Thread: Can Lucid dreaming really change your personality?

Whether LDs can alter aspects of your personality depends on whether you believe one's personality is static or dynamic. I tend to subscribe to the dynamic view: how can an insecure person become secure? We soon become what we act like and react like - if this weren't true or at least believed, people wouldn't partake in life coaching nor read self-help books. My ultimate point is that how waking life experiences can, say, help improve your confidence, so can conscious dreams.

Furthermore, there is little fundamental difference between life-coaching and lucid dreams regarding personal growth. Neither of them are 'reality', for they both involve orchestrated artificial environments. The ultimate determinant of their success, then, is whether you put what you've practiced into reality.

Oh, and:

Originally Posted by Oneironaut Zero

There is no way around the notion that dreams are simulations. Are they exact copies of real situations? No, but what simulation is? As I said before, there are mounds of information backing the idea that simulations can help with real-world phobias, and I don't believe there is much reason to assume that lucid dreams would not fall into that catagory. I'm interesting in hearing why you do? (And whether you agree with it or not, this is completely relevant.)

Indeed: systematic desensitization is merely a gradual presentation of a stimulus in different forms until the final, most feared form evokes no fear. It is likely that if you're scared of spiders in waking life, that a gigantic spider in a dream will evoke the same fear. Thus, it is not a huge leap to assume that desensitization to that stimulus in the dream world will have similar effects in the real world.