Thread: Can lucid dreaming trigger schizophrenia?

Hi, I have been into lucid dreaming for 3 and a half years and I feel that there is a big change as in habitual thought patterns as compared to before I did lucid dreaming. The most obvious change or alteration is the idea of reality checks to check if i'm dreaming or not. Doing them for too long I find actually weakens the border between reality and dreams at a subconcious level. In the begining it was fun to do but I got tired of them and stopped after a month or so and picked it up again for like few weeks and then stop again for a while. Other times would be like thinking of LD thoughts and what to use as a good reality check. This went on for the better part of the first year and by the second year I started on dream enactment meaning I acted out the dream sequence I created to use in the eventual lucid dream...call me obsessed but as I went on with 'new' ideas to have lucid dreams and do my thing in them the more I wanted to lucid dream regularly. And up till this year...I feel my mind is saturated with the idea of lucid dreaming and I cannot 'shake' off the strain of doing it even when I don't.... Makes me think....can too much lucid dreaming eventually lead to Schizophrenia? Now even when I have stopped everything lucid dreaming....I feel the mind is going through a psychological 'epilepsy' like I'd find it difficult to stay focused on the environment instead of going inward and I'd have to pull myself back into awareness of my environment. So just wondering if anyone who lucid dreams as avid as I do exhibit this same effect that I think can only be blamed on myself entirely...

IMJ

Hey imj. I don't think too much lucid dreaming can lead to schitzophrenia seeing as I'm sure there are hundreds of people who've been LD'ing for years who haven't been diangosed with schitzophrenia. I think it comes down to how your mind interprets the experience or what it makes of it. If you're under the belief that lucid dreaming may be too much for you, I'd pull back a bit until you can adequately ascertain the exact reasons that's made you theorize this in the first place.

If you feel you are out of touch with reality, try this: visualize energy coming up into you from the ground, and sit or stand up straight. If you are standing, feel like you are pressing your feet into the ground.

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

If you feel you are out of touch with reality, try this: visualize energy coming up into you from the ground, and sit or stand up straight. If you are standing, feel like you are pressing your feet into the ground.

Visualizing is the aggrevator in my case...but I will try being aware of my feet on the ground...Thanks for the idea....

IMJ

i'm sure that it can't lead to schizophrenia...

But i'm a bit sure that it can 'cause psychological problems, nothing too dangerous...

I'm thinking in LD all the time...
I'm obssessed with it...
I just wanna to live in a lucid dream to be god.

It's not the fault of the lucid dreaming, but it's my fault.

Just relax a bit and you'll be fine

imj, you are not schitzophrenic, trust me. An overactive mind that you can't control is still vey far away from being schitzo. Having a nephew who suffers of said delusional state, I can know, so don't worry, ok

Thanks for replying .

IMJ

I don't think that this post is going to be popular, but..

Originally Posted by imj

Can lucid dreaming trigger Schizophrenia?

Yes, in my opinion it can.

Originally Posted by imj

..reality checks to check if i'm dreaming or not. Doing them for too long I find actually weakens the border between reality and dreams at a subconscious level.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, but anyway:

I know of three people. They had all been LDing for about eight years, when it all started to go very weird. They started to find that they could sometimes "see things" in their peripheral vision whilst awake.. they started to hear voices while awake too.. and staring at anything would make it morph into sometimes strange and scary things, like animals, birds etc.

Now.. if that sort of thing is happening to you, what else would any Psychiatrist say? Classic symptoms of Schizophrenia.

[One of the three people just accepted that it was happening, and went mad in a sober fashion. The other two ended up with shrinks. One didn't mention the visual and auditory "hallucinations" and was given anti-depressants. The other one told their shrink everything, and they were sectioned for 6 weeks and diagnosed as "Schizophrenic"...]

No...at least not yet. But I sure don't want to find out when... What I meant about the reality checks is that doing them to really check if I'm dreaming or not puts me in an awareness that reality or reality as I know it has a counterpart...dreaming. So before lucid dreaming I only knew of one reality but since then I now know of another one which is dreaming and having a good prospect for dreams 'Anything I want I can have' naturally creates the idea of reality as being lesser than dreaming. But I posted this not to give lucid dreaming a bad name, like I mentioned it's my own doing and lack of a real life.....

