Thread: Lucid dreaming biases: a discussion

Introductory note: I deleted the original post and opted for a re-write which can more easily reflect the multiple points of discussion that belong to the thread.

Lucid dreaming biases

We spent a great deal of time in what we call "lucid living", or the (self-made definition) "adoption of a life-style oriented to mindfulness, self-questioning, autobiographical memory, in order to increase the chances of achieving lucid dreams regularly".
Despite this, we know that lucid dreaming can be a very frustrating experience. We see some people achieve lucidity easily, others to struggle for months, just to have their first drop of lucidity, a flash experience that lasts for a couple of seconds. This very forum is flooded with topics of people mentioning that they "can't lucid dream", but not so much about why these people think they are failing. Despite advice being given on a daily basis, many people blame external factors as the culprit of them not achieving lucidity. These are what we can call the Lucid Dreaming Biases. Below, a small list of possible 3 biases, and the respective discussion.

1. Against the concept of technique and the danger of self-fulfilling prophecies

Certainly one can argue that different techniques involve different cognitive skills. I'll make the point against it: what if all techniques are merely a combination of intention, memory, and self-awareness? Wouldn't that severely damage the validity of any argument of "This technique doesn't work for me"? This is not to point out that MILD is exactly the same as Reality checking, but the underlining mechanisms present in both techniques are.

"You want to lucid dream? Intention, memory, self-awareness. It doesn't matter how, just practice, practice, practice."

So what bias could be influence this type of thinking? Let's use as an example the classical case of "Y doesn't work, X does"

Situation: Lara has practiced ADA for 3 months. She doesn't report any lucid dream, and unsatisfied, she switches to MILD. 3 days later, Lara has a lucid dream. "MILD is the one which works for me!" she claims.

Now, many of you already figured out the possible error that Lara might be commiting: self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe Lara actually was getting results with ADA, and if she continued it she would have that lucid dream 3 days later, even without ever trying MILD. Maybe is wasn't about any technique, it was the fact that Lara was pushing herself too much. Or maybe MILD actually works better for her. The point is: we have no clue. Should this mean that is impossible to make a serious evaluation of any technique? No. Does this mean that is impossible for a single individual to effectively test the effectiveness of a single technique? Yes.

2. Mindset bias

This is actually a tricky one: does one person mindset dictate lucid dreaming chances, or even rates? I'll be straightforward on my opinion: No.

Before anything, this is not to say that positive stimulus or mindset cannot improve your cognitive performance on lucid dreaming (certainly so many of us have had lucid dreams without much effort purely due the excitement over the perspective of experiencing one in the next night). But is this what happens to so many other activities? I mean, if I give instructions to 2 subjects (both of them in the "exact" same levels of expertise) to practice piano for 5 months, can the subject that hates the piano be really that bad compared to the one who loves it? We have good reasons to believe the one who loves it will certainly perform better, but just by how much?

Situation: Carl has no lucid dreams for 2 months. He really wants to experience one, he thinks about it every day...he actually writes on a diary about his goals, he makes many...okay not many, but a few reality checks a day, but he surely visualizes his goals very intensively, at least 3 hours every single day. One the other hand, John has been practicing for 2 weeks. He's mostly just curious about what it's like to have a lucid dream, but despite 15 minutes of self-awareness exercises per day, he doesn't bother. He has had 3 lucid dreams so far.

Now, this situation is just as common as any other. Carl could actually be the one with the best results, because after all, he's the one who practiced for 3 hours and who is really hyped about it. Assuming they both have the same quality of life (in terms of sleep, etc), why is John performing better than Carl? I mean mindset has to mean something. Well...it does, but mindset doesn't change methodology.

There's a famous study (will try to post it when I get home) regarding learning whose results showed that students that weren't even intending to perform certain memory task, still did better at it than students that were told to perform it correctly. What this showed is that despite wanting or not wanting to memorize/learn something, it was actually the method the students used that dictated their results. TLDR: it's not about whether you want to learn a skill or not, or how you feel about it, it's mainly about how you learn it. In this case of Carl and John, 15 minutes of self-awareness exercises proved more effective than 3 hours of visualization. So there is indeed something about each lucid dreaming technique, maybe there are actually "bad techniques" (I can recall that "BYHATWILD: bang your head against the wall induced lucid dream" xD) and great techniques (the ones who best follow the pillars - whatever they might be - of lucidity).

This may sound too theory and not so much results, but we have indeed some tools to evaluate some of the lucid dreaming techniques. Not perfect tools, as you will see, but a researcher has made a meta-analysis of the most effective lucid dreaming techniques. For the sake of the size of this particular post, I will not address the results (I'll post the link though), but it seems that maybe some ways of lucid dreaming are indeed more effective. Maybe people who follow more "exotic" techniques are fail, cannot actually blame the mindset, but the actual technique. Or maybe people that claim success with many techniques are actually applying key concepts of one effective one with the rest of them. Food for thought, which is all that matters here ^^

3. Self-report bias

Lucid dreaming makes us talk a lot.

"Yes I did this and that, and maybe that, because I was doing this, but I can't remember exactly".
"Well, I was thinking about it at this particular moment, it was probably why this worked"
"When you do this technique, make sure to do this whenever you find yourself here".

But a (probably uncomfortable question) remains: how big of a liars are we? Do we really perform "Lucid living" as we say we do? Do our self-reports actually match our performance? Because if you think about it, how can people using famous (justifiedly) techniques right like many of us would agree cannot have lucid dreams? If I am practicing for 3 hours a day, using an actual effective technique, I should be having lucid dreams eventually right?

Situation: "1 year, not a single LD". Note that this person is struggling to have a lucid dream, so be at least polite on your comments when you refer to her situation.

The hypothesis I came up with is: discrepancies between self-report and actual evaluation. To be more clear: is it possible that the people who claim to be practicing so hard and regularly, are actually practicing way less then they think? Is it possible that the 30 reality checks one claims to perform a day, are actually 5 reality checks accompanied by 25 flash thoughts about lucid dreaming?
This may even apply to other aspects of lucid dreaming, such as control ("how often people stabilize?" or "how much time do people actually spend doing reality checks after they get lucid?"), dream recall, or even duration of a dream.

That's why self-evaluation is so important when "Lucid living": if we can't assess our own behavior in an honest way (notice that I'm not implying this is the case for the person on the topic mentioned above), maybe we can't really strike for a balanced practice that will lead us to regular lucids.

Thoughts?