[color=indigo]I agree completely that killing dream characters is a fun and healthy thing to do MOST of the time. But the above statement is wrong. Try telling it to the parents whos kids died while another kid shot them, influenced completely by games. He got so obsessed with it, he did it IRL. Sometimes it CAN breed violence, and it already has done. But this does rarely happen, and in most cases the person/s it has affected already has psychotic problems. Healthy people can tell the difference between waking reality and fantasy. But there are many people out there who can’t. So my opinion is: if you are completely sure you are sane, do it. If not…then…don’t shoot me?[/color]
Fair point but i did say The only people that would kill in real life because they did in a dream/game are those with extremely low morality and conscience, in which case they would probably if killed eventually anyways. I should have really added psychotic disorders in there too but it’s 3:11 am lol leave me be 
exactly. People with psychotic problems are very impressionable even non-violent things can cause them to commit violent acts so to say it’s purely down to violent games/movies would be a little inaccurate, it’s just in the aftermath people say “i was playing this game/watching this movie” and people stop listening to the rest. That said even pacman could be concidered “violent”
I would genuinely be intersted in finding out how many violent crime were committed “because of voilent games/movies” where the guilty party was totally sane and of stable mind however or at least of the age of 15. - this also includes those who aren’t sociopathic.
I’d be more interested in knowing why they allowed them to play violent games anyways. Children and psychotics are the two most impressionable minds and a psychotic child allowed to view/play anything remotely psychotic is just asking for trouble.
You raise a very good point, though perhaps it’s a little more complicated than that. Simulated violence is a great way to relieve tension, and have a bit of fun without the severe consequences. At the same time, though, the argument could be made that you’re subconsciously teaching yourself to handle particular situations inappropriately. I know it’s unlikely that an avid video game enthusiast would absent-mindedly ram someone off their moterbike because they were so used to doing it in Vice City, but the effects could be more subtle.
Consider the use of simulated violence as a form of stress relief. The participant is essentially training themself to use violence (simulated or otherwise, the aggression is there) as a means to relieve the tension. This association between tension (anxiety, stress, anger, etc) and violence, may intrude on the person’s general attitude when dealing with realistic problems. They probably won’t reach for the 12 guage, but they may tackle the situation aggressively as they’re used to in a virtual environment.
I don’t necessarily agree with the above, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
I think saying so and so did (pick your action) because he/she watched too may horror movies playing games or what ever, is just a way for people to rationalize there behavior. As a society we want to believe that is true. No, we have to believe it is true. Because what other explanation can there be. To me it is the equivalent of the twinkie defense. First you have a crime now you create a excuse. People have been committing acts of violence long before there were violent TV or games.
I have used my dreams to vent out my frustrations and found it to be very relieving. Even fun and I feel more peaceful afterward. It certainty does not cause me to commit real acts of violence. I believe that Lucid Dreaming is a safe place for people to freely express there feelings and fantasies with out worrying about real life consequences or restraints. It may even be helpful. I think it would be an interesting experiment to see if people who have problems with anger could use lucid dreaming to help control there problems.
sno_isulli [edit to correct sp]
Well said
Your right. I have no idea why I felt I should reply to his post. It was compleatly OT and I apologize. I should have just ignored him or referred him to the thread for those who wish to continue the religious debate.
I noticed you never seem to get her name right. Just think “Illusions” backwards. 
gasp I never noticed! sno_isulli! What a great name!
I’d like to point out that children are not born with a conscience and therefore violent media is VERY dangerous for them be exposed to.
All it takes is just halfway crappy parents and you could have a very problematic kid.
Kids are not likely to recreate violence they see in tv if they see consequences (such as someone being punished for being violent) however if there are no consequences (AND WHEN ARE THERE ON TV? Some guy shoots a bunch of drug dealers and the chief slaps him on the back and gives him a promotion!) they are somewhat more likely to repeat it, and if they are praised for being violent, the child is MUCH more likely to act out what he sees.
The problem herein lies that because our society is so stupid, we really do praise violence in a lot of circumstances, like “it’s okay for a cop to beat a guy that ran form him, he had it coming!” or “people deserve to be raped in jail!” or “our soldiers are good and doing God’s work by killing grandmas in Iraq” etc… we live in a society that glorifies violence in media.
