No, unless you are using equipment. There is government involvement regarding things like surgical procedures, but I doubt that extends into harmless things like mind control. And while I don't think agencies like the AMA are technically ran by the government, they definitely work close enough to be considered official. (e.g., Lose your license, lose your right to practice medicine.)

A lot of medical practices are self-regulated, which is better than nothing, but still not proof of anything other than a standard and consistent level of quackery.

REVISION:

For example, I got LASIK surgery a few years ago. I didn't go to the board of LASIK surgeons to figure out if I wanted to do it or not. I read about the scientific reason why it works from objective third party sources. Once convinced it was legitimate, I then checked out the self-regulations and picked a guy who met their qualifications.

(And because the FDA is involved with medical equipment, then I trusted that the device itself was up to par.)

And it has various different parts.

Okay, I think we're going to stop here. I could post any study and you'll just call BS on it simply because it doesn't fit your worldview. Do your own research on corpus callosotomy if you like. You'll get the same information.

bambam is inclined to say that people who disagree with him are wrong. I am shocked by this. Shocked.

There were some posts above about LD'ing and I figured I'd just blather in general about it. I don't feel compelled to target individual sentences here and there.

A couple of points to mull over:

- If you try to do something in a dream, and it doesn't happen, it's largely because you're not totally lucid. There are levels of lucidity, and not everyone gets all the way there every time. Learn how to stabilize your dream before you try doing anything. Google will help you with that. If there's anything in your dream that is fuzzy then you're not fully lucid. When you are, everything comes into focus at once. Literally. All your senses should be on a razor's edge -- everything should feel more real than it possibly can. You won't need glasses, your hearing will be perfect, and you won't have to move your eyes around to 'focus' on things because this is 100% in your mind, and everything can and will be in focus already. Focus is, after all, a byproduct of how your eyes operate.

- It's entirely possible to dream that you're having a lucid dream. And yet you're not, because you'll find you have no control over the dream. It happens fairly often to me.

- Again, if you're not fully lucid you'll have a limited ability to do things. Asking people for help in the dream is an easy way to get around that. If you ask for something and they don't comply, you're either not lucid, or you're being a dick about it. Dream characters sometimes will tell you to sod off if you're being a total tool, lucid or otherwise.

- Lucid dreams are normal dreams, except that you are 'awake' and conscious and in control of your actions. However... just as there are differing states of wakefulness (groggy, hyper, alert, sluggish) there are differing states of lucidity.

- I know this sounds trite, but it absolutely applies to LDs. If you don't believe that something will happen, it won't. If you walk up to a brick wall and have even the slightest notion that you'll be stopped by it, you will. You gotta habeeb.

- Practice. Practice more. At first I totally sucked and couldn't do much, but now I'm in complete, full control of my LDs. The only thing outside my control is the duration of the dream. Some are short; some are long. I can use autosuggestion to influence the subject matter of my dreams, in the hopes that I'll have a familiar dream that will cause me to recognize that I'm dreaming. Make no mistake: this did not come easy for me. I have slaved away at it each and every night for over three years.

When I was a kid I used to roll out of bed all the time. Not a great way to start your morning!

Heh... to me the freaky ones are the false awakenings, where I'll "wake up", proceed into the bathroom, start brushing my teeth... then suddenly wake up all over again, only this time for real

How about "getting up", and you actually do, but you're not actually awake? I've done that on occasion. Hasn't happened since I was a kid. But one time I walked outside, around the house and came in another door. Another time I actually went and took a bath. One time my alarm was going off, and for the life of me I couldn't turn it off, ended up finding my walkman, opening it up and cracking it in half That didn't make me happy when I realized what happened. Recently my alarm was going off, and I couldn't turn the damn thing off (a theme perhaps?), hit the alarm many many times, tried different buttons and NOTHING helped! Then I woke up, hit sleep, and went back to sleep

I think I posted about that same dream already in this thread.

As far as I know I don't ever actually do things in my sleep, but my younger brother did once. He was just power walking in circles around the kitchen table around 1AM.

Me> What are you doing?
Him> Looking for my shoes.
Me> Go to bed.
Him> Okay.

He didn't remember it the next day.

