While I've had a few "lucid" dreams in my life that I can remember, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims they can do this with some regularity. Don't forget, there's a comparable number of people who claim the ability to "astral travel".
When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you do.
>Don't forget, there's a comparable number of people who claim the ability to "astral travel".
That is a rather uncompelling argument. How many people claim to be able to do something has very little to do with whether or not that thing is possible. Many, many people claim to have been helped by homeopathic remedies, and none of them have. Relatively few people claim to be able to walk on their hands, but many of them can.
"Number of claims" is evidence, but it is such weak evidence that its effect on your beliefs should almost always be overwhelmed by the effect of your prior. The plausibility of astral projection and homeopathy is incredibly low, and the weak evidence given by "number of adherents" doesn't significantly budge the needle.
On the other hand, having had personal experience with lucid dreams, your appraisal of the plausibility of regular, practiced lucid dreaming should be rather high. If, then, you encounter even a dozen people who claim to have done this successfully, you should believe that is probably possible. That is, of course, unless you have some appropriately strong justification based on your understanding of neuroscience for why it should not be possible.
>When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you do.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The part of your brain that perceives being in control is not the part of the brain that issues commands. So if we allow that it is possible to believe you have control over your actions without actually having control over your actions, then we must accept that this is in fact always the case, even while we are awake. The belief that you are an atomic unit which simultaneously perceives and manipulates the world is a form of essentialism which we can pretty well rule out by now.
Edit: I should also add that "lucid dreaming" doesn't technically imply control; it just means you're aware that you're in a dream.
Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately. The one dream that I remember where I suddenly realized I was dreaming but didn't wake up went pretty awry. I became very confused in the dream trying to figure out if I was awake or not. It was disturbing.
>Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately.
Most, but not all of my experiences have been similar, although I actually suspect that in at least some cases I have not actually woken up, but have merely dreamt that I woke up. At one point I "woke up" from a lucid dream to find myself in bed in the middle of the night, went back to sleep, and then was awoken moments later by my alarm and found that the sun was fully risen. Not conclusive, as I may have just slept dreamlessly in the interim (although that's uncommon after waking from a dream and going back to sleep), but suspicious.
Another time, I woke up immediately after realizing I was dreaming, looked around my room, and found that my dream had persisted and was visually composited over the real world around me. This was, of course, extremely disconcerting, and my solution was to close my eyes and go back to sleep. But looking back, it seems far more likely that I dreamt that entire experience, including the waking up and looking around, than that my brain actually had that kind of catastrophic system failure.
In any case, losing your grasp on lucid dreams is a common and frustrating problem, and people have gathered a few tricks for holding on. One that has sometimes worked for me is, when I feel things beginning to slip, rather than panicking, to spin gently in place with my eyes closed (although closing your eyes in a dream is not always
> "(although closing your eyes in a dream is not always"
I've been lucid dreaming for a good many years now. Losing visual sensations in a dream typically leads me to waking up. I attribute this to me being a rather visual learner/thinker while awake. Early on I tried the spinning-around trick, but it led to confusing visual-blurs and often me unintentionally sensing my real-body's proprioceptive channel, all leading to waking up.
My best dream-stabilizing trick so far has been to look at my dream hands and use one to scratch the palm of the other. That ties my visual perceptions to my dream-body's tactile sensations. Once I get a dream stabilized like this, I can just keep one hand scratching its own palm all the time, serving as a good, constant reminder that I'm still dreaming.
Or, if I'm flying/hovering, I just crash into something or the ground (the harder the better), also linking the visual to the tactile.
You haven't had any lucid dreams then - it's not like wishy-washy pseudo-spiritual nonsense. It's nothing like astral projection. You're just fully awake inside your dream. You know 100% that you're dreaming, and that you are lying in your bed and you can control what happens in your dream (maybe "steer" is a better word than control).
The websites I've seen about it make out like there is a spiritual aspect - but that's just hippies trying to make it seem important.
Most of the time a dream just like most people, but once in a while I experience being awake in a dream which I also call lucid dreaming. It's very interesting and the level of realism will vary. I find that it varies depending on how I have let my different desires (e.g. lust, hunger, laziness, etc) dictate my behavior during the day. The more control I exercise over them the better the experience is.
But I have also had a complete different kind of experience, one that is more realistic than lucid dreaming. It feels as real as being awake. I believe that this is what many call the astral. I can count the times I had such experiences with one hand. It's very rare for me and it requires such an effort that I fail most of the times. And by effort I mean not acting on the different desires that come during the day and trying to understand what triggers them and dismissing them without emotion.
