I was just reading some user comments on another site that made me realize how little our society respects dreams, and how this has led to a culture where many people are convinced that they either don’t dream at all, or that dreams make no sense, are not vivid, and cannot be controlled. They’re just the “random firing” of neurons in sleep, like a screensaver for the brain so it doesn’t power down while resting. To end a story with “it was all a dream” is considered the ultimate sin in storytelling, because if something is “only a dream,” it’s completely worthless in every way.
Children soak up their cultures when they’re very young, and perhaps the reason why people in our modern culture struggle to recall dreams and to become lucid is because when our brains are young and impressionable, as tiny toddlers, we decide what is and isn’t important by watching those around us, and focus on what we determine to be important. We learn to tune out the traffic noise outside our house: no one ever mentions it, people act like they can’t hear it, and really they usually don’t, they tune it out, and a kid learns to do that too.
When a kid grows up, waking up each morning after many dreams, and finds that the other people around in the society never mention these happenings, don’t wake up each day and recount their dreams to each other excitedly, never ask the child about his or her own dreams, even telling a child it’s silly to have been scared or excited by “only a dream,” and generally completely devalue them, kids learn that these experiences are as unimportant as the traffic noise outside, and disregard them, automatically tuning it out upon awakening. They don’t strengthen and develop the mental pathways for natural automatic lucid dreaming every night, with vivid dream recall.
We come to it later in life, when we have to use more repetition and patient effort to achieve what we could have done so easily when our brains were malleable as infants, but maybe it’s not quite too late. Given that lucid dreaming depends mostly on confidence and your own expectations, perhaps we can fake it out! 
Why not do a visualization during whenever you normally do them, or create a scene during a lucid dream itself, and visit a society where dreams ARE venerated! Put yourself in the scene as a toddler living in a society that feels comfortable and happy to you, and where dreams are highly respected. Nobody would even think of dishonoring a dream by rushing off to work before telling his family members of his dream exploits just completed. Even little children are encouraged to tell what they did, and everyone can get a good laugh at their antics. Only after the dreams are respectfully talked over and everyone takes time to say thanks for the dreams, do people move on with their day.
This idea just hit me and I haven’t tried it yet but I plan to! I’ve already got a picture in my mind of how the people look when they gather in their morning dream circle to share their adventures Of course you could picture them any way you like, the idea is to convince yourself that you experienced living a life in a society like that, and lucid dreaming is as natural to you as breathing, because that’s just what everyone always does where you live, no big deal.
Anyone else want to give it a try?
