Thread: What do Doctors and Neurologists and Therapist think of Lucid dreaming?

Well - scientists - and mainly psychiatrists and psychologists, who do research are very interested.
But you are probably correct that most doctors haven´t heard of it - esp. outside of the above disciplines.

Lets say somebody denies it - tells you it does not exist - just print out some of the papers, linked or copied in the following thread.
That should make them pause and think again, if they are professional:

http://www.dreamviews.com/lucid-drea...ess-brain.html

If you trust your doctor - and can talk about very personal things well with her or him - if you feel, you are confronted with somebody with an open mindset - it is worth a try.
Otherwise maybe search another doctor..

There are also some very knowledgeable people who know all the facts about lucid dreaming but still maintain that these dreams are not in fact lucid, but just a convincing illusion of lucidity.

Doesn´t mean, one can not talk to these people in a meaningful way..

I'm not a researcher, but being someone who has been wanting to become a researcher on the field (probably won't happen though, lucid dreaming research isn't exactly at a famous spot right now! ), some things:

- The main problem is not so much the ideas that dwell around the scientific community: it's the lack of opinion. This is actually not a recent problem: big names like Keith Hearne or even LaBerge experienced difficulties on getting their research papers published on respected journals, and these 2 men were largely responsible for the golden age of lucid dreaming research! This problem is caused by several aspets that affect not only lucid dreaming, but other types of somewhat related research:

> First of all, psychoanalysis's image is somewhat vilified nowadays. Despite this being a huge ignorance towards it's use on psychotherapy, it means that less research is oriented towards dreams (a big part of Freud's work), especially after some researchers suggesting that dreams might just be an ephiphenomenon of certain brain processes. This is actually huge, because at some point (if you want to read more on this The Mind at Night is the book you want to get) the major part of funding went straight into sleep disorder research. It's not by coincidence that dream research is so unknown among the scientific community, but to be fair, we're much better nowadays with all the relation between sleep/dreams and learning/memory.

> We currently have no proper way of testing it in an efficient way. I could mention how the very nature of a lucid dream makes it hard to be studied by science, but is enough to use a single argument: we have no proper method to induce lucid dreams. This makes it so you don't really have much data to support several ideas regarding lucidity and what you can do with it, which damages the credibility of the field. That's no wonder why "doctors" (at least mental health doctors) don't really present lucid dreaming as a alternative therapy method: they don't know anything about it, and even we commited onironautas are somewhat in the dark.

These are problems that need to be addressed before you see other fields of science to "include" a lucid dreaming perspective in their work, because lucid dreams have many many applications. The psychiatrists and clinical psychologists (practitioners) that I have contact with don't really view it as something relevant, and I could see things like WBTB or WILD being perceived as negative (because WBTB/WILD are not very "healthy" techniques if used regularly let's confess).