Highly skeptical is not what I'd call you. Overly skeptical is what I'd call you. I've been LD'ing for 4+ years now. I feel more refreshed and less groggy after a fun lucid dream. Every time. I know several other veteran dreamers and they say the same thing. None of us do the WBTB, we just go lucid in the middle of the dream. Sleep is a finely tuned process but you dream every night whether you remember it or not so lucid dreaming is not disrupting anything. It just gives you an awesome amount of control over
I swear, reading through these posts is super frustrating. It's like everyone who can't/hasn't lucid dreamt before is actively discouraging others from trying it because they're jealous/scared or something.
"I swear, reading through these posts is super frustrating. It's like everyone who can't/hasn't lucid dreamt before is actively discouraging others from trying it because they're jealous/scared or something."
I think you're reading too much into my post that just isn't there. Jealousy? Fear? Give me a break. The assertion that I can't, or haven't, had a lucid dream before? False on both counts. "Actively discouraging others from trying it?" Again, no. Not at all.
Let's stay away from ad hominems in this discussion, please. They don't advance the dialogue in any meaningful way.
Fellow LDer here. I've never felt any adverse effects of the type in discussion (quite the contrary, amazing euphoria and well-being on some occasions). But we shouldn't pretend that lucid dreaming is likely to be stimulating only and exactly the same brain regions as more typical dreaming (in terms of the metabolic and other activity levels). Learning to activate the relevant memory writing modules while in dreams so as to increase dream recall is, after all, one of the typical first steps to developing LDs. That mental machinery is seemingly not typically on to such a degree when dreaming as most people normally do.
That alone shows that some brain activity needs to be online that isn't in typical dreaming, and I imagine the various other bits of learned mental behavior to the LDing skill-set also change activation levels in brain regions. Learning to exert the kind of attention/expectation control to stabilize and alter dreams is another sub-skill that often takes practice and so probably involves bringing online brain resources that might otherwise be off/recharging.
So if some people have lower neurochemical reserves of some type or other, this extra activity, use of such neurochemicals, at night (when their reserves would otherwise be replenished) could push them under some threshold of good functioning for a while. My guess is that such sensitivities would be the rare minority cases, but this field is quite understudied to have grounded empirical beliefs on the matter.
"Some cases I know about from personal observation involve disturbing sleep cycles so much in pursuit of lucid dreams that the young people failed in work environments or crashed and burned in their university studies."
That is laughable ignorance my friend. The Wake Back To Bed method might mess your sleep schedule up a little, but you're only supposed to be up for about 30 minutes or so then you go back to sleep. That's not even the most common way of lucid dreaming. To say people have ruined their lives trying to lucid dream is, frankly, completely ridiculous and I'm embarrassed for the HN community for upvoting this post.
It wouldn't be too far of a stretch. Starting simply with the knowledge that dreaming happens while in REM, someone could find it logically to switch to an Uberman-type Polyphasic sleep schedule, since one of the biggest advertised advantage of such sleep schedule is dropping into REM a lot quicker due to exhaustion. If Uberman doesn't actually help them in terms of the sleep they need, but they also don't want to give it up, hoping to get all that lucid dreaming, a student could continue it for a a few months, which coincidentally is a school semester. Now you've got a student who is really burned out, and once exam time will crash and burn. Depending on the program, university they attend, and the person themselves, failing a semester could really screw them over one way or another.
For me, the Wake Back to Bed, when it does work, generally involves first the 30 minutes staying up, then 40 to 90 minutes of lying awake in bed before falling asleep. So that does unfortunately mess a bit with the sleep cycle, even though it should be just a blip in the radar in theory. Haven't managed to get any other method to work reliably. I guess what works and how varies by individual.
One of the few times I'm actually qualified to comment on an article. Top comment by tokenadult has it all wrong. Sure you can do Wake Back to Bed ones or mess up your sleep cycle to do it but you certainly don't have to. I never did I lucid dream several times a week. It's much easier to just keep a dream journal and do realit checks while you're awake.
Second, there's no need for piles of studies on lucid dreaming. I never feel tired or anything like that after I have big lucid dreams. The opposite in fact. After a particularly emotional or powerful dream I feel alive! I feel exuberant and it's easier for me to get out of bed. It's a fantastic way to practice skills as well. I'm an MMA fighter and I have many many fighting dreams that feel perfectly fluid and natural. The pathways in my brain for fighting are being stimulated for hours at a time while I sleep. Sure it's not 1:1 with real life practice but the opponents in my dreams often do novel moves I have never been exposed to before and I have to come up with novel counter techniques. It's clear to me that lucid dreaming practice is helpful to real world skills.
Not to mention the entertainment value. My favorite most recent one was telekinetic powers. I made forks and knives fly across the room then when I wanted to test out more power I looked out the window and made a nice car sized chunk of earth come rippping out of the ground. It was fucking awesome.
This is my fucking dream. I don't mean to sound unprofessional since I will apply for this but in this case it is necessary to use the strongest word available. This is what I want so badly it almost brings tears to my eye.
I swear, reading through these posts is super frustrating. It's like everyone who can't/hasn't lucid dreamt before is actively discouraging others from trying it because they're jealous/scared or something.