Just throwing this out there. I've had hundreds of lucid dreams and it's the most amazing experiences I've have in my life. It takes practice to
1) figure out you're dreaming with some level of reliability
2) learn to take control
3) train yourself not to get too excited so you don't wake yourself almost immediately.
I believe the first step is to train yourself to recognize a dream. It becomes easier once you've done it, so I assume a few lucid dreams can lead to many more. There are devices that supposedly trigger lucid dreams in many that have never had one, I highly recommend trying it. Example of one of these products: http://sleepwithremee.com/ . They detect REM cycles and signal you in-dream with light through your closed eyelids, since vision isn't actually suppressed during REM.
I've hit the point where I've had lucid dreams the seem to last over an hour. Its insane, not even something I can describe to someone that hasn't lived it. Like closing your eyes and thinking about flying, but with the same level of detail as the real world. The sound, sights, feeling of the sun and wind, even pain. To be a little inappropriate, sexual experiences also feel just the same as the real version. I've had hyper real dreams too, especially with vision. Colors that are impossibly bright and saturated, or impossible acuity.
I used to lucid dream pretty naturally, then stopped because I started getting very regular sleep paralysis.
Nowadays when I do end up lucid dreaming (most often by accident) I notice a fairly significant drop in sleep quality.
Even worse, I sometimes lucid dream, then "awaken" into another dream where I'm not lucid and those experiences really fuck with me.
On a different note I'd love to get a high quality sleep-tracking night mask. Most of the "smart" ones I know of have awful battery life. I don't want another device to charge every few days.
Learning to lucid dream is basically giving yourself a sleep disorder on purpose. Having done this deliberately in the past and had some fairly wacky side-effects, I think it's worth people considering the negatives if they style trying to induce lucidity.
I could believe it ruins sleep quality definitely. Even with experience it's hard to keep your mind from fully waking during periods of lucidity. I've managed to go an hour or two many times but it invariably ends with me waking at a random time in the middle of the night
False memories are one which many have experienced, as well as mentioned above, increased chance of sleep paralysis. Increased SP doesn't seem so bad, just maybe inconvenient. Building up more and more false memories doesn't seem like a great idea.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Can I ask how you found your sleep paralysis encounters? (for want of a better word).
Personally I've found them deeply disturbing. Throughout my life I have experienced moments of sleep paralysis at most on 10 occasions. They've left a big impact though, and I sympathize with anyone who has the misfortune of feeling as though you are trapped and unable to move.
After watching the film "Waking life" I spent a long time thinking about lucid dreaming and perhaps maybe had 1 or 2 myself. I had never connected the two however, definitely food for thought.
I used to get sleep paralysis a lot when I was younger. It could be fairly terrifying sometimes. I remember the scariest i was probably as a teenager lying on my stomach while it felt like someone eas holding me down with the blankets. The first one i remember i was pretty young. My brother and me still shared a room and had bunk beds. I remember waking up one morning and watched a giant spider crossing the ladder towards my face and freaking out but not being able to move or yell or anything. Then suddenly I could and the spider was gone.
When I actually learned what it was I tried lucid dreaming and stuff with it. But, I always find the feeling uncomfortable. I don't like not being able to move or do anything while your dreams mix with your bedroom.
It doesn't happen so much now. Every once in a while if I wake up in the morning and go back to sleep, the second time I wake up it'll happen. I don't tend to sleep in any more and once i'm awake I get up.
I don't know if it's related but i've always had problems sleeping. When I was young I was scared to sleep, even as a baby i didn't sleep well. I can usually fall asleep alright now but the slightest noise in the night wakes me up and I still feel wary about losing conciousness.
I'm not the parent but I experience sleep paralysis fairly regularly - maybe once or twice a month. It's happened enough times that I can usually recognise it and can either try to wake myself up or wait until I go back to sleep, so it's not particularly scary. It depends though - if I get sleep paralysis coming out of a nightmare it can be fairly uncomfortable, but not much more than if I were to have just the nightmare on its own. Probably the worst part is the embarrassment of someone witnessing me thrashing around trying to wake up or hearing me moan in my sleep.
I haven't actually. I feel like my previous girlfriend told me I was an extremely quiet sleeper so I don't think I have problems breathing when I'm asleep.
I've always had trouble with false memories. Not of anything important, but I sometimes dream of very mundane things, like moving my wallet or keys. Or telling someone something.
I used to have regular hypnogogia, and I often imagined that monsters were coming to steal my wallet and keys from my bedside. Those items started "moving" during the night, to under the mattress, or into blankets in the closet, so "they" wouldn't find them. It is genetic for me, as my mother had some similar experiences. I only happened to learn it was a "thing with a name" because I was dancing Argentine tango with a postdoc sleep researcher, and we got to talking. Oddly enough, her suggested solution worked perfectly - a night light. It is a very long story.
I used to read lucid dreaming forums. A lot of people complain that their sleep becomes less restful, the more they lucid dream. Also that it becomes impossible to have a night without lucid dreams once you get enough experience, so you can't catch a break.
I experienced this for years, but it never seemed to actually affect "rest". I'd have multiple intense dreams per night, waking up often between them. But not feeling sleep deprived at all, if anything the opposite. However i was also in my early 20s so maybe it would be harder now.
I used to lucid dream all the time as a kid, it just happened naturally, and never left me tired. It mostly stopped and in my 20s I tried some exercises to induce lucid dreams. My experience was like a restless night of sleep after studying late for a big test the next morning. Because, there was something I was supposed to be remembering, instead of just sleeping soundly.
So I think lucid dreaming is not necessarily a problem in itself but forcefully training yourself to do it can be rough going.
I do not blame you. I've experienced sleep paralysis more than once, and it is not pleasant at all. I remember trying to scream at the top of my lungs in my head for... I don't know how long but my perception of it was that it was for hours on end. Then all of a sudden something broke through, and I woke my wife up with the loudest scream she's ever heard out of anyone.
