Yeah, in a recent ld i felt depression and it faded slightly but i pulled it back. I managed to have continuous false awakens that night though so its not a ld killer. i think a happy mindset helps a ld. Because whenever i suffer depression i find it hard to concentrate.
Depression hasn’t really affected my ability to LD. It’s always been a great escape. I’ve been severly depressed for awhile now and the only difference has occationally been my recall, which has dropped. Other than that, my chances of LD’s haven’t decreased in the slightest.
I’d imagine however, that people who need motivation to LD are affected since depression can affect you in that area.
Depression runs in my family, and I had it pretty bad for about a year or so when I was younger. I still have it, but I stopped taking meds and couseling. I’ve just learned to deal with it and figured out ways on my own to combat it. When I had it worse, I don’t really remember dreaming very much, considering I slept or napped almost the whole day. From my experience, I’m not sure if it would affect LDing in itself, but it might reduce dream recall.
Well, it certainly must be different from people to people. I see a lot of people in this thread say that depression has affected their lucid dreaming ability in a negative way. It has been the opposite for me. When I was around 18-21 years old, I had both anxiety and depression, but I was not anxious all the time, only on occasions, but I was depressed and sad all the time. Back then I knew what lucid dreams were and that I had them, but that was pretty much all I knew about lucid dreaming. During this time I had lots of lucid dreams, and good dream recall. It might also be worth mentioning that I slept for 10-12 hours a night at the worst times… My lucid dreams were at least a comfort to me back then. The depression went away when I took up martial arts, and I haven’t been depressed since then.
I’ve also talked to several lucid dreamers who have had them since a young age, and something almost all of us have in common is that we have at least at some point in our lives had anxiety and/or depression.