Thread: Benefits/disadvantages of lucid dreaming?

Hello j08p25!

Benefits:
1. Enjoy wondrous nightly adventures
2. Learn more about yourself
3. Confront persistent nightmares
4. Get better connected "spiritually"

I'm sure there are plenty more "benefits" of lucid dreaming, these are just a few I came up with off the top of my head. As far as disadvantages go, I have yet to come across any personally

Benefits:
- being able to do pretty much anything that you can imagine.
- practice waking life stuff (hobbies, overcoming fears, etc)
- being able to meet and talk with people that you wouldn't normally be able to do in waking life (e.g. fictional characters, people who have died).
- being able to explore places you wouldn't normally be able to explore

For me, the major disadvantage is the amount of effort I have to put into LDing to get results. It can be frustrating, putting in a lot of effort into the daytime work, but not seeing the results until much later. Not to mention, the dry spells .

Benefit:-
Control your dream at will.
Meet your DC or whatever it is.
Escape a kind of boring reality.

Disadvantages:
It occurs in a short duration.
Hard to lucid dreaming about something that you really want in that dream.

Don't know of any proven health benefits. For all I know, it might have some detrimental effects, too. Either way, it's pretty fricken cool to see what your brain is capable of in the dream world; the novelty effect lasts a long time since every scenario, in my experience, is different, albeit different versions of the same thing—that took me a while to realize.

For having lucid dreams, I really wouldn't say that there are any disadvantages. I mean, sure, I could say that they don't last long enough (XD), but that's not so much of a disadvantage as it is a "characteristic" of LDing that we all just kind of have to put up with.

As it's already been said, there are far too many benefits to lucid dreaming: being more creative, the nightly adventures, more inner- and worldy insight, etc., etc., etc. . . .

Pro: Lucid dreams allow the person to access knowledge about the nature of the self and reality that may otherwise be unattainable. They also provide a platform to work on the cultivation of wholesome mind states and the abandonment of harmful ones without certain limitations inherent in physical reality.

Con: Lucid dreams may encourage and facilitate the growth of harmful egoic tendencies and mind states.

Like most of the people who have posted in this thread, I practice lucid dreaming both for fun and as a way of exploring my subconscious mind. One other benefit that I've noticed is that I tend to sleep better and feel more rested when I'm trying to have lucid dreams. On mornings when I wake up directly out of lucid dreams at the end of my sleep cycle, I feel more awake than I usually do in the morning. Plus, trying to have lucid dreams makes me pay more attention to my sleep habits than usual; since I can usually only have lucid dreams when I get enough sleep, lucid dreaming gives me an extra incentive to make sure I get enough sleep each night.