I think many people are forgetting that, in some areas of Eastern society, lucid dreaming is a lot more than some esoteric fad that people get into once in a while because it's "cool to do every now and then." It's a way of life. In many places it is actually encouraged, psychologically in a way that most of us Westerners have been practically bred to have absolutely no concept of. Show me a person who has been rendered "insane" in their waking life by having too many lucid dreams, and I'll lend a little more credibility to the theory.

Not only that, but there is another point being completely overlooked. Compare how often the mind, theoretically, dreams per night, versus how often we actually remember experiencing those dreams. To remember taking part in 1-2 lucid dreams per night, in my opinion, has absolutely no effect on the other 10+ dreams that we don't actually even remember having. Bringing your consciousness in to participate in what's going on around you while dreaming, especially while not actively affecting the content, does not stop the dream from happening. Your surroundings can still change at will, relationships between concepts are still being made outside of your conscious perception, in large quantities. To have complete control over any and all dream processes, for any period of time, is a skill I've not yet seen displayed by anyone on the planet.

Which brings me to a question I've been asking myself for quite some time, now:

How do we know that, while we are consciously, or unconsciously, experiencing an area of our "dream world," there aren't equal, but parallel, dream processes taking place?

In other words; while we are experiencing the dream of being stretched out on a yacht in the meditteranean (sp) with a supermodel, how do we know that some other part of our mind isn't putting together concepts that we would consider a nightmare (if we were to shift over to that thought process) at the Exact Same Time?