Post by Leo McGinnis on Apr 6, 2010 14:24:06 GMT -5
I have been unable to lucid dream. Advice?
Um, I'd love to give you some advice, but first I must know what it is exactly that you're doing to induce lucid dreams. Couple of things:
1. Are you writing down or otherwise recording most of your dreams? I recommend increasing your dream recall to where you remember at least 2-4 dreams a night with relative ease if you're not at that point already. It's possible to forget lucid dreams just like normal dreams!
2. What induction method are you using? If you're not sure what I'm talking about, refer to Links and descriptions to lots of induction techniques
3. Do you often check your reality in real life to make it a habit that you may reproduce in dreams?
4. Just how long have you been trying? For some people it happens fast, but for me it took over a month before I had my first lucid dream and that first one only lasted like 10 seconds. Not to discourage you, but you just may need more time.
Finally there's the LD4all Knowledge Base which has information on almost all topics regarding lucid dreaming. Or if you want more in depth and scientific information, try Dream Views. There's tutorials and lots and lots of information on both of those sites/forums.
If you just want a quick answer in this thread, refer to my above questions. I need to know some more before I can give more solid advice.
Having lucid dreams every night for a long period of time is a bad idea. Your prefrontal cortex is the only part of your brain that is awake at the time which gives the perception of a lucid dream. This means that your prefrontal cortex is not getting any sleep, and you are going to have some serious sleep deprivation related brain problems in your prefrontal cortex. Every once in a while is fine, though.
To my knowledge there is no scientific evidence supporting this theory and I am not aware of any documented cases of this kind of sleep deprivation happening just from consistent lucid dreaming as opposed to normal dreaming. Folks like Stephen LaBerge would have discovered this decades ago if it were true. Of course, I don't know everything, so if you can point me to a study where they've tested and confirmed this I'd be very interested.
It's just that I've been looking into lucid dreaming for years and I've never come across this before.
Besides, very few people are able to lucid dream consistently every night. The few people who can do this are usually very knowledgeable about dreams and sleep in general or they're students/researchers of the phenomenon.