IMJ

Originally Posted by Oneiro

I know of three people. They had all been LDing for about eight years, when it all started to go very weird. They started to find that they could sometimes "see things" in their peripheral vision whilst awake.. they started to hear voices while awake too.. and staring at anything would make it morph into sometimes strange and scary things, like animals, birds etc.

Did you or do you know them from a forum, or from real life? Not that I doubt the fact that this happened, but really knowing them would provide additional weight to the cases. And did it happen to all 3 at the same time?

Originally Posted by Xetrov

Did you or do you know them from a forum, or from real life?

I know them personally.. one acquaintance and two friends of mine.

Originally Posted by Xetrov

And did it happen to all 3 at the same time?

No, it didn't. And having thought about it, I was wrong to say that 8 year figure. It happened like this: first one was in 1985 after 8 years LDing, second one in 1998 after 23 years LDing, third one in 2007 after 12 years of LDing..

To Arutad.....It's hard to be specific but the effect can be compared to trying to figure out a major math problem for the whole day, only it's for years and it stays, the mind gets so into it to the point that it affects normal thought patterns (thought signature of a person). I think it may lead to Schizophrenia in my case if I continue what I do actively because of the inward perspective that has been created and the isolating effects of it from the real world into the idea of dreaming. I have stopped my activities but find it difficult to restablish normal thought patterns without losing focus and going inward again toward lucid dreaming thoughts. At the same time I find it almost impossible to NOT think of it as it already has become a thought pattern by itself. The remedy I think is to allow the thoughts as random but not pay too much attention to it so after sometime it'll fade I guess.

IMJ

It sounds to me like you are on a kind of autopilot where you cant avoid constantly reality checking and thinking about lucid dreaming. I think it might be a good idea to practice some sort of basic mediation. Hopefully it will help you clear your mind and focus on the present while in real life.

I would look up some youtube videos on Jon Kabat-Zinn. I've watched a few and he makes a lot of sense about being in the exact moment that you are currently experiencing. Nothing in the past or the future matters but the very moment you are experiencing. It seems you are a little obsessed with what you plan on doing in future lucid dreaming experiences, so focusing on the present may help.

Try taking a break from all lucid dreaming attempts for as long as it takes for you to get a real grip on reality. Good luck with everything, I think you'll be fine. It's at least a good sign that you are recognizing the problem now and making attempts to fix it.

Originally Posted by imj

I think it may lead to Schizophrenia in my case if I continue

Schizophrenia is a scary word, but in reality you're unlikely to have it. It is not an illness per se but a collection of a few symptoms that gets labeled like that. Inward persective is not one of them.

I have stopped my activities but find it difficult to restablish normal thought patterns without losing focus and going inward again toward lucid dreaming thoughts. At the same time I find it almost impossible to NOT think of it as it already has become a thought pattern by itself. The remedy I think is to allow the thoughts as random but not pay too much attention to it so after sometime it'll fade I guess.

The remedy is to plunge yourself into reality, judging by your complaint about having no life it is the real root of your problem, and LDing might be a substitute for something else. So that really is the best advise I can give you! Dealing with reality a lot has a side-effect of destroying obsessions, too, by making you too busy to think of them.

And if you want to block out the annoying thought patterns at times when you're alone and happen to have nothing to do, you could instead study something very hard (non-school chemistry, math) or pick an addictive activity (gaming, watching movies), in other words do something that can temporarily blast out all thoughts unrelated to it by the amount of focus required to do it. But that alone is unlikely to help you, in my opinion.

Originally Posted by Oneiro

I know them personally.. one acquaintance and two friends of mine.

Oneiro how can we be sure that LDing actually played any major role in their development of said illness? Maybe they would have developed it without LDing too?

Makes me wonder also how are they doing these days, have they recovered?

Originally Posted by Oneiro

I don't think that this post is going to be popular, but..



Yes, in my opinion it can.



