I personally think that it is immoral to kill DCs just for fun in LDs. After all, DCs in your dream have their own personalities, and possibly have their own thoughts, so killing them would be much like killing someone in RL. I would never hurt a DC unless they happened to attack me, and maybe not even then. (I would probably just teleport out of there)
Never innocents. If I were to harm a DC, it would be a character that I specifically created as an enemy, such as a serial killer or a group of hostile aliens, or something along the lines of that. I wouldn’t go on a mass killing spree, though.
I think that if you’re smart enough not to do the same thing in real life, it’s alright to do anything you want in a lucid dream. As Deusabscondidum said, it would be like harming a video game (I lost >.>) character.
Morality is something defined by our society. But are dreams are not defined by that, WE create that society and so there are no “rules” to obey. Personally I’ve never dreamt of killing anyone (be that in a ND or a LD), but I don’t think such a thing is immoral.
On a side-note, instead of killing a DC, I would like to try killing myself in a LD. It would be quite interesting, though would it be immoral? I don’t think so.
Well, I was once very angry at somebody I knew and that person appeared out of nowhere in a normal dream. (I wasn’t even aware of the fact that lucid dreams existed back then.) Very angry. 
And then, without me really interfering with anything, I acted violent on her. Details are not important at all, but it was stuff I found very inhumane. And I continued for a while, taking out my anger to the dream’s fullest. When I woke up, I felt very relieved. 
I was not really over my anger, but I could tolerate it better. Remembering the dream everytime I saw the person made me feel sick of what I (or my SC) did, but I didn’t really feel the need to break things at the time. 
I’m not sure if the dream meant my SC was corrupted or sickly or disgusting or anything, but my SC was all of those adjectives. And the dream helped me recover. Since then, I don’t believe that dreams should be (even NDs) interpretted to understand your SC. I think seeing them as a therapy is a better option. 
If you had no reason to do anything to the person, who maybe you don’t know at all, I’m not sure what to think about those dreams.
I think for this discussion, that is the key distinction. Being in a normal dream, I often act uncharictaristically of my waking self and do things that I either don’t understand or would never consider in waking reality. I’m truly asleep to the situation and am riding along the dream like a wave, passively participating and sometimes not even aware of the reason behind my actions. I would think in this state, anything my dream self does is not only excusable, but beyond my control.
While lucid, however, everything is intentional. And it is driven by my waking consiousness that I brought into my dreamworld without leaving the REM state. Now, personal accountability can be measured.
But the debate is still valid.
In a world with no consequences (at least immediately felt), right and wrong are blurred and each individual is only as accountable as their personal conscious allows. More conservative people may think some things are reprehensible, while others who live a different lifestyle may draw the line at DC murder or torture. And still, just because you make the consious decision to do something you know there will be no consequenses for, that doesn’t filp a switch in your brain that turns you evil. I think that the repeditive violoent behavior for people who are not normally violent would be unhealthy. But for people who have trouble behaving in society without harming others, it may be more of an outlet.
Good topic.
Ok, because the whole topic “ethic” is a complex system, that may be seen in many different ways BECAUSE it is complex, I don´t want to state my opinion on this ( actually, do I have one?) but rather show the relativity of some actions.
In our waking life we are always surrendered by immoral actions.
We read books about murders/big fantasy warships/brutality/less violent crimes/…;
we see films, in which the good and bad guys are battling in more or less direct ways;
we play games, which are more or less violent, partly even if not really violent, they are about quite immoral things (eg. strategygames).
In most of the time, we dont really think about the morality of the actual film/book/game - we simply consume the emotions caused by our active or passive activity. There is a difference between sandbox and accounted decisions like " He did that, so he has to be killed"
What I want to say is: There are worlds between meaning it and doing it.
Like torturing a DC and having fun because he has pain is not like being nija and assasinating some DC´s because its a cool action that you cannot do in RL.
To take it to another level : the difference between doing it because of the effect or doing it because of the action itself.
Nontheless, as I already mentioned “sandbox”, I may not be wrong to collect the most diverse expieriences to have more data for your conscious mind to calculate/judge/analysise/think about.
I think one cannot judge a person because of his actions in his dreams, as cruel they may be; at least the matter is about what the person actually thinks.
Morality itself is a very relative topic, for example:
I really agree to the sentence " Don´t do to others what you don´t want to be done to you ( if you were in the same situation) "
But in fact, without to offend against this statement, one could justify things like torture/mass murder/…/ with uncountable argumentations.
