For anyone not familiar, a common class of techniques people used to use (still do? Not mentioned in the article) involve regularly testing yourself to see if you're in a dream. Counting your fingers; in dreams, you may not have 5 per finger. (Sound familiar from a modern take?) Or, look at numbers and words; a digital clock; in dreams they may not make sense, but in real life they do. (OK, this is really sounding familiar...)
The idea is that when you check while awake, you will pass the awake-check, but set up a habit pattern. While dreaming, you will observe weird stuff when this happens, realize it must then you must be dreaming; you then become lucid, and can sort of control the dream, or at least be aware you're dreaming.
It may or may not have worked for me a handful of times. It certainly felt so, but only briefly, and I can't confirm it was the desired effect. Would wake up shortly after each time.
I had to stop doing reality checks because I would wake up soon after realizing that I was dreaming which caused me to miss out on needed sleep.
Also lucid nightmares and false awakenings aren’t great. Spin around in circles fast so everything is blurry and you might buy some time.
This is very common, one of best tricks is to start spinning/looking around as much as possible - it’ll keep you inside.
But if a person decided to count fingers to check if he is dreaming then he is already in lucid dreaming right? Because normally you do not know you are in a dream unless you are already in lucid dreaming.
The goal is to make reality checks a habit. It turns out dream-you still has their habits.
> Counting your fingers; in dreams, you may not have 5 per finger
That sounds horrifying. 5 fingers per finger. Do those other 5 fingers also have five fingers per finger, like a finger fractal gone out of control?
It's not horrifying when dreaming. It's like "yup, 7 fingers, totally normal, let's move on".
In dreams, I've seen people vibrate drastically until they become part of the scenery. Or other insane and horrible to describe things. However, to "myself" in the dream, that was not as surprising as my recollection of it.
A lot of the motional subsystems in your brain are turned off when you dream so you don’t react to things as you normally would. Nightmares, etc happen when those subsystems stay on for some reason (PTSD, for example). See Chap 10 (IIRC) https://amzn.to/3DzSLva
Was really necessary to include an affiliate link?
I think you missed that they were pointing out a typo, the original poster said '5 (fingers) per finger' not the intended '5 (fingers) per hand' (and before anyone points out that it should be digits, yes, I know, take that up with the original poster too).
A fractal coast of feeling; a strange loop, recurring. Nightmares within nightmares.
Or, a keyboard accident.
> Sound familiar from a modern take?
I am not sure what you're referring to but I remember watching an episode of some fictional show on Netflix where this method was used. Where a couple would count their fingers throughout the day so they could dream lucidly together.
If I'd have to guess I think it was "Behind Her Eyes".
The modern take is AI image hallucinations. I didn't realize this at the time, but it's obvious now: The reality checks lucid dreamers suggest match closely with prev-gen AI hallucinations. (fingers, text, numbers etc)
Maybe we are actually LLMs, but we have prompts that prevent us from noticing that. Unless we sleep, probably because our developers decided not to censor that part.
My first thought was totems from Inception.
> OK, this is really sounding familiar...
So you’re saying the simulation architects used an older diffusion model for dreams.
> It may or may not have worked for me a handful of times
Exactly my experience. I used the exact strategy you mention (add pinching yourself, as old fashioned as that sounds) and it was almost too easy how quickly it worked, couple days I think. I questioned if it was real or not
>So you’re saying the simulation architects used an older diffusion model for dreams.
I think these concepts are actually related - the things that end up messed up in dreams and diffusion models are things that have high information density. Faces, hands, books, phone screens, ship layouts etc all have a lot of information in them from a human perspective. If we pay attention then we can see the (lack of) this level of detail.
This kind of lucid dreaming advice has worked for me a handful of times. They've been very memorable dreams.
Carlos Castaneda ?
Looking at your hands worked for me. It was definitely a fun thing when I got it to work
A spinning top.
As a kid, I was so happy to "discover" that I could be mildly awake and control my dreams. It happened by mistake: I fell asleep while listening to loud music. I was in a middle state, half-awake because of the loud music, and half-asleep, dreaming. In the dream, I was an observer, aware that it was a dream. The music in the background was annoying me, and it was stressful. Later, I "improved" the technique and learned to control the dream while blocking out the annoying music.
