Dream Control.

[gael]

Lucid dreaming is pretty common, and you'll read about it in any book about dreams.

Some people are more prone than others, the same as some people can recall most of the whole nights dreams, were as others completely bin them to the back of the mind on waking.

 

[NetGear]

I am really into it. I've been practicing for years, but only thing I really do is just write down what I dreamt and remind myself what kind of signal for dreams were evident for me if I missed them. Doing just that got me to where I was and I am wondering if there is anyone who is farther ahead than me.

 

[gael]

I gave up on them a long time ago. I kinda miss them now that its been mentioned.

 

[animepornstar]

Originally posted by NetGear



I feel much more refreshed waking up from a lucid dream. Since if your lucidating, your in your REM state. Beside lucidating and not lucidating doesnt have any difference in how much rest you get. Your brain is constantly active and firing off signals when you sleep, which converts to what we know as dreams. Lucid dreaming is simply being able to control these signals to what you want it to be.

maybe it's ok if it's the last dream you are dreaming and the alarm clock will soon be ringing, but when i woke up from lucid dreams in the middle of the night (sometimes many times per night) i usually got my sleeping spoiled. after a week or so you will feel that you mental health has changed.

i really wonder if it doesn't harm rem dreaming. it would be interesting to hear a doctors opinion.

 

[NetGear]

Originally posted by gael
I gave up on them a long time ago. I kinda miss them now that its been mentioned.

I figure your brains gonna shoot meaningless singals anyway when you sleep, why not make sense of it?

Its only efficient.

 

[NetGear]

Originally posted by animepornstar

maybe it's ok if it's the last dream you are dreaming and the alarm clock will soon be ringing, but when i woke up from lucid dreams in the middle of the night (sometimes many times per night) i usually got my sleeping spoiled. after a week or so you will feel that you mental health has changed.

i really wonder if it doesn't harm rem dreaming. it would be interesting to hear a doctors opinion.

REM state IS what creates dreams. Its Psychology 101.

Theres absolutely no harm

EDIT: Which is why I also said some drugs can help/prevent dreaming. According to what I know, marijuana prevents brain togo in REM state, which is why it can prevent dreaming. But if it wears off while your sleeping, brain will try to make up for the net loss, thus you'll have a longer period of REM state. This is why often people recall having a good dream or woke up well when they went to sleep high. I doubt someone can time it though.

 

[animepornstar]

Originally posted by NetGear


REM state IS what creates dreams. Its Psychology 101.

Theres absolutely no harm

yes, but the rem state is also the most important part of sleeping. i wonder if really nothing important is changed, but you are probably right.

if you wake up in the middle of the night it still means problems cause you have to fall asleep again.

 

[animepornstar]

btw, i should go to bed now. have a lot to do tomorrow. good night.

 

[NetGear]

I tend to lucidate at 6... or maybe thats the only one I remember.

I dont wake up at night. Once I had lucid experience at 1 in the morning, but I had no problem going back to sleep the moment after I finished recalling and writing what happened.

The hours of sleep dont matter as long as you get enough stage 4(?) aka REM state anyway.

 

[cromagnon]

Sweet Dreams!

By the way, Nixon, you DO dream; you just don't remember them. You enter REM sleep about every 90 minutes, so you dream several times per night. Each cycle, the time spent in REM increases. Toward the morning, when you wake up, you have a higher likelihood of being in REM sleep, and that's the dream most people remember having.

Can't say much about lucid dreams, though. There probably is something different going on there. I only remember one lucid dream from when I was 7 y/o. I was flying, and it was the best!

 

[NetGear]

Now CS majors will prolly disagree strongly...

But I think of sleeping as kind of like defragging. Your brain needs REM state for some reason, and during that state, brain is very active. And since its active, brain can interpret it as signals and have a dream. While defragging, computer is very active. It makes all that grrrr noise. So i think its only efficient if you can use that processing power to, say play quake III while the computer is defragging.

 

[cromagnon]

No one really knows what the function of sleep is, despite decades of research on the subject. We think it has to do with 'repairing' or possibly 'downloading and synthesizing information,' but those are only theories at best.

There must be some important evolutionary reason for sleep; we just don't know what it is. Why else would the overwhelming majority of animals spend 30% of their life in a state where they are highly susceptible to being killed?

 

[Switch625]

I can't really control what is happening in my dreams. However, sometimes when a dream gets really outlandish or scary, I will "say" something like "alright, that's enough of that." The offending dream will terminate, and a new one will start. In other words, I can sometimes halt a dream that is bothering me. That's about as close as I come to being able to control my dreams.

 

[NetGear]

Thats mostly the reason why people start lucidating.

 

[gael]

I don't know if prolonged lucid dreaming over a period of time has any repercussions, I don't think it is even possible.
I know that REM sleep/dreams helps the brain play out roles that overcome and deal with every day fears, anxieties, etc, and is essentail for good mental health.

I'm sure there is a limit on how much you can have them or control them. Eventually your brain will just say, "enough, you had your fun, i've a mind to clean out here."

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

I have much control over my dreams, particularly in the later sleep cycles.

 

[EuropeanPotato]

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes my dreams happen. Like I dreamt about... a guy named Charlie I met two years before the dream telling a horse to sneeze. In about 6 months, 2 1/2 yrs from meeting Charlie an not seeing him for 2 1/2 years, I see him @ summer camp and the police bring in their horses on the field and... and.. he tells the horses to sneeze! Wierd.

 

[Perfection]

You know what is really fun, when lucid dreaming comes on, think of a big juicy steak, and eat it savoring all the tasty flavors, the only problem is when that happens I usually wake up with drool on my pillow.

 

[Zarn]

I had several dreams that I could fly. I use to have the same two nightmares over and over again, but I found out how to control them and made them senseless dreams that don't hurt anyone. I remember dreaming about an angel once, but I didn't have much control over that one for some reason. These were all a long time ago. I still dream, but about my high school. I never remember my nightmares. I think everyone gets one nightmare a night or something like that.

 

[Pongui]

How unconscious I am when dreaming depends on how single-minded my consciousness is when awake.

Some days, or some years, I'm especially pig-headed and my mind accumulates great weights of unresolved problems and unexplored possibilities. Then, at night, the dreams take firm hold and randomly smash all these unrelated things together to play out the weird results. Upon waking, I want nothing to do with that nonsense, and forget it.

Other times, if my waking mind is free to drift foolishly and brave to face any issue, I have little material for abstract dreams, and so I go through all the proper sleep cycles without getting lost. My train of thought just plods along rationally overnight, and I wake feeling cheated that I spent a whole night "dreaming" about backing-up my hard drive and revamping the directory structure, or something equally mundane.

With all my dreams, lucid or not, I wake immediately before a certain threshold of feeling. I believe that protects my waking mind from becoming overly imprinted by a dream conclusion.