I taught myself lucid dreaming at about the age of 8, because I wanted to answer a question, “Can one practice the modification of human behavior while sleeping.” It took me 3 nights before I could do it.
I use to rate how aware I was in the lucid dream by how well I could reason.
I find many of the statements about lucid dreaming and schizophrenia seem to indicate that the authors of such statements really cannot distinguish between lucid dreaming and delusions–it has become a catch all phrase.
Now, since it is not even understood that there are two fundamental types of reasoning, logic and analogic, nor the principles involved in them, I think that psychology yet exist in a very primitive state.
I have found that how people react to lucid dreaming is determined by their conceptual ability to begin with. Even their ability to call a dream lucid or not is determined by what they consider lucidity itself to be.
There are, and always have been, people who have a great deal to say about a great many things they know not a great deal of.
Analogically, lucid dreaming can be addressing the modification of emotion. Logically it can address one’s ability to conceptualize–just like the waking state. If one is ignorant of linguistic principles, they are not worth much as psychologists.
Every environmental acquisition system of a living organism functions through the artifice of craft-logically or analogically. The human mind is not different. Language is a craft, and one can view all mental processes in the light of linguistic processes and rate that mind in accordance with the product it is evolving to produce—human behavior that maintains and promotes the life of the body.
Psychology has yet to be founded itself on a standard. This is strange when every environmental acquisition system that is functional is rated in accordance with specific products.
If psychology were to take up the challenge of standards, it would challenge every aspect of civilization as we know it, because there are standards of human discourse itself. Nor can that job be done with institutions spitting out psychologist who themselves are often more dysfunctional than their patients.