As you see, it seems to be the best to follow the middle course, in life in general, in your dreams, in following the middle course itself, …
Also don´t over-worry about things…
PS.: What about finding happiness in being, doing, living, thinking…
... you know.. just
:fly:the current reflections of my dream experiences show me that it is not mattering if the dcs are “real” or not “real” because when we assume we can learn from them we can then have conversations, experience feelings, learn , and then they are !
because they are parts of ourselves ( or not ) , either way , it is good to treat them as being real, so that we can learn, because dreams show us how we think about the real world, and show us the depth of our relationships and our beliefs, and i have found that if i am dreaing that someone is in harmony with me even if i wouldn’t think that person is, than it is and has always been true
for instance i had a great dream of living in a nice home with my uncle for a long time, and we did nice bonding things and then went for a trip somewhere, and that is a dream that shows that , there is THAT potential to manifest EXACTLY, if i allow it,
and i see dreams as being so useful and full of clues that, of course you can also have fun in them, and that is fine, it would be a great thing to learn from them too
++++ i met a dream woman inside a video game and i had a lot of fears and doubts about us being with each other, and doing what we were, and any time i had a thought immediately a person appeared to my side , personifying that thought with persuasion , and i knew it but also was swayed by those doubtful influences
one then convinced me to focus on somethig else and then i was playing a different game but i found the game to be devoid of meaning and went back to this woman but i still felt something wasn’t right and she said to me
“your doubts and fears are manifesting and are the result of …” and explained it, and i knew it to be true, but did not know whether ultimately she was trustworthy as many times she looked “dark” in some way , but that could have been my own fears causing her to morph dark !
then i fell into a negative lower reality and it was full of people with violence and with guns an di had to put my hand on one mans heart and keep saying , i love you its okay, im sorry, its alright
and he eventually woke up an drealized that i did not do anything wrong to him and he started to act similar to me
then i found a way into a “heaven” where things were beautiful and the people were calm, and i asked questions " where am i ? " one person had a straw in his nose which obviously means something,
one female dc told me “the purpose is to be everywhere on this island at once” which i knew meant to gain and evolve in dream awareness and higher conscousness, and the place seemed so huge it would never be explored in the time i had to be there
and if you think about our dream adventures in the end it is not at all rewarding or satisfying to be experienced conflict and chaos and all the negative things, becuase what if you couldn’t wake up from that plane any more ? It would be less real than here but you would have to work your way out of it
and i’ve had VERY long dreams where i Cannot WAKE UP and am faced with contemplating these situations and others where it is easy to and i know my stay will be rbefi, and i am always feeling on a deep level that to have a dream reality full of chaos is essentially, not beautiful and wonderful 
and the real freedom is in finding the beautiful places, the serene cities, to reflections of a higher reality where people are well.
now if they are you, if they aren’t you, if its “astral”, it its not “astral” the only thing that makes it not “real” is in that the laws are different than here ( i.e. , i have heard dreams have the law of anti-gravity) , and that you can wake up.
I really agree to your exposition.
this got alot to a point.
Ah I love to see different starting points going to statements that are all right 
as for life 
Here is the thing, as far as I can tell: your subconscious tends to give you what you need in dreams. If there’s an empty space and you think it’s supposed to have a person in it, your SC will probably put one there, and in that case the person’s just there for that purpose. If you’re angry and someone shows up and you kill them, that’s likely what they were there for. I don’t think it’s “immoral” to hurt dream characters, then, because what you put into dreams is generally what you need to get out of them. It’s like writing a character into a book knowing that the main character is going to kill them eventually, I guess.
I’ve never had any interest in harming my own DCs. In fact, I have a weird habit of apologizing to them for my SC’s decision to give them unfortunate circumstances. (“I’m sorry I made you so stupid that you fell off that balcony. Are you okay?”) I guess if I did I’d be less perturbed by the fact that I had hurt one of them than by the fact that my brain thought I needed a helpless entity to kill. Because I’m pretty sure that would mean something important.
Does that make sense? I’m not positing this as truth, of course, just rambling opinion. But I suspect this is how it works for me at least.
I feel it all comes down to the individual interpretation of the characters and meanings of the dream. I don’t believe “morality” even has to come into the picture. If there is an emotional tension in your psyche, odds are you’ll be killing or hurting someone in a dream - that’s just the way the SC expresses itself. There is something that needs to be faced, in that case, and the meaning of that killing is only to be interpreted by the individual.
BUT, if you find yourself in a situation without peril or danger and you simply begin slaughtering DCs just because you think it’s entertaining… well, how many of you would kill someone for entertainment in real life?
Science says that the brain cannot distinguish between “reality” and what is imagined. So if you imagine killing someone (and reveling in their suffering), then you may as well have committed a murder. Your consciousness is the witness - by your own perception you have just taken a life. Even if that person wasn’t real, it’s still taken by the brain as a real action. That’s worth thinking about.
Murders done in cold blood or for sport I find particularly disturbing. Just what is it that is so pleasing about taking a human life, real or imagined? Of course you will face no consequences in a ld, but is it the consequence that makes murder such a bad thing? I don’t think so.
I agree with TheChris, when he talked about the “middle way” and finding happiness in being, doing, living, and thinking.
Kudos on that one! 
Yeah, murder for many people is bad just because the consequences are great.
That makes me sad.
