I've heard a lot of claims about lucid dreaming among some young people I know well locally (some of whom post here from time to time). I don't get the impression that lucid dreaming is really as beneficial as they think it is. Some cases I know about from personal observation involve disturbing sleep cycles so much in pursuit of lucid dreams that the young people failed in work environments or crashed and burned in their university studies. Getting a normal amount of sleep (for you, that leaves you feeling rested when you wake up in the morning) is very important. It's a lot more important than what kind of dreams you have.
I read through the whole submitted article, and I didn't see any reporting on rigorous study of the waking state health or performance of long-term lucid dreamers. All we see in the article is anecdotes, summed up by
"For Hobson, the neuroscientist, the benefits of being able to achieve lucid dreaming are much simpler.
"'We don't really know if there are real psychological advantages, but I can tell you that it has huge entertainment value. It's like going to the movies and not paying for your ticket.'"
An issue to consider whenever participants on Hacker News discuss self-help strategies is how reliable the research base is. People who only use the University of Google Library to do research will often find websites by advocacy groups that are pushing a solution that may not have been tested. Fortunately, Google's own director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, has written a guide to reading research reports
that reminds us all about what to look for when someone reports some new, amazing treatment. Check out whether lucid dreaming has really been well evaluated with sufficiently large sample sizes, control groups, and other marks of good research.
may do more for many people in high-creativity careers than lucid dreaming. There is a better research base, by far, for the writing self-help than for lucid dreaming. Try it and see how it works.
I've always been able to enjoy interesting movie-like experiences by DAY-dreaming, and it's not explained here why anyone should alter their sleep cycle (which has known risks, up to and including psychotic symptoms) just to be entertained. A lot of researchers over the years have done a lot of research on human dreams in particular and sleep cycles more generally. Where is there any evidence that lucid dreaming is helpful rather than harmful, long-term?
Best wishes for much success in improving your personal insight and problem-solving.
I tried lucid dreaming and it was quite easy for me to control my dreams. But after I woke up, despite the fact that I had slept 8+ hours, I felt mentally exhausted. Physically I was fine, no yawning or anything, but mentally I felt like I hadn't slept. It was a weird disassociation of physical vs mental exhaustion.
I've tried it a few times and it's the same every time. To me the slightly more fun lucid dreams are not worth the exhausted feeling in the morning.
I tried lucid dreaming a few years ago. Initially, the main problem that I was having was to wake up as soon as I realized I was in the middle of a dream. It took me almost no time to go back to sleep but I "was missing" the dream every time I woke up.
After a few days, I was able to control most of my dreams. I never had full control of those (there was a moment where something got out of control) but I liked the experience. I think the best experience I had dreaming was flying.
In any case, I always woke up fully rested (which might have to do with not being able to control it 100%).
Fellow lucid dreamer here. I've tried some explorations of the interface between sleep and waking from within dreams. In my experience/opinion, sex dreams might tend to break up because they use the tactile sense a lot and vision not so much. That can lead to inadvertently paying attention/letting-in one's real-body proprioceptive sense channel or attempting to give motor commands out to one's real muscles (rather than sticking with the dream-sense channels and the more expectation-based moment to moment control of one's dream).
Physically I felt great. Mentally it was like I had spent a long day memorizing pi numbers, or spent the day in an ice cream store while willfully resisting the temptation to eat any of it.
Hard to put into words, basically like there was a part of me, specifically something like the part responsible for will and motivation that desperately needed rest.
In theory, it should be pretty easy to lab test the effects of lucid dreaming on various parts of the brain. In your case, the regions associated with willpower, executive function, etc. (prefrontal cortex, primarily). You could do sleep studies and fMRI studies of brain regions, both after waking from normal sleep cycles and after waking from lucid dreaming.
Call me highly skeptical that there are any neurological benefits to lucid dreaming. In fact, I'm inclined to believe that intentionally inducing lucid dreams, night after night, is going to have a serious net-detrimental effect on health by way of disrupting sleep cycles.
Sleep serves a lot of very finely tuned purposes for the brain and the body, not the least of which is mental "garbage collection."
Highly skeptical is not what I'd call you. Overly skeptical is what I'd call you. I've been LD'ing for 4+ years now. I feel more refreshed and less groggy after a fun lucid dream. Every time. I know several other veteran dreamers and they say the same thing. None of us do the WBTB, we just go lucid in the middle of the dream. Sleep is a finely tuned process but you dream every night whether you remember it or not so lucid dreaming is not disrupting anything. It just gives you an awesome amount of control over
I swear, reading through these posts is super frustrating. It's like everyone who can't/hasn't lucid dreamt before is actively discouraging others from trying it because they're jealous/scared or something.
"I swear, reading through these posts is super frustrating. It's like everyone who can't/hasn't lucid dreamt before is actively discouraging others from trying it because they're jealous/scared or something."
