 Originally Posted by SleepyCookieDough
Well, I think the same as Scatterbrain. There was no way the patients were cheating since Laberge could see their brainwaves which indicated wheter they were sleeping or not. Besides, I'm suspecting that you're telling me that I should not take a scientist's researchs in considering; he might have lied about it. So, I might also doubt that there is anythign such as 2+2=4, because who knows. Whoever tested it might have cheated and added another apple or took one out. What are you telling me? It's simple logic that 2+2=4 because you can simply bring two fingers up and add two more and you now see 4? Well, same for lucid dreaming.
I agree with this...
 Originally Posted by SleepyCookieDough
You had some and most people on this website had them. Are you saying that everyone on this website are lucid dreamers wannabe and we all pretend we get lucid dreams just 'cause we think it'd be cool so we spent hours on here talking about things that we know doesn't exist but we just lie about it anyways? Doesn't make sense to me. If there was only 4 people, ok, maybe, but we're a lot too much to be all lying.
..but not this. In fact, a population as large as our could easily sustain delusion. It happens all the time. It's called "Groupthink."
Before I go farther, I want to take time to define the term "delusion."
Delusion simply means "a fixed belief that is either false, fanciful, or derived from deception." It doesn't mean you have a psychological condition, that you are experiencing hallucinations, or that there is anything mentally "wrong" with you, at all, apart from having an incorrect belief.
To apply it here, lets say that instead of being a lucid dreaming forum, this was a homeopathy forum. Everyone is here because they are an enthusiastic user or provider of homeopathic preparations.
Groupthink would assert itself in the form of us, as a group, ignoring or rationalizing away evidence which contradicts the claims of homeopathy, and placing undo focus or faulty perspective on information that seems to support it.
We would all have stories of our "successful" treatments of illnesses with homeopathy, as well as stories of failed attempts to do so, and those failures would be treated as evidence of incorrect application, rather than as evidence that the phenomenon is bunk.
Occasionally, individuals would get access to better information and stray from the flock, but on the whole, the community would continue to sustain itself indefinitely. In fact, the delusion itself would probably outlast the community. The website would be far more likely to die a slow death of disinterest, or suffer some server issues that disrupt the relationships to a point where they cannot easily recover, or something like that than to have everyone become disillusioned.
And you can't expect the media to do the job, either; the research proving that homeopathy doesn't work is well-documented and freely available, and yet communities of believers sustain themselves quite readily in spite of this.
The same is true for people who believe they have exorcised demons, people who believe they have been abducted by aliens, people who believe all sorts of other things.
A word on demons and aliens abductions, in particular. Both of these ideas come from the intersection of normal personal phenomena (sleep paralysis, in both cases) with cultural archetypes (evil spirits, and extraterrestrial beings, respectively. In fact, you can trace the relative decline of the former to the ascendance of the latter. It's almost as if aliens didn't achieve the technology to reach Earth until we learned enough about the universe to conceptualize the possibility of aliens.)
When we fail to adequately appreciate the ease with which our sense of reality can be compromised, we leave ourselves open to all sorts of delusions.
 Originally Posted by SleepyCookieDough
Nice!
I've had 3 dreams in the last four days but they were all too short for me to do anything like that... 
Keep at it. It gets much easier with practice. My personal advice is to grow your dream powers in ways that are intuitive to you, rather than trying to force yourself to do something you can't easily imagine.
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