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Ok, throwing this question out there for fun and to satisfy my own curiosity. :)
Some people, when something great happens to them or when something horrible happens to them, they immediately pinch themselves and tell themselves they must be dreaming. One person even ruptured an artery doing this. :roll:
Anyway, why don't these people get lucid in their dreams? i think it's rather ironic.
My answer is that while they get excited and pinch themselves (I assume you mean in RL) and say they must be dreaming, it doesnt REALLY occur to them that they really COULD be dreaming. You have to truly believe it is possible you ARE dreaming.
Just what Rothgar said. It's basically the same as doing a reality check in a mechanical way without any true questioning: they end up failing and giving you undesired outcomes. With those people, they are so used to those "actions" that they don't even truly think about them.
Also we all know that pinching oneself is not a good reality check because it can be equally realistic in dream as in real life. So anyone who chooses pinching as their reality check is kind of like someone who says that they will check whether they are depressed by checking whether they know the answer to 2 + 2, and then are surprised that they did not figure out that they were depressed, not realizing that depression does not preclude basic arithmetic abilities.
Lack of emotions (believing, that they are really dreaming), as it was pointed out. And lack of frequency. You probably don't pinch yourself 5 times a day, no matter what. And lack of intent. They don't think about lucid dreaming.
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Originally Posted by PostScript99
Maybe they do, briefly.
First, something great or horrible must happen to them within the dream in order for them to pinch themselves; this might be less likely than you'd think -- people with the personal wherewithal to recognize "pinchable" moments in waking life might be a bit more likely to ignore them in dreaming life (this really does make sense, if you think about it) -- so opportunities to pinch might be rare.
But when they do happen, that pinch will likely operate exactly as prescibed: when the dreamer pinches and feels nothing or, more likely, realizes during the process of pinching that this is a dream, they'll immediately dismiss the pinchable event as unreal (thus ending their brief flash of lucidity) and go on with the dream -- without ever becoming fully lucid and likely without ever remembering they did any pinching. Go figure.
So, pinching (or rationally using "pinching" as a cue for sorting out the odd) might work quite well for those who pinch ... but doing so need not have anything to do with self-awareness in a dream. Pinching may be an acknowledgement or test of an odd moment, but it does not equal lucidity.