There is a FAQ surfaced from digg.com which talks about lucid dream – dreams that knowing that you are dreaming and you have full control of the dream course. It is similar to a time when you nearly awake from the sleep and you are dreaming – you are in full conscious yet you are still in dream.
However I have concerns on lucid dreaming on both psychological and physical level. I want to counter the FAQ by linking several resources on lucid dream problems, to make sure readers of the FAQ are fully aware of possible issues associating to it:
In the last resource, Lucid Dreaming at Wiki Books, has a section on possible dangers of lucid dreaming. It sums up different categories of its problems:
- Addiction
- Alienation
- Dissociation
- Controversial: Accidentally encountering “spiritual” entities
- Controversial: Exhaustion
- Controversial: Inability to stop
- Controversial: Undesirable false awakenings
Take extremely cautious on lucid dreaming.
I think the benefits highly outweigh the negative effects of lucid dreaming. I’ve been doing it for about 5 years now, and while I am not perfect at it, it has still helped me with my overall concentration levels and imagination levels also. Check out, http://www.ld4all.com for a great resource and message board on Lucid Dreaming where you can ask any question you’ve got.
I’m with Ben. Plus the first two websites do not look very authoritive :) I’m not saying wikibooks is, but even wikibooks is more better than geocities or some spiritwatch :D
I tried lucid dreaming a few months ago, and I had one incredibly vivid, near-lucid nightmare that made me decide to stop. I didn’t ever succeed in getting full lucidity, but it got a little too uncomfortable for me.
That being said, books on lucid dreams sometimes warn their readers that some people may find lucid dreaming to be a horrible experience, because it forces you to meet parts of yourself you might not want to.
Also, is lifehack.org saving money by hiring writers who don’t speak English? That article was atrocious.
[...] Caution on Hacking Your Dream – Lucid Dreaming – lifehack.org # Addiction # Alienation # Dissociation # Controversial: Accidentally encountering “spiritual” entities # Controversial: Exhaustion # Controversial: Inability to stop # Controversial: Undesirable false awakenings [...]
geh?!? lucid dreaming is dangerous?!? how is that? it’s a basic dream that you just have control over. there ment to make you feel better. like one girl in california, she was incredibly lonly and made a “dream friend” while lucid dreaming that made her feel less lonely, plus, some people have lucid dreams without trying to. my first lucid dream was when i was 10 and i felt alot better after i relized i was dreaming.
ok. wtevr.
I find the concept of Lucid Dreaming very exciting but at the same time am cautious as to whether I should experience it. The Lucid Dreaming and Mental Health column says that you should space out who much you lucid dream. However, my concern is that once you learn to lucid dream can you deliberately stop when you want to?
I’m sorry but I can’t see in what way Lucid Dreaming can be dangerous for yourself….
The way I, and thousands of other people, have experienced it is totally positive.
The only arguments I understood where that when you are depressed or mentally fragile, it can be disturbing…But then anything you experience in life can be disturbing…
Take it positively!…You make it sound like playing with the devil…
I’m sorry but I can’t see in what way Lucid Dreaming can be dangerous for yourself….
The way I, and thousands of other people, have experienced it is totally positive.
The only arguments I understood where that when you are depressed or mentally fragile, it can be disturbing…But then anything you experience in life can be disturbing…
Take it positively!…You make it sound like playing with the devil…
Oh, and finding lucid dreaming terrifying is just like having fear of…real life.
Recommended Reading
What good reading can be found on Internet? Interesting links for lucid dreaming.
The danger of lucid dreaming is what is reffered to as “thin walls”.
It’s when people have too many realistic dreams, and they start to have trouble telling them appart from reality.
It sounds silly.
The problem is, when your concious mind is controlling your actions in your dreams, it feels the exact same way as when your concious mind is controlling things when your awake.
Are you kidding me? The only “negative” thing about lucid dreaming is, well, addiction :) I love going to bed, as I can be sure I am going to enjoy a fun “movie” where I am the main character. Ability to do anything, control anything and realization that you are dreaming opens up amazing possibilities for learning things about your psyche & discovering your true self. I’ve been lucid dreaming ever since I was a little kid, and I’m over 30 now. Still doing well. After a while you get to learn how to “program” your dreams in advance, which is much simpler than one may think, but that is a completely different subject.
i have lucid dreams every often and rarely they lead to sleep paralysis which is a very terrifying thing. I would love to be able to just sleep for a night and not worry about something trying to harm me while im paralyzed in my bed.
As some said lucid dreaming is awesome…of course it is, when you learn to control it and have powerfull mind and control your emotions (you have to meditate a lot)… A LOT!!!
