Holding Breath

I just read that if you hold your breath in a LD you will in RL aswell. Is this true?

I can’t tell, because all the people that promised they would try it, never posted here again for some reason. :confused:

I wouldn’t try that. I’ve read that dreams occur in real time, but I don’t see how we could be sure about that. It could be that if you hold your breath for ten minutes in-dream, you’d have held it for five minutes in reality. Also, is somebody planning on watching you sleep to confirm that you held your breath?

And, really, it doesn’t make sense to me that we would have breath control in the middle of a lucid dream. The earliest experiments to prove the existence of lucid dreaming used conscious eye movement while dreaming, but when you flap your arms in a dream, your real body doesn’t move.

No holding breath in a dream will not hold breath in real life, I used to have the same worries,and would make my self take a breath and end up waking up.Your body will continue breathing as per normal while you are in a dream.

Don’t worry about it, even if you did hold your breath in real life you would wake up before you died.

It’s actually a good reality check see if you can breath under water etc.

I don’t think you have any control over your breathing in a ND or LD. As soon as SP sets in you lose that control over your breathing (which can even be frightening if you’re accidentally awake when SP sets in). Besides that, millions of years of evolution have made very very sure that you can’t suffocate yourself by holding your breath in any way what so ever. The furthest a very determined person can get is passing himself out and then the breath reflex will take over and wake him up again.

That’s true, except that the breath reflex won’t wake you up. If you try to suffocate yourself or if your body feels suffocated you will roll on your side and you will begin breathing again. Body reflex from millions of years of evolution, indeed. :happy: And no, I don’t think holding your breath in an ld will hold your breath in rl, because remember the rc is that if you hold your nose and try to breathe you will still be able to breathe will holding your nose. But you don’t wake up with your fingers clinching your nose, do you? XD

I’m not sure about this. While observing my cat sleeping, sometimes the first sign that she is dreaming, before the twitching begins, is that she will start breathing differently- as if her breath was responding to some perhaps distressful or exciting dream. The only biological reason I can think of that her body would do this without interruption from the mind, is that the brain will start using more oxygen in REM sleep, and so will need more breathing to take place. It is not like her muscles need the oxygen for the intense physical activity she might be involved in in her dream.

Then again, maybe the brain thinks so. Then again, once more, do cat’s normally have the ability to control their breathing while awake? Nevertheless, the breathing is a movement that cannot cause too much trouble (as with the eye-movements), so evolution would not automatically make it out of the control of the dreaming brain, since, it doesn’t really matter if it controls it or not. At least not for non-aquatic animals. The activity of holding one’s breath for no reason in a dream, I do not believe has come up often during evolution, because, really, it is nonsense! Why would you want to? It seems like a uniquely human idea.

I wouldn’t call it out of the question, but I think there is good reason to doubt that you can do it. We do seem to lose control of your breathing during WILD.

Very interesting opinions… but they are wrong. :tongue: LaBerge and other researchers have made experiments about this. For instance, you can read in this article (https://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/index.html):

And here is an excerpt of this article (https://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/si91ld.html):

When you hold your breath in a dream, whether a ND or a LD, after a while you can’t hold it anymore and you wake up. This happened to me many times in ND’s.