I'm not exactly sure what you mean here, but anyway:

I know of three people. They had all been LDing for about eight years, when it all started to go very weird. They started to find that they could sometimes "see things" in their peripheral vision whilst awake.. they started to hear voices while awake too.. and staring at anything would make it morph into sometimes strange and scary things, like animals, birds etc.

Now.. if that sort of thing is happening to you, what else would any Psychiatrist say? Classic symptoms of Schizophrenia.

[One of the three people just accepted that it was happening, and went mad in a sober fashion. The other two ended up with shrinks. One didn't mention the visual and auditory "hallucinations" and was given anti-depressants. The other one told their shrink everything, and they were sectioned for 6 weeks and diagnosed as "Schizophrenic"...]

This sounds extremely unlikely. Going schizo because you're sometimes aware that you're dreaming. Really?

Originally Posted by imj

by the second year I started on dream enactment meaning I acted out the dream sequence I created to use in the eventual lucid dream...call me obsessed but as I went on with 'new' ideas to have lucid dreams and do my thing in them the more I wanted to lucid dream regularly.

What does that mean, are you saying that you keep acting out your future dream-actions in reality uncontrollably?

I feel my mind is saturated with the idea of lucid dreaming and I cannot 'shake' off the strain of doing it even when I don't....

Doing what? When you don't do what?

I feel the mind is going through a psychological 'epilepsy' like I'd find it difficult to stay focused on the environment instead of going inward and I'd have to pull myself back into awareness of my environment.

Are you speaking about thinking too much to yourself or about some kind of zoning out? The first is normal.

It's hard to answer such a question when the information you give is so vague. But so far there's no direct evidence that LDing can trigger mental illnesses. It might, just as the first-time alcohol drinking or first-time doing drugs is often a trigger for a latent illness. But how many people have you seen who go mad from drinking or drugs? That's rare, so you have nothing to fear, unless you think that you might have a latent disease that could be triggered by experiences with alternative states. And even then, there's no evidence that LDing falls into the same risk group as alcohol or drugs.

Originally Posted by imj

can too much lucid dreaming eventually lead to Schizophrenia?

No. Although schizophrenia is closely linked to Hynogogic Hallucinations. The hallucinations in HH are identical to those experienced by schizophrenics.

Originally Posted by imj

I feel the mind is going through a psychological 'epilepsy' like I'd find it difficult to stay focused on the environment instead of going inward and I'd have to pull myself back into awareness of my environment.

Everyone's got the same problem there. Especially newb LDers. That kind of introversion is the reason a lot of LDers find themselves waking up during lucids.

But since we're on the topic, that's what mental illness is, generally speaking. Either you focus your attention too much on something and it become larger than life, or you don't focus enough attention and things become confusing and fall apart.

Schizophrenia is a disease that hasn't got, yet, a well defined etiology. And which diagnosis is still based on the symptoms presented by the patient without a defined clinical test that could tell you, right away, that you suffer from that condition.

Altough this is true, there are some factors that are tought to influence the onset of this disease like drug consumption (for example cannabis) or even other kind of environmental factors (some discussion is going on about this).

I don't know how relevant is the role of Lucid Dreaming on this disease. If you think that 0.4–0.6% of the population may have this disease (based on Wikipedia) and that a small group of them may lucid dream it is a really minimal ammount of people. Also you don't know for sure if they had any of the other factors i talked about before and if they were the real starters of the problem.

I don't contest that eventually it may be a trigger of Schizophrenia. As Lucid Dreaming, with the reality check stuff, wants to make sure you are not dreaming and have a critical aproach to your surroundings making it an habit. It might, in certain suceptible people which have a tendency to have some reality detachment problem, start exarcebating their problem that was latent.

But if you want to directly relate LD with Schizophrenia with a cause-effect behaviour wouldn't that mean that, a lot of people of this forum, on some point of their lives would suffer from it. Also, wouldn't that mean that a natural Lucid Dreamer or even narcoleptics (which experience SP with some hallucinations associated) would, eventually, without any way to avoid it, suffer from this condition sooner or later. Also wouldn't that mean that the Tibetan Dream Yogis would also be exposed to a danger that could increase their chance to suffer from Schizophrenia.

