I tried lucid dreaming and it was quite easy for me to control my dreams. But after I woke up, despite the fact that I had slept 8+ hours, I felt mentally exhausted. Physically I was fine, no yawning or anything, but mentally I felt like I hadn't slept. It was a weird disassociation of physical vs mental exhaustion.
I've tried it a few times and it's the same every time. To me the slightly more fun lucid dreams are not worth the exhausted feeling in the morning.
I tried lucid dreaming a few years ago. Initially, the main problem that I was having was to wake up as soon as I realized I was in the middle of a dream. It took me almost no time to go back to sleep but I "was missing" the dream every time I woke up.
After a few days, I was able to control most of my dreams. I never had full control of those (there was a moment where something got out of control) but I liked the experience. I think the best experience I had dreaming was flying.
In any case, I always woke up fully rested (which might have to do with not being able to control it 100%).
Fellow lucid dreamer here. I've tried some explorations of the interface between sleep and waking from within dreams. In my experience/opinion, sex dreams might tend to break up because they use the tactile sense a lot and vision not so much. That can lead to inadvertently paying attention/letting-in one's real-body proprioceptive sense channel or attempting to give motor commands out to one's real muscles (rather than sticking with the dream-sense channels and the more expectation-based moment to moment control of one's dream).
Physically I felt great. Mentally it was like I had spent a long day memorizing pi numbers, or spent the day in an ice cream store while willfully resisting the temptation to eat any of it.
Hard to put into words, basically like there was a part of me, specifically something like the part responsible for will and motivation that desperately needed rest.
In theory, it should be pretty easy to lab test the effects of lucid dreaming on various parts of the brain. In your case, the regions associated with willpower, executive function, etc. (prefrontal cortex, primarily). You could do sleep studies and fMRI studies of brain regions, both after waking from normal sleep cycles and after waking from lucid dreaming.
Call me highly skeptical that there are any neurological benefits to lucid dreaming. In fact, I'm inclined to believe that intentionally inducing lucid dreams, night after night, is going to have a serious net-detrimental effect on health by way of disrupting sleep cycles.
Sleep serves a lot of very finely tuned purposes for the brain and the body, not the least of which is mental "garbage collection."
Highly skeptical is not what I'd call you. Overly skeptical is what I'd call you. I've been LD'ing for 4+ years now. I feel more refreshed and less groggy after a fun lucid dream. Every time. I know several other veteran dreamers and they say the same thing. None of us do the WBTB, we just go lucid in the middle of the dream. Sleep is a finely tuned process but you dream every night whether you remember it or not so lucid dreaming is not disrupting anything. It just gives you an awesome amount of control over
I swear, reading through these posts is super frustrating. It's like everyone who can't/hasn't lucid dreamt before is actively discouraging others from trying it because they're jealous/scared or something.
"I swear, reading through these posts is super frustrating. It's like everyone who can't/hasn't lucid dreamt before is actively discouraging others from trying it because they're jealous/scared or something."
I think you're reading too much into my post that just isn't there. Jealousy? Fear? Give me a break. The assertion that I can't, or haven't, had a lucid dream before? False on both counts. "Actively discouraging others from trying it?" Again, no. Not at all.
Let's stay away from ad hominems in this discussion, please. They don't advance the dialogue in any meaningful way.
Fellow LDer here. I've never felt any adverse effects of the type in discussion (quite the contrary, amazing euphoria and well-being on some occasions). But we shouldn't pretend that lucid dreaming is likely to be stimulating only and exactly the same brain regions as more typical dreaming (in terms of the metabolic and other activity levels). Learning to activate the relevant memory writing modules while in dreams so as to increase dream recall is, after all, one of the typical first steps to developing LDs. That mental machinery is seemingly not typically on to such a degree when dreaming as most people normally do.
That alone shows that some brain activity needs to be online that isn't in typical dreaming, and I imagine the various other bits of learned mental behavior to the LDing skill-set also change activation levels in brain regions. Learning to exert the kind of attention/expectation control to stabilize and alter dreams is another sub-skill that often takes practice and so probably involves bringing online brain resources that might otherwise be off/recharging.
So if some people have lower neurochemical reserves of some type or other, this extra activity, use of such neurochemicals, at night (when their reserves would otherwise be replenished) could push them under some threshold of good functioning for a while. My guess is that such sensitivities would be the rare minority cases, but this field is quite understudied to have grounded empirical beliefs on the matter.
I've tried it a few times and it's the same every time. To me the slightly more fun lucid dreams are not worth the exhausted feeling in the morning.