Lucid Dreaming, for those who haven't seen the movie, The Waking Life, is a special kind of dreaming where you're aware that you're dreaming. The obvious benefits of lucid dreaming are obvious: potential to control your dreams thereby achieving greater fantasy, the potential for transcendance, the ability to alleviate fears, etc.

I'm currently trying stuff out some of the techniques and I'll report back on them later. So far though, practicing the techniques for lucid dreaming helps to cultivate your imagination. This is good for many things, such as art, strategy, and creative thinking. It's also good for positive imagery. If you can truly imagine yourself as a certain kind of person, then your body reacts and supports that image of yourself. I knew a kid at Stanford who never got sick and he said he secret was that he alway had a positive view of himself as a strong, healthy person.

a thousand years is but an instant. there's nothing new, nothing
different. same pattern, over and over. the same clouds,
the same music, the same as i felt an hour or an eternity
ago. there's nothing here for me now, nothing at all.
now i remember, this happened to me before, this is
why i left. you have begun to find your answers.
although it will seem difficult, the rewards
will be great. exercise your human mind as
fully as possible, knowing that it is only
an exercise. build beautiful artifacts,
solve problems, export the secrets
of the physical universe, savor the
input from all the senses, feel the
joy, and sorrow, the laughter, the
empathy, compassion and tuck these
emotional memories in your travel
bag. i remember where i came
from, and how i became human,
why i hung around and now,
my final departure schedule:
this way out... escaping
velocity, not just
eternity, but
infinity.

- Ryan Powers
The Waking Life

In the film The Waking Life there's a scene with an old man philosopher who invokes Sartre and says, "To reject any single moment of existence is to reject ALL of existence." At first, I'm like, wow, that's great; he was able to tap into the modern philosophical implication from determinism that you cannot reject one effect without rejecting every single cause in the world that led up to it. And then I thought, man, I hope it doesn't take me 40 years to learn the same lesson that a simpleton could learn, i.e. that "It's all good" and that we should learn to accept things.