Coming from a religious background, I believed that I was being possessed to explain the lack of control over my body. I even hallucinated an "evil" "form" coming towards me before my body locked up and I felt tingles. So ~weird~ terrifying being able to scream without your body doing anything.
Sleep paralysis is mortifying if you don't know what you're dealing with. I can completely understand how that's been the source of many people believing in possessions over the centuries.
Most of my paralysis episodes didn't involve the "evil presence" people often talk about. That is, until a recent one less than a year ago, where I woke up with a giant "invisible" spider on my chest
It's terrifying to be in this state of mind where you know what's happening, but you also really, really feel that presence. I wonder if this is similar to what schizophrenic patients feel.
Yeah I just had one of these a couple of weeks ago. Lying on my side and could feel an evil presence behind me, but couldn't move my body at all, even though I was (or at least believed I was) fully awake. Not fun.
When I had massive dental problems a few years ago I was taking codeine 60mg and an over the counter sleep aid (which it turns out is a potentiator for codeine).
I had the worst sleep paralysis I've ever had, I was laid facing the wall with the light and I would have sworn there was absolute evil behind me, it was frankly terrifying.
It broke suddenly and I kept out of bed and shot out the room, took me about 15 minutes for heart rate to come down.
I don't scare easily and I'm a life long atheist but I can see how if you where raised religious you'd assume it was whatever evil presence your religion has.
Seeing figures and humanoid shapes when experiencing sleep paralysis isn't uncommon. I've never seen them myself, I just get a progressively louder ringing noise in my head until it feels like my head is going to blow up. I was always able to break out eventually, but it's terrifying. You can't move and are in pain. The only way I could get out was to find one finger or toe I could wiggle a tiny bit, then keep doing that until my body started to slowly come back to life. It takes some time but eventually you hit a threshold and you come back online pretty fast. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it takes me 2-3 tried to fall alseep as it happens consecutively.
" find one finger or toe I could wiggle a tiny bit"
Do you know for sure that it actually wiggles? Because that's what I tried doing once, and my wife told me that my entire body was still and I just woke up all of a sudden.
I've had sleep paralysis but never had the feeling of the presence. I just know I'm stuck. As if some kind of force has frozen my whole body. The first few occasions it is extremely scary, I think after that you know what is happening but it is still very disconcerting.
A year or so ago, I woke up during the night and felt tingling in my feet. The tingling kept increasing in intensity and seemed to slowly rise along my limbs. A few seconds later, I suddenly heard someone shout with an aggressive but soft voice next to my ear, and felt eerily realistic hands grab my arms and vigorously scratch my right palm. In absolute terror, I remember trying to scream and shake it off, but I couldn't move. And it felt so real. A few seconds later I managed to snap off the paralysis, and rocketed out of my bed. I didn't sleep that night.
I've woken up others the same way. At some point I learned to recognize sleep paralysis and just wait it out. It's still unpleasant though, I get sensations like needles pricking my skin all over.
This happens to me every so often. The worst is the feeling of not being able to breathe, but it's happened to me enough that I figure my body will take care of oxygenating itself if necessary.
Once you come to terms with the fact that sleep paralysis is a thing, I think it's just another interesting mental experience. The lack of control is also kind of fun. Who knows what's going to happen next? But you probably won't die. Not the worst thing in the world.
Lucid or not, I realized a while ago that I don't experience physical pain in my dreams. I have started to wonder if this was a general experience. Experiences I'd expect to be painful (like getting shot or carried away by a wall of fire) simply startle me awake.
It's interesting to hear you do feel that. I've experienced all kinds of things emotionally - embarrassment, fear, anxiety. But never physical pain.
It's not pleasant. Sometimes intense enough that I'm in a state of shock through much of the next day. Most of the pain I remember has been in the form of lucid nightmares. Usually snake bites, gun shots, knives, etc. Almost never from environmental realities like hot surfaces, crashes, or falls.
Self-aware nightmares are way more terrifying than the regular variety, a lucid dream where I sometimes can't take control. I usually try to wake myself immediately, but sometimes this leads to repeated false awakenings. The worst I remember is 5 false awakenings before waking up for real.
I can't agree with you enough in everything you've said. I taught myself how to lucid dream in 2011. I used a technique where I made a habit of checking reality through the day every day. Eventually the habit became ingrained enough that I started remembering to check even during dreams, triggering a realization that I was actually dreaming and initiating a lucid dream.
It is exactly as you described. Nobody can ever understand it until they experience it. Comparing it to the matrix might do it a little justice. But there are limitations -- waking up, falling back into non-lucidity, false awakenings and so on.
The first lucid dream I had was glorious. I was dreaming about being on a very tall grey building with overcast skies, on a wooden deck protruding from the side of the building. I became lucid and commanded the sky to crack with lightning and it did. I flew upward and created a swirl of clouds and was generally having an amazing time. This all was as if it were completely real. Then, too excited, I woke up. But it was a terrifying false awakening where a black figure sprinted toward me and attacked me. Then I woke up for real, absolutely terrified. It was so scary that I decided not to lucid dream anymore. But with recounting all of this, and thinking about it for the first time again, I think I might start doing it again.
Its a LOT like the matrix. Perception of your ability to alter reality makes reality altering possible, with the only limitation being your own faith in the extent reality can be altered. Very meta.
I never consciously do reality checks, but I'm a very inquisitive and skeptical person. Easily distracted by cracks in the wall type.
I wouldn't let one bad experience stop you from lucid dreaming :( . I might be an outlier, but my experiences have been overwhelmingly amazing. Yes, I still have nightmares are the lucid ones are waaayyy worse. But lucid dreaming is such a great experience I would never wish it away
The faith part is hard. When I've managed to be lucid flying is a skill that is hard to master. I get a lot of big hops but can't seem to actually fly.
Yeesh, yeah, now you mention it I've had those exact same symptoms when trying to awaken from a negative lucid dream: A bunch of false awakenings in a row. I wonder how linked those things are... I rarely have false awakenings without having been lucid before.
same, I can't think of a single false awakening outside of trying to end a lucid nightmare. Maybe the same "your wish is my command" type control you get over reality perception is a double edge sword. You want to be awake so you "wake up" into a fresh dream world, because your mind has no way to take you to reality. Kinda terrifying.
