While I understand that part of the fascination in LDs is total release of your inhibitions and that dream characters aren’t real, there is some hurt in mindless violence, rape, etc. It hurts yourself. Ever action you take affects you psychologically, especially in dreams when your mind is more open and impressionable. It’s like a form of self-hyonosis. How would you feel if you broke that barrier and raped your best friend - only to find out that it exhilirated you and whenever you saw that person the image popped up in your mind? It can affect you, but the good news is we coudl also use our dreams to strengthen our positive attributes. Helping a stranger in a dream may very well allow you to be more willing to help out in real life, and so on. Thoughts?
This seems a waste of a good LD … unless the help includes getting into an adventure of some kind. Since the DC isn’t real!
It’s odd i feel this way, since I wouldn’t want to do anything negative towards DCs 
The only fighting I would get involved in would be in a game scenario. Any sex would have to be fully consentual in every way.
I wouldn’t tie things down with “ethics”, necessarily, but I wouldn’t do anything horrible.
I wouldn’t torture, I wouldn’t rape, I most likely wouldn’t do drugs, because those are things I’d never do in real life.
I wouldn’t have a problem with killing in LD’s…obviously I’d never do it IRL. The thing about killing in LD’s is that it sounds fun to just make DC’s to battle, to fight monsters, to get in scraps with DC’s, stuff like that. But to just go around killing people in an LD for no reason, I doubt I’d do that.
most important point i think.
I think humans learn and are shaped largely from experience… and if we were to participate and engage in activities in our dreams that were inhumane/evil/extremely violent etc… then I would think that those experiences, especially if very frequent, would shape our personalities and our psyche in a recognizable and possibly detrimental way - even if the experiences were “not in real life”.
Me personally though… I would probably never think or want to engage in something incredibly inhumane and evil, in dream or waking life… although the possibilities and circumstances are infinite so I suppose I can never say never either…
AHH 
I could never kill a DC! I know they aren’t exactly “real” but still. I woulden’t be able to do it. Monsters and stuff maybe. But people? nuh-uh. Its grossly morbid in my mind. I just don’t have the heart…or the stomach. I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to. (No offense to those who have done it. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just not for me.)
P.S. Very nicely put, Adahni! 
After being in a seriouce relationship for a while, i noticed that my sexual dreams went down hill… They would still try to happen, but i would always say “I’m not going to cheat on emilee”. I hold that value close in real life, so it was very apparent in the dream world for quite a while. I really wish it didnt happen, cause i missed out on having fun with the love of my life afew times.
Turnes out that my now ex, cheated on me in real life, so it was all worthless. Atleast i know im a good guy.
I like to fight in LDs, but often nothing happens, i’ll just hit them with no recoil or reaction.
I definatly think there are things that you shouldnt do even in a dream, but i also believe in free will, so i think people should feel free to do whatever they want, atleast in the dreamworld. I guess what stuff u do, is really just a reflection of your personality. So if your going around raping and killing people, then just maybe you have some deep seeded issues that need dealing with.
Foote
about to BTB
I do have certain ethics in my lucid dreams I realise, but they don’t really matter because I am not tempted to do things contrasting with those etics. In normal dreams however, I can do the most vile things.
I want to be myself at all times. And in a dream I can be myself without having to worry about consequences.
That means I will not kill people without a good reason(beating someone to death with bare hands is the last resort, when no weapon is near).
Definitely will not throw a defenseless puppy off a tall building(throwing puppies off tall buildings is a very bad thing 
, I’d rather throw some humans 
).
Rape seems FAR below me, below anyone who calls himself a civilizes human being really.
If I see someone or something that, in my mind, deserves to suffer and/or die, than I will torture and/or kill it.
Anyone who betrays me, sooner or later, one way or another, WILL get punished(I try to keep that one in real life as well).
I would though prefer doing more interesting things in LD’s though, like investigate conspiracy theories, even if it is pointless, or exploring places I haven’t been to, in the present, past and maybe future. And if something happens that bothers me, I would destroy it 
.
