Thread: Lucid dreaming: Brain freeze

Lucid dreaming is unparalleled. Being as it is an amazing experience it makes me wonder why it is so hard to do it. Why something so simple and great is nearly impossible for most people to achieve. The conclusion I am constantly drawn back to is that because the brain needs dreaming for vital survival and emotional stability, the five minutes to half an hour spent flying over the ocean, fighting in zeroG, or having adult time with the new secretary is impeding on time the brain desperately needs organize the mind.
Just my two cents, why do you think that lucid dreaming comes so hard to most?

Most people lucid dream within the first month so I wouldn't consider it that hard.

I have heard many people on this forum say that being lucid during a dream has no impact on the quality of sleep. I have a hard time believing that being unconscious during a dream means the mind is organizing itself.

As far as why it's so hard, I have also read some people say that the mind naturally shuts down its logic centers before going to sleep, making it harder to realize you're dreaming. As far as WILD goes, the challenge there is to transfer your mind's focus from your physical body to your dream body as a dream forms. Without the proper focus / mindset, your mind will focus back on your physical body, making it impossible to dream.

I think its hard for people for many different reasons. One of them is that they consider dreaming to be a waste of time to pay attention to and therefore don't even consider lucid dreaming as a possibility. Another is that it takes a certain amount of concentration to be able to recognize you are dreaming and then go 'have adult time with your secretary'. For different people that amount of concentration varies making it hard for some and easy for others, like the process of learning. Also, the lack of dreaming at all... some people don't remember their dreams, some aren't very creative about when they do, some people are plagued by nightmares, and so on. Lucid dreaming and learning it is a personal process for every individual.

Lucid dreaming is only extremely difficult if you are stressed or have a busy lifestyle and it has no effect on the way your mind organizes your thoughts prior to awakening. It's not like every single dream you have is a lucid dream with no goal but to follow emotion, ego, desires, or primitive instinct. And if you somehow have had constant lucid dreams in which the case is that your subconscious mind does not have free control over what you perceive in the dream, you probably would have learned by now to cognitively assess and stabilize your emotional well-being using your own conscious alongside with your active subconscious in the dream, or it may not even matter if you do what I just stated anyway since dreams may just be a neural phenomena or vestigial part of the brain's function, so it likely has no effect on our vitality.

I did not mean that lucid dreaming was detrimental nor that it was an impossible feat, I simply meant that the reason lucid dreaming is a rarity rather than a normality could be that the brain categorizes it as an interference with normal functions. Just as a side note, the unconscious state of dreaming is the brain separating necessary information and rapidly repeating the neuron chain that makes up the memory, fortifying it and filing it as as long term memory. Lucid dreaming diverts the normal function and fortifies other, possibly non-essential, information.

I see where you're getting at, although I didn't interpret your post as stating that lucid dreaming is impossible, but you did state it was somewhat of a challenge, which I don't entirely disagree with.

Lucid dreaming is an abnormality, a manipulation of our mental capability, but not all our dreams are lucid. The time you spend lucid theoretically should have little effect on how your brain organizes it's thoughts, since again, we still have other dreams. Lucid dreams may not be entirely non-essential either though, as lucid dreams are rooted in the cognitive control of one's environment, and should very possibly (although I have no solid proof of this) improve skills like awareness, reflex, abstract thinking, and critical thinking.


EDIT: Also, as I had stated in a different thread, nearly anything you create (lucid dream or not) is a derivative of some other concept, event, or object. Essentially both the autonomous and cognitive manipulation, recollection, and creation of anything in a dream would have a similar effect on the brain whether you are lucid or not.

"...categorizes it as interference with normal functions..."

Hmm. that one is tough... but I don't know if its true or not. Seeing as becoming lucid could be categorized as either an ability or a natural phenomenon... Kind of like ball lightning. We might consider it to be abnormal because it appears to happen less but it is in fact part of our environment/ the way we were made to function. I don't think of it as your brain making it hard to become lucid because it recognizes it as something unnatural but rather a different kind of focus and concentration we don't normally use.