I’ve had the false awakenings bit - that realization in dream can be frightening, mostly because it makes me panic that I’m dying - when I can’t seem to shake myself out of it.
I've only experienced false awakenings a few times, but I like them. I do a reality check every time I wake up (made it a habit) so it's a free lucid dream.
>I've experienced all kinds of things emotionally - embarrassment, fear, anxiety. But never physical pain
I am the same, I've never felt any pain in a dream, extreme fear is the strongest negative emotion or feeling I've ever experienced, but that usually wakes me up and ends the dream.
I am jealous! Pretty much any time I experience a nightmare, it's a dog biting me, or I'm being stabbed, or some wild animals are attacking me, and there's almost always vivid and terrible pain. It goes away the moment I wake up, but I cannot for the life of me control it in my dreams, regardless of if I'm lucid or not.
It's one of those weird personal secrets, things that never come up. I realized years ago that lucid dreamers are fairly rare, and most of those that have had lucid dreams don't have many.
It makes for a really awkward discussion most of the time. And it's impossible to explain well to somebody that hasn't experienced it.
Might be generics or wiring, or just figuring out how to recognize dreams, who knows. Its real weird that some people can have this otherworldly incredible experience with no drugs, and yet most of the population never experiences it. I'm lucky I guess, but to me its normal
I guess the experience is agreeable to you? I have lucid dreams sometimes, and something about it is very unsettling to me. I sometimes have non-lucid nightmares where I can feel myself losing my mind, with uncontrollable visual hallucinations and a sense of falling apart mentally. I also have nightmares where I wake up from a dream, only to realize I'm still dreaming, over and over again. Somehow the lucid dreams I have feel similar to this, there's a strong sense of being at risk of going mad. Maybe it's that I haven't trained for it, but I don't particularly feel like I want to learn to have more of those.
Almost always exceedingly wonderful, better than anything 'IRL'. Except for lucid nightmares which seem to start out as regular nightmares anyways. Sometimes I'm able to overpower the nightmare and go fully lucid, other times I can't and its horrible. Way worse than a regular nightmare because I'm fully aware of whats happening.
Its definitely unsettling at first. I started lucid dreaming by chance at ~11 so I guess I'm used to it. I don't think much of it when I look away from the window and it turns into a flock of birds, just roll with it ya know :)
I think the false awakenings are part of lucid dreaming. The awareness that you're not actually awake yet is a small step from control of your dreams.
You forgot the most important step: keep a dream log so you actually start to remember your dreams! Otherwise you might have a lucid one but either forget it during the remainder of your sleep, or forget it within a few minutes of waking up.
yes, or get in the habit of ruminating on the dream for a while still in bed. Whenever I have a nice lucid dream I lay in bed and run it through my memory over and over for a couple minutes. Otherwise some mysterious process will clear any figment of the dream from your memory within an hour or so
This sounds wonderful. I've only had a couple of lucid dreams and am currently trying again to be able to invoke them. I am starting by keeping a dream journal again, which I did consistently during the time I had my few lucid dream experiences. At the same time I have to fight the urge to record every single dream throughout the night because I don't want to break up my sleep. I only record what I remember upon wakeup time in the morning, which is often just a fraction of the night's dreams.
How did you train yourself to recognise a dream; was it a particular kind of reality check? Do you find you also have great dream recall in general?
If I think about the dream right after waking up I can generally recall most of it. Working 9-5 these days I sometimes just don't have time to make sure I commit it to memory though :( .
I don't do a certain reality check, but I've been lucid dreaming on and off since early teens so I just notice sometimes. Most often when I remember noticing its because I look away and things are different when I look back
Reading is weird during dreams, lucid or otherwise. I recently had a very odd dream in which I thought I was awake, but lying in bed with my eyes closed. I was amazed that I could still see! I picked up a piece of clear plastic package and opened my eyes, and it was totally blank. Then, I closed my eyes, still able to see, and suddenly the packaging was covered with writing in all kinds of fonts, points, and colors. Total... gibberish. I thought some of it was sort of funny, so I reached out for my dictaphone (nowhere close in reality, but right there in a dream) and was going to record some of these whacky lines. The problem was that I could hear my radio, and I knew I’d be recording that too, so I reached out to turn it off. Nothing, still on. I kept doing that until I woke up, realized my radio was on as an alarm, there was no dictaphone, no plastic, nothing.
Very odd experience, but it fits with my memories of trying to read in dreams. The words are either nonsense, mad-libs, or they make sense, but change the moment your attention shifts.
I've had the experience of dreaming of a book or even a movie that I'd seemingly created, with an agonizing desire to somehow copy it to retain it before I wake up.
Such things made me think about the difference between actually reading or watching something in a dream, and merely having the feeling that I did. Did the writing I thought I read/wrote really exist in my mind such that I lost something on waking up?
No, mental illness runs in my family so I consider it too risky. But I've been told by a friend that lucid dreams occasionally, that lucid dreams are different from LSD/mushrooms in that you have much more control over the experience and it seems more real.
There's definitely other psychedelics that produce "real" seeming illusions but I'm not aware of any that give you direct control over them like lucid dreaming can.
Simple. They don't. My stream of thought during a lucid dream isn't much different from my stream of thought during normal, sober waking hours - it is just the stuff going on around me is weird and I have different constraints on what is possible.
On psychedelics, I view the world and myself differently. I know I'm on drugs. My stream of thought is different I'm obviously still in my house, for example, and I know I can't fly or make things appear out of thin air. By the time any hallucinations would be dream-like (strong and heavy), I freaking know I'm hallucinating. Even with lighter things (much more common), I know it is a hallucination. I know that my painting doesn't really move like that, for example.
