LD's drove my friend insane

Quest for Lucidity
1

I am currently attempting to enter a LD through the WILD technique, but I wish to share a story (more like a warning).

   I have a friend who's name I won't share, who has done lucid dreaming for some time, and was sharing his experiences with me (he made me want to do it myself :razz:). Anyways, in August this year, my friend came to my house looking frustrated and shocked me by telling me that I am not here and that he is dreaming! I told him it's all real (because it obviously was, but you never know). He then told me that he has observed lots of dreamsigns and that he can't read any text. He said that it is clearly a dream but that he cannot wake up, that he has been in it for ever. He said that everything is different and that he can even get all the effects he was getting while LD-ing (strobing of vision while turning around, text unreadable/changing, the buildings were not where he remembered them, I looked different, his parents are never home, etc). 
 I became very freaked out and I took him into the house to give him a glass of Sprite and cool down, maybe watch some TV, but he was not the way I knew him, he was scared and was sometimes staring blankly. Eventually, his parents came home from work and phoned me because they were worried becuase my friend was not home. I told them that something is wrong with him, and they came over immediately. The next day, his parents took him to a doctor and, after days of testing, the doctor concluded that he has schizophrenia  :cry: . 
 Apparently, his LD hobby became the main plot for his schizo phantasy, in which he was dreaming and everyone and everything around him was unreal. He is doing a lot better now (he's on medication). 
 I am particularly concerned that practicing lucid dreaming may reveal latent schizophrenia in people who might never develop it at all. I am honestly a bit scared of doing it myself because my family too has a few (dead) members who have been schizophrenic.
2

:eek: Insane !? :eek:

That would be like a nightmare !
Beliving you are in a LD and youre not !

I can`t say anything about your question. :neutral:

But I have begun to think its a dream and dont stop wonder after some RCs , but I dont think its a dream .
I just think that it is so weird that it could be .
I use lenses and when they start messin` …

3

Hmmm…
Today I was sitting around thinking about dreams and whatnot. I asked myself if I was dreaming and concluded that maybe our entire lives are nothing but dreams of what out lives could be like and that when we die we are actually just waking up in the “real” real life. I laughed at the thought and shrugged it away though. No real point here cept that I have experienced many times where i wasn’t sure if I was awake or not.

4

Hmm, well it was pretty disturbing the other day when I kept thinking that humans only had 4 fingers on each hand… IRL. I saw a game called ‘5 Fingers’ and wondered why he needed an extra. After I was done playing I realized what had just been going through my mind and did a RC. (after a quick truit-slap to the head :truit: )

5

well according to buddhism and the budda that are lives are dreams and we exist in two states awakesleeping and sleeping but either is still asleep not really awake to the universe and everything, even the air and space. I sometimes realise it that everything is a vibration and it is not so much what you see but the content of it. It is hard to explain.
Also to do with the story above I was reading today about stuff to do with shamans in this book I have been reading lately about lucid dreams. And it states that to be a shaman you have to be born into it, but you also have to want to do it after which you have to be like a master mediater and then a master LD but the extent of this is you going into a state of rebirth but this is commonly known as schizophrenia but as part if the initiation to be a real shaman you have to find the right path and act on both evil and good at the same time.
The medicine practise Homeopathy is based on this that to treat or heal someone you need to apply posistive or negative energy. Thus this goes back to what I was saying before about the vibrations around us. Of course this could mean anything and I might be wrong but it is hard to dissprove as shamans have been healing ppl for 1000’s of yrs. Also whilst I was in amsterdam last year I met a shaman there and he said he had treated 145 cancer patients and cured 90 and when they next went to see a doctor, the doctor said there was nothing wrong with them. Also he didn’t do anything magical all he did was give them a solid decent diet and some herbel rememdies. But to make them you can’t be anyone but a shaman, i certainly respect them as i have been in the presence of one.

And in response to the guy who started this topic, I think your friend needs to mediate or do tai-chi it will sort his energy out and unclog some ports. He just needs to relax and clear his mind.

:astral:

6

Well i’m more of a skeptic, I don’t believe in this spiritual stuff, sorry :razz:

but I must admit i am taking lots of homeopathic medicine but I don’t think it works by applying different types of energy. Basically, homeopathy shouldn’t work… but somehow it does :happy:

i tend to believe the low concentration chemicals in those homeopathic beads/pills/palletes/little balls or whatever somehow regulate chemical inbalances in your body.

7

Okay attention seeking man. I seriously doubt that, and i think that if this is true, your friend would have gone insane anyways. But since this is a dream and you don’t exist, i really shouldn’t worry. PWNED!

8

A lot more people have mental illnesses than you might think. My uncle died as an indirect result of his schizophrenia.

I see no reason why lucid dreaming couldn’t trigger it as Metabog said. But still I would think about it as a risk no worth worrying about. Worrying about triggering an illness you may or may not have will probably be more harmful.

