I managed to lucid dream after doing just a few exercises. It was actually a lot of fun. My son only has lucid dreams and he does this naturally. I think that he manages to do this because he suffered terribly from nightmares from age two until he was about six. He got control of his dreams and he’s steered every bad dream into a good one since.
This guy was a nut. He probably has schizophrenia. He was obviously into just about every conspiracy theory out there.
It’s impossible to understand crazy. That’s why it’s crazy! Trying to link his insanity to music, political ideology or anything else is tilting at windmills. Sane people will never be able to really understand insanity. It’s the very nature of the thing.
And yet, for some strange reason, we all want to try. We don’t want to accept that some people just have broken brains and that’s all there is to it. That he’d be driven over the edge if he’d been exposed to nothing more than videos of playing puppies. He’d manage to act out if he’d had access to nothing more than plastic butter knives.
I'm not saying that I have the definitive answer. But consider the following from the Wikipedia entry on "Lucid Dreams":
Another theory presented by transpersonal psychology and some Eastern religions is that it is the individual's state of consciousness (or awareness) that determines their ability to discriminate and differentiate between what is real, and what is false or illusory. In the dream state, many experiences are accepted as real by the dreamer that would not be accepted as real in the waking state. Some religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism describe states of consciousness (i.e., Nirvana or Moksha) where individuals "wake up", and discover a new or altered state of consciousness that reveals their normal waking experience to be unreal, dream-like, or maya (illusion).At the very least, don't you think that this could push an already-unstable person over the edge, and induce psychosis?
This is straight-up New Age teaching, which has been known to induce psychosis. See my link to Sharon Lee Giganti above.
First, I agree with St_Thomas_Aquinas that there can be a confluence of a vulnerable subject and a dangerous practice. New Age theory has a specific view of reality which encourages “magical thinking,” giving it the veneer of social acceptability. It amounts to the removal of an important layer of inhibition that would otherwise act as a check on some unstable minds.
Second, schizophrenia is a disease without a clear, uniform definition (despite what you may have heard) and therefore without a clear, uniform etiology. Put another way, you can’t be sure what caused it if you don’t really know what it is, and you can’t be sure what it is if you don’t really know what caused it. Truth be told, schizophrenia has become a catch-all term for a variety of manifestations, many of which cannot be defined in purely biological terms. There are diagnosed schizophrenics who are not the victim of “broken brains” so much as “broken thought patterns,” and practices which seriously affect those thought patterns cannot be automatically dismissed as unimportant.
Third, surrendering to the purely biological view of mental illness was one of our early mistakes in the slide to Progressivism, which is inherently materialistic and views the human mind as no more than the sum of its chemical reactions. Hence, under that view, any “bad thinking” can be corrected via purely chemical, physical coercion, with no reference to spirit or old-fashioned notions of individual moral responsibility. From which we get such things as those infamous Soviet psychiatric hospitals for those with “bad” political thoughts.
So, while there certainly can be mental disorders with biological factors, a purely biological view of mental illness with no allowance for a transcendent individual responsibility leads directly to the nightmare of the “therapeutic state,” because it shuts the victim of mental illness out of the one area where they might really find a cure, their own individual power of self-control. And that is too much to give up, both for them, and for those around them.