Ive noticed that my lucid dreams correlate very heavily with sleep paralysis and while lucid dreaming is fun the risk of sleep paralysis, which is like my worst nightmare is almost too great. I have a technique for getting out of sleep paralysis where I kind of metnally think of jiggling my head on my neck very rapidly but sometimes i keep falling back into paralysis so the whole experience is really uncomfortable. As a result I think when i lucid dream i get kind of amped up and wake myself up or ill remain in the dream but the quality is really low, eventually I realize im just laying awake with my eyes closed for many hours and get horrible sleep. Any tips on not waking yourself up specifically? Am i lucid dreaming in the wrong stage of sleep or something?
I think staying asleep is just experience. I remember my lucid dreams when I was really young were rarely longer than a few minutes. Sometimes seconds. Its really all about staying calm from what I've learned. And trying not to focus too much. If you put too much effort into control it seems to increase awareness to a point where you wake.
All conjecture of course because we know startling little about how dreams work :)
I had only a few lucid dreams. In that moment I was pretty sure to be lucid, but after waking up, it felt like a dream in which I just thought I was lucid.
How do you differentiate between the two? Is it even possible?
I tend to have my waking stream of thought during a lucid dream. It isn't really different from waking stream of thought. I can control my own actions, but my dreams are usually fun and I get curious to see where the current story is going.
I don't know if that helps or not, but that's what it does with me.
Its pretty clear to me at least. I can sometimes remember the moment I figured out I was dreaming. With some great ones being jumping through a closed window and off a skyscraper.
That seems terrifying. How do you separate that experience from the real world if you're say standing on the edge of a roof or bridge? How do you know _for sure_ you're dreaming and it's ok to jump?
I’ve had a few lucid dreams. The first couple of times were after making a habit of counting my fingers. In real life you always have the correct number. When dreaming it might be an incorrect or seemingly indeterminate amount of fingers.
So at that moment I would realize I was dreaming. But I don’t see why you’d just jump off of a bridge neither in a dream nor IRL. Personally what I chose to do was to attempt to fly by imagining jet motors on my legs. And it worked! And then I got excited and woke up :P
Anyway, when you become lucid it is because of things that are not like reality, so it will be obvious that it really is a dream. I see your concern but I could never imagine anyone thinking they were dreaming when they were not.
Another couple of times I’ve realized I was dreaming because the text in books or in papers were a jumbled floating mess rather than the static arrangement of letters that one would expect, and no information was conveyed as opposed to real life where most books and magazines are written to present some form of information in writing.
And one time I had a nightmare where my fingers and hands got holes in them and something was coming for me and I said “this is not possible”, and I realized then that I was dreaming and I took control and turned the nightmare into a pleasant dream by projecting the disease over on my assailant and escaping from it :)
Not the parent, but I have had similar experiences. What I do is check my wristwatch twice in a row. If the readings are radically different, or other weird stuff happens (no hands, more hands than usual, hands moving really fast, etc.) then I'm pretty sure it's a dream. And viceversa (apparently, my mind is not capable of generating a coherent watch in a dream, so if the watch behaves normally I know it's real life).
I'm also not able to generate a complex text in a dream, so trying to read a book can also work, and I suppose there are many similar possible tests based on the limitations of your dreaming mind. But the advantage of the wristwatch is that I always wear it in real life, so I know I will also be wearing it in dreams, so I can always do that test, while a book may not be available in a dream.
If you want to kill me, give me a wristwatch that does weird stuff and I might jump from a skyscraper trying to fly in real life at some point :)
My go-to reality check is to hold my nose and see if I can breathe through my fingers or not. If I'm lucid, then I feel the air going past them. I guess my subconscious doesn't bother trying to make everything completely realistic.
My parents took me to a dream/meditation therapist when I was 8 or so for nightmares. He taught me to lucid dream and it has been a benefit ever since. Except, I just haven't been able to fly like I used to in my teens & twenties. In my forties now, I am lucky if I can get some gliding lift from running on a slope anymore.I used to rise from earth all the way past LEO. Sigh.
What has helped me stimulate higher consciousness is drinking a half cup of coffee right as I go to bed. Caffeine does not amp me out like most, but it does make the dreams more vivid & memorable.
This is entirely hearsay but I've also heard that eating a banana before sleep can stimulate more vivid dreams. I'm going to do some reading tomorrow to see what exactly this is meant to be based on.
Quick search results are lots of claims of eating foods high in tryptophan to raise serotonin with little research results included.
However, the NIH research suggests(which I am more inclined to trust over commercial sites):
Sunlight, happiness, exercise and diet. Fatigue even reduces amino acids that may inhibit absorption of serotonin. As for the diet part:
For me, flying begins with high jumping while controlling my movement in air. I start by jumping 6 feet, then again and achieving 15-20 feet, then eventually over a house. After jumping over the house is when I start to change my lateral velocity while in air, and begin to control my speed of descent as well. Eventually, I jump about 100 feet in the air, start moving sideways at the peak of my jump, and slow down my descent as I get close to the ground, the point where I'm flying directly over the ground at a decent speed.
Once I get there, I have complete control and can fly however I want as fast as I want. I've never been able to hold on for more than a minute or so though before I wake up.
Hahaha, most of my flying is leaping off/out of whatever I'm standing on/in. Usually immediately after I become lucid. Could get interesting if I did psychedelics lol
The only times I've had trouble telling the difference is immediately after waking up. Especially after the false awakening lucid nightmares mentioned below. Turning the lights on and walking around for a minute is enough to dispel any doubt. Dreams are a different reality, and being so familiar with this one its easy to figure out when you're "home"
in one of my first lucid dreams i started reading a book and then thought to myself, "hang on, no way this is a dream if i can read a book!", and then fell back into regular dream state haha
Could you explain further? Are there phases of dream where one can or cannot read?
I heard an old tale (pre-internet days) where dreaming happens in a different part of the brain than reading, so supposedly it isnt possible to read in a dream and thus being able to read is a litmus test of whether you're dreaming or not....but i often read during dreams so I couldnt figure it out.
