Lucid dreaming with mental illness / tips on how to tell the difference between dreams / real life

[luffy28]

Hi, I had a meeting with my psychiatrist and they said I shouldn't practice lucid dreaming because it may conflict with hallucinations. I have schizoaffective disorder bipolar type (which also includes depression). I have emailed two people including a person that wrote a book and they both said they can't tell the difference between real life and dreams. I also want to know any tips on how to tell the difference between dreams and real life. Thanks.

[Lang]

Disclaimer: Please note that All information on this site is Information provided on this site for personal entertainment, reference, and educational purposes. Dream Views does not hold any credentials or licenses in the psychological or medical fields and its opinions should not be considered as from a professional source. Therefore, this site does not serve as a replacement for mental or psychological counseling. That said, I agree with your Doctor. I think that is really hard to say because whatever tips we give may get in the way of the treatment that you are getting from your psychiatrist. (IMO) How long have you been getting treatment? May I ask? Whatever you do, don't skip your meds. Here for those who may know what that is? Spoiler for What is SchiZoaffective Disorder?:

[luffy28]

Hi, I've been taking psych meds for it since 2007. That's also how long I've been getting treatment. I don't skip my meds I have to take them to go to sleep. The reason I'm asking is that my current psychologist IMO is very good and they teach at a top Ivy League university. My last psychiatrist didn't mind / care about me doing lucid dreaming. I also have tried doing creative / regular visualization in the place of dreams but it gets boring. Thanks.

[DarkestDarkness]

Hello luffy28. Here I would be inclined to agree with your doctor too by default. As someone who has an unrelated but still lifelong condition, I understand that this can sometimes be a frustrating thing to hear. The trouble with your questions is that a good and well considered answer (for you) would need both a lot more context from your part, and at the same time a lot more knowledge about your condition from the part of anyone responding to you, and as we are not experts, we can't really give you even remotely decent advice, other than to be careful if there's a serious possibility that this might be harmful to you, something that only you and your doctor(s) can decide together, really. As for telling between real life and dreams, it might be worth keeping in mind that even if you were to get an opinion from someone with the same or a similar condition as yourself, there's no guarantee that you'd have the same triggers, responses and so on. When people have the same illness as another person, it often seems to be the case that the symptomology has variations between each unique patient/person. I know that my mother suffers from a bipolar illness which has sometimes meant that she couldn't tell apart between things she'd thought/dreamt and the actual reality of what was going on, so while I only have this second-hand experience, it tells me that it can be quite difficult/challenging for someone with a condition like this to manage this threshold between what's real and not. For her, this has caused dangerous situations and I wouldn't like to think about such things happening to someone else because of poor or inadequate advice. I would personally suggest that if your doctor is decent, that you should consider discussing this issue again in more detail with them if it's something that's very important to you.

[Hilary]

I agree with Lang and Dark about making sure you're in alignment with your psychiatrist's treatment plan for you. I would not go against his or her advice. That said, if it's something you really want to do, I would bring up the subject to your psychiatrist, and even talk about how your previous doctor thought it was permissible. It's possible your doctor may not have a lot of knowledge about the subject, so you could help describe it to them. They may have good reasons for not wanting you to do that right now - but maybe you can bring it up again in the future (maybe 6 months?) if you've been doing well with the treatment and meds. If you've lucid dreamed before, you might mention that as well, assuming it did not cause problems last time. If, however, you're honestly struggling with telling the difference between reality and dreaming, then I would have a hard time believing your doctor would be OK with this. That could be dangerous. At the end of the day, if they remain firm on this, follow their advice.

[Occipitalred]

I don't understand this. We dream every night. I don't see how awareness of the difference between dreaming and waking experience can bring about the opposite? Maybe if our lucid dreaming practice is actually biased toward a bad understanding of the difference between dreaming and waking experience...

[DarkestDarkness]

I don't see how awareness of the difference between dreaming and waking experience can bring about the opposite? Other than as you say, through a poor understanding, it generally can't. The issue here and the safety concern would have little to do with generally being aware of the difference or not. Even when only temporarily so, when people are in a manic, paranoic or otherwise "delusional" state, we just can't reason the same way as "normal". Although this will be a bit overly simplistic, in a way it's a bit like when you do certain things in a dream (lucid or not) and often after the dream you realise that something that seemed perfectly logical in the dream didn't actually make sense.

[luffy28]

Thanks for all the replies. I'll ask my psychiatrist about it when I meet with them. If they say no I won't do it. Thanks.