Oh, another thing I used to do:

A while back when I lived with my dad, I'd skip school a lot, and stay home and sleep much of the day. At a certain point I would get a bad "feeling" that usually meant someone was about to come home, even when I was asleep. A few times the feeling was so strong that it not only made me realize I was sleeping, but I was able to force myself awake after much strain (it was really hard). Most times (that I remember) I was actually right, not long after I woke up, my dad came home (even though it was a rather odd time for him to come home). Usually what I tried to do was move a limb or sit up while sleeping, when I actually manage to move, it immediately wakes me up, but actually moving something is the hard part.

How many levels deep have you gone? I'm at least at 4-5 levels deep.

When I get into a routine that happens.

Recently I went to sleep in the wee hours, intending to just catch a 3 hour nap. I ended up sleeping through my phone's alarm. I had an important appointment at 10am.

When I woke up, my eyes blasted open and I bolted up immediately and grabbed my phone.

10:00am exactly.

When I was in school I would regularly "wake up, but not really." It was practically a daily thing. My alarm would go off, I would wake up and shut it off, get out of bed, and start getting ready for school, and then my mom would yell at me to get up. I'd yell back at her, "I AM UP!!!11 " She'd yell at me that I am not up and then I'd wake up and realize I was still in bed sleep. Sometimes I would fall back asleep multiple times in the same morning and this would repeat. She'd think I was lying, but I honstly thought I was up!

When I was young I used to sleep walk a bit. One night when I was probably 7 or 8, I allegedly walked down stairs (we had really steep stairs in my original house), went outside, and walked half way down^[1] my driveway^[2]. As the story goes, my mother heard a sound, woke up, and went downstairs to check. She found my baby blanket, which I used to like to sleep with, laying at the door. She opened the door and looked outside and apparently saw me walking away... She called out to me and I apparently responded and came back and went back to bed without saying a word. I always wondered where I was going and where I might have woken up if she hadn't caught me.

I think I've allegedly slept walked a few other times (that people know of), but I don't remember any other stories. My brother allegedly swore in his sleep when he was like 10 (and we weren't permitted to swear until well into high school). I guess my mother woke up in the middle of the night and as she was passing by our bedroom door, she heard my brother yell out, "SHIT!" Shortly after, I guess he yelled, "IT HAPPENED ON THE BUS!" After that he was silent again.

I've heard my brother talk in his sleep a few times too. Allegedly I have done it also, but I don't think anyone ever witnessed anything memorable enough to ... remember.

I will certainly give it a try, and I suspect it will succeed and fail at the same time, but for entirely different reasons. I'm sure I'll have no trouble computing the number, but I'll likely lose the dream in the process. LDs require intense concentration to maintain for a long time. You have to stop and periodically stabilize the dream or else you'll lose it, and if you spend too much time obsessing over a particular element, your subconscious will happily take over once more and you'll drift off to your typical dream state. You can feel this happening and stop it with surprisingly little practice. I usually start to feel dizzy, and the periphery begins to blur badly. I can do a bit of hand rubbing and get another minute or so, or I can spin and really give myself some time to work with.

Maintaining a LD, I believe, is a subtle battle against your subconscious for control. You're in its back yard, breaking its rules, and it doesn't like that. It has a plan for your dream time, and you're stomping all over it. So the first chance it gets to take over, it will. If you pay attention to the dream, you stay in control. If you let your mind wander or focus on one thing for too long, you're vulnerable.

I'm surrounded by noobs

I've never had a 3rd person dream. I'm guessing your mind is so focused on gaming it shapes your perception of things. Interesting. Very interesting, actually. Your experiences would indicate you're achieving what is commonly referred to as a low level of lucidity. There's no scientific way to gauge that since LDing is a 100% subjective thing, but if you're still seeing a bunch of fuzzy or poorly defined details you're definitely not well off.

Your conscious brain has numerous limitations, and your subconscious has certain limitations as well, but it has access to far more raw knowledge and... let's call it computing power. When you're LDing both parts of your brain are active at the same time. Both are active, but one side is in more control than the other. Get it?

You can call BS all you want. If you don't attempt to improve what little LD skills you have, you'll never do anything with it. You spend a third of your life sleeping. Some of us want to enjoy that.

Start here if you're actually serious about LDing.

... weren't you berating me about anecdotal experience earlier?

Anyway, for my experience, I'm not good at lucid dreaming (not that I've tried very hard). Learning and experiencing hypnosis has definitely helped my sleep though; it used to take me 2 or 3 hours to get to sleep at night (yes, really) and now it takes ten minutes. I can set my internal alarm clock to wake up at arbitrary times (which I'll hit to within 5 minutes) and I either began dreaming again, or just started remembering it. Which is nice.