I’ve spoken a LOT about what you CAN do in lucid dreams and how it’s the most amazing thing ever, and I think it really is: BUT there are some things you certainly can’t do in lucid dreams. There are lots of lucid dreaming MYTHS and I want to go over these in detail now so you can approach this with more knowledge and logic.
So lucid dreaming can be used for a wide range of things including improving your confidence, experiencing your fantasies and crushing your deepest fears, but there are so many myths in the lucid community that people genuinely seem to believe, and after my conversations with a few angry people on Reddit over the years, I thought I’d finally put these to rest.
The top lucid dreaming myths (What you CAN’T do in lucid dreams)
Note: These are in no particular order and if you have evidence to suggest that these ARE true (Unlikely because I’ve done my research) I’m always open to hearing new ideas and new studies etc, and I’m very open to hearing if I ay be wrong but I firmly believe I’m right on most of these, at the time of writing this (August 2018). I say that because technology changes so very quickly that there might be a way which we could overcome these issues and actually be able to do them in the future..
I also created a video if you’d rather watch that, just showing some lucid dreaming myths and things you can’t do but explained in a bit more detail that on here (Remember to subscribe to the channel and watch my other videos!):
1: You can’t learn new information in lucid dreams
This is a big one. I’ve spoken a lot about how you can improve physical skills in lucid dreams and REALLY improve at them in waking life. That’s true. That’s very true and useful, BUT you can’t learn NEW things that you didn’t already know. I’m talking about facts and not inspiration here, for example you can get inspiration for a painting or something like that in a dream but you can’t learn new FACTS that you didn’t already know.
This is because when we dream we’re creating and experiencing the world based on our expectations, and existing memories. This combined with our subconscious mind ‘inventing’ the dream and the things in it make up the dream world we experience. BUT our subconscious mind can’t just connect to the internet and download facts you didn’t already know.
2: You can’t physically heal yourself in a lucid dream
This is one which I wish DID work but it actually doesn’t. There are people who believe you can heal yourself physically in a lucid dream by dreaming about ‘healing thoughts’ etc. Now, this is an interesting one because you CAN heal emotional issues in lucid dreams for example things like PTSD or anxiety. This has been proven but it’s NOT been proven that you can physically heal things with lucid dreams, like broken bones, chronic diseases etc.
The reason I think this myth has gained so much traction is because when you are able to lucid dream, you’re able to have an intense experience whereby you can talk to dream characters or parts of your mind and talk about things like ‘heal me’ or ‘help me recover faster’ and it can feel very intense and real, but it’s not. It’s a placebo effect and what you’re actually experiencing is just a change of mental attitude that makes you feel better, but not actually GET better.
3: You can’t have a SHARED lucid dream (yet)
As much as I really would love this to be the case, we can’t SHARE lucid dreams and experience the exact same dream. This is a confusing one for most people, because if you’ve been lucid dreaming for a while you’ll have probably said to your buddy ‘Hey let’s try and find eachother in our lucid dreams tonight’ and you might have even found them, but we can’t SHARE dreams. Even if you do dream about your buddy and they dream about you, and even if you dream about doing the same things, that isn’t proof that you’ve shared a dream.
Even if you’ve both not spoken about WHERE you’ll meet and you’ve gone into the lucid dreams and happened to dream about the same setting (for example being on a beach) this is a coincidence and doesn’t prove that you’ve shared a dream. If shared dreaming does become possible in the future, I’ll be very happy and it will probably have something to do with an AI chip capable of reading and understanding what each person is experiencing and then sharing that with the other dreamer at the same time (would require an incredible amount of computing power).
4: You can’t KEEP yourself lucid for hours on end
Again, I really do wish all of these myths WERE true, but they’re just not. You can’t lucid dream for hours on end or keep yourself ‘locked or trapped’ inside a dream for as long as you want. It seems like you can when you’ve learned to lucid dream, and we’ve all had those lucid dreams where we’re in the deep dreaming state, we’re lucid and we feel like we’re intentionally STAYING in the lucid dream and NOT waking up because of our own free will, right?
But it’s not always the case. We can influence how long we stay in lucid dreams to SOME degree but we certainly can’t keep ourselves ‘under’ for several hours at a time, like in Inception. What actually happens is because we’re lucid everything seems more vivid, and it FEELS like we’re in the dream for longer. I’ve written another post about time dilation in dreams which sort of explains it a bit better.
So what CAN you do with lucid dreaming?
Well like I’ve said, I really do hope this stuff changes in the future and we’re able to do these things with the help of technology or something. I really do because it would make the whole idea of lucid dreaming even more impressive, but for now these are myths that aren’t true. That being said, there are some AMAZING things you can do with lucid dreaming right now for example:
- Flying like a superhero
- Dissolving the dream scene and experiencing pure awareness
- Practicing real life skills and actually improving at them
- Removing fears and phobias from your life
- And a lot more things that you’ve not thought about!