The danger of lucid dreamin: When you have normal (untrained) mind, you are usualy not in control of your mind and emotions. This is where a problem might arise. (btw you are usualy not in control, even if you think you are).
The subconscious mind contains all of the patterns that you call “ME”. Guess what happens if “ME” has seen lost of evil in its life. You might get overwhelmed by how evil your mind really is, all your desires, emotions and all neuro-connections to these desires and emotions might get activated if you dont know, what you are doing and your psyche can get under evil onslought. Of course we are talking about what most ppl concider evil and good, even though such things dont exist.
For those who want to try learning lucind dreaming I suggest at least 1-2 monts of void meditation (stilling your mind) and if you feel like it, continue with some additional meditations. I know cases of ppl with weak minds, learned lucind dreaming and have psychical problems cause they are not really in control of what is happening in their dream, they just mannaged to make their nightmares unbelievably real.
Ummm… I’m 13 and am, at the moment, mystified, yet terrified of lucid dreaming. The concept of having total control over one’s current actions and surrounding’s actions is very appealing, yet i am terrified that I will have semi-lucent nightmares… again. This happened a while back and it seemed to be a series. I kept continuing the dream sequence every night until I finally beat the cause of said nightmare, this being a “virus” that I had dreamt about at the age of 9 or so that, originally, brought inanimate object to a zombified half-life, but, as the sequence continued, began to spread to human hosts and became a mixture of a stupid fad and “Las Plagas”. At first, their weakness was water, but then, as I though about it, that went away and they started to emit a poisonous gas cloud. I know, it sounds dumb, but anything weird in dreams can be horrifying. I specifically recall one very vivid moment when, while crawling through the air ducts of my school to escape what was named SIN after what was written across the infected peoples knuckles (weird, I know…), when I encountered two of my classmates. They were, for some reason, “talking” and comparing knuckles… when I panicked and wondered what would happen if they were in the vent along with me. Suddenly, they appeared directly in front of me with their newly added scales and evil grins. I must have really freaked out because, directly after this, I appeared over a waterfall in the safari, floating on a living mattress that I, for some reason, thought of as an elephant. I finally destroyed whatever the thing was, and my dream sequence just suddenly ended. It’s really weird and slightly comical, but I don’t want it to happen again. I don’t know whether or not I will get a good dream, especially because I have a mirror directly in front of my bed, so a more realistic dream could instantly become the most realistic possible nightmare. I don’t know which is more likely, so I may need some reassurance here. I would love to go to Hyrule (TOTAL NERD HERE!) but if cd-i ganon (google is your friend) comes and eats my face while dressed as my dad again, I’m a bit indecisive.
1. Addiction, jep, but so is everything that your brain makes dopamine for,meaning, everything is addictive, this point has now become invalid.
2. Alienation, that’s your personality, not your ability to do something 90% of the population doesn’t even know of, point invalid again.
3. Dissociation, you’re just being plain stupid by doing that, point invalid, can always happen.
4. Encountering spiritual entities, it’s what you do in your dream, doing something because it’s an accident is not possible, you do what you think, not what something else does, point invalid.
5. Exhaustion, uber BS there, you’re sleeping, you always dream, this means you should be exhausted when you wake up without a lucid dream, which does not happen, invalid and totally media made-up tales.
6. Inability to stop, see nr 1.
7. Undiserable false awakenings, you get these while you dream “normal” as well, so that point is just poop.
eduard you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. i had a completely unintentional lucid dream last night, i didnt even know what a lucid dream was exactly at the time. The entire time i was trying to escape it being that i had a bad experience with something that feels like a lucid dream and i tried to wake up. i had sleep paralysis and struggled in my bed for hours. finally when i awoke i could barely move my body was so sore and it continues to be sore. i had a completely lucid dream and it was so terrifying in a way that you could only understand if you experienced the dream yourself. Also i think it may have been an anxiety dream which obviously would be slightly different but i dont know that much about dreams so i wouldn’t be able to decipher the difference anyways.
For a long time I had perfect lucid dreams, but once I wanted to experience “out of body” in a Lucid Dream. Unfrotunetaly something went bad, and since then when I have a lucid dream it ends up with a body paralyse. Ever since I can’t control my dream for more than just few minutes and the worst of all I know that at the end I would be suffering from it. I cant express the pain before awakening. I see only white and black (like untuned tv channel) dots and I feel that something splashes my head and… Uh its terrible. My whole body shivers even when I recall it.
You are a complete idiot. Try not to die from stupidity.