How far the history of LD goes?

Hello all!

I'm a newbie, found this forum today and registered.

I've had discussions about LD with my friend for last three days and he is convinced LD is somehow dangerous or at least it makes you tired, because your mind is not really sleeping. He even thought advanced lucid dreamer might go insane because of ability to create so real dream sceneries and for doing all those RCs all the time.

I tried to explain him that when a person is having a psychosis, they are NOT in control of them, but in LD one is in control of all the "monsters".

Also mentioned one isn't doing it correctly if one is tired after waking up. At least this is what I've learned from different sources in the Internet. I suggested him mind doesn't have to be in sleep (lets face it, mind keeps buzzing all the time!) to process some messages from the subconscious mind, because LDer can talk directly to the subconscious and that is much faster, than watching all the cryptic symbolism. Isn't it?

So how far the history of lucid dreaming goes? In a podcast I found a lady told she has been LDer for about 20 years and she sounded completely sane. If there are hundreds of people, who have done it decades, who are advanced LDers, shouldn't they be in mental institution by now if it really were dangerous?

uhh all I can say is that after every lucid I have I feel great. I get better sleep knowing I accomplished something instead of did nothing while I was asleep. lucid dreaming and lack of sleep are completely irrelevant IMHO. ;)

I believe somewhere in the "WILD" section of this forum, somebody posted a thread called something like "thousand year old WILD technique". I forget where it originated, but it's ancient.

Lucid dreaming probably goes back as far as the first human being who had a concept of self. I mean, as long as man was physiologically able to, he was probably capable of lucid dreaming. You'll hear about yogis and crap like that, but I believe that there were probably tons of people able to do this but keeping it to themselves.

Lucid dreaming makes me feel amazing and incredibly rested.

A history of lucid dreaming? ha. I would have thought it would have been since man knew how to dream. written history, on the other hand, I think monks or Buddhists practiced something similar for centuries? something like that?

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Originally Posted by WolfTotem

I've had discussions about LD with my friend for last three days and he is convinced LD is somehow dangerous or at least it makes you tired, because your mind is not really sleeping. He even thought advanced lucid dreamer might go insane because of ability to create so real dream sceneries and for doing all those RCs all the time.

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I would say it makes you more sane. You are training yourself to recognize the difference between reality and dreams. You could say the normal person is delusional because they are fooled by a false reality every night. The lucid dreamer learns skills to be able to recognize hallucinations and take control of them.

It makes sense to assume lucid dreaming was an integral part of ancient religions based on dreaming, trance induction, or visions. You can track down brief mentions of conscious dreaming in people's letters and diaries going back quite a while (like, 4th or 5th century I believe). It is definitely a phenomenon that has been with us for quite a while. As a system being taught and explored purposefully, Tibetan dream yoga goes back to about the 8-9th century. . Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys's wrote about it in the 19th century. Frederik van Eeden finally coined the term "Lucid Dreaming" in the early 20th century. Stephen Laberge proved it in a lab in the 1980s, and is responsible for getting it widely accepted by the scientific community.