Disclaimer: My message before ChatGPT correcteded because my English isn't good enough to me:
As a kid I was so happy to "discover" that I can be mildly awake and control my dreams. It happen by mistake, I fall at sleep while listening music loudly, I was in a middle state of being awake because the loud music, and being sleep dreaming, in the dream I was as a observer, knowing that that was a dream, and with the music on the backround annoying me, it was stresfull. Later I "improved" the technique and was able to control the dream, and discard the annoying music.
Your English is actually pretty good, for what that’s worth. Not sure how long you’ve been speaking it or what language(s) you’re coming from.
Up until I was around 10, most of my dreams were lucid - I didn’t have to do anything special to ‘enter’ them. Then they became less and less frequent. The last one was when I was 15 or so.
Given lucidity more often arises in broken sleep, I wonder if historical biphasic sleep patterns meant that lucidity was much more common in the past. And so if there could be a correlation here with religious visions.
I was in a conversation recently with a christian convert who seemed to operate on the principle that the tenants of a religion are real if there are religious experiences which indicate it to be so -- and it became clear they meant in dreams, but not exactly dream-like states. At the same event there was a muslim who had family members with visions (and so on). I made the point that localised to each region of the world are its own cultural beliefs 'replayed back' in such states -- this is especially noticiable in schizophrenia where psychosis-based delusions are heavily mapped through a cultural lens (eg., some spy service is contacting them through 5G; and UFOs in a previous era; ghosts before then; and devils before then).
It does seem plausible that lucid dreaming offers a plausible explanation of religious 'visions' which occur in well-functioning people; and likewise a mechanism for why they are so encultured -- with gods of one locale appearing to adhearents there.
And if lucid dream were previously much more widespread, this offers an additional benefit of religious mythology, which is narrative material for the construction of these dreams.
You don't even necessarily need lucid dreaming to explain these experiences. Practices clearly intended to altar mental & emotional state are endemic to all religions.
Combined fasting, sleep deprivation, and focused attention are enough to induce hallucinatory experiences for a lot of people, specifically if that experience is sought out over time. Even in christianity this was widespread until relatively recently in the form of pre-feast fasting & vigil, and is still practiced by monastics.
Lucid dreaming may be part of these traditions I don't really know. Religious experience is so broad and ancient it's hard to rule things out. But there are a lot of descriptions of visions, and while it's common for them not to distinguish between "visions" and "dreams" per se I've never read a description of something that sounds like lucid dreaming in a pre-modern source.
s/tenants/tenets/
This idea is interesting, but unfalsifiable with our current methods of understanding history.
I used to be heavily into lucid dreaming back in the early 00s along with others in the Dream Views forum. That was a wild time with people making new ways to induce a lucid dreaming (with techniques usually ending in -ILD). If you told us this back then
> This research could lead to wearable devices programmed with algorithms that detect opportune moments to induce lucidity in people as they sleep
-we would’ve lost our minds. Above most other recent inventions, this really feels like the future
Why did you stop? Did you gain any insights from your experience.
I think many of us nerds are intrigued by the concept of lucid dreaming but haven't actually explored the space. I skimmed a book on the subject in the mid 80's, but only tried the techniques a couple of times. Oddly, I still remember a couple of my lucid dreams.
At the time, the two most popular ways for getting lucid in a dream was
1. Doing a reality check habitually in real life. Eventually you'll start doing it in dreams and have it fail. This _usually_ kicks you into lucid territory
2. Estimating when you're going to be in a REM state and setting a timer to wake yourself up. Then, after gaining consciousness fully, trying to make your body go to sleep while your mind is awake
Can you spot why I stopped doing it after a period of time? It end up feeling like a lot of work every day just for a chance (a low one in my and most people's cases) of having a lucid dream. Sleeping was no longer a passive, let's-relax type of activity. I just wanted to reclaim that period of time in a way.
I think my biggest takeaway from my lucid dreams was just the feeling of being in one. It's hard to describe, but the rush that comes along with the realization you can do anything you want is quite exhilarating.
I can reliably meditate myself into a lucid dream if you're interested in learning the technique. You've probably encounteted it before. I also just regularly find myself in lucid dreams because I'm constantly looking for discrepancies and gain control the moment I find one.
The basic technique is just to meditate to sleep by counting your breaths, while not moving at all. It is really hard to pull off until you get used to it, but with some dedication you can get decent success. If you do it right, your body enters sleep paralysis while your brain is still awake, and you get dropped into a dream.
