I read this book recentley which mentioned lucid dreaming.

It was about the future, in which synthetic drugs had become incredibly advanced and addicting. In this world the most popular drug was something that allowed the user to experience full lucid dreams.

Originally invented by college students at MIT trying to study for midterms in their sleep, the drug allowed the user to instantly recognize that they were in a lucid dream, regardless of what night it was or their present state of mind. The drug also had an amazing ability to make the user perceive that their dream had lasted for decades, and in an eight-hour night, the user experienced twenty years of completley lucid and controlled dreams.

the college students used all of this time not only to study for their midterms, but develop new theories of physics with the infinite resources and complete control of reality that they had in their dreams.

However, the drug had the nasty habit of being incredibly addictive, and if the user skipped two nights without taking it, they would fall into a coma and die some days later. The users, however, didn't care about this, because to them it seemed like they went twenty years before taking another hit.

Soon the drug spread so fast and became so popular that the government was forced to legalize it, and passed it out to every home that had an addict free of charge...and it completley ruined the populace.

People no longer cared about the waking world, and they began to see their lives only in terms of the twenty year dreams that they had every night. Children became as adults overnight, inexperienced yet ambitious people became amazing leaders from the experiences of dictating their entire dream universes for decades on end...yet the world decayed from the lack of caring. People would simply wake up, pop a sleeping pill and the drug, and go back to bed....

Just something to think about