Thread: A Treatise on Proof

There was an emotional eruption on a recent thread regarding proof, and its priority among members here. The conversation really had no place in the thread on which it was, so I thought I would start one here, if anyone is interested.

Why? Because I noticed a very troubling theme in that conversation: That proof, and by extension truth, does not matter.

It seems the norm here that, if a person believes he has had a certain dream experience, the fact that he thinks he had it is enough for him, and it should be so for everyone else. That he cannot repeat the experience, or wave some tangible flag (like, someone else objectively acknowledging a shared dream) that backs him up simply does not matter. Worse, it seems that people are willing to believe something is proven simply because other people, especially those with lots of colorful “medals” under their names, say it is proven. In other words proof -- the act of showing your work, as it were, or the presentation of real evidence, even to yourself, does not matter.

Here is why it should matter: The human mind is a fantastically capable thing. Literally. By that I mean that the mind is more than able to create any image or experience that a person can desire, and it does so best in dreams. So, if a person really, really wants to, say, have a lucid dream, their dreaming mind will eventually oblige by producing a dream in which that person thinks he is lucid, even though he is just dreaming that he is lucid, and lacks any of the waking awareness needed for true lucidity. The same goes for shared dreaming, AP, OBE’s and anything else like that. So, if a person chooses not to prove, even to himself, that he experienced one of these things, he may never learn that the "great" event he just had was "only a dream," he will fail to experience real lucidity, or a real shared dream, etc, and he might have trouble learning to bring about the real thing.

Proof in LD’ing, for me, is very simple and comes in two parts:

1. Since an LD is a moment of waking consciousness, it will be recorded by your brain as a waking memory. Unlike dreams, which are for the most part quickly discarded even by the brain’s short term memory system, waking memories are easily recorded and stand a much better chance of getting filed into long term memory when they have much emotional import, as a lucid dream might. So, lucid dreams are easy to prove, simply because you remember them as any other waking event. And yes, with careful discipline regular dreams can be filed in long term memory, but that only happens after you make a real effort, and therein lies the difference:

Actual LD’s stay with you, whether or not you want them to, but regular dreams take a real effort to remember. So, if you struggle to remember a dream that you were sure was lucid, it most likely was not.

2. When retelling the dream, if the dreamer says things like “And then this happened to me,” or “And then that dream character said that to me,” he is very likely retelling a non-lucid dream. Lucidity means, by definition, that the dreamer is consciously involved in the dream, and that he is actively affecting the dream, simply because he knows that everything in this dream is his. To tell it like someone else was in charge betrays the fact that you were not, and the dream was not lucid -- or at least not terribly lucid.

Again, these are only proofs to the dreamer himself. Even LaBerge couldn’t really prove the existence of lucid dreams to others very effectively. What I’m most concerned with here is what you’re proving to yourself -- I really don’t care what someone else thinks!

Proof in other nocturnal events, like shared dreaming, is more complex, because it requires corroboration from someone who is not you; and need preferably also not just proof from the person with whom you are sharing a dream, but from an objective “referee.” This is because two people with very similar desires/history/day residue stand an excellent chance of believing and, more importantly, remembering later that they shared a dream, simply because their dreams were similar -- just as they planned, or were destined by similar or shared waking experience to have. Experiments can be set up with a third party referee instructing potential dream sharers before the dream, and interviewing after the dream to see if information he asked them to share actually was. This is a pretty simple test, which to my knowledge been tried many times, but has yet to succeed.

This is all very important because there is so much to be mined from lucid dreaming, and that mining is categorically blocked if a person fails to lucid dream, or to share a dream, or whatever else, but then convinces himself that he succeeded. These claimants take away from their dream no proof, no true experience, but a genuine confidence that “I did it.” Who, exactly, is that helping?

The other side of a proof, call it the mathematical side rather than the empirical side, is that a proof is literally a showcase of the steps taken to achieve whatever event is being discussed.

These are steps that must be able to be taken by anybody, with similar results, in order for the proof to be valid. If someone can show, even once, that these steps don’t work then the proof, and the prover’s statement, are not valid. A person cannot simply say that dream sharing, for instance, is true simply because “It happened to me.” They must also be able to show how it happened, and offer instructions to others that will work. This is why your math teacher wanted you to show your work, and why you are not smarter than her because you got the answer anyway, but have no idea how you did so.

There seems to be a great deal of “because I said so” going on on this site, and I wonder how often someone has been fooled into believing that she had an LD, or a shared dream, because that is exactly what she wanted, and the real experience never happened. I personally call them False LD’s and they have happened to me thousands of times.

Let it be clear that I truly want to believe in this stuff, and have made it my life’s work to prove it’s all real, or not, and to find out where it all leads, if it is real. That is not the mindset of a skeptic, by any measure. I am in no way trying to say, “It can’t be.” Instead I fear that it has already been discovered “To be,” but those who did it have chosen to believe, rather than to prove.


Now, a quick note regarding debate: Say whatever the hell you want, but be nice! Also, if you tell me that I can only understand a phenomenon like dream sharing if I’ve done it myself, please be assured that I’ve had many occurrences that felt just like what you guys call a shared dream, but I could never prove to myself that they truly were. It is not enough simply to say, “I’ve done it.” That is not how reality works, it is not how you learn to do it right (or confirm that you already did), and, above all, it is not how you learn to master the art of dreaming. Or any art, for that matter!

I truly hope that people choose to discuss this stuff -- it is the core of everything we are doing, and to ignore it might prevent many, many dreamers from ever experiencing the true potential of lucid dreaming.