Counting your breaths seems like a better way to do it. When I tried wake-induced LD'ing, I didn't have any strategy in mind when it came to what I should be thinking of. When I was right at the boundary of dreaming, my thoughts would start racing and I would usually snap myself awake. Your advice would likely have saved me from a few failures.
Yeah, I've had some success with WILDs, which I'd typically practice on a Saturday or Sunday morning, but ultimately it was a crapshoot compared to just meditating myself to sleep.
I'd also recommend lying on your back when attempting to lucid dream, it always made it much more likely to occur for me, along with sleep paralysis. There is some unexplored physiological reason for this, but it's real and many sleep experts have found the same results.
I would also recommend not getting caught up in losing track of the count, simply starting over from 0 the moment you realize that you lost your place.
I have severe chronic insomnia, ADHD, tourettic OCD and a predisposition for body-focused repetitive behaviors so if I can meditate myself to sleep, I'm pretty sure anyone can with some practice. The reason why I can't do it every night and "beat" insomnia is two-fold:
One, because it paradoxically aggravates sleep avoidance for me. It's an excruciating experience spending 30-60 minutes lying completely still while alarm bells are going off in my head, paired with intense urges commanding me to scratch an itch or adjust a limb, and it's anything but meditative until the very moment sleep paralysis kicks in and my body goes numb.
Two, it usually puts me into sleep paralysis which is just rolling the dice for a metric ton of adrenaline to get released during a paralysis hallucination. I've had sleep paralysis encounters keep me up for the next few days, shit gives me the creeps.
Is WILD something that needs to be done in the morning after having been in REM phase or can you do it at night when getting into bed?
Yeah that's exactly why I never actually got deep into these techniques, I dunno about any diagnosed mental conditions but I used to have the sleep paralysis thing just as like what felt as my brains last resort to knock me out or something, and sometimes it would flip me into a lucid dream while others I'd just have like intense nightmares where I'd get sucked into a black hole appearing in the sky or creepy faced creatures from beyond would show me future technologies. It just felt way too close to insanity lol
I remember a friend of mine saying how he went manic and hadn't slept for days after trying some stuff he read in a book about 'dream yoga'. Always honestly left the impression that you can fuck this up just like you can pulling a muscle in your leg, except this is your mind you're talking about
I like the analogy to pulling a muscle. You also got me reading about dream yoga, which I hadn't encountered before. Going to try that! I've done dream math and dream poetry/freestyle before, but I haven't tried dream meditating. Fascinating idea.
The "getting sucked into the sky" dreams are always incredibly exhilarating. Had some like that.
I had an extraordinarily rare moment a few years ago wherein I actually had one single 8-hour interrupted sleep session. For the entire 8 hours, I was sucked in a single, continuous lucid dream that took place over a full day of school. I was completely convinced that I'd died or was dying in my sleep and was experiencing an extended DMT-fueled hallucination.
I was literally running my hand across surfaces and studying reflections in the CRT monitors trying to find imperfections or proof that it was just a normal dream. But everything was hyperrealistic and vivid and continuous. The dream even started out with me waking up, getting ready, getting on the bus and arriving to school. Even the clocks were behaving.
During the dream, between classes, there was a hole in floor of the main hallway which just got bigger and bigger each time I saw it. And each time, there was a larger crowd of people surrounding it. Eventually, I saw someone jump in. Towards the end of the day, there was a full-blown hole cult worshiping and praying to the hole, wearing religious garb, making offerings, etc. It took a few weeks to recover from that dream.
Yeah just be careful with all this stuff. People end up doing these things and having experiences I barely understand like 'kundalini awakenings' which to all appearances to me just look like mania or light psychosis, these aren't particularly enjoyable experiences to go through and alot of the time I see people who seek that kind of thing out, they end up going through it for like a whole year or so before getting back on their feet. You can lose your job and all sorts of other life disrupting side effects which is why I'm pretty sure there's religious infrastructure to handle people who take this path in life in cultures where doing this kind of thing is normal. Maybe start with reading a book or some meditation classes or something before jumping into the advanced techniques right away I think is the wise way to go with anything that requires discipline
Thanks for the advice. I'm mainly curious if some of the neurological or psychological benefits of yoga or other meditative techniques might still exist or at least be simulated during a directed dream.
