Using Lucid Dreams To Create Positive Thoughts In Real Life?
I've been thinking about this for a while now and was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this or can point me towards any resources at all that discuss this idea.
Basically, I have had this theory about lucid dreaming that goes like this; Sometimes, our dreams can be so realistic feeling that we can sometimes confuse them for memories. It follows, that if we can control our dreams, we can effectively create our own positive memories to change who we are, almost like positive affirmations in a way. If I am afraid of public speaking, approaching women, or have low self confidence, I can design lucid dreams where I give standing ovation worthy keynotes to crowds of thousands of people, approach hundreds of women in a single night, or create an environment where I can act out my waking life with confidence. Basically, I can run simulations where I conquer my greatest fears at a massive scale that feel completely realistic. I tried researching this for some amount of time to see if this had been explored before but couldn't find anything. Then I found this excerpt from Are You Dreaming? By Daniel Love
The ultimate feedback loop
"Once we have learnt to appreciate the importance of the quality of the information with which we fill our minds, an interesting feedback loop can occur. As we’ve discussed, dreams are far from isolated from our waking life, they can impact them in many and varied ways, from improving our creativity to influencing our moods. Likewise, your dreams are reliant on the experiences of your waking life for the raw materials from which they are built. Lucid dreaming can increase your awareness of the subtle interplay between the waking and dreaming worlds; you will become aware that, as a sentient consciousness that moves between worlds, the actions taken in either world will have repercussions in the other. This creates what could be considered an inter-world feedback loop, one which can act as a self-fuelling catalyst for some dramatic changes in your life.
Let’s look at this in the simplest terms possible. As you make positive changes in your life, altering the information with which you feed your brain, your lucid dreams will start to become more powerful, interesting, useful and inspiring. This inspiration and positivity from your dreamworld can then feedback into your waking life, fuelling further improvements in your waking world. Of course, this process will then repeat: life improvements = dream improvements = life improvements = dream improvements and so on. This can happen on various levels of the human experience, the most obvious being the psychological level.
Positive psychological experiences in your waking or dreaming life will impact their dreaming or waking equivalent. An example would be for those who suffer with low self-confidence; they may well initially experiment with tackling their confidence issues in the dreamworld, experimenting with new ways to interact with others in this consequence-free environment. Eventually, it is likely that such dream experiments will start to filter into and enhance their waking life confidence. As their confidence improves in the waking world, so it will raise the bar for confidence in the dreamworld. Needless to say, such a feedback loop may continue until such an individual no longer struggles with feelings of low self-confidence.
This feedback loop isn’t limited only to the realm of the psychological; skills, hobbies and all manner of human experiences can be improved in such a way. All it takes is the motivation to allow the dreamworld and the waking world to positively influence each other. Of course, with any feedback loop negative patterns could also emerge, so it is important for lucid dreamers to keep a track on their behaviours and the areas upon which they place their focus.
A common area of risk for some dreamers is in letting the consequence-free environment of their dreams filter too strongly into their waking lives. In dreamland, we are all essentially ‘gods’ of our own private universe; the characters we interact with are temporary and there is zero long-term damage that can be achieved through any negative behaviour we engage in.
There is a small risk here that, for some dreamers, this sense of freedom could negatively influence their behaviour in the waking world, giving them an exaggerated sense of self-importance, or losing empathy for others in the real world. The best way to avoid this is to remind oneself that, even in the dreamworld, we are still accountable to our own sense of right and wrong. It is best to avoid behaviours in dreamland that we would be ashamed of in the waking world. In general, however, such situations are unlikely to occur; more often than not, the freedom of dreamland simply filters into waking life in a positive fashion, helping one see through some of our own self-limiting beliefs about what is or isn’t possible.
Also, if we remind ourselves that the characters in dreams are aspects of our own minds, then we are likely to treat them with the respect they deserve. Indeed, such a way of thinking can even improve our empathy and respect for others in waking life, as it helps remind us that, as members of planet Earth, we all have far more in common than we have differences. In many ways, as one species we could almost be considered much as we consider our characters in dreams, as aspects of the same entity (the human race) expressed in different ways. That said, it is important to remind ourselves that a feedback loop can and does occur between the waking and dreaming world and we should still remain vigilant that such a force is moving us in a positive direction."
So as far as I know, this is the only form of media that discusses this idea. Has anyone ever thought about this before?
