Argument against lucid dreaming

[gasull]

I found this line of reasoning against lucid dreaming (http://www.supermemo.com/help/faq/sleep.htm#2454-7638):

Lucid dreaming is as useful for learning and creativity as LSD. Striving at lucid dreaming is rather likely to disrupt your healthy sleep and negatively affect learning. During REM sleep, the prefrontal cortex should normally be de-activated. Hobson's AIM model of 3D sleep-wake space (http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/05/44/bbs00000544-00/bbs.hobson.html) can be used to illustrate the state corresponding to lucid dreaming as a partitioning, in which the cortex and the rest of the brain occupy different points in the AIM space. Such partitioning is likely to interfere with the physiological function of REM sleep. It can be compared to eating your lunch while jogging (i.e. the situation where contradictory targets are fed to the nervous system). Using auto-suggestive tricks to change the AIM state may affect neural processes occurring in sleep with unpredictable consequences that are not likely to be positive. As for creativity, it is conceivable that LSD (and less so lucid dreaming efforts) might boost non-specific creativity or help understand the creative process; however, most of the mankind's creative breakthroughs occur when a healthily refreshed mind focuses on solving a specific problem. Hallucinatory haze is not helpful in directing creativity towards useful purposes. Creativity is a game of chance. You should look for ways of consciously directing the creative process rather than to increase its randomness indiscriminately.

Does anybody have a rebuttal?

Or at least personal anecdotal counter-evidence?

I was getting interested into lucid dreaming because Time Ferris is into it, but after reading this I'm about to forget about it.

[americanoracle]

Page 34 of me ebook and need a break, have a rebuttal.



Lucid dreaming is as useful for learning and creativity as LSD.

Would not recommend it to anyone but from a purely objective point of view, LSD can be HUGELY usefl for learning and creativity, among other positive purposes. Beatles, Pink Floyd, Tim Leary... and you think it is random coincidence that the MSFT Windows Logo os a big multi-colored floating window pane with tracers floating off of it? Most of the tech revolution was born in a psychedelic haze, this was not by happenstance.





Striving at lucid dreaming is rather likely to disrupt your healthy sleep and negatively affect learning. During REM sleep, the prefrontal cortex should normally be de-activated. Hobson's AIM model of 3D sleep-wake space can be used to illustrate the state corresponding to lucid dreaming as a partitioning, in which the cortex and the rest of the brain occupy different points in the AIM space. Such partitioning is likely to interfere with the physiological function of REM sleep.

This is 100% speculative conjecture and probably impossible to prove, as "lucid dreaming" is itself an entirely subjective experience. Negatively affect learning? Show me a study. Negatively affect health? Zero chance that study exists.


It can be compared to eating your lunch while jogging (i.e. the situation where contradictory targets are fed to the nervous system).

No, it can't. Eating is a measurable function. So is jogging. What is the "purpose" of dreaming? Besides, eating while jogging is probably not that unhealthy in moderation.


Using auto-suggestive tricks to change the AIM state may affect neural processes occurring in sleep with unpredictable consequences that are not likely to be positive.

Therefore, whatever you do, do not ever have nightmares, and never ever go to sleep thinking about a problem in your life. IT COULD KILL YOU!

(This is just stupid, sorry)


As for creativity, it is conceivable that LSD (and less so lucid dreaming efforts) might boost non-specific creativity or help understand the creative process; however, most of the mankind's creative breakthroughs occur when a healthily refreshed mind focuses on solving a specific problem.

Says who? Most of mankind's breakthroughs came from complete accidents and the lone pursuits of stark raving lunatics who seldom accounted for their personal state of mind, if ever.


Hallucinatory haze is not helpful in directing creativity towards useful purposes.

How is lucid dreaming a hallucinatory haze?

Creativity is a game of chance.

Maybe, what does that have to do with lucid dreaming


You should look for ways of consciously directing the creative process rather than to increase its randomness indiscriminately.

If it is "a game of chance" then conscious direction has no bearing on it anway. Also there is no reason to infer that lucid dreaming and randomness have any relationship at all.

Note- just because somebody strings a bunch of words together doesn't give them meaning. Try and find some critical thinking skills.


Back to my book...that was probably a colossal waste of 7 minutes.

[gasull]

americanoracle, the main point of the argument in the link is this:

Hobson's AIM model of 3D sleep-wake space can be used to illustrate the state corresponding to lucid dreaming as a partitioning, in which the cortex and the rest of the brain occupy different points in the AIM space. Such partitioning is likely to interfere with the physiological function of REM sleep.

That's not "100% speculative" as you said. Lucid dreaming converts REM sleep into something else (well, into lucid dreaming).

Lucid-dreaming every now and then might not be unhealthy, just like small doses of LSD (or any drug) aren't either.

I wonder, how much lucid dreaming vs regular dreaming is recommended?

Is it healthy to give up regular dreaming altogether? (I am not saying that you or anybody advocates this; I'm just asking).

[americanoracle]

Another area for study—although one that presents a unique challenge—is the state known as lucid dreaming, when one is caught in limbo between waking and REM dreaming. EEG data collected by Ursula Voss, PhD, suggest that during lucid dreaming the brain stem generates REM sleep dreaming, but the reactivation of certain areas of the cortex enables the person to simultaneously be in a waking state. However, Dr. Hobson stated, lucid dreaming is a very unstable state that is difficult to study, because the subject tends not to remain lucid but rather wakes up or falls back into REM sleep dreaming.

Lucid dreaming is “a hybrid state that features both waking and dreaming consciousness in REM sleep,” Dr. Hobson said. “The next step [for study] will be to put these subjects in a scanner and find out whether there are differences in regional brain activation that correspond” to recent findings on the subject.

Dr. Hobson concluded that “waking consciousness is the highest achievement of evolution. By having waking consciousness, we are able to plan, to give talks, to understand each other, and to achieve enormous cognitive capability. This hasn’t happened by accident, as we don’t learn to be awake after we are born. We have dream consciousness already in place when we are born, and we build on top of it a sense of agency, movement, sensation, and emotion—all the details of individual experience.”

Or, to put it differently, “I don’t have to invent consciousness every time I wake up,” he said. “There is a program in my brain for consciousness, and it needs relatively little adjustment to be brought into contact with reality.”


http://www.neurologyreviews.com/08%20aug/AlteredDreaming.html

Assuming you "decided" to stop dreaming altogether, how exactly would go about that?

As for it being dangerous to dream in any capacity, it is an integral process of consciousness. Totally ridiculous. It's like saying people should not have hair.

Eastern medicine, accupuncture specifically, suggests that the ideal sleep state is total dreamlessness, for whatever that is worth to you.

[gasull]

lucid dreaming is a very unstable state that is difficult to study, because the subject tends not to remain lucid but rather wakes up or falls back into REM sleep dreaming.

So the conclusion is that I shouldn't worry about lucid dreaming too much (in relation with regular dreaming), since I won't be able to do it too often anyway.

Eastern medicine, accupuncture specifically, suggests that the ideal sleep state is total dreamlessness, for whatever that is worth to you.

I'm lost here. Could you explain this further? Are you arguing we should avoid dreaming (or dreaming so often)?

[americanoracle]

Upon further contemplation I would simply suggest you take whatever you've been doing to get you to where you are now, and start doing entiely the opposite.

Best of luck!