My Skeptic Of A Wife

my wife thinks that lucid dreaming is not real or at least not good for ones body... anyway she was asking me some questions last night about being able to do things in dreams that she thought were impossible to do in dreams... everything she asked about seemed do-able to me except a couple of situations. since i am not very experianced a LD-ing and dont have great control yet i thought i'd ask some of you who are really experianced.

can you change the dream world form color to black and white?
and
can you die in a lucid dream?

i know the second one goes against the "indestructable dream-self" idea but can you will yourself to die?

i'd also love to shut her up with some science about LD-ing and its affects on your health if anyone has some good information on this.

she has been quite discouraging to me about this so i need some ammo to counter her!

You can do anything in a dream. But it will not affect your real self, nor your health. So if you die in a dream, you will not die in real life, even if you will it. Although my lucid cousin asked me the same thing and I haven't heard from him since ......(only joking).

"Although lucid dreams have been reported since Aristotle, until recently many researchers doubted that the dreaming brain was capable of such a high degree of mental functioning and consciousness. Based on earlier studies showing that some of the eye movements of REM sleep corresponded to the reported direction of the dreamer's gaze (e.g., Roffwarg et al. 1962), we asked subjects to carry out distinctive patterns of voluntary eye movements when they realized they were dreaming. The prearranged eye movement signals appeared on the polygraph records during REM, proving that the subjects had indeed been lucid during uninterrupted REM sleep (LaBerge 1990; LaBerge et al. 1981). Figure 1 shows an example."
http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/index.html

These type of studies have undeniably proven lucid dreaming.

I have never experienced a dream in black in white, i've never tried too, i
could probably make a single object lose color, but i highly doubt i could
change everything to black and white at this point.

but if your consious mind is not fully asleep while you are lucid is your brain getting the full benifit of sleeping?

The longer I am lucid the more refreshed I feel in the morning. Actually my overall mental and physical health has improved dramatically since I started Lding. It seems the processes that happen during REM sleep are enhanced by lucidity.

You mind/brain never fully shuts down - you dream every night but as your recall is poor you forget it upon waking. Your physical body may be resting but your mind is always active ;) So you could Lucid Dream every night and not be fatigued that you would notice.

You can do everything you described except dieing, that would be impossible.

The first thing your wife must realize is their is nothing supernatural about it and it is not any different then a normal dream, for instance in a dream you could realize that your in a garden/house/school/car and it wouldn't be any different then realizing your in a dream.

Also control works in a similer manner if you can spawn randon things you can certainly spawn only black and white, but when you get into changing/exploring information that is only in the real world, that is not possible, though arguably people claim to have shared dreams, though thats probably BS/coincidence.

I am not sure about the black and white thing, as I have never had a dream in black and white, and never tried too, but I have made the sky flash all colors of the rainbow (aside from just blue...) because I was trying to prove to my dream friend that they were in my dream.

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Originally Posted by LucidDreamGod

You can do everything you described except dieing, that would be impossible.

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I shot myself in the head once and I did die.
I died a few times.
It spoils my dreams and being awake afterwards completely, it's not that funny.
Mostly I stay awake and process what happened and then go back to sleep.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aniki

I shot myself in the head once and I did die.
I died a few times.
It spoils my dreams and being awake afterwards completely, it's not that funny.
Mostly I stay awake and process what happened and then go back to sleep.

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Well the actual act of dieing, not like jumping of a cliff or shooting yourself in the head and waking up. I've done that stuff many times :P.

I'm a little confused now.
You mean experiencing the act of dying like it would be for real?
The heart stops and then the breathing and fading away kind of feeling?

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Originally Posted by aniki

I'm a little confused now.
You mean experiencing the act of dying like it would be for real?
The heart stops and then the breathing and fading away kind of feeling?

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I just mean physicaly dieing, like I said anything that changes things in the real world.

feeling the symptoms of death is certainly possible though.

dunno if this has been said in this thread already but umm... has it occured to you to just not tell her if your having LD's? i mean, it's not as if you glow neon or something when you have them...

well they have become an important part of my life and i thought she would want to share that with me, or at the very least that she might care enough about it to pretend.

a bit off topic- luciddreamgod, how long did it take you to get good with WILD? i have been trying and cant get past the crushing urge to move. are you a LD natural or is it something you had to aquire?

what is WILD?

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Originally Posted by joshbotch

well they have become an important part of my life and i thought she would want to share that with me, or at the very least that she might care enough about it to pretend.

a bit off topic- luciddreamgod, how long did it take you to get good with WILD? i have been trying and cant get past the crushing urge to move. are you a LD natural or is it something you had to aquire?

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I have not actually gotten good at WILDing yet, in fact I haven't actually tried directly very much, but I practice practically every day. By practice I mean my goal is to create an image in my mind through the act of visualizing that is very easy to maintain and very vivid, I've gotten quite good, but due to my distractive habits I've not practiced enough as I would have liked to, the urge to move is a test from your body to see if your still awake, your not truly in a bad position your brain just is testing you to see if your awake. But visualization I see it as the door way to lucid mastery, because it has the very essence of a dream and recreates it in waking life. I don't know about you but a light bulb goes up in my head when I see how they are the same process, and the fact that if you can visualize anything you can set the wheel of a dream in motion, through a WILD.

I have had lucid dreams in my younger days without much trying but they were usually caused by nightmares and my older brother just told me to pinch myself and if it didn't hurt I was dreaming and could wake myself up, not sure if I'm a natural or not, but they come sometimes without much trouble at all for me.

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Originally Posted by complete newb

what is WILD?

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WILD is the act of maintaining a small stream of conscious well falling asleep usually in the middle of the night after getting up. Resulting in a lucid dream ofcourse.

I bet it's possible to have a black and white dream, I once had a dream where everything had that yellow tinge like in home videos from the 70s