Originally Posted by FriendlyFace
... I am interested to know why you claim that DMT use will stunt progress in lucid dreaming. Do you have personal experience with this? If not can you refer us to your sources? In my experience, dreams became much more vivid during and for a few months after my DMT use. That being said, I think it would be ill-advised for anyone to use DMT for the sole purpose of enhancing dreams or lucid dreaming ability.
You sort of answered your question yourself: Lucid dreaming is not about vividness, it's about self-awareness.
The trouble with hallucinogens, including DMT (and LSD, and peyote, and ayahuasca, and no doubt many more) with regard to LD'ing is that by their nature they create doors rather than open them. Those doors may indeed open to some amazing experiences, experiences that might change your life, or at least your outlook on life. But they add imagery and amp up your perception, challenging your cognition, erasing your memory, and generally setting your self-awareness in a distant back seat for the entire ride. Your dreams might have been more vivid, but I would bet that your sense of self during those vivid dreams, your sense that "this is all a dream, a universe created by my mind," was greatly diminished (even in cases where your hallucinating mind proudly, vividly, proclaimed that you were lucid though not a scrap of waking-life self-awareness was present -- that's happened to me a few times).
This was because all that vividness, all that extra input, overpowered the tenuous grasp that self-awareness holds during the best of dreams, replacing it with stuff that was more than cool enough to help you forget that you were supposed to be lucid. On top of that, drugs like these fill you with an artificial sense of confidence and depth that convinces you, especially after the fact, that great things happened, so you'll believe that you were just plain expert at whatever it was you were doing (video cameras are fun to have around to show people after the fact just how expert they were). And no, I'm not talking about simple visual and tactile awareness, both of which are often heightened to astounding (if still imagined) degrees. I'm talking about self-awareness.
In short, it might have been a great trip, and you might even have learned something, but you did so at the expense of self-awareness, and not its enhancement. Self awareness equals lucidity.
As an aside, this point isn't just for hallucinogens. Supplements like gallantamine and huperzine tend to encourage vividness in dreams, and if doses are too high, that vividness will make the dream far more interesting "as is," causing you to forget about lucidity (not always a bad thing, BTW!). I agree that it would be ill-advised for anyone to use DMT for the sole purpose of enhancing dreams or lucid dreaming ability.
Though I feel my personal experience was extensive enough to make my point (that's all I'll say about this; I'm not playing your "prove it" game), I still do not feel that your "you have to have done it to understand it" argument is valid. I have no kids, but when I tell my sister that a Pizza-Bites-only diet is not good for her 6-year-old, and she says "What do you know? You don't have kids," is she right too? Facts exist and can be known without having to directly experience their source, and though it certainly would help, you do not need to have a complete personal understanding of a thing to know what it is or what it can do.
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