For a child that doesn’t know any better (AND BY DEFAULT NONE OF THEM DO) this is a horribly dangerous thing.
Kids don’t have senses of right or wrong, I mean, that is painfully obvious, most kids for example (via brainwashing) think that drug users are “losers” and deserve to be in jail, deserve to be shot by the police… etc…
Morals? Common sense. No. kids are inherently “stupid” and it takes good parents (which we don’t have a lot of these days) to teach them to separate tv from reality, games from reality, and to filter out all this crap society feeds them that is completely untrue.
A child of a bigot will be a bigot. A child of a hippy will be a hippy (until public schools have their ways with him). A child of an abusive dad will probably end up picking up abusive habits (providing there is no intervention etc). A child of a violent dad will be violent.
We are breeding a bunch of psychotic kids… a study was done where children’s parents and a police officer told them what to do if they ever found a gun, and how dangerous guns are, how playing with them can kill them… then they planted unloaded (and trgiger locked) guns in their classroom… guess what the idiots did? WOW! points at friends head and pulls the trigger
ALL OF THEM played with them… even some of the girls.
Okay, and they were told what not to do and told the consequences of it…
I don’t know what my parents did “right” but they did have me believing th drug/gun propoganda, to run and tell an adult, not touch it, etc… and many times my friends would see a realistic toy gun and ask if it’s real before they played with it… so… we were raised right somehow, but that was a long time ago, and we never watched movies where people shot each other, the most violent stuff we watched was power rangers and ninja turtles.
(which do encourage violence against “bad guys”)
So yeah, something is horribly wrong here with this society… kids should be kept away form that kind of stuff until at least late childhood, and they should be taught that violence is wrong, blah blah blah… but they aren’t.
A noncaring or non-restricting parent letting his kid watch and play whatever he wants is goin to give the child a warped mind at a young age, becuase by default the childs mind is rather empty, growing up exposed to violent media and whatnot is going to be bad for him no matter what… and the permissive parenting just makes it worse.
Until the kids become somewhat mature they should be shielded form that kind of stuff, and when they see it, it should be explained to them that “things don’t work that way in real life”…
Etc… but that’s not the way it is.
I understand what you are trying to say (I think) though I don’t really understand what it has to do with the topic. So before I reply to what I think you are getting at. Would you explain how it applies to the topic: killing dream characters. I am not being picky and I think I know where you are going. I am just asking for clarification. I don’t want to misinterpret your words.
Damn, they found out! I’m outta here. . . 
I thank my brother for the “backwards flippy” idea. His TN_Adrom screen name made no sense to me until he said it was: mordant backwards. That kid. . .
someone should make a topic about how how topics never stay on topic, and see how long it takes that topic to get off topic… hmm… that’s a good idea: the off topic topic
anyway, i know i said i was done w/ this thread, but i deemed holy reality’s post worthy of a response, even thought it was a bit off topic 
milod, you asked how holy reality’s thread relates to DC killing, i’m gonna go out on a limb and offer a hypothesis:
perhaps it’s early exposure to violence when we were young and impressionable, that caused us to grow up to think that violence was an acceptable way to solve problems. i’m reminded of growing up watching he-man, transformers, spiderman etc. they were “good guys”, but they didn’t use good negotiating tactics to defeat their opponents.
i may be reaching with that hypothesis and holy reality’s post was just plain off topic… but i’m gonna respond anyway
=> holy reality, i definitely agree that a conscience is a construct of society (unless that wasn’t your claim when you said that children don’t have a conscience yet, in which case i am stating that society creates consciences as my claim) but i definitely do not agree that children will automatically grow up to reflect the environment that they were raised in
example: growing up, i had a friend who cussed like a sailor, his dad cussed like a sailor, and his mom cussed… albeit, not quite like a sailor. my friend’s little sister (who was about 6 or 7)… i’d never heard a single explitive come out of her mouth at all… i always thought that was the most amazing thing.
also, i don’t think it is at all fair to say that simply because kids haven’t devoloped a sense of right and wrong that they are stupid, even if you did put “stupid” in quotes.
