Why are even dream researchers so unfamiliar with lucid dreaming?

**Laurelindo** · 07-16-2014 06:27 PM

My impression of dream researchers in general is that, while they do of course value dreams higher than most other people, they still seem completely ignorant about lucid dreaming.
I recently watched an episode of "Through The Wormhole With Morgan Freeman", and that episode was trying to answer the question what it was that shaped our personality (memories played a large role, of course).
Then a dream researcher starts talking, about halfway through the episode, and I obviously became very curious and hoped that he was going to touch on lucid dreaming at some point, since conscious dreams are very relevant for a discussion about our personality - but he never did, all he talked about was how dreams were "the unconscious mind", and just like most other people he seemed to value dreams as "those things we have no control over, and that randomly happen during the night".
At least, that was my impression.
And I see this attitude among almost all dream researchers, and not even the dream books at my local library seem to mention lucid dreaming in any shape or form - except the books written by people like Stephen LaBerge and Robert Waggoner, of course.
But in general, it seems like most dream researchers have never even heard of lucid dreaming.
How can it be that unknown?
Is lucid dreaming really so underground that not even dream experts know much about it?
Shouldn't they have heard about Keith Hearne's and Stephen LaBerge's remarkable proofs that lucid dreaming really does exist?

**ThreeCat** · 07-16-2014 06:54 PM

It's just not "big" in the realm of scientific literature. It's entirely subjective (other than signalling people from REM sleep) which makes it difficult to do objective studies on it. Even when you group some oneironauts to run tests, you're really (in my opinion) mostly learning about those particular oneironauts. Everyone's dreaming mind is so different.

On the other hand, there is a learning curve to lucid dreaming that make it inaccessible to many people who are not interested in putting in the work to learn, which makes it difficult for therapists to integrate into their psychotherapies. Oh well.

**Hitokage** · 07-16-2014 07:15 PM

Yea the problem is as ThreeCat said that it's a very subjective matter. Researchers prefer facts that they can prove. Nevertheless as you said there are some very good publications about that.
Our teacher in psychology lessons told us that there are many doctors and therapists which use this technique. Even some monks in Asia used this as a way to meditate for thousand years.
I guess it's just not that interesting topic for most people.

**SinisterDezz** · 07-17-2014 03:37 AM

I always thought lucid dreaming was more mainstream than that...

Glad it isn't.

If it hit LARGE mainstream, I would be sad to see what people do to it.

I like my small community.

And as stated before, it's not very popular due to what ThreeCat said.