About the LD community

[jogo]

Hi DV, I've been totally consumed with LDing for just over a month. It started when I saw this popular Youtube clip about, The Science of Lucid Dreaming I'd really like to know a bit more about the LD community. Is this a very underground movement? If so why? How come not everyone is getting in on this amazing activity? Admittedly I'm yet to experience my first LD but I'm learning and experiencing more and more each night. So I'm hoping I'm nearly there. It just seems to me that if LD is all it's claimed to be, it could really make a lot of people happy, in an otherwise rather challenging world where most great, exciting, desirable experiences are not readily available to all. So I'm wondering, is the LD community growing? Is it becoming mainstream? For example has membership of this website grown much over the years or is LDing destined to remain a fringe, underground, thing...like, say, speed-walking? (Dunno' it's the best example I could come up with). Jogo PS. I haven't spoken to my wife or friends about LD as I feel it's kind of weird. But I like having my own secret weird hobby. Hmmm....

[splodeymissile]

Hello and welcome. I wouldn't say its underground, as that implies its illegal. People just don't know about and, unfortunately, don't seem to be particularly interested when it is brought up. I do agree that it bring happiness to quite a few people, but, society, my generation, in particular, are very apathetic to anything not on TV and likely wouldn't put the effort in. We do try, though. The community seems to be growing steadily, but we aren't quite mainstream yet. And lucid dreaming isn't weird, thought the idea of a secret hobby is fascinating. Any questions, ask away.

[benni]

Hey and welcome! I definitely couldn't agree more with what has been said above. I have made similar experiences - I have a few friends who find the topic interesting when I talk about it and they actually would like to try it as well, but their laziness always seems to win. The rest of the people simply don't seem to care about it. And it really isn't weird (at least according to my definition of weird). Everyone of us dreams every single night - so why not use this time and get involved actively in your dreams instead of just getting up in the morning and forgetting all the adventures of your night?! It can be so much fun. And yes, for me LDs are all they "claim to be"! They always give me an incredibly revealing feeling which is what keeps me going, but also dreaming in general just got soooo interesting to me after increasing my recall that I just love to write down all my dreams in a Dream Journal and just read through old dreams And of course being able to do all the fun stuff in LDs is awesome as well! Anyway, good luck and sweet dreams!

[NinjaBtch]

At first it may seem wierd to some people but after explaining it in its detail not manny people think its wierd or negative. I have only had one lucid dream tough....

[jogo]

Thanks for your views :-)

[Laurelindo]

Hello and welcome, jogo. Lucid dreaming is still a relatively new scientific phenomenon - it was proven for the first time 40 years ago, by telling lucid dreamers to perform certain pre-agreed upon eye signals in their dreams, and this worked because your dream eyes move exactly the same as your real, physical eyes (in fact, almost everything you do in dreams has a similar effect on your physical body; that's why you become paralyzed while you dream). Anyway, lucid dreaming is something that is very unfamiliar to a lot of us, because we are mostly used to our waking lives and we generally don't pay much attention to our dreams and think of them as trivial and unimportant - so when you tell people that you can become consciously aware in dreams, it almost becomes too much for them, and it sounds strange. When I tell people about lucid dreaming they either seem completely uninterested, or they look at me as if I were crazy and quickly try to change the subject. Rest assured, though, that lucid dreaming is completely safe, and in fact quite healthy and gives you unique opportunities to try out new behaviours. Lucid dreams can sometimes be very vivid, so vivid and alive that they rival the vividness even of waking life, and that is an incredible thing to experience.

[Rothgar]

It is hard to explain it properly to people.They think it just dreaming, or think you are messing with the occult. Or wondering why you are wasting your time on something that isn't real. If they could only experience it for themselves their attitudes would change I think. But this is a tough nut to crack.

[JadeGreen]

I always found lucid dreaming somewhat strange in the way that it has always had a low, but steady presence in our culture. (I mean, they're always coming out with these EILD masks, so there must be a decent market for them, and we periodically hear about lucid dreaming in the media. (Matrix, Inception).) It's not really huge, mostly because mainstream culture can be somewhat closed-minded to new things. But lucid dreaming hasn't really died either, and most things that don't get really big usually fade into obscurity within a few years. To me that was somewhat strange, I started lucid dreaming three years ago now, and I thought it was on the verge of becoming this huge cultural phenomenon. But it never did. And now, it still looks like the lucid dreaming community is on the verge of surfacing in mainstream culture. But if lucid dreaming has been practiced for thousands of years, and it never became big or important in any culture, so why should it become big now? So I just suppose that this is the nature of the lucid dreaming community. I can't see lucid dreaming becoming mainstream anytime soon for that reason. Most people just don't want to "waste" their time on something they think is just pretend.

[jogo]

Are there any celebrity LDers?

[Laurelindo]

Are there any celebrity LDers? The Wachowski brothers, the creators of The Matrix, are natural lucid dreamers. I also know Leonardo DiCaprio is a lucid dreamer, and that's probably one of the reasons why he was the main character in Inception. Another famous lucid dreamer is Stephen King, and I believe Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein were also lucid dreamers to some degree. On a side note, you shouldn't compare The Matrix and Inception too much with lucid dreaming. Both movies do have a couple good points, but they are largely fictional, and there is no such thing as "dream limbo" or "death in real life if you die in a dream". We all have lots of dreams every night, whether we remember them or not, and lucid dreaming is like any other dream except you happen to know you are dreaming.

[jogo]

Thanks!

[StephL]

We have a German psychology researcher on the forum - MelSchaedlich - and she was involved with the production of a documentary on TV - Arté, a German/French station, which was aired this January. Great overview and surely a good advertisement - I hope, many people watched it. There is a lot of scientific activity around the topic over here at the moment and since a while, too.

[Memm]

I think most people know what lucid dreaming is or have heard about it before, so I'd say knowing about it is pretty mainstream, actually doing it isn't as much. It's a bit like mnemotechnics, meditation or any other "self-improvement" type of things; can be life changing but only if you get over the "cool, but can't really be bothered" speed bump. Suppose it takes more interest in oneself than a lot of people have; they're just interested in external things, but I imagine this also varies by culture / country. It might be very popular in Asia for example, can anyone confirm / deny?