Is an LD as benificial to your mind and body as an ND. If you could LD all night (i no this is highly thoeretical) would you be tired in the morning. According to alot of sources R.E.M sleep is the only sleep you really need to live (hence polyphasic sleeping), so would an LD be as restful as reggular R.E.M sleep.
If so, you could, in thoery, live consciously 24hrs a day. How cool would that be!
Like a dream come true! 
REM is not the only sleep you need to live, but lack of the other stages of sleep wouldn’t show up for years. You need very little of it. So you couldn’t go straight from conscious to REM, but you could probably move through the other stages of sleep faster than normal without any risks. (If you could somehow train yourself for it.)
There is a sleep program that does just that, but in my opinion it’s not worth it. People have rearranged their sleep schedule so that they sleep for 20-30 minutes every couple hours, instead of 8-10 hours at night. It adds up to 3-4 hours and they claim to feel MORE rested after this.
But they also say that they get be wide awake one second, and then when their usual “nap time” comes they’ll be out like a rock. So you would have to stick strictly to the schedule, and besides… what are you going to do all night long when everybody else is asleep?
AHH, I forgot something…
The reason I brought that up is because when they go to sleep they go almost immediately to REM sleep. I forgot the name of the program but I’m sure someone here knows what it’s called. Also, people who have done this said that the first week or so of trying to get used to it is absolutely hell.
yes, that is polyphasic sleep as i mentioned b4.
and you dont nessicerally have to go through the other stages of sleepgo get to R.E.M, take WILDing for example, doing this at normal sleeping night (instead of WBTB) is skipping the first deep sleep stage. I think if you could somehow train yourself to hold on to the R.E.M sleep (maybe through a LD) you could successfully have 24hr consciousness (with a normal nights sleep every month or so like in polyphasic sleep).
It would be possible to be 24h conscious, very advanced lucid dreamers perhaps yogi’s or the likes can do that. If you do this you will not be able to skip deep sleep so you have to stay lucid there as well (which is not easy but possible). I dont think any damage would occur if you did this for the rest of your life, since your brain will still get it’s normal amount of rest.
The only diffrence with lucid dreams and normal dreams is that you realise you are dreaming. Your REM phase happens even if you realise you are dreaming, unless you wake yourself up of course.
It is possible to be “conscious” 24 hours per day. I know, from what I have read, that Tibetan Buddhists (and I am sure other disciplines)can do it. Jeff has also reported that he can stay conscious during all stages of sleep.
You can be conscious in non rem states. This is where you will hear people talk about the void. I have only experienced this a few times myself but, I quickly loose consciousness. Then regain consciousness when a dream starts again. Right now I am of the opinion that I loose consciousness however, some things that other people have shared makes me think that I might just be conscious during those times and I don’t remember. I think this because I do become conscious as soon as a dream starts. I can actually see the dream come into focus at times. Other times Im just suddenly in the dream fully lucid.
Also, you can dream in non- REM stages. Jeff talks about this a lot and says these dreams are in black and white. I have never experienced this my self ( at least I don’t think I have). I have had short low lucid dreams that I thought were non REM dreams but, they are in color.
Now, getting to the heart of your question. I do not think it is possible to dream (lucid or other wise) all night long. While I believe that you can bend the rules slightly: like inducing a REM period at bed time, extending the length of rem periods etc. I do not think you can completely break the rules. In the comas thread, jeff shared his experiences with consciousness in delta sleep and no matter what he did he could not create any visuals at all. Nor could he bring himself up to REM sleep. But anyway, that is just my take on it and I could be completely wrong. Perhaps as we practice we will evolve to become true masters of the mind and learn to significantly alter our sleep patterns. However, even if we can, that does not necessarily mean that we should. The different levels of sleep exist for a reason and if we tamper with that (too much) we could miss out on something important. Perhaps even harm ourselves in the long run.
Also science has found interesting findings that we need deep sleep to make special proteins that play a role in our immune system. During deep sleep, the production of growth hormone is at its peak. Growth hormone speeds the absorption of nutrients and amino acids into your cells and aids the healing of tissues throughout your body. The hormone also stimulates your bone marrow, where your immune system cells are born.
So we also need deep sleep and not just rem!
yes, but lucid dreaming in delta would still have the same benefits right?
plus, we need delta to be healthy, but we dont nessiceraly have to have it.
Well u have high and low delta sleep.
high delta is from 2 to 4 hz and there u have still dreams, but in low delta from 2 hz and lower u dont have dreams anymore, to less brain activity!
I do not believe that is correct. From what I understand we need both Alpha 7-14 cps and Delta 0-4 cps in order to survive. Theta 4-7 cps is another matter, while many “experts” may claim that we do not need Theta they really do not know that for a fact. There is too much about our brain that we do not know. Like I said above, it is certainly possible to retain consciousness in those states, But you may not be able to dream in all of them.
With that said, retaining consciousness through all sleep stages has it’s advantages. You would likely have more lucid dreams in both rem and non-rem sleep. However, as far as I know, you cant continuously dream through all of these stages so, you may well have long periods where you are doing nothing but looking into blackness.