What you mean probably is that you are so interested in lucid dreaming that it has became one of your main goals. This doesn't mean necessarily that you are schizophrenic but does mean that you are taking LD too seriously, like an addiction and that it is making you lose touch with reality. I would suggest taking a break and trying to focus your toughts on something else and avoid it becoming an obsession.

Good luck with it.

Haha, I've been crazy before, right now it's residual (not active), I haven't became lucid yet, but I'm quite paranoid it could push me off the mental edge again.. IMJ what you explained is scarily like how I was when I had my mental break, you kind of do life second, but think first.

I don't really believe in schizophrenia, I believe in Carl Jung's theory of The Soul In Crisis

What is Schizophrenia (According to Jung) : A good question, with no simple, short, or straightforward answer, since each sufferer is unique and schizophrenia is a complex phenomenon. In general, schizophrenia is an extremely introverted, psychospiritual mode of perception, or way of relating to the world; or state of consciousness involving (what I have called) 'extreme empathy'. This simultaneous blessing and curse is due to a fragile, fragmented, dead, or lost ego, or conscious personality structure. The normal, ego-enforced boundaries between the self and the world have broken down, such that schizophrenia sufferers - for better and worse - find themselves identifying with everything within their scope of perception. It is because of this ego loss, or 'dis-integration' that psychosis, shamanic initiation and mystical experience are so inextricably bound. The schizophrenic person may appear to family, friends and doctors to be lacking in emotion, but in reality is in a state of intense empathy, such that extreme sensations of joy and fear are usual. Because of their fragile personal boundaries, schizophrenic folk typically see, hear, sense, perceive and understand things that others are unaware of. Secret, or symbolic meanings are seen and heard in everything, and the schizophrenia sufferer typically feels responsible for the fate of the world.

That sounds extremely accurate to how I was feeling, I'm not sure if any other residual "schizophrenics" are here, but this seems to be in dispute, is there anyone here who might've gone off the deep end before and still LD's? I'm very scared of WILD's because of the HH, my mind can't really control 100% of it's visualizations, and I believe that it's because my conscious mind wants it to be stable, and so I wrestle it for control, and it ends up in fear, which ends up in dark images, scary things.

Originally Posted by IWillBeLight

I don't really believe in schizophrenia, I believe in Carl Jung's theory of The Soul In Crisis

How does Jung's theory explain hearing voices and having ideas about reality that are totally removed from the truth? My nephew thought that my grandma poisoned him and that he was about to go play football at Arsenal. Also a voice was seemingly whispering stuff to him about what he had to do (weird stuff). Jung does not say anything about such symptoms or does he?

I'm not sure, it would probably have to do with the soul being trapped somewhere it doesn't belong, or being fragmented.. maybe connected to a collective concious.

something of that nature, google it.. I've had a friend who could freaking read minds when she went crazy, but was hearing other peoples voices and talking to them, had giant memory lapses, tried to get on a train and almost died, thought her sister who was in the military was spying on her.

i mean, madness is madness, but i believe Carl Jung (who's successfully cured it before) had it a bit more correct then Western medicine, we just give pills that numb the symptoms, creating zombies, and shells of the souls.. and go on with life.

I don't think lucid dreaming can trigger schizophrenia, but you first have to think about what schizophrenia is. Schizophrenia is hearing voices, is it not?


I am, however, very interested in what you said about lucid dreaming changing habitual thought patterns. I recently read a book that said lucid dreamers had minds and cognitive functions similar to that of people who practice TD meditation, which is definitely a good thing.

I've had lucid dreams since I was 5. You just need to take a break from them.
Next time you want to do a reality check just put it out of your mind.(Let the dream take it's course.) Focus on school/work, or find a hobby. The mind is not something to mess with.
What I do is have lucid dreams for awhile(a week), then take a VERY long break from them.
Just stop thinking about them. Stay away from this website,
This all sounds drastic but it helps me. And besides, I enjoy non-lucid dreams better anyway.

Originally Posted by zherkehzi

The mind is not something to mess with.

Right on! I should have been more carefull with what I was doing.... Moderation was the way to go.

IMJ