Thread: Left handed or ambidextrous?

I drink my tea with either hand.
I can type twice as fast with left than with my right.
My left hand is much stronger.

I'm right handed

I am left-handed, although I have practiced my right hand for some time and can now write decently well with it.
I often tend to have lucid dreams that start out as False Awakenings, and they usually end quite quickly, usually within a couple of minutes.
But I have managed to stay in a few of those dreams for about 5-10 minutes or so, and I have noticed that in those longer dreams I have been more relaxed and not worried so much about losing the dream - I see something interesting, and then I go like "wow, this is so cool, here in the dreamscape!", instead of the infamous classic "I must stay in the dream, don't collapse, goddammit I must keep it stable...!"

My left is stronger than right (most everything on my left)
I write right handed, but I can do almost anything with both since I broke my right hand when I was younger.

Your first few LDs will start at the end of your REM because that is when you will have the highest awareness (99.9% of the time) so you will most likely lose it because of this. How many LDs do you have and what time do they normally come?

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

Your first few LDs will start at the end of your REM because that is when you will have the highest awareness (99.9% of the time) so you will most likely lose it because of this. How many LDs do you have and what time do they normally come?

I've had about 25 LD's, over a year and a half, but every single one has been less than about 10 seconds, and all are just before I wake! Some are as short as one second.
I usually wake up after each dream / REM cycle, and it's then that I often have a breif lucid moment. It's usually in the morning an hour or two before rising.

I've had one DILD where I had only just started doing the nose pinch RC in waking life, and I spontaneously did a nose pinch while in a dream and had a few seconds of lucidity before I woke.
Most of my LDs have really good clarity - I guess so shockingly clear that I wake so fast I can't seem to stabilise.

The reason for the post was, out of frustration, I wondered if my left-handed wired brain is somehow going to find it more difficult to LD, but with you guys responding that has pretty much quashed that idea!

Most of my LDs have just come, as you say, at waking, where I am most aware. I think I need to concentrate on DILD, and awareness with mantras. I guess I haven't perhaps being doing the basics well enough?

I've tried WBTB/WILD and had a little success, with a couple of LDs that way, but again, as soon as I get lucid I wake up.

I've been trying supplements more recently, and had a close experience of an LD where I remembered to try and ground myself by rubbing my hands, and although it started to work, I still woke. I think it's because once my critical reasoning kicks in, it crashes in and wakes me. I can't seem to get that nonchalant balance of noticing and interacting without going "WOW!!".

The problem is, it really is "WOW!!".

I do seem to struggle with the awareness thing. I'm not the most observant person normally. Fryingman has given me a few tips about "continuous RC", and I am trying to notice gravity while awake, repatedly noticing how gravity feels.
The reson for this one is that I did also get lucid a short while ago by noticing that I was moving along without having to use my legs, sort of floating along. I thought "hey, I'm floating along without using my legs", got a very clear Lucid, drifted up into the air and then woke up!

Anyway, apologies for my rambling. Great to hear you lefties / ambies are also capable LD'ers!

It's something to do with the fact that for most, the right side of the brain is to do with emotional aspects, and if under stress the two hemispheres can start to work together.

In a healthy individual, the two brain hemispheres are well-connected and always working together, making that kind of distinction almost impossible to determine in a specific way. Yes, the 2 hemispheres seem indeed to function differently, resembling the idea of "emotional/rational" sides, but in truth, it's so much more complex than this. Emotion isn't neatly packed into a part of the brain: it differs where we're talking into face recognition, memory, threat response, etc etc. Dreaming is even more general: due the type of experience your brain is generating, your entire brain is lighting up (some parts more active than others of course).
When we apply this to lucid dreaming, we see that it occurs (as you would expect) in both hemispheres:



So nothing to worry about On a last note, I'd say that some traits could correlate with a easier trigger of lucidity, but nothing extreme and certainly not set in stone. In the same way some people are better at music than others, but everyone can learn how to play an instrument

What is considered a "healthy individual", by the way?
For example, I know a guy who suffers from schizophrenia, would that be something that would hinder the ability to lucid dream for him?
And what about disorders like autism?

Hey Zoth, thanks for the insight. I realise that the brain is far more complex than is often described. I suppose research must have been done in sleep labs with less normal brains (schizophrenic, autistic etc.), but I suppose like most things there will be a spectrum of responses.

What is considered a "healthy individual", by the way?

A person without cognitive deficits I guess.

For example, I know a guy who suffers from schizophrenia, would that be something that would hinder the ability to lucid dream for him?
And what about disorders like autism?

That's a good point you make, but one we cannot definitively answer. For some decades now neurologists like to point to the "enlarged ventricles" people with schizophrenia have, but we have true (or should we say solid) biological model of the disease (only guesses). To add to that, the superficial classification encouraged by the DSM also promotes a generalized (and wrong) view of some so-called "brain disorders" (schizophrenia and depression are examples of mental health disorders that encompass a wide range of behavioral problems, but nowadays we tend to clump them into the same box).
Aside from this "battle", we can observe clearly that there are some constraints in the expression of consciousness in these types of people. Examples are episodic and autobiographic memory, cognitive, self-monitoring, awareness, sense of self, etc. To add to the problem, not all these deficits are necessarily constant (which only adds to the complexity of the disease and hinders understanding relevant to a long-term treatment, aka= better continuously give them medication even if it doesn't address the underlining cause of the behavior).
Finally: what effects this might have in lucidity? The most obvious one: difficulty to achieve self-awareness in dreams. Schizophrenic hallucinations are intense to the point where it's near to impossible to convince the patient that what he's experiencing is not real, making it even harder to become self-aware. Now that you mention, I have no knowledge if there's any non-biomedical treatment being applied towards self-awareness regulation, but it's indeed interesting to consider whether lucid dreaming induction techniques would have any effect on patients with schizophrenia or even Alzheimer patients. Notice that lucid dreaming can be dangerous ground for people like these, for reasons I'm sure are easy to grasp.
Regardless, I know that at least some schizophrenic people can lucid dream, and even achieve good rates, but without more information on the individual cases, it's impossible to determine the degree of difficulty (compared to a normal person) on the occurrence of the phenomenon.