Quote Originally Posted by tiddlywink101 View Post
Firstly when I was awaking at 5am each to record my dreams I noticed a lack of concentration that day at school, leaving me thinking that it was because I had interrupted some vital process of the sleeping mind (I am only 15 so my brain is still developing)
It only makes sense that if you're missing out on sleep, your mind won't work as well. It's unlikely to be the interruption of sleep that's the problem, since most people wake up in the middle of the night occasionally, so I suspect the problem is that you're not getting enough sleep. This isn't a danger from lucidity itself, just your dream journal habits, and will likely go away if you go to sleep earlier or write in your dream journal later.

Quote Originally Posted by tiddlywink101 View Post
Secondly we have to train ourselves to LD thus breaking natural barriers in our mind that could be there to safeguard against dream lucidity, so surely it's not natural and may have harmful effects.
I have two points against this. First, many people occasionally lucid dream without any effort or training, I did occasionally, and some people LD all the time without ever even having heard of lucid dreaming. If lucid dreaming was innately harmful, wouldn't these people have these mental barriers too?

Second, just because we have to train ourselves to do it, doesn't mean it's harmful. There are all sorts of things we have to train ourselves to do that we aren't naturally able to do that actually help the mind, like learning to play an instrument, read, use mental math, and many others. Who's to say that lucid dreaming isn't one of these? I don't see any reason at all to think the difficulty involved in lucid dreaming has to do with some sort of mental barrier, instead of simply being the normal difficulty involved in learning a difficult skill.