For example, I once had a dream that I smoked DMT and had a full-blown psychedelic experience during my dream. I then woke up and felt "high", in some kind of altered state, for over 12 hours. Under the right circumstances or simulated environment, the brain seems able to induce a variety of sudden or gradual psychological and neurological changes.
Imagine someone without control of their limbs being able to benefit from practicing tai chi or yoga in their sleep. Obviously, feedback from an instructor is important, but imagine a distant future where we are able to record and decode our dreams and allow instructors to review footage.
Similar story happened to me once: I had recently got my drivers license, and one day went to bed early (completely sober). In my dream that night I got drunk, took my dads car and wrecked it. When I woke up next morning, first thing I did was to take dads car to pick up a friend of mine. I felt so hung over, and was driving like I was "still drunk". I had that feeling the whole day. Still remember it well today, even 20 years later.
I kind of figured we already had that on a basic level [1], no idea how accurate it is or if it's just some nonsense but I seem to recall research even like ten years ago which was around these lines, also from Japan, on way earlier iterations of the technology [2], this is just through stable diffusion now...
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-p...
What are examples of reality checks.
Two that I used was:
1. Trying to put your index finger through the other palm. In a dream this works, it just goes through;
2. Press your nose closed and continue breathing normally. In a dream this works.
I stopped for a similar reason as the other poster. It really interfered with my ability to get the much needed rest while sleeping. It doesn’t come free (but is awesome when it works)
Nice - these two were my go-tos as well. The nose-plug one felt especially weird once you realized what was happening.
Mine as well -- nose-plug was most effective but also least discrete and most awkward to do in public. Checking a clock was my second go-to..
You could simply look this up on the internet, but for those of us who are exceptionally lazy, here goes:
Every now and then, say every hour, or whenever you think of it, look around you. Try to check if what you see is real. Are things floating around and is gravity not working as expected? When you look over your shoulder and back, did the room change color, and did the table just turn into a tree? Try to touch something with your hand. Do you not feel any resistance when your hand drops through the couch? If so, you are probably dreaming.
A few are: Look at a digital time twice, in a dream the numbers will usually change. Try to read fine print. Perfect vision with no glasses if you wear them.
My favourite was "how did I get here?". In walking life a story immediately appears, in the dream you were just kind of always there.
The famous example from the movie Inception is spinning a top; if it never stops you are probably asleep (or maybe reality broke, oops!). But most people don't carry around a top to do this, so the other replies give some more practical examples that LD practitioners have come up with over the years.
I would just ask myself “Am I dreaming?”
When I’m awake, I immediately answer “no,” but when I’m asleep, I’m not sure. That’s enough to know that I’m not awake.
Close your lips and try to breath through your mouth. If you can, you're dreaming.
Check the time on your phone/watch twice in a short time.
I was casually into this stuff like twenty years ago–read the forums, tried various techniques etc. I did have a bit of real success with it, also having some lucid dreams that are memorable years later, however I didn't actually like the experience of consistently remembering lots of details from my dreams, which was, I think, most of why I stopped.
At the time, at least, the recommended starting point was dream journaling–writing down everything you can remember as soon as you wake up. Practicing that even for a few days has the effect of helping you retain quite a bit more detail from your dreams. It wasn't so much that I had unpleasant dreams as it was that remembering them made the night seem somehow less restful, as though I needed the relatively blank gap of sleep in the filmstrip of my memory to be able to wake up with a clear head.
I found another method: after waking up in the morning (with time to doze off again), nicotine pouch under the gum just after the heavy breathing starts. Super vivid lucid dreams, with obvious gotchas of using nicotine
That sounds like a stupid way to suffocate and die on something in your sleep but it does affect a neurochemical (acetylcholine) which are implicated in how dreams and the entire sleep/wake cycle work. There's safer alternatives in my mind, 'oneirogics' [1] as I remember them being called, which affect the same neurotransmitters with none of the horrible addiction or choking risk - can be as simple as some ancient shamanic technique one researcher in central america told me, which was a maracuya leaf placed in your pillow to remind you in your dream of the distinct smell from the waking world that you're dreaming so you may control it
AFAIK galantamine is the only drug with actual studies[0] for inducing lucidity. Participants would practice dream recall and reality checks each day, and fall asleep after reciting lucid dream affirmations. Then be awoken in the middle of the night to take galantamine, and fall back asleep while visualizing a continuation of the dream they were in last.
