>Don't forget, there's a comparable number of people who claim the ability to "astral travel".
That is a rather uncompelling argument. How many people claim to be able to do something has very little to do with whether or not that thing is possible. Many, many people claim to have been helped by homeopathic remedies, and none of them have. Relatively few people claim to be able to walk on their hands, but many of them can.
"Number of claims" is evidence, but it is such weak evidence that its effect on your beliefs should almost always be overwhelmed by the effect of your prior. The plausibility of astral projection and homeopathy is incredibly low, and the weak evidence given by "number of adherents" doesn't significantly budge the needle.
On the other hand, having had personal experience with lucid dreams, your appraisal of the plausibility of regular, practiced lucid dreaming should be rather high. If, then, you encounter even a dozen people who claim to have done this successfully, you should believe that is probably possible. That is, of course, unless you have some appropriately strong justification based on your understanding of neuroscience for why it should not be possible.
>When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you do.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The part of your brain that perceives being in control is not the part of the brain that issues commands. So if we allow that it is possible to believe you have control over your actions without actually having control over your actions, then we must accept that this is in fact always the case, even while we are awake. The belief that you are an atomic unit which simultaneously perceives and manipulates the world is a form of essentialism which we can pretty well rule out by now.
Edit: I should also add that "lucid dreaming" doesn't technically imply control; it just means you're aware that you're in a dream.
Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately. The one dream that I remember where I suddenly realized I was dreaming but didn't wake up went pretty awry. I became very confused in the dream trying to figure out if I was awake or not. It was disturbing.
>Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately.
Most, but not all of my experiences have been similar, although I actually suspect that in at least some cases I have not actually woken up, but have merely dreamt that I woke up. At one point I "woke up" from a lucid dream to find myself in bed in the middle of the night, went back to sleep, and then was awoken moments later by my alarm and found that the sun was fully risen. Not conclusive, as I may have just slept dreamlessly in the interim (although that's uncommon after waking from a dream and going back to sleep), but suspicious.
Another time, I woke up immediately after realizing I was dreaming, looked around my room, and found that my dream had persisted and was visually composited over the real world around me. This was, of course, extremely disconcerting, and my solution was to close my eyes and go back to sleep. But looking back, it seems far more likely that I dreamt that entire experience, including the waking up and looking around, than that my brain actually had that kind of catastrophic system failure.
In any case, losing your grasp on lucid dreams is a common and frustrating problem, and people have gathered a few tricks for holding on. One that has sometimes worked for me is, when I feel things beginning to slip, rather than panicking, to spin gently in place with my eyes closed (although closing your eyes in a dream is not always
> "(although closing your eyes in a dream is not always"
I've been lucid dreaming for a good many years now. Losing visual sensations in a dream typically leads me to waking up. I attribute this to me being a rather visual learner/thinker while awake. Early on I tried the spinning-around trick, but it led to confusing visual-blurs and often me unintentionally sensing my real-body's proprioceptive channel, all leading to waking up.
My best dream-stabilizing trick so far has been to look at my dream hands and use one to scratch the palm of the other. That ties my visual perceptions to my dream-body's tactile sensations. Once I get a dream stabilized like this, I can just keep one hand scratching its own palm all the time, serving as a good, constant reminder that I'm still dreaming.
Or, if I'm flying/hovering, I just crash into something or the ground (the harder the better), also linking the visual to the tactile.
That is a rather uncompelling argument. How many people claim to be able to do something has very little to do with whether or not that thing is possible. Many, many people claim to have been helped by homeopathic remedies, and none of them have. Relatively few people claim to be able to walk on their hands, but many of them can.
"Number of claims" is evidence, but it is such weak evidence that its effect on your beliefs should almost always be overwhelmed by the effect of your prior. The plausibility of astral projection and homeopathy is incredibly low, and the weak evidence given by "number of adherents" doesn't significantly budge the needle.
On the other hand, having had personal experience with lucid dreams, your appraisal of the plausibility of regular, practiced lucid dreaming should be rather high. If, then, you encounter even a dozen people who claim to have done this successfully, you should believe that is probably possible. That is, of course, unless you have some appropriately strong justification based on your understanding of neuroscience for why it should not be possible.
>When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you do.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The part of your brain that perceives being in control is not the part of the brain that issues commands. So if we allow that it is possible to believe you have control over your actions without actually having control over your actions, then we must accept that this is in fact always the case, even while we are awake. The belief that you are an atomic unit which simultaneously perceives and manipulates the world is a form of essentialism which we can pretty well rule out by now.
Edit: I should also add that "lucid dreaming" doesn't technically imply control; it just means you're aware that you're in a dream.