You speak in a manner that seems familiar. One that I took on some time ago and am thankful to have left behind. Please be careful if this describes your current situation:
Thanks for the link. I'm familiar with the views/theories that that cult/group uses. Young and malleable minds can be easily manipulated using such views.
I find that for most people including me, it is much more beneficial to learn to meditate since the benefits are more practical. In my case meditation also allows me to have lucid dream with much better quality. I attribute that to the fact that meditation helps control the mind which calms the mind enough to realize that I'm in a dream.
I believe the answer to that is that lucid dreamers have a token symbol they regularly keep in real life that cannot attain a specific state in reality; if they keep this token so persistent in their life that it inevitably ends up in the dream, they can interact with the token to determine the dreamstate by making the token do something impossible. This boolean answer hopefully trickles up to you just enough to go "whoa!" without waking you - at which point you're free to dream about the 3 things people do with lucid dreaming.
I bet you if you just stubbornly enough decide to lucid dream every night it won't be long before you have lucid dreams semi regularly. But I don't recommend that, see my other posts in this discussion as to why.
Well first, you're right, you can't _prove_ something like that to yourself. But in that case, what's the difference? (Unsolvable, usually irrelevant philosophical question, I suppose.)
Second, folks claiming to astral travel are, as far as I can tell, just lucid dreaming. Otherwise, we'd see more cults doing amazing things because they could go around and view secret plans, codes, passwords, and whatnot.
As a lucid dreamer, the difference is pretty obvious. A memory of a dream feels like just that, a dream. Remembering a lucid dream feels more like a memory from everyday life- I remember actually being 'there'.
Waking up directly after a lucid dream makes it even more apparent, to transition from the dream-world into the real world with no apparent loss of consciousness in between.
When you're dreaming, it feels real, but as soon as you wake you realize that it was not. In a lucid dream, it feels like a dream, and that feeling persists through waking. Perhaps you will wake in a moment and discover that your present feeling of consciousness is an illusion; until then, you kind of just have to trust it.
I believe the answer to this is that you decide what you want to do in your dream before you go to sleep. If you do exactly what you planned, you were controlling your dream. If you were dreaming you controlled your dream, but you dreamt about what you wanted to, does it matter?
LaBerge proved that people can have lucid dreams at will as part of his doctoral research at Stanford. Even if you haven't mastered the at-will inductions like MILD or WILD (see Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by LaBerge or consult Google), you can increase your frequency of lucid dreams (once or twice a week for me in my third year of high school) by using critical state testing, which practitioners of Tibetan dream yoga have supposedly been doing for hundreds of years. The idea is twofold.
First, it's usually very easy to tell if you're dreaming. If you're sober and you even have to think about whether you're dreaming then you can safely say you are. That's hard for some people to do, so you might want to use a more tangible method. If you pinch your nose and try to breathe through it, you will be able to breathe in almost all dreams (you can never 100% prove awakeness, but we only care about proving asleepness), and you will never be able to breathe if you're awake. So if you find you can breathe through a pinched nose, you know you're dreaming. If you don't want to pinch your nose in public all the time, you could look at your hand instead. Count the number of fingers and ask yourself if they are straight or deformed. The dreaming mind is really bad about accurately generating five-fingered realistic hands, but we never notice unless we deliberately look at our hands in a dream. This method is almost as surefire as the nose method.
The second part of the method is that if you make it a habit to check to see if you're dreaming whenever a certain kind of event comes up, let's say whenever you walk through a doorway, that behavior will carry over to your dreams once it has become a habit. Once you walk through a doorway in your dream, you will do the nose or hand test and discover that you're dreaming. It's fine to be skeptical of science when it sounds too good to be true, but seriously give it a try. Lucid dreaming is a lot of fun, and there are also a lot of practical benefits. One that comes to mind is being able to literally work out problems in your sleep. It's sometimes hard to keep text constant on a dream whiteboard, but you have the advantage of being able to manipulate text with the snap of your fingers--something that you can't even do yet with vim or emacs. Another advantage of lucid dreaming is nutrition and weight loss. It's a lot easier to say no to that piece of cake now if you'll have the opportunity to eat it while you sleep. Dream food tastes about the same as real food.
P.S. The experience of astral projection (in the sense of having a highly real-feeling dream in which you can roll out of your physical body and walk around your room, which looks virtually identical to how it does in real life) is actually a real phenomenon that's rather easy to induce using a variation of wake-initiated lucid dreaming (WILD). The vast majority of people who claim to achieve this are telling the truth. While there is no reason to accept the non-scientific explanation that they're actually leaving their body in some astral plane in real life, the actual experience they're reporting is very real.
When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you do.