Thread: Possible Dangers Of Lucid Dreaming!

I just reject sources with have no references to any reliable data. Nothing more.

If you have no mental disorder, everything is fine. If you do however, then i guess, you are not able to achieve lucid dreaming.

So much for standing by your principles 0o

When people start saying that lucid dreaming can be addictive and harmful to people with mental illness, I remember this link and then I laugh for a bit

But, truth be said, there might indeed be some negative consequences for lucid dreaming. As far as report go, I'd say this consequences were really minimal. If we're talking about undeniable negative aspects, there's only one I can recall:

- WBTB or WILD reduces total amount of time sleep, and can *potentially* harm your overall sleep quality. You may think not, but 20 minutes lost per day adds to quite a bit after some time, especially if you're already sleeping 8 hours (excluding the average 15minutes to fall asleep). My personal opinion on this one is that they are just 2 among many techniques for lucid dreaming, and many lders opt to completely ignore the WILD method, but yes, many people would be better off by just not waking themselves up during the night.

Other than that no apparent consequences exist. All mentions to addiction, dissociation, they are fit into a specific scenario where the person is already at risk, it's not enough to say that the person "think about it every day", addiction has actual serious implications on the person's normal functioning. Regarding people with psychosis, like StephL mentioned, you don't see these people with in constant acute phases, and even if it's proven that lucid dreaming could be a dangerous activity for these, you're still talking about a relatively low margin of the population, and you'd review this case by case, in the same way you'd analyse if a taxi driver with frequent epileptic attacks is fit for his work.

Now, the complicated part: we don't know how random dream content expression is. If it happens to be relevant (imagine for example that this dream happened exactly like this so you could consolidate/get rid of certain memories), then there would be some consequences for lucidity. When I say consequences, I'm not talking about extremes, but things like loss of certain memories....and then you realize that this can't be true or is completely irrelevant: memory recall already distorts the memory itself. At some point, you start "incrementing" false details into the "real memories" to a point where a significant percentage of that (once-real) memory is actually false. And we don't even know if dreams (I'd be more inclined to mention "some" dreams, for the sake of honesty, because some N-REM dreams seem especially relevant to certain motor learning) possess dream content expression that has a direct purpose.

Originally Posted by JoannaB

Well, LaBerge in his books said that lucid dreaming is not recommended to people with mental disorders that make them unable to differentiate reality from non reality.

I'd say this was more in lines of : safety first!

Originally Posted by JoannaB

On the face of it initially I thought that makes sense, but I have thought about it some more, and here is my current thinking: if someone is already unable to differentiate reality from non reality, so they already have times when they are incorrectly thinking their experience is real when it is not or vice versa thinking reality is not real. So they are already doing that. In such a situation what would be the harm for such a person to try to learn to differentiate reality from dreams. Now granted they likely will be unsuccessful since they already have issues with this, but attempting to become better at it, wouldn't that be desirable? Of course, especially such people should avoid ever doing anything that they would regret if their assessment of their state was wrong, thus no shooting people with gun if one thinks it is just a dream. Lucid dreaming practice is fundamentally about increasing awareness, and even if someone is mentally ill, wouldn't attempting to increase awareness be more likely to help rather than harm? Now I may be wrong about that since I am not a psychologist of psychiatrist, so this is just speculation, and if you think I am wrong please correct me.

Beautifully put, agree with all that. I'd love to perform a longitudinal study on the effects of lucid dreaming prolonged practice on patients with Alzheimer's disease.