also, i think kids some sense of fantasy and actuality, i don’t think you give them enough credit, but then again i’m reminded of another debate i had w/ you when it was revealed you believe everything is causally determined… i think that’s a rather pessimistic view, but now i’m getting really off topic 
it was already being discussed, i just might have been a bit late…
anyways…
oneiromancer: "example: growing up, i had a friend who cussed like a sailor, his dad cussed like a sailor, and his mom cussed… albeit, not quite like a sailor. my friend’s little sister (who was about 6 or 7)… i’d never heard a single explitive come out of her mouth at all… i always thought that was the most amazing thing. "
Did you live with her? Perhaps she was taught that “We are allowed to say bad words but you aren’t…” or she learned it gets her in trouble at school… or maybe through punishment she learned that they were “grown up words” or something…
I mean it’s like, you explain to kids that you are old enough to drink alcohol but they aren’t, and how it’s dangerous for them and can kill them, and well… I haven’t seen very many 5 year old alcoholics.
In an attempt to directly tie this into dreaming, obviously violent dreams can be sparked by violent media… I don’t know whether I’d consider that a problem or not unless they bother you… and well this was just to kind of illustrate how violent content (lucid dream, game, movie) can indeed effect the mind and make you more violent.
Not to blame music but the angsty kids that commit acts of violence never tend to listen to 'N Sync… why is that? You could say they were prone to violence and therefore drawn to violent music… but I mean… I like “violent” music to a degree (providing there is a point to it) and I’m not too prone to violence… so…
You know, you get in the cycle of falling in love with violent media (or in this case going on killing sprees frequently while lucid) and well as I’ve already said I think it can start a downward spiral.
We can’t really apply violent lucid dreams to kids, since most kids aren’t good at LDing and if a kid is violent at a young age, it probably isn’t his fault unless there is something wrong with his brain.
But I made that reply because two other people were already discussing various forms of violence we are exposed to, and the effect it has on children… I saw someone say something about a kid not having a conscience as if it was the kids fault, and pointed out that you are not born with a conscience, it is formed into you by someone or society.
holy reality
Since my early child hood I was a horror / action movie addict. I mean I could probably name quite a few old horror movies that you most likely never heard of and they were actually scary. Now that did not make me go out and commit acts of violence or cause nightmares or any thing like that.
Again in our desperate need to find a reason why violent people act the way they do we look back and say he/she watched “bad” movies so that must be it. I do not buy any of it. TV, games, and music do not cause violent behaviors. Even in children.
Sorry holy reality, I buy your circumstances argument’s. But, I don’t buy the TV and games argument. We (including children) are not that weak willed or stupid.
Yes they are and studies show it.
Everything affects us. (the question then is “how much”? and it largely varies)
Example, you are listening to a slow boring song on the radio, then something exciting/heavy comes on, you get energized, you feel like speeding, or you do speed.
I’m sure we’ve all been there. I mean the very nature of being alive is stimulus/response, stimulus/response, violent movies affect you, romance movies affect you, documentaries affect you, everything affects you.
There are an equal number of studies that say the opposite.
Many defense lawyers have tried to blame TV when representing defendants who were charged with murder or other violent crimes. They mostly fail because there is no unbiased scientific proof either way.
A person who is intent on committing violent acts will do so. A tv show or a game is not going to cause someone to snap and go out and hurt people.
I think it’s a little shortsighted to stop there. You have to go back a little further and ask the question of what caused them to become intent on committing those acts in the first place. It’s easy to say “that person is just violent”, but I don’t believe anything at all can happen with justified cause. It might not be movies or games that provoke such a detrimental attitude, but it must be something. Upbringing, imbalance of natural chemicals, something.
Form my point of view, it isn’t reasonable to suggest that people will act in a way they weren’t influenced to.
I totally agree with you. I thought we discussed that earlier in the thread. (Maybe it was a different thread there are so many similar topics out there.)
What causes violence ? I think the answer is different depending on the individual. Many people are driven to commit crimes (some times violent ones) do to desperation, and poverty. Some because of repeated child hood abuse/neglect. Drug/alcohol addiction is certainly a factor. But, even that does not fully explain why. There are many people whocome from a similar background yet don’t commit acts of violence towards others or themselves. Some people break the cycle do to an intervention of some sort. Some change on there own.
I don’t think there is any one single thing that we can point to and say, “That’s the problem right there.” If we could we would wipe out violence tomorrow.
You could ask psychologists, historian’s, clergy, philosophers and none would agree.
