Can you use LD’s to practice skills that you use in real life and actually improve them in real life. Like sport, academia, confidence.
I can see how you can improve maybe confidence as you can imagine the same scenario you might face in a presentation for example, but other things like sport…I don’t know, maybe the experiences we have in dreams reinforce our minds capabilities; that would indeed be a very useful application of LD’s (which btw I haven’t managed yet, not even remotely!)
I heard of story of golf player that was doing LD and improved his swing because he praticed in a dream.
I dont know if its true but we have heard of it many times.
According to many people, yes, these things are possible. I can’t verify that with personal experience, but this would make sense for some things. Like you said, confidence can be greatly boosted by the things you do in LDs. But sports…I really couldn’t say. There are certainly a lot of personal anecdotes about this being successful, and I’d tend to trust those.
Yeah im sure they are true. Dreamer scientifist say that morning dream really help you to take on the journey and without knowing it teach you advice on the thing that will come.
There are many accounts about improving skills in LD’ing. Improving confidence when facing a presentation has been given as an example many times. Then Pr Paul Tholey trained the olympic german ski jump team by this way. He said he also learnt to make skateboarding figures like this.
Thus lucid dreaming is a solution but it seems possible to enhance some abilities just by imagining too. And it’s likely to be easier than LD’ing cause the main problem with LD’ing is having lots of LD’s and remember what to do in dreams. This requires a good lucidity level and you don’t have it all the time.
I heard this story too. I verified and it wasn’t really in LD’s indeed. Jack Nicklaus corrected his swing in the 1960’s by having a dream which showed he was holding his club incorrectly.
[i]“Wednesday night I had a dream and it was about my golf swing. I was hitting them pretty good in the dream and all at once I realized I wasn’t holding the club the way I’ve actually been holding it lately. I’ve been having trouble collapsing my right arm taking the club head away from the ball, but I was doing it perfectly in my sleep. So when I came to the course yesterday morning I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. I shot a sixty-eight yesterday and a sixty-five today.”
Sources: Jack Nicklaus, as told to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, 27 June 1964[/i]
in EWLD Laberge says that when you dream of making physical movements, those muscle areas are stimulated, though they are suppressed through paralysis, so bascially you can practice phsyical exercises in your dreams and it will help you improve while awake.
the best thing is if you want to get really good at something, do it awake AND asleep! The first time I rode a bike in like 7 years I was out riding for 3 hours and when I went to bed my mind started dreaming about bike riding to re-orient itself to this skill, in what would have normally been un-eventful semi-awake semi-notawake dreamless sleep.
EDIT: Thanks for finding the thread for me Mod… No worries!
I was wondering if anyone else uses lucid dreams as a means for improvement in daily waking life?
For example, learning how to play guitar better, learning how to exercise better, or learning how to socialize better…
I’ve got to the point now where lucid dreams are no longer a means for a quick thrill, and I no longer feel the need to satisfy myself by going around asking DC’s/SG’s questions… So now I use my lucid dreams each night to help me with everyday life. For example, at the moment I am having trouble communicating with this one particular person, so I recreate the scene I wish to practice, and have the opportunity to work on it. I believe this is actually the ‘medical’ or rather health purpose/reason behind lucid dreaming, what lucid dreaming is meant to be used for… and it does help me a lot to get in this practice while i sleep
Some nights however I will choose not to lucid dream, because the day was stressful or something happened, and the mind needs to unwind from it… otherwise I end up feeling like crap the next day. But if the day has been generally non-stressful then I will try to lucid dream that night with the intention of practicing whatever area of my life needs work.
I would like to hear if anyone else does the same sort of thing, what it is they practice, what experiences they have had with this, what they have learnt/gained from doing it… and so on.
I agree with this… especially when it comes to martial arts… If you visualise punching someone in the chest your punch stops at the chest, but if you visualise punching through their chest then the punch has a lot more power. You hear about the chinese guys who have unbendable arms and do all that crazy stuff… most of it comes from using visualisation. When you throw an opponent into the ground it will hurt, but think of how much more power and force is achieved when your visualising the opponent going 1 mile deep into the ground when you let go… it really does make a big difference.
I actually practiced martial arts in my lucid dreams when I first took it up and it helped a lot! During class I wouldn’t have the time to implement what I was learning, but then at night I would have the chance on using the skills on actual opponents (in this case DC’s) which gave me that workable experiential knowledge.
I thought once you are in sleep paralysis your entire nervous system shuts off to the rest of your body? (besides the brain that is) meaning that those muscle areas cannot be stimulated, not even on a nervous electrical impulse level? There is however something I recently discovered called Muscle Memory… whether that memory is stored in the muscles themselves or the brain I am unsure but I would love for this to be true…
But when you think about it… flying doesn’t exactly build up your flying muscles now does it?