9

I think LDing could be a possible trigger for unlocking mental disorders because you are always questioning reality.
I guess you should pick questions that you will only get a positive response with if you really are dreaming. I am not too worried about this though. I suppose for some people LDing could suppress mental disorders but that is just speculation.

10

Wicked! :eek:

Poor guy… I feel so sorry for him… :sad:

11

Yeah Dreams give you raw material to question reality, but this in time leads to depression, The human mind is not capable of thinking deep over and over. You have to have a break from time to time, to recover from the depths of lifes meaning etc. :smile:

12

Sounds like something out of one of those “NightMare on Elm Street” Movies

Magic

13

This is actually the first time I come across a truly negative side-effect of LDs on a person :eek:

That seems very plausible… Makes you ponder about what you’re doing, and the things you might be setting in motion but which effects will only be visible after quite some time.

I hope the guy will be allright…

14

He’s fine, it was more like an episode. I think he may get it again if he quits taking the drugs.

I don’t think anyone will get schizophrenia simply from LD-ing and questioning reality, but if the illness was going to happen later in life anyway, LD-ing may in fact trigger it sooner.

this is the main reason.
psychoactive drugs like LSD and Psylocibin Mushrooms have been proven to unleash such mental illnesses in patients who would have developted it later anyway (Syd Barrett, for example. Poor guy, trapped in a dream world!).

15

Please don’t mind me if I sound like a n00b, but what was schizophrenia again?

16

Wow, poor guy… thats creepy :confused: hope it won’t happen again!
Even thoug i must say that it sounds odd… he was so confused that he thougt that his RC’s failed? (or how was it?)

I may have gotten this all wrong, but isnt schizophrenia when you think that you’re multiple persons? I saw a TV show about that once… also very scary

You mean medicine by drugs, right? Because otherwise, that would have sounded really wrong.

17

schizophrenia is when u see or hear stuff that doesnt really happening…

as i always say, once you believe something - its happen…

he must tought for some reason that he is LDing and believed it so hard that his mind has been twisted itself.

18

let’s see what the wiki has to say on this…

effectively, someone with said disease has a completely busted view of the world around him.

as for your friends “insanity” or whatever you want to call it, i would’nt worry about it. i seriously doubt it could be common enough to happen to any more of your friends/relatives. i have, until this thread, never heard of anyone having ended up worse off from LDing than when they started. i would’nt worry too much about it, if i were you. if dreams could make you go bonkers, then we would all be hospitalized and doped up with weird drugs. and the fact that we arent, means they are safe. most likely this was caused by something else. i think…

19

Yes, your friend’s clearly delusional, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s schizophrenic, and it absolutely doesn’t mean that his condition is caused by practicing lucid dreaming. How old is he? Could it be that your friend suffered from severe sleep deprivation? Were any drugs involved? There are too many factors that could have caused that kind of behaviour. Also, people are often misdiagnosed for schizophrenia, as there is no objective biological test for this illness. Usually you need an agreement between at least two psychiatrists to apply this diagnosis. I really do hope he’s diagnosed and treated by professionals.

20

In my personal oppinion, I believe he just couldn’t handle the truth. In my life, i have been striving to access my subconcious and concious control so that I can achieve a state in which lucid dreams and waking life are indistinguishable. After 7 months of intense work on this project, i was able to close my eyes and enter the lucid world, and then open my eyes into the waking world - both were almost exactly the same except the lucid world was like the negative of a photograph. Black and white, where white should be black. The ultimate state of living is one in which a person has ultimate concious control and can design thier reality as they fit. They essentially become god. In essence, I have been trying to end up where your friend is. I have wanted to seek out a psychiatric ward and ask if i can come in and spend some time with individuals who claimed they could fly, so that they could teach me how. We lock up the people who can control thier destiny, yet those who really are in the jail, are the business men and women who have no control of thier reality and walk around answering thier phones and going home to thier kids every day.

The real problem here in my eyes is that he went into this state unknowingly and thus was not prepared for it, or had doubts about entering a state of total control.

In ways, I envy you friend because he came close to becoming the god of his reality. It is just a shame that he had not the right state of mind or experience to go “right, I understand the situation I am in, so I will make the best of it.”

A person who has had experience with psychedelics will probably empathise. The first time you take them, everything shocks you because you couldn’t believe it was happening. But after you unlock that door, and understand how things can change so rapidly, you begin to control the integration of these factors, and suddenly you can walk around, do the shopping, play with the kids, etc, in your altered reality, without appearing any different to anyone else, as you accustom to the effects of the altered state.

It is a shame your friend tried to deny his altered/new-found state, which ultimately ended up in him forcing his reality into a ‘bad trip’ in which he believes will not end. I encourage him, once he has grounded himself, to keep lucid dreaming, but only after serious introverted and extroverted conversations to define where he wants to go, his limits, and to obtain the headspace that if something unexpected happens, it is better to be calm and understand it. Fear is only the lack of understanding.