Quote Originally Posted by Pan View Post
Exactly.

Loaf you seem to be completely overlooking the natural lucid dreamer. There are plenty of them, who have been lucid dreaming regularly for as long as they can remember. For them, it's an innate ability, which could have been inherited. Sleep paralysis and other sleep disorders are hereditary, as well as personality characteristics, and ways of thinking...so why is it wrong to theorize that lucid dreaming might also be hereditary? And who are you to so arrogantly make the claim that it isn't? We are only speculating...which is a good thing. It fosters creative thought and has often led to great scientific discoveries. You should try widening your gaze a bit.
When you first found out about lucid dreaming, how many years into your life were you before you started to practice lucid dreaming? How long had you not been using those areas of the mind engaged by lucid dreaming? 20 years? 30? The natural lucid dreamer (at least all of them that I have met) seems to be someone who experienced a lucid dream early on in their life (childhood has been the case 100% in my own personal experience) and took that experience seriously and continued to come back to it, developing skill in it over time. Children grasp concepts much easier than adults, and I bet if someone told you during your childhood you could become lucid in dreams and do all the things you can't do while awake, you as a child would go to bed every night so focused on lucid dreaming you'd basically be guaranteeing yourself a lucid dream. Over the years, all of that practice that never seemed like practice adds up. Innate ability or concept grasped and practiced early with dedication into adulthood?

Sleep paralysis is not a sleep disorder, it's an automatic process that prevents you from physically acting out your dreams with your muscles moving and contracting. While you sleep and are dreaming, your brain, hormones, and muscles are all active. If you are struck in the arm multiple times in a dream, struggle with an enemy, and then are shocked awake, when you open your eyes, your breathing is intensified, your arm is in pain where you were hit, and you are sweating from your struggle with an enemy. Sleep paralysis prevented you from doing all of these things physically, and rolling out of bed, or even striking your partner. Sleep paralysis is a harmless, automatic process, not a disorder. Not being able to get sleep paralysis would be a disorder.