Searching the internet (present day) reveals a spectrum of opinions on whether one can or cannot read during dreams (and thus whether it can be used as a litmus test for reality.) Do you know if there is a definitive opinion on this?
IME, often the text is gibberish, or at least nonsense semantically, and/or changes as you move your eyes, especially if you look away for a moment. The same applies to eg. clocks. Details never seem to be very stable in the dream world.
i've found that to be the case for anything (not just text) in normal dreams; but one of the most surprising characteristics of lucid dreaming ive experienced is the stability -- for example in one dream i looked at a persian rug up close and could see the different colored fibres of the fabric. that said, things can certainly change dramatically and rapidly (...and now im flying!)
If you close your eyes and visualize reading a random magazine, what is in it? What do the words say? What is in the article? Can you actually read it? Is it different if it is a magazine you wouldn't usually read, like you might in a doctor's office waiting room? How about a new book?
Yes, this seems a difficult exercise, but it is exactly what your mind is against in a dream. And while a few people can read things in dreams, many cannot. Some folks can read simple signs. For me, most times, letters move around - if they are even latin letters at all. That said, sometimes I know what they say regardless. I get the illusion of reading, but not the actual experience.
Reading is sometimes a trigger for lucid dreams for me. It was unsettling at first :)
i'll also add that just "attempting" a litmus test can be a sufficient trigger for a lucid state. i'd heard about "flipping the light switch" from the film waking life. i tried it in a dream and the switch worked fine, but it was the fact that i was questioning whether i was in a dream in the first place that lead me to realize i was dreaming nevertheless (i think thats what the top comment is getting at -- strengthening these habits so that you do things like check light switches not because if they fail you know you're in a dream, but to put your mind into a state where you're always questioning whether you are awake. then you can spot the clues
yes i'd heard the same thing -- that's actually what went through my head (in my lucid state) and convinced my dreaming brain that i was not dreaming (even though i was)! its interesting, the experience itself seemed utterly normal and convincing.
I also had a time with lots of lucid dreams and becoming conscious during sleep paralysis.
For me those things were very new and out of curiosity I often tried to verify if dream reality is some kind of "real" reality or connected to it. Among my curious quest, I also tried to read newspapers in my dreams and was also able to read pars of it, e.g headline/date. I even wrote the information down afterwards at that time (dream journal). The headline was not interesting btw and the date was in the future.
Had some dreams which I think were really interesting, maybe they are also interesting to read for you:
* becoming lucid in dream, all dark, a noise, flying towards me like a fly, emitting a sound which terrifies me to the bones. The entity comes from far distance, swiftly flying closer and closer whirling like mad around me. Had this dream multiple times - till I decided in real life that I should stop being afraid of imaginary noises in dreams. Next time the dream came up I remembered my decision and I tried to not panic with all my courage and it worked. First few times this dreams occurred, when the noise approached, I woke/sprung up from sleep which so much sheer panic, I did not believe I was able to feel so much fear/panic (sweaty + heart beats like crazy).
* flying through a purple tunnel (like near death experience), while flying through (I could influence speed), my body was shaking as if in roller-coaster (but not my real body was shaking, since I was aware of it), it felt like something within my body was shaking, which was not muscles/bones, also feeling like my body was charging up with some kind of electricity. I could control the speed, finally reached end of tunnel, saw sky, mountains, nice landscape: since I was lucid, I thought: "Wait, am I going to die now?" -> I then hesitated to go further, the tunnel dissolved in a million threads and I woke up.
* becoming lucid in a dream, with a new kind of peaceful mind-state, I felt like void, but was still aware of existing/being (everything was dark, I did not identify as something, but still was aware). A desire to "wish" something came up and with it my nice mind-state was broken and the wished scenery appeared. At the same time I felt, that my control/awareness of the dream diminished, till it was completely gone. In hindsight, I came up with the theory, that a dreaming-mind without desire (Scale: longing <---> fearing) is complete and aware (but nothing is there, no self, but still awareness). It splits up as desire arises and creates two halves: the desired (observed) scenery and the observer. I wonder if spiritual/religions people learned their theories from lucid dreams: at least for me this would make sense to me.
* lucid dreams where I felt my body in bed and small orbs flying through my body, as the flew through, voices appeared in my head and some of the orbs tried to take my body resp. pushed me awareness out. I resisted and woke up. (After this dreams I thought I might have some schizophrenic disorder)
* same dream as above, this time a wasp tried to enter my head, as it was trying to enter my head, I heard millions of voices talking at the same time. (Waking up -> schizophrenic disorder barometer rises)
* waking up and for about 5 sec. had no memory of who I am, where I am, what this is all about what I am seeing. Very strange experience, like being completely out of this world. Had this 2 times (After each time, slight concerns that something might not be ok with my brain/circulation).
* Impressing art dream: looking at ancient stone bridge, which was made of thousands of horses emerging out of each other like a wave (sculptured horses), similar to the painting from "The Great Wave" from Kanagawa. The bridge was broken in the middle.
* Many dreams with fake awakening, also some with >5 times in a row and aware in paralysis. It often happened to me that I fell back to sleep with increased body awareness. Most of the time I then dreams to rob through a desert with numb limbs trying to move on and fighting to open my heavy eyelids. In such meta-state, heavy eyelids resp. problems opening my eyes seeing something was dominant. Often I could really see, what was around me, but my eyes were not focused and I misinterpreted the image I was perceiving.
* Some dreams where I saw things from the future, e.g. I once dreamed about a scenery where I saw people with some kin of liquid space suite. They turned it on and I was impressed to see such superb sci-fi suits with such cool effects when activating them. Turns out, weeks later, I went to the cinema and saw the scenery in some superman movie. Critic: does brain gave me false memories about it? Did I unconsciously see some trailer and then had a dream about it?
Things I assume could have triggered my lucid dreams:
* bad nutrition (fast food, almost just microwave food)
* noisy room (under my room was a street) - it was like a bridge, below street, low traffic
* snoring / maybe apnea in sleep?
