Thread: Is it possible to enter an LD outside of a REM cycle?

Originally Posted by Robot_Butler

That is a great point about "inhabiting the dream," moonshine. I know exactly what you are talking about.

I'm still a little confused, also about how you can dream in NREM sleep, not have any kind of physical paralysis/atonia, but still keep from acting it out? Is "not inhabiting the dream" the only thing holding your back from sleepwalking? This goes back to what Thor was talking about a few months ago about low muscle tone vs. complete atonia. REM atonia vs. NREM atonia vs. NREM low muscle tone. The literature seems to be a little unclear about the details of these things.

I've just come to the conclusion that there are no real hard boundaries between different stages of sleep. There must be some overlap and wiggle room. How else do we explain the huge variety of experiences reported? Like Shift said, unless you hook yourself up to a monitor, there is no real way to know when you are in what stage of sleep. You have to rely on your experience, which can obviously be misleading. It is a dream, after all, a hallucination. It is hard enough to know when you are even dreaming. Pinpointing what stage of sleep you are in seems almost impossible.

hmm, I have to disagree with your final statement about it being impossible to pinpoint the stage of sleep you're in. If you use an EEG(if I'm not mistaken about the machine name) and then once you LD, you can use some kind of signal with your eyes, then the machine will record it. This was how Dr. LaBerge proved that Lucid Dreaming exists. Once you are awake, you can look at the EEG and find the peaks that correspond to your signal and determine the stage of sleep. Far as I know, you can move your eyes in REM, but, not sure about NREM. If you can't do so in NREM, then if the EEG doesn't pick up anything even though you did the signal, it means that you dreamt in NREM, because, if it was REM, then it would have picked it up, so, either way you'll find the stage you dreamt in

Originally Posted by The Legend

I can remember i had a dream during NREM sleep it was very very blurred and dark it was like a half finished painting there were holes all over that opened into endless black pits.

hmm, makes me wonder if my LD was in NREM and not REM. Why do I say this? Well, while the dream happened over 1-2 month ago if I'm not mistaken, it felt hazy which might have been the reason I realized that I was dreaming right off the bat with no RCs done

I wanted to add that I think its possible to get an LD outside of the REM cycle. One thing though, if you exercise and end up getting SP when you go to bed, could you WILD into a REM period or would it still be NREM?