There's a new book on lucid dreaming for experienced and intermediate level lucid dreamers. It's Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner -- it has chapters on healing one's self in a lucid dream state, interacting with the awareness behind the dream, seeking out unknown information, etc.

If you have ever experienced a real Lucid Dream, how can you worry about being so good at it that your "good night's sleep" is compromised? I could only hope to have so many as to have to worry about that.

I also have some concerns like Vickie's. During normal sleep, the aminergic neurons (responsible for critical thought) are inactive, but during a lucid dream they are active. This suggests to me that lucid dreams might have some as yet unobserved negative effects, due to the aminergic neurons not getting enough rest.

Many years ago, I had what I called a self-healing dream.

The background to it is that I was an abused child. My abuser had many tricks to keep me aware of how little I mattered. One of them was to buy a treat for my siblings, while buying none for me, even though I was present.

In my dream, I saw myself as an eight year old straggling behind my abuser (parent) and my siblings, crying because they all had ice cream cones, and I had none.

My adult self walked up to my eight year old self and gathered him in my arms and made a promise that everything would be o.k. I would buy him all the ice cream cones he wanted, and I would keep him safe.

I woke with a great sense of something being finished, finally healed. It was a very physical feeling, and I've never forgotten it.

Edited by author 11-09-2004 10:11 PM
I would like to know,if sleep paralysis restricts you from physical movement, then why can I consiously decide to turn over left or right to make decisions in dreams,Choices and plans to the right,creation and observation to the left?

I believe lucid dreaming to be a means of not only night time enjoyment but a tool that can be used to develop and cultivate the latent abilities of the mind. I have been doing dream research for years and have found that people who practice energy work in their dreams tend to develop 100 times more faster than those who would attempt to develope parnormal abilities during their waking state. I suggest taht if you are new to lucid dreaming, astral projection or esp you visit The Foundation for the Advancement of Human Knowledge website http://www.fahk.org/site.php?content=mind.luciddreaming
The foundation is growing and getting notarized to be the site for advance mind training on the web. I am not only a member I am on their board of directors.

I've experienced many things in my dreams . . . including stimulation of all five senses. I've smelt incense, tasted soup, seen colors, i don't remember any specific moments of hearing music or sound but that one thing I actively enjoy in the "real" world moreso than the others. I believe it's possible that there are alternate realities, or "dream worlds".

When I was younger, I had No Life. This was because I was rejected, an outcast. I had very lucid dreams. In these dreams I often realized that I was dreaming. When I did, within the dream, I had godlike power. This world was much preferable to my mundane "everyday" life. Was it another world I saw? Perhaps. Did it give me a better understanding of "real" life? No. I miss those dreams.

I am building a lucid dream induction device. It is modeled after the Nova Dreamer. I was wondering if anyone has attempted this on this board. Any tips? If not to those with novaDreamers, what is the timing on the leds? How long do they light, what is the time between flashes?

When you walk into a room where an infant is and it reaches out to you, the baby can't decipher near and far yet. In its reality your right in front of it and it reaches assuming it can touch you. In life, people and experiences teach us right, wrong, real, and fake this sets the rules for “reality”. But in your dreams specifically lucid dreams you make the rules, your interpretation of real changes. You have the abillity to break the rules that have been programmed into your brain. In my opinion reality is only a blanket of perception relative to your mindset meaning Real is what you make of it "dreams" or not. (A Brain in a Vat)

When I think of "reality" I find myself unable to escape the perception that a reality has to have some connection with both time and space, which then implies that when you dream you are observing a whole new world which is affected by time and exists somewhere in the universe. I am aware that such thinking is probably very flawed - reality probably doesn't have to mean time and space. However, I still think dreaming is a kind of hallucination, and lucid dreaming is the ability to control a hallucination. Not that that is a bad thing. It depends on what you would define as "real".

If one is flying in a lucid dream and one allows lucidity to increase without awakening, then the flying dream takes on the character of an out of body experience. Perhaps lucid dreams can be a path into whatever realm(s)
lie "before" or "above" our own physical reality. Maybe it's the Dreamtime. Maybe when we die we enter something like the realm where fully lucid dreams lie. The Tibetan Buddhists have a saying in which they liken sleep to the
"little death." And dreams akin to an immediate afterlife condition. I think there's much to be learned by bringing counsciousness to bear in dreams I think it's an exciting frontier.

Edited by author 12-25-2003 08:51 PM
There does not seem to me that there is any meaning or practical usefulness to dreams, lucid or otherwise. I think dreams are just random chemical activity in the brain. But, I keep an open mind and will consider other posts here.

Lucid dreams are really fun when I have them - it's an exciting feeling - like making some kind of illicit discovery - your in a dream! Sometimes the dream becomes less vivid then, or ends abruptly at that point. I doubt that it's "unhealthy" or dangerous to have them, merely difficult to induce. It would seem like different parts of your mind are getting "in sync" in an unusual and possibly synergistic way. Do dreams have an external/trancendental reality? I think sometimes, not always, and that the mind interprets that external reality through a complex and sometimes garbled set of symbols that are hard, but not impossible to decipher.