I try to be quite ethical in lucid dreams for “two”
reasons
firstly ,
" "
if you have a game, you put in a cheat code, the game becomes boring fast, and you lost all the fun, forever and ever until you find a new game that is challenging and novel, therefore just this morning i was on a computer and it said “dreaming”, i noticed odd things, my friend was sending me a message that I was dreaming, I discussed this with my dad, he thought so
I asked her “well what do I do in a lucid dream anyway?” i was dreaming, so what ? I’ve had soooo many of them you know!
she said “go to the store and look around or something like that…”
don’t think I actually did anything…
now second it is because, it is only by treating dreams with the same respect that you have for this reality, that you can find true enjoyment in the subtlety of being in a dreamworld, although this is also the first reason, the second being perhaps that you accrue karma by feeding parcels of your personality based upon any deliberate actions you take
for instance if you want a dream girlfriend, it is so much more meaningful to go talk to a girl, and respect her like she is real (BECAUSE SHE IS ! sometimes!) and then you can really have the growing experience of belonging, sure
you can warp ahead a few levels, to where you are already together, if you just want someone to hang out with for a while, on a dream date or something, but
considering them AS real opens many vistas , rather than being a tyrannical guy with unlimited cheat codes… which is fine because everyone likely goes through that phase of lucidity.
Great topic!
I can’t say I have thought about it. But “be yourself” was a hard learned lesson since childhood and I do not plan on letting go.
Also, dreams, much like our waking hours form our thoughts and conciousness. Do things you shouldn’t in an LD, the urges to do things in real life will be right there. The mind changes and adapts to those things, you may find yourself loosing control no?
A dream is as fake or real as you want it to be. Rather than do things you should never do in real life, find ways around it, do what you want in the right way; usually it is possible. Now, you have not only been working to solve any problems in real life while you sleep, but it may spark new thoughts and solutions you may not have already thought of!
So then why bother?
But you probably wouldn’t do it in a dream if there wasn’t already an urge!
If you’re worried about the indulging of that urge having an effect on your real life I’d say it probably would. But whether that effect is positive (satiating your appetite for wrongness) or negative (encouraging wrongness) is unclear and probably depends on the person and the frequency.
I’m struggling to understand. I get why you should consider the dreamworld as real so it will feel more special. But that is not an ethical issue. You can use that same frame of mind to do the most unethical things you can imagine, by any school of thought. I happen to believe there is no right and wrong but still, on a personal level regarding the dreamworld as real is just for you own enjoyment and nothing more. When you think about it, that’s also the reason people act ethically- it feels better. Then again it’s also why people act unethically. It’s all quite hedonistic isn’t it?
I also get why you’d rather spread good karma.
But I’m not sure what you mean by cheat codes. Is it the dreamstate itself? The fact that you can do anything? Kind of hard to get around really. Actually I kind of got it now. More challenging to resist urges than to give in to them. That is the new game. Sort of like playing the game with cheatcodes on, but playing like they are off. Well, it seems to me, again, that it’s a matter of personal enjoyment and not ethics. Might as well make up some other rules to make it more challenging. Like, no flying, no conjuring.
About the reality of it all. I think that, ethics must be based on something particular. And it makes the most sense that ethical rules should be based on not creating negative effects, while allowing good ones, or even encouraging them. That’s Utilitarianism for ya.
It makes sense that ethics should be different in dreams then, because dreams are imagination. And there ain’t really much harm that can be done. Even so, some think that doing harm to dream characters will make you a more harmful person in real life. There could be something to this, which makes it wrong from a utilitarian point of view. However I don’t think it is really true that it does, maybe sometimes, but mostly not.
It’s similar to playing a video game as you pointed out earlier. And when you go around shooting and destroying in a videogame there is no real harm to anybody or anything. And mostly you don’t go out and do the same thing in real life. This is probably because of the fact that you are aware that it’s not real people and things that you destroy. You don’t consider them real. And then you can damage them without feeling remorse. But the second you think they are real, you pity them. So you won’t think yourself that you are killing anybody in a dream, it’s not the same act as in real life. It’s only pretending. Like you are up on stage. And nobody ever complained that acting would be a problem.
