Thread: is it true that when you lucid dream, you don't get the same rest you get during a regular dream?

I can't speak to the biology of it but personally I have always felt very refreshed and alert after waking from a lucid dream, and I am never alert in the morning, ever. As for excitment from the lucid dream causing this, I don't really get excited in lucid dreams very often so I would rule that out personally.

Perhaps if you're in the lucid for 30 minutes or more, but a few minutes won't do anything to your sleep. Even if it did, I'd rather start my day having had an incredible dream I can think back on and cherish, than sleep 15-20 minutes extra. The happy feelings give you ten times more energy than 15 minutes of sleep.

The quality of your rest is largely determined by your mood, so in that case lucid dreams affect it in a good way. Since most lucids occur in REM your body restoration should be inaffected. Seeing as we don't know the exact method or reason by which the brain dreams we don't know what effect lucid dreaming has on it, we assume that we lose rest because we are aware but it is not neccesarily true. Maybe we are not giving our brain enough time to react and think about our life but we could also say that our brain is learning more than the average dreamer.

I agree with the previous posters. Also, I think we should be happier that we get lucid during REM, because then we can control our dream, and we have a better way of relieving our stress (or at least for me personally). As what Matte said, I would also much rather prefer waking up feeling giddy over having been lucid than getting a few extra minutes of sleep...unless of course those extra minutes are spent lucid too! Haha