Anecdotally, I become lucid whenever I take it without doing the rest of the study's rituals, but I've worked on improving my dream recall for years now.
Yeah, I used to be really into knowing a ton about this stuff because it was something I kept on having out of my control before - I used to have worsening sleep paralysis when I was young and into my 20s, and lucid dreaming would be sort of a side effect of it... I guess this is what that WILD (wake-induced lucid dreaming) thing tries to actually induce, like from what I was reading you sort of meditate your way into that state and flip your consicousness into a lucid dream. Honestly my sleep was crazy back then and I talked to a doctor who said it was grounds for going for a sleep study and getting tested to see if I had narcolepsy, but I just ended up moving way closer to the equator instead and something about the seasonality of the sun coming up and down at the same time all year round is what a doctor there said could have reset my circadian rhythm as it got more pronounced in dark winter time.
> In the lab we can prime sleepers to have lucid dreams by waking them and then prompting them as they fall back asleep.
This felt odd to read.
The key difference between this and FBI's Guantánamo techniques is there is no force involved.
I was expecting the article to explore how you are basically interrupting sleep to achieve this.
The purpose of sleep isn't to dream, it's to garbage collect. Activating parts of the brain to control dreams means they aren't sleeping anymore, which surely is getting in the way of the primary function?
The GC hypothesis is an hypothesis of one of the possible functions of sleeping. Nature never does 1 thing and 1 thing alone.
I suppose I can hunt and peck but it would be nice to have links to the studies/papers mentioned. I wonder if they pay attention to any side-effects of lucid dreaming - after all, there is a reason we sleep the way we sleep, and tempering with it must have some cost.
The ultimate video game rendering engine.
You'd think so but everything is weird and little makes sense, even if you have some level of awareness and control.
The experience indeed can be very much like the "Oasis" video game that runs entirely on fast transformer inference.
Dream reality works by association and expectation rather than having a strict ruleset.
Except, it doesn't render anything. It's the recently used parts of the higher layers of the inference network starting to have electrical activity of their own to do some kind of optimization/defragmentation.
I barely dream nowadays. But it was intense in childhood and teen years. Maybe because of all the violence and stress of family/school/christianity.
For those of you who are not crusty aging Gen-Xers such as myself, perhaps I can introduce you to the movie "Dreamscape" which I found pretty captivating as a pre-teen.
Looks like it's out there on streaming services still: https://www.tvguide.com/movies/dreamscape/2000115208/
No commentray but I find it interesting that this is considered research by a scientific journal...
>That was the conclusion of a recent study by Mallett, who surveyed 400 posts on Reddit to identify exactly when and how lucid dreams are helpful for improving mental health.
The new science is… podcasts. I fell asleep listening to Ologies and dreamed I was building a new cabin in the woods. (She had a cabin architect on as the guest.)
i have a very vivid imagination to the point that in some circumstances when i think back to what i was imagining the memory "feels" like a dream. It's hard to describe but i can walk through scenarios is fine detail and then a few days later when i think back it's like remembering a dream. It's sort of like lucid dreaming but it takes a few days to remember it as a lucid dream.
Any budget-friendly lucid dreaming devices that work?
The Monroe Institute sells a series of audio clips that emit a different tone in each ear with which the brain creates a third oscillating tone. This third tone is known as binaural beats which they allege to synchronizes the brain's hemispheres.
The series is called the Gateway Experience. Its a kind of semi guided meditation using the binaural beats that is intended to induce out of body experiences.
I tried it years ago and although I never experienced a OOBE it did seem to induce lucid dreaming. Its a bit new-agey but not in a preachy or religious way.
I am shocked to see The Gateway Experience mentioned. I specifically clicked on this story to post about it.
Anyway, TGE is a fantastic resource if you put the time into it. I've gotten to levels of meditation through it that still make me question reality.
On the one hand, I'm very much facts, data, and reproducibility oriented, and "I know" that everything I experienced was just my brain having fun.
On the other hand, WTF. Maybe I am more than my physical self, and there are alternate dimensions I can teleport myself to.
> I've gotten to levels of meditation through it that still make me question reality.
I don't know if this matches anything you achieve through meditation, but I've had some incredibly complex and vivid dreams that make me question everything about myself and my brain. I tend to agree that it just comes down to an astonishingly powerful organ flexing its power.