* very dark room (closed roller blinds)
* to much sleeping
* to less outdoor action/interaction
* meditation (focusing on a point e.g corner of wall, not letting it go, not allowing yourself to blink or to look shortly away (surely its not good for your eyes!) - after a short period of time, if you keep your eyes on a point, vision blanks out and you become blind)
More of a pre-lucid dream question... can you dictate the content/topic of your dreams? That would be some powerful stuff - virtual reality of another kind.
I've had quasi-lucid dreams. I have free will in them (and certain "learned processes" such as flying), but I am not aware that it is a dream until I wake up. So far as those go, I can "physically" escape settings that I don't like but I can't decide what settings I end up in. I'm generally stuck with the people the dream starts with and they always have their own free will.
Yes. Once you're fully lucid you can do anything. I've flown across the US, into space, banged movie stars in the white house, drove Ferraris off cliffs, etc... Since your thought process is a bit disorganized the hardest part is deciding what to do on the spot, knowing you've only got a few minutes to an or so hour max
I don't have that much power. For example, I can indeed fly, or jump as high as I want, but I have problems creating objects or people out of thin air. It seems easier for me to imagine that the object is behind me, and then turning around, then it mostly works (not always). And people in my lucid dreams sometimes have their own will, so I can try to bang anywhere (knowing that I won't hurt real people and there will be no police) but I get rejected sometimes :)
I suppose it's all a matter of practice or of becoming more lucid, though.
Sometimes things don't end up like I wanted either, but I've gotten pretty good at "ejecting" those situations rapidly, a few seconds, in favor of what I'm looking for. Not absolute God Mode, more like browsing an unlimited movie collection for what you want
Many REM sleep studies are done on lucid dreamers because they can signal the researchers by moving their eyes during sleep. Most muscles are paralyzed, but its been found that eye movements match the dreamscape. They've used this to determine that "dream time" matches real time for instance, by having lucid dreamers count with their eyes.
Two way communication is theoretically possible by measuring eye movements and signaling back with light flashes, but not sure its been done.
And yeah I have a feeling it affects sleep in some way, especially because being lucid for long periods of time tends to wake you up randomly at night
That sounds awesome! Thank you for sharing the experience, I really want to try that myself. Asking because it's related to my field of interest--do you mind sharing your IPIP-NEO result? http://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/ipipneo120.htm
Thanks! I like to ask people with those kind of Adventurous and Immoderate results--did you ever try Ayahuasca? Other psychonaut-type experiments? Forms of yoga? What seems interesting next?
No psychedelics, too much family history of mental illness. I've always been a YOLO type person in and outside of work.
Risks are often greatly overestimated, and appealing to the corporate mindset disgusts me. I'm the type that loves risk and doesn't hesitate to call bullshit as long as it wont get me canned. Figuring out if you're in a dream is superficially similar to realizing someone is screwing with you lol.
I've heard that in recent years there's an increasing understanding that while achieving lucid dreams is very doable, full dream control is rare even with years of practice. (I'm pretty sure there's at least one journal article on this, but I can't find it now.)
Do you find that you have pretty much full control, or are you just along for the ride a lot of the time?
To contrast with the parent poster,I've had lucid dreaming before and it was a quite boring actually. Everything was muddled and blurry, nothing comparable with the real world. It felt like I was telling myself a story and my unconscious mind would go along with it and the dream would follow it.
Ive read that Remee doesnt detect REM phase, just acts as a glorified alarmed clock. Is it actually useful? Sometimes it takes me a long time to fall asleep.
I've lucid dreamed a few times, and every time I am able to summon a "debug menu". Sort of a drop-down menu with all of the dream parameters. I can never think of anything more interesting to try than Physics>Gravity>moon.
I turned off collisions once, and spent like twenty minutes just putting my hands through walls and giggling.
It's weirdly common in my dreams to have low gravity or to have the ability to swim through the air. I'm pretty sure my brain is recognizing that gravity isn't applying to me in the way it should be if I were standing up (because I'm actually laying down in a bed), and my brain is just confabulating an explanation for it. So that makes me wonder whether that circumstance in your lucid dream (and choices in lucid dreams in general) is really happening because of your free choice, and whether the belief that you decided for that to happen is just part of your brain confabulating an explanation. I assume it and probably most decisions are a mix of both.
Sorry, being a hormonally motivated biological machine developed over millions of years sometimes makes me have sexual thoughts cause I'm programmed to have one too many of them; I apologize for stating the course of action that 99% of the straight males in the world would do if they TRULY could control their dreams, if lucid dreaming wasn't just another vapid fantasy about being able to control one's brain.
It's not like I posted porn; it was just a comment, you guys truly are super sensitive over there in California.
Plus I really wanted to point out that 99% of the straight males in the world would do sexual things in their dreams if they TRULY could control their dreams, if lucid dreaming wasn't just another vapid fantasy about being able to control one's brain.
The big loud part in the center of of your brain is the sexual part, you are not programmed to enjoy flying that's why many of us don't enjoy that, and the little piece that may enjoy it is incidental, the only 4 hardwired desires are food, sleep, sex and offspring/family protectionism.
Lucid dreaming is real, being able to control what happens there is not (lack of evidence shows so)
> and the little piece that may enjoy it is incidental, the only 4 hardwired desires are food, sleep, sex and offspring/family protectionism.
I enjoy music and programming, where does that fit into that narrative? I also dream about a lot more varied things than those you list. Including flying, when I have a lucid dream.
Controlling what you do during a dream makes it a lucid dream. Saying there is an issue with them because nobody talks about satisfying their sexual desires is an odd argument to make, and may show your biases more than anything.
It isn't sensitivity in the way you're thinking. The issue is that unsubstantive comments grow like weeds if we let them. Since we don't want them to take over the site, we need to not let them.
When we post moderation comments here we're not making any statements about acceptability in general! Only about what tends to have a good vs. bad effect on HN, relative to the goals of the site (which are described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
HN is a specific kind of web site and all we care about is keeping it on track for its particular purpose. I'm sure those comments are entirely acceptable in many other contexts.
