Thread: Why do so many people not even know LD exists?

Because it's not taught in school, oh and dreaming is generally frowned upon by most of society. Fuck knows why, or should I say, the government knows why.

Originally Posted by Barry

My parents who are both in the 50's, dont even know that LD exists, and a few other old people I asked dont either. I would of thought it would of been more popular, bearing in mind you can do anything you want.

Society is often years, decades behind facts. People knew the earth was round way before it was widely accepted, they got their ideas rejected and were laughed at. Lucid dreaming was scientifically proven in the 80's. Its the same thing, people will realise, but its gonna take a while.

Also, the way people are "conditioned" today, makes your dreams seem as though they aren't important. What is important is to look good, get a job, get a family, settle down etc. so people don't think too much about their dreams or even lucidity. Placing emphasis on dreams is considered childish, (obv not here) and is pushed out of mind when a person gets to a certain age, its sad really.

It doesn't personally surprise me, since Laberge didn't start doing his work on lucid dreaming until the 80's, with his first published work in 1985. Also, it really didn't gain popularity until the early 2000s, so it's not a wonder that it's not so well known. Plus, it takes a lot of time and skill to do, and most of today's generation wants everything right awya. We live in the NOW generation, which means people want it onDemand, as opposed to have to actually work for something.

Just my $0.02

It would of been awesome to learn about LD at school

Originally Posted by Barry

It would of been awesome to learn about LD at school

Fuck yeah. Imagine if we learned these techniques at an age where we spend most of our sleeping time in REM. oh my god, would of been amazing. It's something id like to teach my children ASAP. (when/if I have them)

Originally Posted by Barry

It would of been awesome to learn about LD at school

It would. Infact, it would have been awesome to learn about SLEEP at school, (at mine anyway, dont know about you)
Would have solved a lot of mine, and others problems.

Originally Posted by Barry

It would of been awesome to learn about LD at school

Learn, but not be graded. If someone cannot meditate well enough or be aware, they should not be docked credit.

Not everyone experiences LDs. Many people have one and then stumble upon information after looking it up. Others don't care to look into dreams or sleep because they take it for granted. Reality is what drives success - not dreams - as well, according to virtually everyone.

My dad first told me about lucid dreaming in the early 90s. He had some success back then. I only started lucid dreaming recently after coming across more information on the internet. Now that more and more people are getting information about lucid dreaming through the internet and movies i am sure it will gain popularity, but as stated above, lots of people are not going to put in the work, or the patience to become lucid. I think we will remain a small percentage of the population. When I told my wife about lucid dreaming she had absolutely no interest in trying it herself.

Lucid dreams don't fit into any economic theories.

Originally Posted by Barry

It would of been awesome to learn about LD at school

I was wondering about this long time ago. Yes its a pitty that our "western" society does not know too much about this topic. If our society would learn those things at childhood we would probably have a better world right now. It would help in personal development - but does the evil() goverment wants us to be smarter? (ofcourse not)

The other thing thats on my mind often is : even if I am explaining to someone "new" what is LD - they dont seem to belive or maybe not just that, but they dont seem to be interested in it. Usually when Im describing what is LD most of the people are entusiastic about it at firs - sayin wow thats cool, really we can do all this cool things? like in matrix ?
And then I say sure we can! usually (just like DaTechnoKing said) - when they hear that there is small probability of doing it with just one night - they walk away from this topic. Too fucking lazy! But how can it be? Just a little effort and you can change the way you percive the world and reality. For me - whan i first heard of LD - i remember this very good (it was over 10 years ago) i instantly had to try! it seamed so great that i had to see for my self is that really possible. Well my anwser was pretty quick and my life changed for good. I think that you really have to have an urge to seek the trouth. Not many people has this urge.
The choice is : take the red pill (and give a little effort to know the trouth about yourself) or the blue pill and dont give a fuck. So go on continue your ignorance and sleep like an animal...
The other thing is that all real ocultism and shamanism was killed hundreds of years ago. Burning witches and things like that. They killed a very important part of human culture. Now people try to get back on right track but its not so easy.
There are few cultures that still cultivate dreams - for example Xhosa tribe or Tibetan buddhism (which thanks to Chinees has a serious problem with continuation of their culture). Those are the only two examples of still living cultures that are working with dreams. That makes me sad...
Goverments and big corporations doesnt want us to become smarter, to know the truth. What they want is to have controll over masses and unfortunatelly they succided somehow.

Originally Posted by Treboreous

My dad first told me about lucid dreaming in the early 90s.

Lucky you to have a cool father and shame on you that you started after 20 years of knowing about LD

I've met quite a few people who don't know what it is. The weird thing is though after I explain it to them, I'd say about 30% say they have them sometimes.

Yeah, It is very sad that people don't take there dreams seriously! I didn't know about lucid dreaming until one of my friends at school, ( me and him had a intro to philosophy class together) said that he had heard about it and so me and him started to look in to it and it just blew my mind that i could really do something like inception, of coarse, in a more natural way without a machine. But, i must say it is difficult to do, and i haven't had an LD yet, but i really really cant wait to have one because i know just how much my life will change!

