Great article.
In Taoist Medicine, too much lucid dreaming can cause health problems, and is generally avoided.
I’ve always wondered about this, given the cross-cultural influences between Tibet, Buddhism, and China.
Have you come across anything about what Tibetan physicians considered about these practices? Did they take precautionary measures to ensure sleep was still restful?
The TCM view is that excessive ‘wandering of the soul’ will not allow deep integration and regeneration that sleep provides. It will deplete xue (Blood, yin) and lead to a number of different physiological problems.
Would love to know more about this.
😊🙏🏽☯️
Thanks for your comment. From what I know, the argument that Lucid dreams interfere with regenerative or restful sleep has been rejected many times. One reason is because just by practising/doing lucid dreaming will not change the sleep cycles or patterns (for example you will not have more REM sleep and less dreamless sleep phases than one would naturally have at night). You will still have the same frequency and duration of REM sleep in one night, the only difference is that you would be conscious in some of those phases instead of unconscious and this does not really affect restfulness or integration because these mostly happen in the other parts of the sleep cycle. I don't know what Taoist medicine says about this. Perhaps you have a link to it?