I have the book The Lucid Dreamer by Malcolm Godwin. It is the book that I happened to bump into in Books a Million in the new age section a while back and first learn about lucid dreaming as a common practice. Last night, I was reading some of it (It has been a reference book for me for years.) and reading about what happens in the brain when a person becomes lucid.

The aminergic neurons in the brain are what give us our sense of the absurdity of certain ideas and situations. When you have non-lucid dreams, the aminergic neurons are resting, and that is why the most off the wall stuff can happen without you thinking anything of it. When you become lucid, your aminergic neurons have been awoken. What puzzles me is that the book also says that the aminergic neurons are the only neurons that rest during a non-lucid dream, and they rest for the purpose of saving up their potential for the next day. If that is the case, then how does lucid dreaming affect the level of rest they get in a night?

I also have Stephen LaBerge's book Lucid Dreaming. I could not find anything in it about the aminergic neurons, but I did come across the point that the major restoration of neurological faculties takes place during dreamless sleep. Godwin says that the first dream cycle, generally 90 minutes, involves about ten minutes of R.E.M. sleep and that the R.E.M. proportion increases with every dream cycle in a sleep period. It maxes out with about 60 of the 90 minutes. With that in mind, I figure that the amount of rest the aminergic neurons get in a night would not be seriously affected by even a night of dreaming that is lucid the entire way (hypothetical idea, perhaps).

So my question is this: Would a person who has lucid dreams need some degree of increased sleep, and how much?