true there are some potential problems with lucid dream therapy. Some of these could be the nature of lucid dreaming itself. What if the decision was made to use lucid dream therapy and the patient could not achieve lucidity? Lucidity can be “induced” or helped by a variety of means but this is still no guarantee.Another problem is lack of dream recall. The use of lucid dreams would be useless if the dreamer had no recollection of the events. One could argue that if the dreamer gained control to “tone down” the fear in the dream, one would be less likely to wake up with disturbed feelings from the nightmare, even if one did not remember the nightmare the next day. Regardless of the recall, the dreamers’ sleep would not be disrupted. Lucid dreams can produce an awakening, but the argument can be made that lucidity will produce the same amount of awakenings as the nightmares. The effect will certainly be different, which is a benefit to the lucid induced awakening.The benefits of lucid dream therapy seem to outweigh the possible disadvantages. The advantages hinge on the assumption that dream recall will be high and that the subjects will become lucid easily. These are large assumptions but they are not so large that they should be the preventing factor of lucid dream therapy research. Research could still be possible while outlining those difficulties, so why has this not been addressed? Again, we return to the repeatedly mentioned stigma. Evidence has been presented to show the advantages of lucid dreaming for treating disturbing dreams. It has been noted, “…recurrent nightmares and sleep continuity disturbances are key criteria for PTSD and sleep disturbances are the most frequently reported complaints among PTSD patients” (“Clinical Frontiers” [1]). It has also been shown that lucid dreaming, though thought to treat disturbing dreams, has not been used in PTSD ...
