Lucid Dreams Affect Real Life?

I have heard that what you do in lucid dreams affects you in real life. I have heard of both direct and indirect effects. An example of direct would be talking to girls in a dream would make you more confident in real life or something that you can actually notice directly happening. An indirect effect would be something subconscious like if you go on rampages killing dream characters you may become more violent, or if you make all violent and bad things in your dream peaceful you will become more peaceful in real life. The third aspect of this test is whether you can learn in a lucid dream. An example would be if you set the environment equal to real life and fight someone using only human abilities (they have similar abilities) or any other skill that can be learned by practice. As I intend to become lucid within 2 months via SSILD, I will be doing this experiment as well, however I am asking for other lucid dreamers to do it. If you want to do this post below and post your attempts.

-----> Try to keep all of your attempts in one post by editing it so that the forum can stay concise and easy to read. <------------

This is my main reason for learning this skill, I think it has much greater potential for improving one's life than any self help book. We're always told to change our beliefs about what is possible and what we're capable of by constantly reframing our thoughts until new neural pathways replace old one's. While this works, it takes a long time and constant effort. The quickest way to change behaviours is to act out new ones which can be the hardest thing to do. Lucid dreaming gives us a safe arena to practice and directly influence the brain as it doesn't know the difference between dream actions and waking ones. Stephen LaBerge talks about this and gives examples in his book. The power of this became obvious to me after my first WILD at the beginning of the night. While looking around and marvelling at the realism I responded to something the way I would have if awake simply because there was no difference. After waking I realised I could have acted the way I want to instead of succumbing to old behaviours.

Does this mean I can use dreams to fix my trouble with school? It is not that I lack the skill to succeed, it is that I lack the confidence and focus. For example I should be working right now. I guess you could describe it as super-procrastination. Everyone procrastinates, but my problem is that I procrastinate too much and then fail to make up for it, leading to bad grades etc.

I believe you can but you'll have to explore and experiment with different ways of doing it. With something like that you can simply try asking in the dream state for more confidence and focus. Robert Waggoner has great examples in his book of asking the "awareness behind the dream" these kinds of questions. If you don't have time to read the book search the web for the interviews he did when promoting the book. I found them really inspirational.

I also think just practicing the skill of lucid dreaming alone will help as it requires focus, concentration and commitment and you'll develop those qualities as a by-product. I'm still in the early stages myself but I aim to try these things out as well.