There is an anime series with something similar to this as one of the premises, 'Overlord'. Near the beginning, the protagonist uses superuser powers to reprogram a cute but hateful character in a VR game so they are in love with him.
It goes rather less well than he expects. Great series, incidentally.
This is an interesting study but I have several methodologic concerns and feel like nobody is discussing conflict of interest here. This is done at an institute owned and managed by one researcher, recruited from attendees of a seminar on lucid dreaming, approved by the ethics committee of that institute, and using a gold standard self-report rating scale that the primary author also invented. I am very curious about what they used for their active placebo. I suppose research on dreaming and the interaction of drugs with dreaming is pretty interesting and sparse, so I'll take what I can get but it would be cool to see this replicated in a more generalizable way before anyone starts trying this at home.
Missing a key analysis - note this sentence:
"Side effects were more commonly reported for both the 4 mg dose (p = 0.039) and 8 mg dose (p = 0.057) compared to placebo"
It's highly likely that participants were unblinded by side effects, a common problem in many placebo-controlled trials that is rarely addressed. If you're a lucid dreamer, and interested enough to participate in a clinical trial, you might be more apt to report the outcome of interest during active drug (= side effect) periods. Note that this need not be a conscious decision, just an unconscious bias.
Many RCT's include some language about asking participants to guess treatment assignment - but this result is rarely reported...
I'm very interested in lucid dreaming but I have never been able to lucid dream consistently even using a lot of standard advice ("Be aware if you're dreaming", etc, etc).
It seems as if anything that allowed many non-lucid dreamer to lucid dream consistently would have to be more than a placebo effect.
This topic interests me, I have used indirect techniques to increase the rate at which I get into a lucid dream state, drugs are not necessary with the correct schedule. However like others here have noted sleep quality is reduced and REM does not seem to have the same restorative effect if you spend it lucid dreaming.
I was actually first taught how to do this by my Chinese martial arts teacher, he recommended I spend any time I had in lucid dreams shadowboxing and sparing with opponents and in situations (often against weapons) I fear the most. It has actually increased my ability to think objectively during stressful situations. Especially because when you get too excited in a dream it usually collapses (look up deepening techniques if this is a problem for you).
One way I have heard people use this technique outside of martial arts is practicing public speaking in the dream state to increase confidence and create a realistic practice environment. Of course the possibilities are wide, however I find it very difficult to do things I have not experienced in real life, for example I can jump really high like I would if I was on a trampoline but I can not fly around like superman.
I practiced lucid dreaming intensely when I was 18 for over a year and it has been automatic since (it is over 25 years later); I would not miss it for the world. It's like a strong hallucinogenic drug but without the side effects (aka recovery is instant when I wake up). I like doing the things you would think that are great; flying around, getting shot without being hurt (I did it 1000s of times and still find it interesting when the bullet goes in but it doesn't hurt; very strange feelings as my brain signals imminent and possibly lethal damage), fighting with robots, having sex and so on. And everything (well, for as far as I know that is; many things I dream I have never experienced, but it my brain at least thinks they would feel like that) feels like the real thing. Also in real life I have fear of heights; in my dreams I like to fly as high as I can and then swoop down over the lands (which are often rain forests with maya temples for some reason).
I do solve programming problems in those dreams, at least I think so; I wake up with a clear path to attacking those problems I went to sleep with and I do have lucid dreams where I am discussing those issues with someone. Always someone who I 'feel' I know, but who looks very different than they do in real life. I definitely would find going to sleep a lot more boring without these dreams. Advantage I find as well (I am not sure if everyone has this, but the book I learned lucid dreaming from says it's one of the side effects) is that I remember all my dreams.
I have long been curious about the following; since I have been wearing wristbands like the Fitto, which measures sleep, I notice something which could be related (or Fitto etc sleep measurement is just bullshit; I had it with multiple brands though); compared to everyone I know, I spend far more time in REM and deep sleep; far more than my comparable age group. I spend, comparatively, very little time in light or awake state every night. Wonder how this is for other lucid dreamers.
Had a similar experience - started as a teenager and now it's automatic. Also dreams are becoming more abstract, more visceral, and more epic as I age.
Sometimes wish I could turn it off, though - it can be exhausting. I'd like sleep to be more restful by default but have a way to choose to have a lucid dream if desired.
This requires a bit of backstory; I grew up in a very small village with a very small library. The village as a whole was very religious and most books in the library were screened by bible thumbing community members. I had ‘internet’ of sorts through BBS systems which gatewayed to international gopher, ftp and other systems but books were books. One of the books that slipped through the cracks was a outer body experience book. I am an atheist; always was while raised christian; I always asked the questions I was not allowed to ask and I never found anything in religion remotely believable even though everyone around me (without exception) was devout. I do not believe in outer body experience but it was something else to read for a change. So I read it and it contained a training for doing OBE, which is, in fact, lucid dreaming. And I can see how someone can see lucid dreaming for OBE or even signs of god and an afterlife. It is pretty convincing. I have spoken to dead people, next to my bed. I remember the conversations. I have met and talked to people I have never met and so forth. I have seen angels (as our earthly brain would imagine them; lot of light and very friendly). But these were all dreams and we all dream like that: most people just forget what they dream. This book gave me the training to do this at will and even change my dreams significantly.
The all fail the tests that come later in the same book (I will try to find it); the book trains you to fall through your bedroom floor and check the table in your own house for something. Then to prove it is OBE, someone puts something there, like an ace of spades and the next day you tell what it was. Cool so ofcourse I tried this; I fell through my bed, through the floor (which was made of wood which it was not) and floated over the livingroom table, saw a big white paper with a square. Told my sister this: there was no square, there was an ace of spades. It was, ofcourse, a dream but I was far more amazed I could get my brain so far as to do what I set out to do: create a dream in which I do what I wanted before I went to sleep. That I can no longer do at will; that required a lot of training.
