One challenge of bringing western science into the study of lucid dreaming is that western science tends to focus on repeatable external results, and lucid dreaming is by nature personal and subjective. There are a few areas we could bring the scientific method in (one that comes to mind is the seemingly consistent ‘laws’ of the dream world, like the expectation effect) but even then their reach will be limited. Especially when you consider all the steps between the dream experience and a study. We rely on the human person to remember the dream, process it, then verbally translate those experience to words, communicate it to a researcher, then the researcher categorizes the experience into data points. Each one of those events is like sending the original dream experience through Google Translate, something is lost at each step.
Further, we must also acknowledge that we do not have a solid scientific understanding of consciousness, or the psyche, and the field of dreaming touches both of those. We tend to carry some unchecked assumptions about experience and reality as a whole, which will of course distort our understanding of the nature of dreaming.
I believe the study of lucid dreaming has incredible power for transformation. It strikes me as similar to spiritual matters, in a lot of ways. The scientific world and the human mind (perhaps it’s mostly a western thing) want verifiable, consistent, repeatable, concrete answers. Take these steps, get these results. In the world of lucid dreaming, spiritual growth, and psychological transformation, this is not how reality behaves. In those 3 areas there are no methods that work for every single person. It’s not as concrete as the way physical reality behaves. Sign posts, or pointers, tend to be an effective way of communication when conveying deep spiritual truths. The more “direction based” or prescriptive you get, the less effective it becomes. IMO this has to do with how each of these 3 areas is built off of your own “self.” Your path will look different than mine, since we are navigating the waves of our own personal experiences, beliefs, energies, etc. None of us have the same collection of experiences, so none of us can say what steps another will need to take to navigate the challenges they bring.
There’s for sure a ton of room for improvement in the studies of lucid dreams. The challenges I mentioned above need to be navigated, we can’t treat it like we treat sciences of physical reality. We need to be creative and question what a lucid dream science would even look like. I do think it will take a while for a verifiable science to catch up to the fact that individuals are experiencing incredible transformation with lucid dreaming. Also, IMO, the world is not ready for a large scale study that “proves” to the world that lucid dreaming has incredible potential. The public eye is a mess, it would add to the already noisy discourse around the subject.
All that to say, I believe the best thing we can do in this scenario is to be the scientist ourselves. Get curious about what’s possible in a lucid dream, get curious about the nature of dreaming or our selves, and run our own experiments individually. Then talk about those experiences. Hopefully find consistencies. I am already convinced of lucid dreaming’s incredible potential, I really just want to talk about that, and my experiences with people who are equally as excited and curious. Smaller groups of people, larger impact per person. When those small groups get together to ask these questions, I think we’ll see some awesome stuff happen. Like, I know I spoke against prescriptive paths, but I believe we could come up with pretty powerful dream prompts (requests to shout to the lucid dream) with incredible potential for transformation.