The Strange Death of Lucid Dreaming Forums (And Why It Matters)

So, once upon a time when people said “lucid dreaming community” it actually meant something - it was a place where people genuinely interested in lucid dreaming could meet like minds, chat, grow, make friendships - and even invent new stratergies. It wasn't perfect (what ever is) - but we don't have anything like it any more.

The Lucidity Institute forum was the starting point. That was the real deal - serious - researchers and practitioners in the same digital room. It could be messy, the internet was very random back then, but the intention was clear: people were trying to understand the mind.

Then came DreamViews, LD4all, Mortal Mist. None of them were flawless (forums were always magnets for a bit of twaddle), but they left a meaningful history - a thread you could follow.

You could go back, read posts from 2004, see experiments, failures, long (often insane) arguments over whether something worked or was rubbish. Factions developed, alongside friendships. That kind of continuity mattered.

Where's all that now? Well, It’s pretty much gone.

What happened to the Lucidity Institute forum?

It just… vanished. Long since offline. Which is a real shame because it was easily the most serious lucid dreaming forum we’ve ever had.

Real researchers were there, names you’d actually recognise if you read the literature, and conversations that didn’t dissolve into absolute nonsense after a few hours (some went on for years - literally).

But that’s the internet... the early adopters tend to take things seriously, then the unwashed masses descend.

Is DreamViews dead?

Sort of. It still exists (technically), but it feels like walking around a museum after closing time. It's kind of the online equivalent to the "backrooms"

A few people wander in now and then, leave a "hello?" post, disappear again. It’s definitely not what it was.

It's the same story with LD4all - which was once thriving, but is now basically a haunted house of old posts where someone occasionally turns up, looks around, and does a runner.

Mortal Mist? Well, that one has gone completely.

There were others, plenty of micro-communities. But those were the top names.

However, the old landscape of lucid dreaming forums is rubble now, and those of us who remember are all standing around pretending we don’t miss it.

(and even though a lot of nonsense was generated back then, there was a real sense of group exploration)

How the Lucid Dream Forum was replaced by Reddit, Discord and TikTok nonsense

So what exactly filled the gap?

Well, sadly not much that’s any good.

Reddit lucid dreaming is mostly pointless noise - every now and then there's one half-decent thread buried under twenty about omnilucidity (don’t get me started) or “how do I lucid dream tonight plz urgent.”

Discord servers… well, if you're the kind of person who likes to get their science from the online equivalent to a skate park for teens who rarely leave the house - then it's a good place for instant chat (and plenty of toxicity, bullying, groupthink, and entitlement).

As for Facebook groups? They're mostly just recycled memes and half-baked tips that were wrong in 2009 and are still wrong now. These tend to be the home of boomer hippies - so expect a lot of "light work" and other new-age silliness.

And TikTok is… well, TikTok. Great if you've suffered a head injury and have completely lost all critical thinking skills.

Most importantly, none of these places have any meaningful structure or memory. They’re not communities in the old sense - they’re noise machines designed to keep you scrolling, not meaningfully connecting with people, and definitely not thinking.

Odd that social media basically destroyed genuine communities isn't it?

The enshittification of lucid dreaming communities

Cory Doctorow used the word, enshittification, to describe how most things eventually implode into junk, and that’s exactly what happened here. Forums decayed but they still gave you archives, history, a chance to see how ideas evolved over years. You could watch someone go from completely wet behind the ears to genuinely skilled. You could track their experiments, see what worked.

Social media killed all that. Now it’s novelty every single day, every single hour. If it's not new it's not interesting.

So, if you want to build knowledge or to trace experiments across months or years, to actually learn from collective experience - you can forget it. The infrastructure just isn’t there anymore.

And people wonder why lucid dreaming feels harder these days. It’s not harder. Your brain hasn’t changed and the basic neuroscience is still the same.

What’s changed is the culture around it. The teachers are now "influencers" optimising everything for clicks and retention, or anonymous usernames who can vanish the moment they’re wrong (and they often are).

Here's an experiment: try asking the difference between WILD and DILD on Reddit and you’ll get thirty answers, most of them wrong but delivered with absolute confidence. Then ask yourself, "how many of these are genuine humans?"

At least on the old forums you knew who was worth listening to because reputations mattered, they were built over years of posts, and people actually cared about being accurate (mostly).

What we actually lost

Am I indulging in nostalgia? not really (though I suppose there’s a bit of that). We genuinely lost something important when the forums died. We lost continuity - the ability to see how understanding develops over time. We lost accountability - real friendships were formed in forums, people knew who was who, people built reputations.

We lost the collective memory of a community that actually gave a damn about whether what they were saying was true or just sounded good.

Now it’s all fractured, spread thinly across platforms designed to make you doom-scroll, not to make you think. The signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely bonkers in the wrong direction.

Lucid dreaming itself is still alive of course. People still have lucid dreams, still figure out how to do it, still have those extraordinary experiences where you realise you’re dreaming and the whole thing feels like sci-fi magic.

But the way we talk about it online, the way new dreamers find their footing, that’s utterly collapsed.

And that, I think, is one of the main issues these days - the complete absence of a any meaningful functional community to share the journey. I try to keep the flame alive in my YouTube community - and we've genuinely built a group of passionate humans all clinging to this amazing subject. So if you're looking for a home for your lucid dreaming practices - there's still somewhere where real humans share real experiences, and you can get to know each other.

Come join us!