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D_Malik comments on List of underrated risks? - Less Wrong
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You will completely forget around two hours of your life every single night if you don't learn dream recall. And that time will be largely wasted if you don't learn lucid dreaming.
(I know, there's lots of new age bullshit at that link, and in lucid dreaming generally. But no matter how much you cringe at the word "dreamsign", lucid dreaming is a very useful tool if you can spot and dismiss the garbage.)
My SWAG is that if I tried to recall every minute of the last 24 hours, I'd have a <10% success rate, and about 30% of what I did recall would be confabulated. If I tried to recall every minute of the last 240 hours, I'd have a <1% success rate. In that context, worrying about forgetting two hours I spend sleeping isn't really my highest priority.
Could you provide some examples about how exactly it can be useful? What difference did it make in your life? (Providing "insights" is valuable only if you really acted on them later.)
This book has lots of examples in chapters 8 and 9 and maybe 7 and 10.
Some ways lucid dreaming has improved my own life:
It's helped me come up with good ideas for high school creative writing assignments. So far I've acted on three of these, with very good results.
It's helped me to practice better social skills and get over social anxieties.
I used it to practice piano back when I played piano.
Back when I took a first aid class, I used it to practice those techniques and to get over the emotions that can make first aid hard.
I've tried to use it to understand math and other abstract things better. This hasn't worked extremely well (it turns out that seeing in four spacial dimensions is hard), but maybe you're more awesome than me in that respect.
It has generally been an awesome experience.
And there's a lot more that I haven't used it for. You can practice skills like sports or juggling or cooking or magic tricks or fistfights. You can ask questions and get back answers from a part of yourself whose answers you can't predict. You can stop nightmares. You can relive memories more vividly than you can in waking life. You can do all the awesome, irresponsible things that you would otherwise want to do IRL, like driving cars way too fast or playing computer games. You can build and walk through memory palaces.
But I'm sure people here can come up with even cooler things to do. Lucid dreaming is a massive hole in the limitations of ordinary life, where there are massive completely-unexplored areas, and most of the people doing the exploration have been superstitious irrational idiots. I'm a bit worried that people here will reject it simply because it seems on the surface like the wrong sort of weird.
I'm worried about schizophrenia and other nasty delusions. Should I be?
Probably not. Here is an article about it, though the writer seems a bit overconfident.
The article lacks sources. This seems to be a "no evidence it can hurt, because we haven't looked", not a "no evidence it can hurt, look at this study".