A simple app was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42165849
Although it's not about a magical device but about practice.
I was really hoping repeating the mantra "mind awake, body asleep" would be the trick as suggested by Elliot from Mr Robot
As you get close to the threshold when meditating yourself to sleep, your thoughts turn to goop. I've found it much easier to just count my breaths, simply starting over if I lose track. The hardest part is to not forget what you were doing as your mind drifts.
Unfortunately, at some point in life, barely awake = realizing you need to pee.
I began lucid dreaming at the same instant that I began having sleep paralysis about 20 years ago, at age 9. I had a vivid dream, which I still remember in great detail, in which I was in a graveyard and was cursed by a ghost due to the actions of my grandfather.
I woke up from the dream in a state of sleep paralysis, and predictably tried screaming but to no avail. Since then, I would lucid dream at least a few times a week for many years. I would also constantly get sleep paralysis and night terrors. The night terrors were nothing new, I'd had them for as long as I can remember. But they would consistently occur when I was in sleep paralysis.
During paralysis, before falling asleep or after waking up, I would hallucinate beings entering my room, shuffling things around, staring at me, touching me and speaking to me. I've been visited by ghosts, people, giant spiders, the grim reaper, succubi, elves, all sorts of things. Usually there is a great feeling of terror or impending doom. Sometimes I'm told specific things or asked to do favors for the beings.
It's easy to see how people would mistake these incidents for real encounters with otherworldly beings during a time when science was less advanced. In fact, my Catholic guardians were convinced, and still are, that I was possessed by Satan. I never received help for my night terrors, which largely exist because of childhood torture by my guardians in the first place. My grandfather would shake me violently and tell me that Satan was inside of me and that I would never have the capacity to love another person, and that my nightmares and "possession" were a result of letting Satan in my heart.
Eventually I realized that I was having lucid dreams and sleep paralysis far, far more often when I would sleep on my back. In my youth, sleeping on my side hurt and so I was stuck constantly having sleep paralysis. I developed a Pavlovian response to sleeping which fed into an already severe insomnia.
I'm now a 30-year-old adult who still suffers from insomnia and constantly has nightmares about missing the bus, experiencing childhood abuse, being persecuted by police, being at school, etc. My dreams have become a window into childhood trauma where I continually get retraumatized and trigger flashbacks. However, because I often lucid dream, these dreams also afford me a chance to explore these traumas and experience control and safety in situations when I felt like I had neither. Also, I now cannot sleep on my back almost ever due to degenerative spine disease, and other chronic pains keep me up all night, so the nightmares happen a little less frequently. Silver linings.
I think there is so much potential in the therapeutic application of lucid dreaming and I would love to figure out a way to use my knowledge and skill with lucid dreaming to help others.
This was interesting, thanks for posting it.
I experienced intense, complex night terrors when I was a kid, although I was never abused (that I know of). I wonder why.
> being persecuted by police
I have these too in my current life, but as a kind of weird anti-nightmare where I'm actually being extremely successful at escaping.
Had similar shenanigans. Solved by consistently having half a glass of water before bed (yes, you'll need to wake up to let it out), and another half at night if there's any hint of sleep problems.
Great advice. In general I think water does help a lot.
I do have to be careful though, because with lucid dreaming your body might not always stay paralyzed. I've learned over the last 20 years that any time I find myself peeing in a dream, I need to immediately wake up and go use the bathroom before I chance leaking any urine in my sleep.
Luckily, even when not lucid dreaming I retain the ability to wake up at any time due to distress, a very useful coping mechanism from decades of night terrors.
If you need to drink a lot of water, it could be any number of other problems, like a nutrient deficiency or some other health problem.
I'm surprised there's no mention of inducing/controlling lucid sex dreams for therapy or entertainment, but maybe I'm weirder than I thought.
I've found it's pretty hard to induce specific dreams, but once I'm in a dream it's straightforward enough to modify it to my liking.
The hard part is altering the dream significantly without leaving a theta state and collapsing the dream. It all becomes about energy management. For example, two nights ago I found myself in a dream, and a few moments after I walked outside I realized the scene was too bright and noisy, and that my brain would wake up too much processing it.
So I had to hurry back inside, but I couldn't run either or that would release adrenaline. It took a lot of concentration and deliberate movement to get back inside before my dream fully collapsed, and it did collapse soon anyway minutes later.
