The Pros and Cons of Lucid Dreaming

Lucid dreaming is the awareness of us being in a dream. Sometimes, we lucid dream by chance, but we can train ourselves to do this. This article outlines the positives and negatives of learning lucid dreaming. 

Pros: 

Adventure and Excitement: In lucid dreaming, when you really become a master at it, you can manipulate the dream. You can fly around and use superpowers. 

Social Practicality: You can practice role playing in certain social situations. For example, if you want to imagine yourself talking to someone special, you can practice that. 

Nightmare Inhibition: If you are aware that you are just dreaming, dreaming about nightmares will be less frightening. When are aware something is not real, we’re less likely to be affected. 

Problem Solving: Dreams give us a chance to work through problems we may actually be facing in real life. They recreate the environment in which we can try to overcome or solve. 

Cons: 

Addictive: Lucid dreaming can become addictive and this may affect your natural sleeping patterns and create unexpected health change. 

Alienation: Lucid dreaming is bizarre (not a lot of people know about it and not everyone can do it). So when you learn to lucid dream, it may be strange to be one of the few. 

Dissociation: Dissociation is sort of like day dreaming where we are not entirely focused on reality. Lucid dreaming may cause this giving us a harder time telling apart fantasy from waking states. 

Sleep Paralysis: One of the health concerns is the increase risk of sleep paralysis. When we are trying to lucid dream, we are playing on the boundary between waking and sleeping. Sleep paralysis is when we are awake, but our body is still asleep.