Also, thanks for the first part…I didn’t know that 
@ Antares:
You are right about that. It makes me wonder just how much people value life at all. In the end, life’s all anybody really has right? 
Well, it depends on beliefs so I don’t want to go there.
But I wonder how many people would kill others if killing was allowed… 
I think it would stay about the same. Most of the people posting on this thread talk about killing out of curiosity. I don’t think that the number of people who feel the need to murder would change, since they kill whether there are consequences or not. I don’t think consequences prevent murder… its just a neat system of dealing with murderers after the fact. 
Any thoughts on that?
That´s a problem.
I can´t imagine any system of consequences that is fair AND prevents from murders or similar things.
The only solution I see is to increase education, general enlightment and thus also compassion of the people.
This seems to be the only REAL way, but (who wonders) it seems to be by far not the easiest 
Well, I certainly wouldn’t kill anyone, nor you…
But many people actually would if you think about it.
Many people don’t kill because it’s labeled as a crime or because there are consequences.
Though I have yet to be in a situation to live/dream it, my simple moral would be do no harm to life. This is a personal choice, however. You want to be an absolute monster in your LDs? Go ahead. In the end, all a LD is is just a bunch of electric waves in your brain.
Still says something bad about ones character, though.
Having studies ethics, I feel an urge to participate in the discussion. Studying ethics my pre-existing belief that there are no objective values have been thoroughly fortified. The obvious consequence of that belief is that morality in dreams is equally vacuous as in waking life. The only thing we have to discuss is what we as individuals feel is right or wrong. There is no moral system that is better than any other, because in order to make the decision, we have to make value judgements. We cannot support value judgements without appealing to other value judgements to prove that the one in question is good and ought to be accepted. A foundation is necessary, but there is no way to prove that a suggested foundation is good. Unless we are prepared to be intellectually dishonest and simply run with a preferred foundation or set of principles without substantiating it, we have nothing to work with.
Since this is general ethics it may appear to be off topic, but surely it is central to the matter. If we are to judge a person’s actions in a dream, we need to qualify our judgement.
ok I want to join this topic, this is really interesting
I have to admit I still never had LD but from what I read I get that there is a difference between behaving with a DC in a ND and a LD because is sort of behaving with a person in real life.
We must start with a condition: the dream is something strictly related to us, that happens only in hour mind and is completely an illusion? Because if we believe that DC could be other dreamers or that they exist somewhere or anything like that the whole thing is completely different. (see --> SD)
Let’s consider the first case: dreams are imagination. In this case doing something bad to a DC wouldn’t theorically be wrong, because we are not really hurting anyone. For the case of ND, we could put it like a videogame: you kill hundreds of enemies but nobody will come at you and say that you are a psichopatic serial killer. I believe that for LD, the thing is a bit different; in a ND things just “happen” and it could happen as well that you kill/offend/hurt someone, but in a LD you don’t “have to” you just do it if you want. So this means that when you misbehave in a lucid dream you actually do it on purpose. We could answer again that DC are not real so there is no problem on hurting them because they don’t really feel anything, it is just our SC. But, to try to quote the dear S. Freud from his book Dream Interpretation (reccomended ), if when someone ask us if we would do something that we don’t like we answer “neither in a dream”, it means that what we actually do in a dream matters in our daily life and affects our morality. Same thing when we tell a dream we had to someone; most of the times we don’t properly say the whole story but make some minor changes and don’t say at all some parts because we think it’s better not to tell that person those things. If we actually tought that what happens in dreams is not related at all to what we do in our daily life we could tell someone our dreams without any fear; and this is much more important in a LD as we are conscious. In conclusion, I’m not going to give an answer because I’m not able to, what I think is that maybe morality should be applied to dreams too mostly while talking about LD because if someone hurts on purpose a DC only because he wants to means that he likes to; anyway I just wanted to give you some points to reflect by yourself hope I wasn’t boring and that my English wasn’t too bad 
Asura16, it is an interesting point you make about one not wanting to tell others what one has done in a lucid dream. If it was not immoral, then why not? Well, perhaps it is embarassing. Still, some things you might not want to tell about because people do understand that what we do in dreams, to an extent, reflects what we want to do IRL. Freud exaggerated this wish fulfilment aspect of dreams to the extent that he considered nightmares to represent subconscious masochistic tendencies. However, when it comes to lucid dreams our choices are concious and thus they can be seen, at least by others, as indications of certain wishes. We do in lucid dreams things we are not able to do in waking life. So, the judgement we wish to avoid by not sharing things we do in lucid dreams, is that of having those wishes. Wishes transcend the boundry of sleep and waking, and if they exist in the dream they exist in waking life. It is a question of character and not actions. It is not that what one did is a bad thing, it is that one is at all interested in such a thing. In the end I think that one only avoids sharing if one expects the listener to react negatively. For example, a person might not be comfortable with publicly discussing a lucid dream in which he enjoyed being a nazi, but among nazis he would feel quite comfortable.