Thread: Misinformation about lucid dreaming

Hello dreamers.

So I was discussing lucid dreaming with some people today, on facebook of all places, and someone I know (who I'm less than fond of--mostly for the reasons that are to follow) made a comment that I immediately classified as her usual moronic, unscientific, conclusion-jumping hogswallop--she said, "but doesn't lucid dreaming lead to sleep paralysis?" Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understood sleep paralysis as it is discussed on these boards is something along the lines of the state your body is in when sleeping that allows for you to remain motionless and not act out everything you're doing in your dream, and that, as a demonstration of the effect, a sleepwalker is defined by a peculiar lack of this such that he walks around and even talks (there are even such cases as one man who drove to his in-laws' house and murdered them both and was successfully acquitted once it was demonstrated that his brain consistently failed to "shift gears" in this way). So naturally I said that.

Then she presented me with this link, which I didn't really read because I was in class at the time, but I took it upon myself to wiki "sleep paralysis," and found this. The article makes no mention of lucid dreaming but instead talks about a pathology in which subjects cannot move upon waking--this struck me as a failure to "shift" out of the paralyzed state, as I understood it from this website. Nonetheless, I admitted that I was unfamiliar with that usage, but went on to assure her that lucid dreaming would in no way cause this sort of chronic problem.

She then pedantically corrected me and reminded me that she only said it "leads to" sleep paralysis, presented me with this link which, reading it more carefully now (I initially read it on my phone so I just gave it a once-over), I realize I should have reamed her out way more for, because the main page of that wiki explicitly states that the website is for short stories which are designed to shock and unnerve the reader.

If it's not obvious, I really can't stand this person, not because she's a bad person, but simply because she's the exact kind of person that I am just not designed to deal with. She clearly cares not a lick for well-documented facts and believes random shit she reads on the internet because she takes things at face-value and doesn't question. Anyway.

At that point I had nothing I could reasonably say to her that wasn't probably the most condescending thing that I'd ever said to someone, so I said nothing.

The purpose of this post is first to get a clear understanding of what sleep paralysis is. If you don't have the time to read the crazy fake article, which I wouldn't blame you for, it basically talks about binaural beats and how they're said to be designed to put you into sleep paralysis if you just stay still and induce a lucid dream from there. I myself have never tried binaural beats, but I've definitely never heard of them causing paralysis even upon waking, and what's more I can't believe that trying to WILD or especially DILD would lead to such a thing. I know it won't because I done these things of course, and so have you all. Still, I would like to know what those of you with any knowledge on the subject know about the sleep science behind it, if you will.

Second, I'd like to ask what you guys think about the damage this could be doing to the image of lucid dreaming in general. The people on this site know that it's an amazing and eye-opening tool to get a chance to view the inner self and explore whole new realms of possibility. I'm sincerely of the belief that the skill of being able to lucid dream would be invaluable to anyone, and could potentially be a powerful psychotherapeutic tool. Still, not only has it previously and perhaps currently by some as total bunk (which we know it is not, because we know what we have seen, and it was real--or, more importantly, it was not real but felt every bit real), there's also complete garbage such as what this girl shared with me being spread around the internet, and she literally expressed fear to me of what kind of experience she would have if she attempted to lucid dream. It was almost as if we were talking about hallucinogens like acid or shrooms and she was expressing fear that she would have a bad trip.

I hope that in a place like this I don't have to explain what that means or why that matters, but I think that when a people comes to shun things like dreams as unnecessary, or worse, taboo or dark or just untouchable, the people has come to shun themselves. There is a fear of self contained in this grain of salt. And I think the misinformation out there about lucid dreaming is a huge culprit.

Now, I'm also willing to admit that this girl is an imbecile and is not necessarily representative of your average, genuinely curious would-be oneironaut, and I think DV is a wonderful haven for those already interested in this art as well as a beacon for knowledge on the topic. However, it is often the case that the misled masses have much more impact on the discussion than would be preferred.

How do we as a community change things? Do you think I'm overreacting?

I dunno, to be honest this just really pissed me off and I wanted to hear some input from people who actually know their ass from a hole in the ground.

EDIT: I suppose I should clarify that she was afraid because a lot of these sleep paralysis stories, a few of which are included in those bogus links, come packaged with stories of hallucinations of dark figures or, in the case of the horror story, a disfigured character with a butcher's knife who threatens to kill the one attempting the lucid dream. I don't know much about OBE's either, but as far as I'm concerned hallucinations that occur during sleep are called DREAMS and we all have nightmares sometimes.