I decided to post this thread in recovery, since it does deal with a medical theme, though I don't mean to mix things up if it should have gone elsewhere. I read a post from Dvivid that mentioned lucid dreaming, and other experiences, being the branches and leaves of a core development. However, I have developed lucid dreaming techniques in the past for other reasons.
As I've mentioned before, I grapple with a few mental conditions and one of them causes me particularly vivid and problematic nightmares. I was taught to develop lucid dreaming so that I could "awaken" into a dream and tell myself that what was happening was unreal and that I could control the situation. However, this development was purely under the auspices of carefully applied clinical psychology. I was never encouraged to develop a pleasant place to go. Rather, I was only ever told to practice reactions to the terrors in my dreams.
I'm recovering considerably from those days, though the technique is still helpful. I've read quite a bit about people who use lucid dreaming to train in their sleep, so to speak, and I was wondering if anyone had any opinion on whether or not this was a healthy option considering that I have spent so much time cultivating the technique. I even read that a certain psychologist in the early 20th century used lucid dreaming training to allow skiers to ski in their dreams.
Naturally, I don't have any fantastical ideas about this, but I thought it would give me a proactive way to prevent negative dreams from troubling me as they always do. I realize that responses here are not at all a substitute for a professional opinion.