First brain image of a dream created
sciencenews.org
sciencenews.org
Though using an fMRI like this is pretty cool.
If you were getting your entertainment during sleep, what kind of productivity boost would that have? Spend more time sleeping and more of your waking hours working.
How legit he is I don't know.
However, to say that we'd never wake up might be a bit of an exaggeration. Until all labor is automated in some way shape or form, eventually someones going to need to get up to keep the water running.
You also have to remember that people sort of have this tendency to die when they don't eat or drink. Though I guess thats one way we could all never wake up. Have a lucid dream thats so compelling that you can't justify it to yourself to get up for food and water.
EDIT: On the other hand, you could feed people intravenously. But a matrix of solipsism probably doesn't sit right with a significant portion of humanity.
It sounds wonky, but, throwing it out there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder Subset: Depersonalization disorder: periods of detachment from self or surrounding which may be experienced as "unreal" (lacking in control of or "outside of" self) while retaining awareness that this is only a feeling and not a reality.
Too bad hearing about other peoples' lucid dreams is about as boring as hearing about other peoples' dreams in general, so there it's a bit tricky how you'd set up the culture around it.
One idea might be what traditional shamanistic cultures do, and pretend that dreams actually take place in a "real" astral plane, instead of just being whatever your head comes up with. As per the suggestion thing, this might make people end up imagining their lucid dream adventures into the culturally shared astral plane imagery instead of stuff that's more transparently just a rehash of their daily stuff, and strengthen the lucid dream inducing cultural narrative.
For a completely different approach, I wonder if it were possible to build some kind of transcranial magnetic stimulation device that increased dream recall and lucid dreams drastically.
Is lucid dreaming really all that rare? I've been able to have lucid dreams about once a week ever since the age of 14.