Unfortunately, the best we have been able to do is look back after a crime was committed and try to put the pieces together but, even then we still do not get the complete picture.
The bottom line is that we are too complicated to figure out.
With all that said. Some of the worst acts of violence in history occurred long before there was tv, or games. If it plays any factor at all it would be a remote one in my opinion. I have worked with people in the criminal justice system. Many who comited acts of violence and in none of the cases was TV or games the cause or even a factor.
Well said, and I completely agree. That’s not to say there isn’t a definitive set of causes for any and every action a person will perform (I believe there is), but I don’t agree that you can pass the blame for inappropriate actions to the media.
Nobody wants to hear it, but people really are natually capable of violent and unethical acts.
You guys are misinterpreting me.
VIOLENT MOVIES AFFECT YOU.
I never said they made you violent.
THEY CAN contribute to it, though, definitely, and the main issue is CHILDREN here.
But I mean, who needs violent movies when you can go to the collosseum and real people are dying in front of you all the time in the olden days?
We are naturally violent to a degree, but obviously this is complicated by our intelligence, very few animals kill for no reason at all, and they know how to maintain balance, we, humans, seem to desire to wipe each other completely out at all times… unfortunately.
Which just is kind of baffling since we are probably the only species that is actually capable of CHOOSING not to be violent, we are separated from our emotions, at least, most of us… so I mean.
The point though is that violent movies lead to violent thoughts. They do “Wow, that was cool” when someone explodes, is a violent thought.
Two days later, reflecting on that act of violence being cool, that’s a violent thought.
The little things we make habits out of doing affect is in so many intricate ways that aren’t really even conceivable to think about… you know? If you like to watch a lot of romantic movies, stop, watch violent movies instead, vice versa, really pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, etc… everything we do from recreation to education, etc, plays an intricate role in shaping our thoughts and behaviors and senses of “reality” etc.
I never said that violent media causes problems with violence, that isn’t really the case, but it CAN, and it DOES INFLUENCE US
That is what I’m saying. Just like my post is going to cause you start thinking about certain things, and perhaps in the long run very slightly alter your views or thought patterns on a particular subject.
Atheist
Of corse. Since the beginning of time man kind has been at the top of the food chain. We have been hunters, explorers and (yes) warriors. Aggression and violence is deeply routed into our being. It is just we chanel this energy differently then our ancestors did. Unfortunately, as you said we pretend this aspect of our nature does not exist. We consider ourselves to be more civilized than our ancestors. But as a species are we really. We posses weapons capable of destroying the world 100 times over. Our ancestors may have been barbarians yet each clan cared for it’s own. Do we care for ours. All you have to do is walk down any street in the seeder areas of where you live to see how well we take care of our own. Visit a nursing home or psychiatric hospital and even a prison. Incarceration has never proved to be a deterrent for crime so why do we still do it to non violent offenders. ( gone off on a tangent )
(Back on point)
I think we are born with both positive and negative aspects of our nature. They are both important and make us who we are. I think it is important to keep these two elements in balance with each other. Some people my find themselves in unfortunate circumstances such as I described in my previous post. ( drugs/alcohol addiction, poverty, abused as children etc) Any of these things can throw you out of balance. When ever this balance is disrupted in either direction a person is headed for potential disaster.
( trying to get it back on topic and relate it to lucid dreaming)
I think it can healthy to (select negative action) once in a while in a lucid dream. It can help you plow off steam and bring yourself back in balance with your self. You have a safe forum to Chanel your excess negative feelings so why not take advantage of it. I believe that you can even grow and learn from it.
I’ll end with my caveat that though I believe it is perfectly healthy to (negative action) in a LD. Be sure to keep things balanced with some positive dreams too. 
I was not going to post again on these 2 threads (you can’t reason with some people so I’ll just ignore them as I don’t have time to waste anyway) but I found this.
I found a very interesting news article which talks about the problem of violence - very much related to what I was posting in these 2 threads.
Nick Berg’s executioners all too clearly enjoyed beheading him
By Theodore Dalrymple
(Filed: 13/05/2004)
One thing that unites the men who beheaded the American Nick Berg in Iraq, the soldiers who abused Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the Palestinians who have held on to Israeli body parts in Gaza City and the murderers of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan is that they all enjoyed what they did, and enjoyed it immensely.