How people come to do evil things in real life is when they stop seeing people as people. They dehumanise you and then they don’t care what happens to you. You can see it if you look around. Somebody commits a crime and they are no longer human, they are a criminal. So it’s ok to hunt them, beat them, shoot them, and pack them in a box for years and years and years. Or somebody is of a particular creed different from others, and they are not a person anymore but defined by their particularity. The ones that do harm to them don’t consider it evil and would never treat anybody they identify with the same way. So i don’t believe that killing a dream character would make you more likely to kill a real life human, because you are concious that the real life human is real, and identify with them right away. But as soon as you don’t consider the real life human to be a human being, boy they is in trouble. Least if you made a habit to do nasty things to non-humans.
this got long.
I wouldn’t do anything in a dream I didn’t want to, that’s my only restriction. So far I’ve only had two, short, LDs but several NDs where I had fun killing people. I would never kill IWL unless threatened to life, therefore such dreams have never bothered me, I see them simply as a source of entertainment.
In a LD I could imagine it’d be fun to go on a killing spree RPG style, using daggers while dodging and twisting around my enemies. I enjoy this kind of killing in games and dreams but I don’t see it unethical, it’s just a game to me. I wouldn’t kill anyone I know though, it’d probably just make me sad to see them dead so it’d make no sense to do it.
As for sex, I wouldn’t do anything I didn’t like and I don’t know what I like yet. >.<
Animal cruelty seems kinda pointless to me, I wouldn’t even consider it in a LD.
Drugs, well, it would also be kinda pointless. If you’re in control of the world you’d hardly need something like drugs to get your kicks. 
Beauty knows no limits or ethics, because beauty is freedom. Limitless love, immoral.
there is consequence in the sleep of any who knows consequence awake.
i think what a person does in a lucid dream really defines what their true ethics are. in a lucid dream, you are free to do anything that normally would be unacceptable in society. it makes the distinction between what a person really believes they shouldn’t do because it’s wrong, and what they wouldn’t do in RL just because of the social consequences.
ex: if a person in a lucid dream has the choice to kill or not kill a dream character, and they are fully aware that whether they do or not will have no social consequences in RL, then whether they do or not shows if they really genuinly believe what the right or wrong thing to do is.
another ex: in lucid dreams i do things that i would never do in waking life because it’s socially unacceptable but that i don’t think are morally or ethically wrong.
Killing is not a good example, though I’m sure you can think of one. You see, when you are lucid, you know that you are in a dream. Depending on your beliefs about the nature of dreams, you may not consider a dream character a real person. So you do not think you are killing anyone at all. The only thing that doing this in a LUCID dream can ever say about a person is that, if you do it, you must consider it ok to pretend to kill people. It should be more telling of your personality if you are NOT lucid, because then you don’t know you are dreaming and think everything is real. But then again, one does not think normally in regular dreams.
I guess you could compare a lucid dream to a sandbox video game. Tbh, yes, I might like to try being able to point at someone and throwing them backwards a couple hundred feet, and maybe have some fun with big guns 
Sort of like Grand Theft Auto except better. If it got to a stage where everything was realistic, emotional, and someone was for example begging for their life, that’s a bit too far, and I’d go do something else, like flying. Or if it had been a bad day for me I might kill them anyways 
In my opinion you can do whatever you want in your dreams. The dream is all /you/. I f you wish to kill a part of yourself, be my guest. If someone is sick enough to want and be a pedophile in his/her dreams, then go ahead. If this keeps the person from doing such things in the daily life, then do it especially in your dreams. It could be some kind of therapy.
Lucid dreams could even help you with certain things. To go back to certain non-ethical scenes in your dreams could help you overcome those bad memories.
I have to be honest with you -I actually like being a serial killer in my dreams. I love observing the police and to see how they work on my case. I love fleeing from them and escaping and escaping again and again. I was honored when Jack the Ripper gave me a compliment.
This may sound sick, but I must tell you too that in real life I already feel guilty when I accidentally kill an ant or musquito. I’m against violence and when I see blood, I usually faint. It’s odd how that can be so totally different in dreams. On the other hand, I do realise my anger and frustration in those dreams, so I can be calmer in the daytime. 
Dreams are merely your imagination, and therefore this would be akin to applying ethics to what you think about. Limiting what you can think about is unhealthy.