Topic moved from the First Steps forum. Rather hard to find the perfect location though, but I think this general discussion is better located here.
Do you think the world would be better or worse if everyone knew they could Lucid Dream? I was wondering About the advantages or disadvantages of this?
Advatages:
People could be more serene knowing they could do whatever they want
Directors, artists, etc. can figure out how their works should be much more slid than just thinking about it in Daydreaming
Possibly less drug use knowing about LDs(thats a bit of a long shot)
Disadvantages:
People may do dangerous stuff if they make the mistake and think they are in a dream(i.e. Try to fly, kill others,etc.)
Some people might get too hooked and spend most of their life sleeping.
This might be a dumb topic but I was wondering whether or not I should post my experiences on other forums or tell my friends. What do you think?
P.S. Sorry if this is the wrong topic, I looked around and had no idea where to put this. Feel free to move it.
I think there would be a lot less death in general if people knew they could do anything in their dreams, they wouldn’t need to do stupid things in real life, they could simply wait until night to do there thing.
There would be less less drug use, although I don’t truly understand the drug users mind, a bunch of the trippy crap that makes drug usage so attractive to people could be done without harm.
Perhaps even there would be less war and stuff, because everybody would gain a sense of inner-peace from it. It would also give everyone of all nations and religions something in common. Less suicide. Less murder. Less rape. There would really be no point to all these things.
Who knows what it could do. Although I am forever an optimistic, I don’t know what or how effective it could be. Maybe it would give all the sad people something to be happy about. I think thats really the most important thing it could do.
Honestly. I don’t think it would make a difference at all.
People will be who they are with or without lucid dreaming. Maybe somethings would change for the individual, but on the whole I don’t think there would be any significant change to the human species.
There would be a significant difference IF they could some how make a technology that made lucid dreaming easy - any time of the day (so people could release whatever urges they had right when they needed to).
One things for sure, Freud would definately love this idea. He believed that all of our problems come from holding ourselves back from doing whatever we want, because society does not accept it. I would make a list of things, but parental controls would censor them out.
Basically, according to Freud’s psychoanalytical theory on human behavior, this would make a HUGE difference (if it was made easy so you could do it any time without any effort) on society, because people would not feel they would have to hold back any urges. They would know they could do whatever they wanted any time they wanted, but just in another dimension.
A positive side affect of this technology woudl be that it would help with obesity rates as well. People could eat healthy in their waking lives, without and regret, because they would know that whenever they wanted they could go chow down on anything they could imagine and have it do absolutely no harm to their body.
Another side affect of this technology, positive or negative because it’s all opinion based, is that it would put the gaming industry out of business in a matter of years. Who’d want to play a stupid game with semi-decent graphics that you had to hold a control for when you could go into your own world and play whatever damn game you wanted as realistically as you wanted. It may possibly also put the movie industry out of business, but that’s debateable.
All in all, the inventors of such a technology would be RICH.
It’s an interesting thought that I’ve had before myself. The only question is: How can lucid dreaming be made easy and effortless for any time you want it?
I agree with you for the most part. The question at the end is your best point. Some times I just want to do stuff that I shouldn’t be doing so I want to LD it. The bad part is I still can’t get a LD at will so I end up doing it in real life.
I have urges, lucid dreaming does not satisfy those urges. I’ve tried it several times.
It eases it a little sometimes but never satisfied them, the real thing is just different. People weak enough to give into urges will do so eventually, LDing may delay it but not stop it. It cannot change the way a brain works and that’s why it won’t be as effective as you’d think, it could even make things worse.
A psychotic mind could use it to try and find the best ways of doing it in real life, like a test run as opposed to an alternative.
Then there’s the possibility of it becoming like an addiction, what might happen if they can’t satisfy that urge one night because they didn’'t LD? They could have symptoms like wiithdrawl because they became used to using it that way and end up trying to satisfy it IRL.
In a perfect world it would work, but this is no perfect world.
You missed the main point of what I was saying. I was saying that if there was a technology to make it so you could do it AS LONG as you want, ANY TIME you wanted, it would work. The reason it currently does not satisfy you is because you’re only in the dream for a matter of minutes. IF you could do what it was you wanted to do for longer, maybe up to an hour, any reasonable person would admit that would release the urges.
It definitely would be better the more accepted it was… If it was accepted, then most us would probably have been practiced it since early childhood and thus most of us who lucid dream today will probably have been even better at it.
Also just being able to share lucid dream stories with friends, would probably increase motivation alot.
I didn’t miss the point. Technolodgy can fail, thus that one night or day could happen, and if it was as easily availible as that it would be more likely to become addictive and cause the problem.
But time isn’t the problem, it feels different, the emotional responses are different because you know it isn’t real.
Killing in a dream releases anger, but if you thrieve on the fallout of killing, the pain the family goes through. You won’t get that in a dream because it’s not real and so it wouldn’t stop the urges no matter how long you do it.
For someone who sees another person in the killings, eg: sees their mother in the girl they are murdering - that might work in an LD, depending on whether they can control themselves the rest of the time.
With rape, if it was purely the sex then maybe it would help some. But others rape because of mental conditions, it’s the domination, the fact the victim is going to be scared for life and like killing the fallout of it. Some of it might be simulatable in an LD but some won’t be, so the overall urge will exsist regardless.
Somethings it could help with, others it just couldn’t. The mind isn’t as simple as, I’ll just do it this way and it will be fine.
I could see how it might work for drug/alcohol issues, they are very basic urges and the effects can be dreamt easily. But the fallout of something traumatic is unique to the victims, it’s not something you can dream up because of that. It may work in the short term if you could do it anytime you wanted, but in the long term I think the person would slip, they would need the reality.
I’ll have to agree. Seeing as how most people think dreams are random bunk and don’t really care about them, I don’t think lucid dreams would change the majority of people’s behavior in the waking world.
A few intelligent people would use their lucidity to increase their productivity. But everyone else would just do the same stupid crap in their dreams, that they do in real life.
Your cynisism swayed my opinion somewhat. However, at the bare minimum, it would help the actually real people be closer with their spirituality. Perhaps even make intolerable situations bearable, knowing the person can escape into another world where the greatest story is told every night.
Lucid Dreaming just needs to become socially acceptable to talk about in day-to-day conversations to be something thats done widely. Lucid dreaming needs a sponsor, some sort of celebrity. Like Beck, or perhaps Thom Yorke.
I think people would be a lot happier on the whole. People wouldn’t always lament the life they’ve been given if they could do anything in a dream. For example an unpopular person would be less jealous of a jock who gets all the girls if he could do the same at night. Also LDing is a good way to explore your subconcious and to learn things about yourself. So, if everyone could LD it would be good.
Lucid dreaming has Shamanic origins, therefore it’s origins are spiritual. Ignoring that because science looked into it and found it to be true is also discrediting.
Spirits may not have been proven, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore LDings origins and it’s links with spirituality (which has nothing to do with spirits) and religon because LDing has been proven.
But isn’t it still important to question the idea that lucid dreaming could be linked with spirituality? Large areas of psychology are still not properly understood and if everyone chose not to link spirituality and lucid dreaming (and other areas of psychology) we may never truly know whether things like spirits exist or not.
If we want to draw other people to lucid dreaming then it’s important to portray the scientific aspect because, like Tomas said, the scientific aspect will give it more credibility than the spiritualistic aspect. But also it’s important to look into the spiritualistic aspect in a scientific way so that it can be determined whether things like spirit guides really exist.
but I think this general discussion is better located here.