I've mentioned a bunch of times in this space that I used to be really into lucid dreaming as an early teenager (peaking when I was 13-to-14) and was pretty good at it too; then I gradually lost something (interest? or opportune circumstances/lifestyle?) and had mostly stopped doing it by the time I became an adult, and I often wish I could get back what I lost.
I was rereading a bit of one of my old lucid dreaming books (the copy of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, by Stephen LaBerge, which I got when I was 14) and it was describing the DreamLight mask (cutting-edge technology of ~1990 to detect REM sleep and flash lights that will stimulate the user to realize they're dreaming) and began to remember how I'd always been curious about these devices, and also about lucid dreaming retreats in (I think) Hawaii that I knew of at the time, and other things which I couldn't imagine having the money to buy. And now that I do have enough money that I could at least consider buying a new toy like one of these DreamLight-like devices and surely technology will have improved since 25-30 years ago, I wondered if I could find a place that was still selling stuff like that. And of course, I found out that the DreamLight and the NovaDreamer and most other such products have been off the market for many years. Somehow I'm not shocked by this at all.
I can't say that there has ever been any kind of widespread interest in lucid dreaming as a cultural phenomenon at any point in history, but I can't help feeling that there somehow was stronger collective interest in it between 20 and 30 years ago than there ever has been since. A good bit of my vivid recollections of the first-half-of-the-00's internet comes from memories of lurking on a lucid dreaming forum that was connected to the Lucidity Institute -- some years later, the Lucidity Institute lost funding and was shut down. I don't think they're doing those retreats anymore either. Stephen LaBerge (the foremost founding scientific expert on lucid dreaming) is still alive AFAIK but well past retirement age now and maybe no longer active. I don't know of a place where many people talk about it (okay, I checked and there is an active Reddit page which doesn't look to be great quality so far, but as far as I know there is no Lucid Dreaming Tumblr). The topic of lucid dreaming has just fallen long past its peak in our collective pool of cultural interests. There is no "market" for it any more, either in the literal sense of production of lucid dream -stimulating technology or funding for scientific research or in a more metaphorical sense.
The funny thing about it is that this parallels pretty well my own intense interest and engagement with lucid dreaming: peaking around 2000-2002 and then diminishing gradually until it had reached near-oblivion by the end of the '00's and then I haven't quite been able to revive it since. (Of course it's not a precise parallel: I imagine there was a lot of collective activity around the 80's and 90's, which is for instance when LaBerge's seminal books on it came out and the Lucidity Institute was at the height of its powers. But that was pretty much before my time.)
It makes me think of my own personal interest in atheism and related topics, which peaked only slightly after my interest in lucid dreaming (2003-2006-ish) before lagging slightly and then dropping sharply in the early 2010's. (One of my other main sources of memories of the first-half-of-the-'00's internet, even more vivid, is of hanging around atheism-related forums!) And this almost precisely lines up with the New Atheism movement and prevalence of atheism as part of the culture wars (I consider this era to have begun around 2003 and ended definitively in 2011). Now obviously this isn't a coincidence: the fact that everyone was arguing about atheism a lot circa 2005 clearly contributed to my continuing to think about it a lot. But it still feels like kind of an individualistic personal journey for me: my mid-teenage self was ripe for sinking my teeth into this particular kind of social and philosophical question, getting really indignant about it, eventually finding hours to discuss it with semi-strangers as a college campus (an environment very conducive for that!), then eventually feel like I was "growing out of it", had burned myself out mulling and discoursing over something that was never quite going to be resolved across large groups of people (I do feel like my side -- the pro-secular side -- by and large won those culture wars though), and... meh. That arguably sort of is what happened on the broad society-wide scale, in fact: a bunch of people got obsessed by atheism and then kind of collectively "grew out of it", but it feels like something that could only happen to me at those particular ages which makes it feel like a significant coincidence that the particular ages coincided with society's arc here.
