Muscle Memory??

I'm still new to Lucid Dreaming but have been reading up on it over the last few days and have a question hopefully somebody might be able to answer.

Certain tasks in life require us to continuously repeat them in order for us to be competent, as you might have guessed from my Username I train in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and to improve we have to drill moves over and over in practice and in live sparring.

But this of course isn't limited to Jiu-Jitsu their are countless tasks that require us to practice. Has their been any study conducted to see if practice in lucid dreams relates to improvement in reality?

When you ask if it relates to improvement in reality. Are you asking if they are similar or if practicing in a lucid dream would improve any skills in waking life?

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Originally Posted by Irken

When you ask if it relates to improvement in reality. Are you asking if they are similar or if practicing in a lucid dream would improve any skills in waking life?

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The second one. Does practicing in a lucid dream improve your skills in waking life?

I'm not sure. But I doubt it.

I am a karateka and I have always wanted to test this myself. It was one of the first things I thought would be awesome to do in lucids but I havn't tried it yet mainly because it requires more reliable lucidity than I have had during the school year. I can't see why it would not help, infact I'd bet you could get a lot better training in dreams. They have done test in basketball where there are two teams who are going to have a free throw contest. One practices free throws everday for an hour and the other team relaxes and visualized doing free throws for an hour each day. The team who visualized the free throws won. The fact is muscle memory is not actualy in our muscles but in our minds. In dreams your mind also dose not have to think about taking in external input from your senses leaving more to think about the moves. Also you won't fiteag and can train in optimal dream environtmetns with the perfect sparing partners. If you do try this I sugest that when you do it make sure to remember what it felt like when you did that technique the best in waking life and then try and try and get it to feel like that in the dream. Oh and make sure to tell me your results!

Well, maybe a simple task like throwing a basketball could be affected like that, but I doubt you could learn to play the guitar in your dreams. As that requires tons of practice to learn. It'd be neat thought if I could just practice musical instruments in my dreams and become extremely skilled in waking life, as that would definitely save me some time.

Thanks for the reply MadMonkey, that's interesting about the Basketballers. The reason I started this topic was because I had just watched a Documentary on Dreams. (It was on the Special Features disc for Inception)

In the doco one of the researchers talked about an experiment that was conducted where as a group of participants were given a task to attempt to flip a coin into a cup. This task was meet with little success and the participants only managed to land the coin in the cup a few times. After this the participants were told to practice the coin flipping in their lucid dreams. When they re-tried the task in waking life after the lucid dreaming practice they had an improvement of almost double the amount of landed coins.

The doco didn't go in to much detail about the trial and I was wondering if anyone had heard of or experienced anything similar??

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Originally Posted by Irken

Well, maybe a simple task like throwing a basketball could be affected like that, but I doubt you could learn to play the guitar in your dreams. As that requires tons of practice to learn. It'd be neat thought if I could just practice musical instruments in my dreams and become extremely skilled in waking life, as that would definitely save me some time.

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Irken, I think your right about the learning part. I don't think we could learn in our dreams but perhaps we could practiced already learned tasks. It's the repitition that cements it in our minds.

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Originally Posted by JiuJitsuJoe

Irken, I think your right about the learning part. I don't think we could learn in our dreams but perhaps we could practiced already learned tasks. It's the repitition that cements it in our minds.

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Ahh ya I kinda figured you might've meant something different. Still about the guitar thing I'm not sure that practicing in a lucid dream would help in waking life but I don't know. You'd likely play some really cool music and forget to practice in your dream. Or if you practice martial arts you might instead want to fight a bunch of kung fu dudes in your dream instead of practicing. Just a thought.

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Originally Posted by Irken

Well, maybe a simple task like throwing a basketball could be affected like that, but I doubt you could learn to play the guitar in your dreams. As that requires tons of practice to learn. It'd be neat thought if I could just practice musical instruments in my dreams and become extremely skilled in waking life, as that would definitely save me some time.

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You couldn't learn to play a guitar in your dreams but you could practice what you already know. Whe you do something over and over again you brain sort of memorizes how to do it right and it becomes natural and easier. I think you could practice a rift in a dream and get just as much if not more real world experience from it. I have tried several times to play my guitar in lucids and It sounds out of tune and plays the wrong notes but I think I could fix that if I focus on it.

Martial arts I think would be one of the easiest things to practice in dreams because many traditional martial arts like karate have katas (or forms or what ever you want to call them) and they are specificly designed to develop muscle memory and make doing the moves instictual.

Visualizition is effective in sports so Im certain that you could develop muscle memory in an LD.

I'm a freerunner and for me this is also one of my main goals to find out in a lucid dream.
I read something about training your muscles by only thinking about doing exercises, and people who did this became actually stronger. I cant find the artical i read about this but a belive this is the same idea:
http://lecerveau.mcgill.ca/flash/cap...g_strength.pdf