably supposed to.
I have done things in my LD that I would not even think of doing in real life. Since it is just a dream I don’t feel guilty about them. Maybe you should allow yourself just one day per week to vent in your dreams. Give yourself permission to do this and a reminder that there is nothing to feel guilty about because it is just a dream.
Good Luck
well we’ve been over this before, how you would act lucidly in a dream is a good indicator of how you would act in society if you were to never be punished for anything.
The only difference being that my DCs don’t run and scream and exhibit pain (while lucid) so… it’s more video game esque, but that isn’t accounting for shared dreams, which I do think I have at times.
If I feel like venting in a dream I’ll vent though, but that doesn’t mean I need to puporsefully go stalk people I dislike and torment them in dream.