Yeah, we all hear it from the time we're small kids: 'don't worry, it was only just a dream'. Also, I agree with pretty much everything that has been said. Yes, society is behind on the facts for sure. It would also be splendid to learn this @ school. As it happens, I need to hold a presentation for my English class, and I chose 'sleep&dreams' as a subject. It will probably be like 5% scientific stuff about sleep stages etc. and 95% LD. Also, one thing that should be noted is that the internet is only quite recent. Before it, LDing was usually described in books that were considered vague and spiritual, and there were a lot of misconceptions about it. Thanks to our holy internet, information can be shared much more efficiently, and people can easily stumble upon this (like myself, I wouldn't have known about it without the internet either). I therefore expect a rise of popularity as people learn of its existence and it becomes a part of our society. I would love that to happen myself. If more people get into it, then there will be more experience and a much bigger public for tests, meaning our knowledge about LD would increase hugely.
Ofcourse, there is also the point of shared dreaming and stuff, which means ... [insert random government conspiracy theory here]

most of the people have lucid dreams up to age 6-7 i think , so teaching it at school would be awesome , children would know how important dreams are instead of forgetting about them , then stumbling upon the lucid dream topic 15 years later and start working on it allover again

People seem to think dreams are insignificant. Most don't remember thier dreams, or simply think that they do not dream. Also, many live thier lives on 'autopilot' or they're not aware of thier surroundings.

There's also the misconception of dreams being sipritual and whatnot, which puts off some people as they think it's all fantasy etc...

I guess you wouldn't know about it unless you tried to find it, I only knew about it when i searched on the internet about how you could control dreams, teaching it in school would be awesome, but if people thought that it was witchcraft of something like that it could ruin for everyone. I guess i could find some sort of opportunity to make like a speech or something of it at school... Maybe recruit more people, I've been trying to help my friend become lucid but he gave up because he could be spending the 5 mins in the mornings it takes to write down his dream sleeping...

Most People think it's fake, drugo or spiritual. They don't have open minds or give it a chance.

Well, like others have said, dreaming in general isn't something that's commonly talked about on a daily basis, and rarely if ever touched upon in school. Then there's the fact that to the average person the idea of controlling your dreams sounds too fairy tale-ish so a lot of people would probably write it off as being fake.

I've found that I have been trying to help people become lucid... giving them all the advice I can and the link to dreamveiws... so far none have joined this site... they say "how do you even know you can" and "I'll just let dreams be dreams and I'll get over it."

Originally Posted by Puffin

Learn, but not be graded. If someone cannot meditate well enough or be aware, they should not be docked credit.

Well said!
And as Spyguy says, the phrase "it's just a dream" is something that pretty much all of us grew with. It deems our dreams so unimportant.. I'll probably try to never say that to my kids if I have any. I find it amusing because if someone said that to me now, I'd probably mentally smirk and think "if only you knew"..
That said, I've told most of my close friends about lucid dreams. Most of them have had lucid dreams before and they find it pretty cool.

It was actually mentioned once in my high school psychology class. We would have seen a video of Laberge... but the teacher left while it played, the visuals screwed up and everyone else in the class, most likely not having the faintest clue on how cool lucids could be, talked through the entire thing. I was irritated at them but thems the breaks. The same teacher also encouraged keeping a dream journal but that never got off the ground (I was keeping a rather fat one at the time so would have been an easy grade ).

I thought it was weird no one knew lucids back in 2004. I find it really weird it's still so unknown and unmentioned in 2012. Not even casual references unless the media in question is specifically geared towards dreaming as the subject.

Right now it's not really popular, but it is a lot more commonly known than it was 20 years ago (for example). Not too long ago, my mom saw me posting here, and she asked what it was. I explained it was DreamViews and what the site was all about. She knew what it was, and she actually does it as well, and she has for like 30 years. I was like 'O.O, why did you never tell me D:'. Then again, fair is fair, I never told her either. It's a lot more common now than it was back then, and I think that more and more people will learn about it and start doing it as well. It will take a while before people learn to accept the concept (we've all heard the stories from eachother and/or experienced for ourselves about how people often react to LD), but I believe there will be a day when this will be considered 'normal'. That day, kids will be like 'What did you say grandpa? Nobody knew about it back then? That's weird O.O That's like... even more weird that being able to live without a LUHFE8348JFE33N88 Controller Dual Set V33.6 :l', and we will be considered awesome by them as 'folks who were a bit normal, even in that weird time of poverty, wars, corruption, etc.' That last part is more a wish though, it is the hope that humanity will ever turn normal and stop doing that (and now, by the end of this post, I am totally off-topic, but that doesn't really matter )

Originally Posted by Barry

Why do so many people not even know LD exists?

Because they have chosen the wrong pill.