Retaining consciousness throughout all levels of sleep is a good goal to shoot for. It is a goal I am going fore. All I was saying is that you can not eliminate any of the stages of sleep.
i believe this is correct, you will have to maintain lucidity into NREM sleep, be it laying down and literally going asleep in a dream only to wake up back in that dream lucid again (which i’ve “sort of” done but the memories are fuzzy, i’m not sure if i really went into NREM but it seemed like it helped me stay lucid obscenely long) or literally being conscious in deep delta sleep, people have supposedly done it.
the best example i can think of though is the kind of hypnagogic/obe state in which you clearly aren’t awake but you don’t feel like you are asleep either, i was in it this morning via WILD, and i would see images and eventually they formed as holes that lead into dream scapes, but i wasn’t a part of them, i could reach out and touch them, but prior to doing so I had no idea if I was paralysed or not… it seemed like I was, but I felt like I was constantly in immediate danger of moving my real body and waking up…
when I gained a dream body it was… it was just oscilating back and forth with a dream body and my real body, and the only thing I could think of to do to get me into REM sleep was to meditate, so I sat down on the grocery store floor in the dream and tried to meditate/self hypnotize myself, I wanted an astral projection, so I tried to get myself into sleep paralysis, DEEP SLEEP PARALYSIS… but it didn’t really work, I was back in the body but it felt like it wasn’t paralyzed, but I didn’t try to move it, then I was back in the dream and tried climbing an imaginary dream ladder (existing only in my imagination, but I could feel myself climbing it inside an empty void in the dream)…
and well i eventually woke up… it probably lasted 15-20 minutes though… but it just did not have the integrity of an REM dream, so to speak.
so you know I think I was in NREM of some kind… I have a lot of theories about this but I don’t have an EEG so I really can’t confirm … but yeah I think you can be lucid the whole night except for deep sleep… for this to work based upon my experiences you would have to bypass light sleep (where thoughts are racing out of control, and hypnagogics are apparent) and instead be lucid in that, but the thoughts would just be completely absent, all you would get would be images, and you would be the one thinking, not a sort of fragmented “unconsious” that is thinking for you.
holy reality
The dreams that you think were non-rem where they in color or black and white. I too have had some low level lucid dreams that just did not feel the same as other lucid dreams. I used to think these were non rem dreams until I read some of jeff’s old posts about non rem dreaming. In those topics jeff explained that non rem dreams are in black and white. I was just curious to see if that was true for everyone.
Sleep is necessary for all body functions and normal is having at night, beside after lunch 
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Experimenting with sleep is very dangerous and only healthy physicaly and psychicaly can one try to change normal circadian rhytmicity.
Those other mentioned here ways of sleeping try only if absolutely having no problems of any kind, and of course if you don’t take any medication.
We are not talking about any sort of sleep deprivation here.(which would be bad) We are discussing retaining consciousness through all the levels of sleep which is something very different, and in my opinion, harmless to your body.
Is it possible to get yourself in that state of mind that you don’t have to sleep in normal way. Tibetan budhists maybe know some techniques.
I am not sure what you mean by the “normal way”.
Like I said above, I think you can bend some of the rules of sleep but, I do not think you can break them. You can retain consciousness in all levels of sleep but, I don’t think you can completely eliminate any levels of sleep. Now, I do believe you can do things like induce a rem period, prolong a rem period etc. However at some point the dream would end as your body enters deeper levels of sleep.
Anyway, I am back to trying to retain consciousness through all levels of sleep. I will let you know how I make out. If anyone else has experiences with this, what was it like for you during the deeper periods of sleep? Do you notice things like the passage of time?
So far I have induced a dream at my normal bed time then the dream would fade on me. Next I would briefly experience the void but, I would quickly loose consciousness. Then, I would either see the dream start to form or find myself standing in the middle of the dream. Then, the cycle would start all over again. So far this is the closest I have come.
I have managed to stay lucid a few times in deep sleep. First of all you want to know, how can you be sure this is deep sleep and not ‘just’ the black void that often appears beween (lucid) dreams. As far as I know there are 2 checks you can perform. The first is to try and visualise a dream and enter it. If there is any vision whatsoever, you can be sure you arent in deep sleep (well there is 1 exeption, it seems that at the onset of deep sleep it’s still possible to dream in black and white, but I have never done so). Now the next test you can do is to try and wake yourself up. If you succeed fairly rapid, then you probably were not in deep sleep. This test is only useful if normally you can wake yourslelf up fast (in like 5 seconds or less) during a LD. Sofar when I was in deep sleep, I could only wake myself up after like 30s to 1 minute or more of really intense trying (which was scary at first, I thought I couldnt wake up anymore). The feeling is really peculiar and weird at first when you try and can’t wake up.
So what’s it like in deep sleep? Well for one, pretty quiet since you are there without any dream. Also I would say I was able to keep track of time somewhat. Furthermore deep sleep seems to be a stage where you can even more easily feel your energy body, which is nice to experiment with (havent done this a lot but im planning to).
Thanks for sharing your experiences. I am going to continue to practice. It is weird that I can start WILD at my bed time and enter a dream but, then I loose consciousness soon after the dream ends. I suppose I should not complain. I get some great lucid dreams and from what most describe there is not much to do in the deeper states of sleep anyway.