Learning to control the placebo effect

I was two dreams recently where I took drugs and felt the full effects of them. The first was codeine, I felt all the positive effects without the side effects. The second was a sedative that doesn't exist in real life, I snorted a line of it and it felt like getting hit with an elephant tranquiliser. That gives me pretty solid personal evidence that we can utilise the placebo effect to change ones state. The question is how to do it consciously though. And is it easier to do it in the dream state than real life.

The thing about placebos is that, if you know it's a placebo, it'll have hardly, if any, effect. You'd need someone else to give you something telling you it's one thing when in reality it's a sugar pill or something similar. You can't self medicate a placebo with full knowledge that it's a placebo, unless you can train yourself to forget things, but I don't know if that's really a viable option.

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Originally Posted by Burke

The thing about placebos is that, if you know it's a placebo, it'll have hardly, if any, effect. You'd need someone else to give you something telling you it's one thing when in reality it's a sugar pill or something similar. You can't self medicate a placebo with full knowledge that it's a placebo, unless you can train yourself to forget things, but I don't know if that's really a viable option.

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Its probably more like learning skills in lucid dreams. I couldn't fly when I started lucid dreaming, it was when I became lucid in mid air during a non lucid dream that I gained the ability to fly. Once you do it once, you KNOW you can do it again. If beliefs alone are what drive the placebo effect then the belief that you can trigger the effect with thoughts is all it takes.