While reading this passage in an ebook i downloaded I started wondering how exercise would effect dreams and lucid dreams.
How Exercise Affects Your Body Temperature Rhythm
If you want to instantly increase the quality of your sleep, then start an exercise
program if you don’t exercise already. Exercise helps you sleep better in a number of
ways, I’m not even going to mention all the other health benefits! :
• Exercise will raise your body temperature rhythm, and make your body
temperature “peak” at a higher level. This will increase your energy levels
throughout the day, you’ll feel more awake, alive, and motivated.
• As your body temperature levels will max out at a higher level, your body
temperature will also drop more easily and deeper. This will allow you to sleep
deeply, without interruptions.
• Regular exercise will prevent your body temperature rhythm from “flat-lining”,
which will allow you to sleep deeply even if you’ve had a stressful day, or
couldn’t exercise on one particular day.
• Exercise delays the body temperature “drop” in the evening, allowing you to stay
awake and alert longer without feeling tired and drowsy.
• Exercise is also a great relief of tension and stress, which as you’ll later find out,
is a major cause of sleeping disorders
How do you think this would effect REM sleep and dreams?
Also how many of the regular lucid dreamers on here exercise regularly? And how many people exercise regularly who aren’t yet regular lucid dreamers?
bay
Well, I’m not sure of the science or any studies behind it, but here’s my personal experience with the relation between the two. I exercise regularly, at least five or six days a week, cardio, lifting, climbing, etc., the whole gamut of exercise types. For the past month I’ve been having a lucid dream about once a week. I wake up pretty early, so I don’t get too much sleep at night, but I generally nap when it’s convenient, to try and make up for the sleep loss. But that’s more the result of my schedule rather than the effect of exercise.
I googled this topic, and found one pretty inclusive article, here. Though, I say inclusive because it mentions that there are some studies which found regular exercise increases the more regenerative non-REM sleep, and there are other scientists who say that regular exercise doesn’t affect the sleep of normal people.
I see it like this, regular exercise may or may not affect REM sleep frequency. But it certainly doesn’t prevent it. So unless you go lucid during the majority of your REM periods each night (which would be awesome), it shouldn’t be any sort of problem.
thanks for the reply…i guess what i am really wondering is if more exercise = more deep sleep (a bigger portion of your sleep is deep sleep) then where does it take away from? is there less stages 1 and 2 or less of REM sleep - because somethign must be taken away to account for more deep sleep, right?
hmm… Id probably agree to this, whenever I engage in some strenuous of sorts, I find myself the next morning still shattered and needing more sleep then normal and usually I don’t have LD’s following some heavy activity … hope that answers part of your question 
Here’s a link to an abstract for a study on sleep and exercise. In short, they’ve found that both stage 2 and stage 4 increase, it doesn’t mention stages 1 and 3, but those are transition states anyway and are fairly short. But yeah, it’s the overall amount of REM sleep which is reduced.
im sure exercise doesnt help LD.
I would think that exersise would affect lucid dreaming not only on that level, but you would be sleepier, and sleep deeper, and that could reduce LD’s, because to have an LD, you must have some level of awareness. I think naps are best of lucid dreaming because of your light sleep, and having a deeper sleep may decrese your LD chances.