There is almost no greater pleasure known to man than to commit great acts of cruelty in the belief that the cause of right and justice is being served. Anyone who has observed rioters will know that they are having a wonderful time: could there be a greater joy than vandalism with a social purpose?
I used to wonder how it was possible for ordinary men to commit evil acts, and to do so en masse. I was thinking of Nazi Germany at the time, but I might just as well have been thinking of the Soviet Union. More recently, we have the example of Rwanda, where perfectly ordinary people who had been living in apparent conditions of friendship with their neighbours suddenly turned on them and hacked them to death with machetes.
There are a few exceptional human beings who seem to delight in evil all their lives. It is as if there is some inherent or acquired defect in their brains that renders them unable to learn the decencies of life or conform themselves to the canons of civilised behaviour.
From the earliest age, they stand out by their capricious and cruel wilfulness. They delight in torturing animals, dousing them in kerosene and setting them alight, or putting them in the washing machine; they lie and cheat for preference, even when there is no advantage in doing so. They are indifferent to the opinions and sufferings of others, and never learn to modify their behaviour from their own experience.
They are what the 19th-century alienist J. C. Prichard called "morally insane’’: they are neither deluded nor hallucinated - they may even be of good intelligence - but they are incapable of internalising a moral code and of conforming their conduct to it.
Such people are comparatively rare. They might be called evil by nature, although whether someone who performs evil deeds because he is neurologically incapable of performing good ones can be blamed for his behaviour is a puzzle that I leave to the moral philosophers.
Such people are, in any case, few. In the course of my work, I meet them from time to time, and they make your blood run cold. But most evil is not committed by the morally insane, or psychopaths in the Hannibal Lecter mould: it is committed by ordinary people, the kind of people who pass you in the street every day.
My vision of humanity has darkened, not since I read about Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, which seemed to me exotic and distant, culturally and politically, but since I began to investigate the lives of ordinary British people in modern conditions. I have come to the conclusion that the default setting of man is to evil and that, if not all, then many or perhaps most men will commit evil if they can get away with it.
Where there is neither social nor legal pressure to behave decently, there will be a festival of evil. We have created a society in which often there is neither such pressure; as a consequence, I am confronted every day in my work by new evidence of man’s propensity to evil, in the conduct of my patients or that of the people with whom they consort. The gratification that people derive from inflicting suffering on others is unmistakable. Furthermore, it is quite obvious that evil exerts a fascination and attraction for others who do not themselves indulge in it.
For example, it is clear that many young women prefer evil young men to decent ones. Indeed, they are attracted to men with evil written on their faces, as it often is. And the evil that these men do, the violence they commit, is often performed with a simulacrum of an excuse or moral pretext.
A man beats his girlfriend because he alleges that she is two-timing him, but really because there is no better way of keeping her in line, and because beating a defenceless woman is such fun. The sensation of a smashed glass meeting the face of a supposed or pretended enemy is balm to the soul of someone who feels himself to have been wronged all his life.
The experiments of the psychologist Stanley Milgram, published 30 years ago in a book entitled Obedience to Authority, showed how far ordinary people were prepared to inflict pain and even danger, in the form of a simulated electric shock, on a fellow citizen, merely at the behest of a stranger. They had no special reason to do so, beyond a desire to please the stranger and allegedly to further the cause of science.
Very few actually resisted; and if these ordinary people had had a cause for hatred, or had been persuaded that they had a cause for hatred (which often amounts to the same thing), of the person on whom they thought they were inflicting pain and suffering, such minimal resistance as they demonstrated would have evaporated. There is nothing they would not have done.
If the Kingdom of God is within you, so is the Kingdom of Evil. I know this from my experience of myself. When I was about nine, there were often ants’ nests at the base of our house. I used to love pouring boiling water on the ants, seeing them transformed from living beings into little boiled black dots.
How easily I persuaded myself that, by killing them, I was defending our house, preventing it from being undermined! Yet even as I told myself this, I knew that it was the killing I loved, not the structure of our house.
Both self-examination and my experience of others tells me that evil lurks within all of us, waiting for its opportunity to spring. Civilisation may be a veneer, but it is the veneer that separates us from barbarism. Never forget Original Sin and its consequences.
Theodore Dalrymple is a prison doctor
Source was the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/05/13/do1301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/05/13/ixopinion.html