Thread: How can you tell someone is telling the truth about their lucid dreams?

This:

Originally Posted by FryingMan

It's like cheating at online chess, ultimately the only person you're cheating is yourself.

Since in the end we're all in this for ourselves (in a good way, of course, with gaining greater LD'ing skills & frequency our ultimate goal, and not impressing others, in most cases), I don't think blindly showing off (aka, making shit up) for the sake of trolling or impressing really goes very far here.

I think there may be a bigger problem with the memory-based self-delusion Steph noted above: people are telling themselves things that might not quite coincide with what actually happened, either by innocently embellishing their memories of dream events or, also innocently, lending the most interesting conclusions to the nature of their dreams without even considering what probably did happen (i.e., me and my best friend shared a dream because both our dreams had the same things in them, rather than considering that, as best friends, their lives probably contain a lot of things that might come up in a dream coincidentally). That sort of lying is a bit more of a problem for me, because it feeds into the general narrative of the forums until it becomes understood that lots of people, say, frequently have shared dreams, or that SP matters, or that "naturals" are common (and please guys, I'm just making a point, not offering an argument about the nature of these things). And then the problem spirals upwards, as people start feeling left out because they are not having shared dreams or SP and start (again innocently and perhaps unconsciously) adding stuff to their experiences, to their memories, to both better "fit in" with the forum standards and also to convince themselves that they are making progress. And, of course, if any noise is made about this problem of compounding delusion (especially in the SP and "was I actually lucid?" departments, in my case), they generally make very little headway.

This I think might speak to the OP, in that the question of whether we need to have a "lie detector" app in our heads when reading posts, because these accidental embellishments might have slipped so deeply into the norm that they have led many (especially new or potential DV members) to read every post with a cynical eyebrow slightly raised.

On a nicer note, it was a pleasure reading the posts on this thread, and being reminded both that there are still many honest people out there and that they still hold faith that the general theme is "be honest," rather than "be impressive"... that goes a long way toward making everything I just said wrong, and I would like that very much.