With lucid sex dreams, it's similar. Energy conservation is key to extending the experience.
I haven’t had many lucid dreams, but this mirrors my experience. Whenever I realise I’m in a lucid dream, the trick to keep me in it is to manage how much control I exert. If I start to direct it too much I can feel myself waking up and have to “let go” and not react to what’s happening, letting the dream carry me wherever it seems fit. After a while I begin to feel consciousness drifting away and can again exert some modicum of control to explore my surroundings. Rinse and repeat, until I inevitably wake up.
I only experienced lucid dreaming as a child. And perhaps one or two times I would find my crush and give them a kiss. I dunno how I feel about lucid dreaming now. I tend to remember dreams and I like to interpret what my subconscious is trying to express through what happens. If I consciously just try to engineer some scene of maximum pleasure instead would something be lost
Absolutely. Lucid dreaming is such a gift, and it would be a huge disservice to yourself to waste it purely on dopamine-seeking hedonistic scenarios. It's a chance to deeply explore the mind and test hypotheses.
As an example, one thing I like doing is telling my dream subjects that they're in a dream and studying their reactions.
>studying their reactions
Well what are their reactions?
Induced LDs back when I did it were fairly... fragile, so to speak. It was annoying, but if you got "lost in the moment" in the dream you could easily lose lucidity. It's likely still a problem with modern methods of LDing.
So you mean, lurid dreams?
I used to be into lucid dreaming, a pretty long time ago. I stopped mostly because in order to reliably enter them and remember the dreams just involved too much stuff that messed with me getting enough sleep. But I did read one of Stephen LaBerge's books on the subject. I'm pretty sure it was "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming", but I'm not certain it was that one. But it definitely mentioned sex in dreams as a motivation, at least early in his practice. So I certainly don't think your the first or only person who's had that thought.
You guys are having sex dreams?
[dead]
If I know anything about humans, this is a good vehicle to get investment for innovation - porn has been a silent driver of internet technology.
Headline: "even be induce specific dreams just for fun"
Where are the editors? Scientific American has fallen a long way.
Funny enough, AI wouldn’t have made that specific error. Though non-AI checkers would catch this easily.
Is this just WordPress-like churn that no-longer involves decent tools and processes? Is the whole thing written in a browser?
eventually as the quality of the public internet’s training corpus declines, we’ll get there
They be on vacation, yo.
Caveat emptor. Whenever the discussion of lucid dreams comes up on HN, invariably there are reports of people who did it regularly but had to stop because apparently doing it a lot makes the dream world and reality begin to blend too much and you end up tired all the time and not sleeping well.
Almost like claimed “control” is no control at all and yet more people are convinced of their power over life while displaying their helplessness and lack of wisdom. I guess that’s science now: learn one small thing and project it over everything.
Also, issues with lack of dreaming. It's easy to detect when you start dreaming, but the next steps are hard (stay in a dream state, control the dream). You can end up falling back into deep sleep and suppressing dreaming which will lead to not being rested regardless of how many hours you spend in bed.
If/when I find myself in a lucid dream, I look for a place to sleep.
tbh some dreams be hitting more than others some are just messed up lol just a lil note to the dream police
Perhaps science and technology should stay out of the only remaining area of untouched human nature.
The new fraud, this will be filled with questionable companies and untrustworthy experts. Reason enough to avoid the entire sphere.
What is the fraud you're specifically referring to? Lucid dream induction?
I lucid dream myself, which I recognize as impossible to productize. Yet, the productization of lucid dreaming will be attempted, will be successful, and will have nothing to do with lucid dreaming, it will be marketing tie ins with all manner of nonsense.
> which I recognize as impossible to productize
How so? I also lucid dream and could never say anything about that.
Why? I mean, nobody forces you to use tech tools for lucid dreaming.
This is like saying science and technology should stay out of the area of... whatever, say, running. Nobody forces you to wear high-tech gadgets while running.
Can’t wait until there is a lucid dreaming pill I can take, personally
Calea Zacatechici and Silene Capensis have existed since forever... I've personally found them very effective
I mean, there's galantamine... Although the experience for me is different than a naturally induced lucid dream. (And in many countries it's a prescription drug for dementia, so don't take this as advice)
How long til I start seeing ads in my dreams?
Kind of already touched by drugs?