I think you're reading too much into my post that just isn't there. Jealousy? Fear? Give me a break. The assertion that I can't, or haven't, had a lucid dream before? False on both counts. "Actively discouraging others from trying it?" Again, no. Not at all.
Let's stay away from ad hominems in this discussion, please. They don't advance the dialogue in any meaningful way.
Fellow LDer here. I've never felt any adverse effects of the type in discussion (quite the contrary, amazing euphoria and well-being on some occasions). But we shouldn't pretend that lucid dreaming is likely to be stimulating only and exactly the same brain regions as more typical dreaming (in terms of the metabolic and other activity levels). Learning to activate the relevant memory writing modules while in dreams so as to increase dream recall is, after all, one of the typical first steps to developing LDs. That mental machinery is seemingly not typically on to such a degree when dreaming as most people normally do.
That alone shows that some brain activity needs to be online that isn't in typical dreaming, and I imagine the various other bits of learned mental behavior to the LDing skill-set also change activation levels in brain regions. Learning to exert the kind of attention/expectation control to stabilize and alter dreams is another sub-skill that often takes practice and so probably involves bringing online brain resources that might otherwise be off/recharging.
So if some people have lower neurochemical reserves of some type or other, this extra activity, use of such neurochemicals, at night (when their reserves would otherwise be replenished) could push them under some threshold of good functioning for a while. My guess is that such sensitivities would be the rare minority cases, but this field is quite understudied to have grounded empirical beliefs on the matter.
"Some cases I know about from personal observation involve disturbing sleep cycles so much in pursuit of lucid dreams that the young people failed in work environments or crashed and burned in their university studies."
That is laughable ignorance my friend. The Wake Back To Bed method might mess your sleep schedule up a little, but you're only supposed to be up for about 30 minutes or so then you go back to sleep. That's not even the most common way of lucid dreaming. To say people have ruined their lives trying to lucid dream is, frankly, completely ridiculous and I'm embarrassed for the HN community for upvoting this post.
It wouldn't be too far of a stretch. Starting simply with the knowledge that dreaming happens while in REM, someone could find it logically to switch to an Uberman-type Polyphasic sleep schedule, since one of the biggest advertised advantage of such sleep schedule is dropping into REM a lot quicker due to exhaustion. If Uberman doesn't actually help them in terms of the sleep they need, but they also don't want to give it up, hoping to get all that lucid dreaming, a student could continue it for a a few months, which coincidentally is a school semester. Now you've got a student who is really burned out, and once exam time will crash and burn. Depending on the program, university they attend, and the person themselves, failing a semester could really screw them over one way or another.
For me, the Wake Back to Bed, when it does work, generally involves first the 30 minutes staying up, then 40 to 90 minutes of lying awake in bed before falling asleep. So that does unfortunately mess a bit with the sleep cycle, even though it should be just a blip in the radar in theory. Haven't managed to get any other method to work reliably. I guess what works and how varies by individual.
I get the feeling that lucid dreaming provides similar benefits to psilocybin in terms of letting you rewire your emotional responses to certain situations, as well as letting you rewire your muscle memory. Lucid dreaming is never something that I've been particularly interested in, although I think there are certain use cases where it makes, e.g. if you want to teach yourself how to link turns on a snowboard.
I read through the whole submitted article, and I didn't see any reporting on rigorous study of the waking state health or performance of long-term lucid dreamers. All we see in the article is anecdotes, summed up by
"For Hobson, the neuroscientist, the benefits of being able to achieve lucid dreaming are much simpler.
"'We don't really know if there are real psychological advantages, but I can tell you that it has huge entertainment value. It's like going to the movies and not paying for your ticket.'"
An issue to consider whenever participants on Hacker News discuss self-help strategies is how reliable the research base is. People who only use the University of Google Library to do research will often find websites by advocacy groups that are pushing a solution that may not have been tested. Fortunately, Google's own director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, has written a guide to reading research reports
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
that reminds us all about what to look for when someone reports some new, amazing treatment. Check out whether lucid dreaming has really been well evaluated with sufficiently large sample sizes, control groups, and other marks of good research.
I think a writing intervention
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/H...
may do more for many people in high-creativity careers than lucid dreaming. There is a better research base, by far, for the writing self-help than for lucid dreaming. Try it and see how it works.
I've always been able to enjoy interesting movie-like experiences by DAY-dreaming, and it's not explained here why anyone should alter their sleep cycle (which has known risks, up to and including psychotic symptoms) just to be entertained. A lot of researchers over the years have done a lot of research on human dreams in particular and sleep cycles more generally. Where is there any evidence that lucid dreaming is helpful rather than harmful, long-term?
Best wishes for much success in improving your personal insight and problem-solving.