Is Lucid Dreaming Safe? – Possible Dangers of Conscious Dreaming
Being a dream explorer who can control their world is obviously a very amazing thing, but is lucid dreaming really safe?
Anyone who is new to conscious dreaming might have such questions in their mind and I too had the same kind of worries initially.
People have a plethora of things to say about it, but it has never put me into any serious trouble, so I am pretty much sure that it is safe for me.
However, I will leave it up to you to decide whether it is good for you or not by making you aware of a few possible troubles you might have to deal with as a conscious dreamer.
I have faced some of these lucid dreaming dangers whereas the rest is what I have only heard from others, either way, you can know what to expect while trying to have lucid dreams by reading this post.
1 False Awakenings
I have mentioned in many other posts that false awakening is the problem that has troubled me the most.
It is a state where you wake up to find that you are still dreaming. That may not sound much problematic, but it is often very frustrating and annoying when you get trapped in a false awakening loop, which means to have multiple such experiences one after another, sometimes it also makes you to give up the hope of actually waking up.
I have learned a few working methods to deal with false awakenings, so I am comfortable with them now.
2 Sleep Paralysis
People usually consider this as the most terrifying dream experience. I agree to that when it is about the beginners, but experienced lucid dreamers use both sleep paralysis and false awakenings to induce lucid dreams.
It is a state when your mind is half awake, so you find it difficult to move the body and it appears like you are paralyzed. Sometimes people also feel a ghostly presence near them when this happens, but it is a dream state anyway and there are methods to minimize the chances of sleep paralysis.
Even though trying to lucid dream increases your chances of experiencing sleep paralysis, but it can happen to anyone.
3 No Control
Many people think that they have full control over their dreams after having a few lucid dreams, however experienced conscious dreamers know the truth that they actually have only a little control over what happens in their dream world.
Yes, you can do what you want by becoming conscious in your dreams, but everything is not entirely controlled by you and sometimes when you find it incapable of doing anything despite of gaining lucidity, it could become very distressing.
So, what happens is that in a few rare dreams, you get trapped in an unpleasant nightmare, knowing that you are dreaming and still cannot do anything about it.
This in a way is perfectly alright for normal people, but if you are into lucid dreaming, you will get scared since it starts appearing as if someone else is controlling you.
4 Sleep Quality
Dreams occur during REM phase (rapid eye moment) which is the phase of regular sleep cycles that is nearer to the waking state, our mind is more alert than relaxed when this happens.
If we somehow break the usual sleep patterns, then we fail to reach the deep stage of sleep that is very essential for our mind.
People who get too obsessed with lucid dreaming keep on trying to stay in the REM cycle by not letting themselves to have a proper sleep at night, which can result into various mind related afflictions, even insomnia.
5 Memory Related Confusions
I have heard a lot that people report being unable to distinguish what happened in their dreams and what actually happened, thus getting confused between the two worlds after learning how to lucid dream.
Well, everyone often gets confused about whether something happened in a dream or actual life when it comes to small things that happened long ago, right?
This happens because some dreams are intense, perhaps.
Now, when you get interested in your dream world, it is obvious that your dream memories can become strong enough to confuse it with the actual ones. That doesn’t mean that you will become delusional.
Contrary to the usual misconception, it will only happen sometimes and that too will only include small insignificant stuff.
6 Schizophrenia
A person commented on one of my old posts where he mentioned that lucid dreaming can lead to schizophrenia, so I did a small research on it and found out that there have been cases where people lost their perception of true reality and did things believing that it was a dream.
By now, you might be thinking “Oh my god, how can you say lucid dreaming is safe Hari?”
Well, first of all, there are thousands of lucid dreamers who have never experienced a slight change in their perception of reality and second of all, most of such cases have many other reasons that led to such happenings.
Obviously, out of all the worldwide schizophrenia patients even if one or two guys would have tried to lucid dream in the past, such rumors will get circulated.
Overall, I would say that you must be careful to not get too obsessed with it. Lucid dreaming is completely natural (even some kids do it without being taught) but you can make it troublesome by not maintaining the essential balance.
So, unless you have any history of psychological problems or you don’t overdo it, lucid dreaming can rarely cause any series trouble to you.
I hope you enjoyed this post. If you are someone very serious about lucid dreaming then I would like to recommend you my favorite online course for lucid dreaming i.e. Andrew Holecek’s dream sculpting program where he takes the art of lucid dreaming to higher levels like personal and spiritual growth.
What are your views about this post? Do you have any interesting dream or spiritual experience to share? I would love to hear from you, so please do leave your comments below before leaving.
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