Learning about yourself in lucid dreams

[13WAR08T]

Can you learn information about your own thoughts and emotions by talking to dream characters? e,g, If I'm lucid and I ask a DC, "What is my passion/calling in life" or "What should I do as a career?" could I get an answer worth considering or acting on? What about questions about your feelings and behaviour, e.g. "Why do I feel this way about x" or "Why don't I like x, and how can I change that?" or changing your personality, ("How can I be more relaxed/confident?" "How do I overcome my fear of x?") Basically questions one might ask a therapist. Has anyone tried this with any good results?

[LeaningKarst]

OK, a couple thoughts on this. In my experience, it is possible to get extremely insightful responses from dream characters to questions like the ones you mentioned in your post. I don’t know whether you’d get them from just any dream character—personally, I’ve never encountered any characters who give off a bad AI vibe the way many people describe, but if you do, then you may want to start thinking about who you’d want to pose your questions to rather than just grabbing someone off the street. And there is a caveat: I’ve found that this kind of deep, intense conversations with dream characters is practically guaranteed to evaporate from memory upon awakening. Usually, a few isolated remarks and the gist of the conversation are all I can recall. Does the knowledge stay with you on a deeper level? I find it hard to believe that it doesn’t, given how significant these encounters feel. It could be that the sort of knowledge you come away with is a fundamentally different sort than, say, knowing that Y is why you’re afraid of X. Maybe it’s efficacious in overcoming the fear of X in a way that simply knowing the reason isn’t—who knows? I’m curious to see what other responses you get, as I’ve never sat down to compare notes with anyone, and dream-experiences seem to vary so much.

[Kuyarei]

I am also very interested in this topic. I think it is possible to get a positive response like an insight while dreaming, although i don't know if our expectations would alter the DC's responses to align with what we want them to say instead of them saying something unrelated to our control. I suppose it's not easy to accidentally cause that to happen though.. I am not very knowledgeable on how the subconscious mind is on display when we are lucid dreaming, but it can potentially be a way to uncover some of our inner beliefs that we don't really know about in our waking lives which can help a lot with understanding ourselves.

[slash112]

There's loads of ways you can communicate with your subconscious in dreams. I admit, I don't think I've ever done it in a lucid before with that intention. But I do know that your dreams are driven by your subconscious, so when you are talking to any dream character, you are talking to your subconscious. The subconscious is pretty damn smart, it knows a lot of shit you don't. I liked what LeaningKarst said about not knowing whether any DC will do or if you need a specific one. The subconscious works a lot on symbolism and references, so by creating a DC which you think would be knowledgeable in whatever matter you need help with, you are creating a portal to that area in your subconscious. Spiritual folk talk about meeting their spirit guides in dreams too. If you believe in that stuff, dreams make it easy for spirit guides to talk to you, and they know best. You can apparently call out your spirit guides in dreams. Another thing I've never tried but would love to. If you don't believe in that stuff, disregard this bit. EDIT: Even if you don't believe in spirit guides, try calling them out anyways. Your subconscious will create something that's there to help anyways. That's then pretty much a Dream Guide.

[13WAR08T]

I liked what LeaningKarst said about not knowing whether any DC will do or if you need a specific one. The subconscious works a lot on symbolism and references, so by creating a DC which you think would be knowledgeable in whatever matter you need help with, you are creating a portal to that area in your subconscious Ah, I understand that now. Good point I guess who we are talking to in the dream would influence our perception of their credibility and therefore expectation as we would expect different types of characters (e.g. therapists/counsellors, people we trust and are close to, even spiritual beings) to give greater insight in real life. I think it is possible to get a positive response like an insight while dreaming, although i don't know if our expectations would alter the DC's responses to align with what we want them to say instead of them saying something unrelated to our control. So I guess it would help if we had no idea what the answers were ourselves and therefore no desire or preconceived idea of what they might say?

[slash112]

I think if you were to do this, you'd have to clear your mind of expectations and open yourself up to anything. It's easy to do, you just gotta calm down, throw away the past and the future and be in the now, while you ask the question.

[LeaningKarst]

I liked what LeaningKarst said about not knowing whether any DC will do or if you need a specific one. The subconscious works a lot on symbolism and references, so by creating a DC which you think would be knowledgeable in whatever matter you need help with, you are creating a portal to that area in your subconscious. Yeah, exactly. But it can also be interesting to leave the identity of the character up to the dream. Just set the intention of finding someone who is able to answer your question, using whatever method of incubation works for you, and let the dream surprise you from there. If you’re worried about your expectations coloring the answers you get, this might be the better way to go. But I find that, in practice, it's not hard to tell when you're dealing with a character who is drawing on a direct knowledge of your psyche. If you ask one question and get one answer, you might not be able to tell the difference, but an extended conversation makes it clear.