Does LD conflict with the natural purpose of dreams?

Ah, that makes a lot of sense to me, thank you for your input! Some of these are arguments I've used myself when talking to my husband, but since I'm rather new to any serious study of LD and thus don't feel qualified, I thought I'd listen to what other people have to say about it. He countered the first argument with: Even if you don't remember the dreams, your brain might've used the building of said dreams to process things. And he might have a point there, but I think the numbers are on our side. As you said, it's not as if lucid dreamers had no other dreams or even lucid dreams every night! I think lucid dreaming and dream control first sounded like science fiction to him, and when he learned that it is actually possible, he became worried about possible side effects or maybe even addiction.

Daniel is the one to ask about any effect, detrimental or otherwise but I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything, as some people can do this naturally, you’d say it isn’t harmful, certainly not in the numbers of lucid dreams to all the dreams we have, it’s a tiny fraction even for the most successful. Practices like Wake back to bed can affect your sleep of course but then thats why we don’t do them every night, all in moderation to get the right balance of effectiveness and detriment to sleep. If you’re lacking sleep you’ll not get decent REM periods. Addiction I guess is possible but the amount of work required and the techniques generally employed such as WBTB generally ensure you’ll not get more than a couple a week, maybe more if you’re extremely lucky and dedicated but most likely less, so it’s not like you can just decide to have one and it’ll happen, much as that would be nice.