One thing that struck me from Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep was him finishing up the section on lucid dreaming stating people don't know if lucid dreaming is bad, good, or irrelevant when it comes to affecting REM sleep's normal function. I never thought it might have some sort of negative cognitive effects, but I certainly now would be hesitant to try to induce it chemically.
I had a friend of 16 years and more who is in love with a singer in a popular 90s band(obsessed) and it's no way reciprocated. She says he loves her in another dimension and she controls her dreams to speak to him. I use to have to listen to her talk about her fantasy conversations with him until i could no longer take talking about some delusion. She is no longer the fun person I use to know... just lost in a delusion and I and all her family/friends tried to make her snap out of it.. but no one is more important then the delusion :-(
Is there another reason why one would want to lucid dream other then to create another reality that doesn't exist?
Sleep is another form of cognition that can unlock other problem solving capabilities. See "The Committee of Sleep" by Deidre Barrett https://www.amazon.com/Committee-Sleep-Scientists-Athletes-S... for a number of well documented examples of scientists, engineers, artists, and others solving problems or unlocking design insights from dream experiences.
Analyzing what our imagination is capable of. I find it quite curious how it can spin a very detailed dream apparently out of nowhere. It may be curiosity or entertainment. You ask "why create another reality that doesn't exist". Most films, tv series and novels are about "a reality that doesn't exist".
It simply plays a song when you aren't pressing left mouse button. I go to sleep with a mouse taped to my hand and try to keep pressing he button. After around 5-15 minutes the song starts playing on my laptop speakers. For some reason, even if the music is plays, I lucid dream.
I've never dreamed. Or at least I've never had any recollection of dreaming upon waking. I wonder if this would make it so that I could dream, or remember that I dream (if I do dream)?
I rarely remember my dreams, except, when I make a conscious effort of remembering them when I wake up.
One night, right before bed, make the mental note that you need to remember your dream when you wake up. Maybe even write yourself a reminder on your phone or post-it note. When you wake up, seeing the note might help you remember what you dreamed off. Maybe the first time you still won't remember, but I'm sure after a few nights you probably finally will remember your dream.
If you do remember your dream, have a piece of paper close by and write it down immediately, otherwise you might forget about it after your shower.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've been trying it, but so far no dice. Though, since I've never dreamed previously, would I recognize it if I started dreaming now?
I wonder if the induction of lucid dreams could become a commercial endeavor? Viewing it as an alternative to technological virtual reality, people would start buying products which induce dreams instead. Companies would subsequently market and patent items which enhance visual experiences in dreams.
Especially with all the hype around VR, I’ve long suspected that a device or process to reliably induct lucid dreams would be a hugely valuable invention. I suspect many people who have explored lucid dreaming would agree.
Flying/weightlessness has been my all-time-favorite lucid dream.
I have been a lucid dreamer since a long time. It definitely is an amazing thing. I have never really got tempted to wear VR headsets or such devices. I can achieve this state just before I have fallen asleep completely. I get a stronger control over dreams usually in the morning when I have mentally woke up but have not opened my eyes yet.
1. I can fly, hover, experience 0 G. Helps me save the money which I might have spent in doing it in real life.
2. I can solve problems. Programming problems or other real world problems.
3. I meet people whom I may not get a chance to meet with in real life.
4. I can "continue" a dream after waking up and going back to bed.
The best thing about this ability is that you have complete control on your dream. You are aware that you are dreaming. You can direct the dream to go whereever and however you want.
Tangentially related, but if anything "magical" exists, lucid dreaming is the way to it.
Egyptians were supposedly obsessed with being lucid during dreams so they don't "lose" themselves in the afterlife. Seems quite logical, since you essentially lose track of yourself during a dream.
Indeed. The Tibetans claim that this is all a dream, and that the only way to confirm this for yourself is to wake up. Until then, because all of the internal dynamics follow rather precise and well-defined laws (i.e., correlations), it is easy to be fooled into thinking that it is real and external. In actuality, it is all made of "your" mind, in the same way that a dream environment is made of "your" mind. "Your" is in quotes because it is not the mind of the dream character, but of the dreamer. Ultimately the character discovers that the two are the same, by introspecting precisely.
Just some random brainstorming inspired by this post: If you imagined a layer above reality in the chain of dream->reality->x, what qualities would describe it? People often differentiate dreams and reality by the fact that reality follows rigid rules instead of having subjectively-bent rules. Would the rules of x be even rigid-er? Maybe you follow the pattern by subtracting the rest of the subjectiveness left in reality. Reality still has subjective qualities: we're all bound to an arbitrary viewpoint, and things like the Anthropic Principle affect the circumstances that we experience. I guess that basically means some "objective" total view of reality would be the higher layer, but that doesn't really leave any room for actions or cognition as we know it, so it's just a fun thought.
Argh. Buddhist philosophy is ususally horribly written (in the west). Much easier to come to grips with this idea if we start from the much more commonly agreed that our sense perceptions and memory are generally sufficient for survival, but very much inexact in comparison to the reality of what is perceived and remembered.
Add to this, a very strong insistence that everything is in a perpetual state of flux, that there is no perpetual "you" or "me" (or indeed anything). Trivial physical example - a molecule in your body is exhaled, and now inhaled by me... (cue "we are all one..."). A part of the earth turns into a banana plant, you eat the banana, and the banana turns into a human being. Now where are the boundaries of "you" and "the Earth"? See first paragraph reminding you about the very limited nature of your sense perceptions and memories.
The foregoing is stuff "we all know" but push into the background while we "get on with real life", but the yogic/Buddhist approach asks us to foreground it, and ask ourselves how we would conceive of and live life with those understandings in the foreground. Further, what if dynamics beyond those limited senses were at play? Psychology and ethics which takes the above as a starting point, rather than exisiting power relations, ends up looking different from what we have now.
The whole thing is like a snake swallowing its own tail. If what "they" are saying is correct, then this is "my" dream. The Buddha is a character I dreamed up to remind me how to wake up.
Why isn't this solipsism? First, because it's not my personal dream (the person being a character himself). Second, for a similar reason as MWI is not solipsism. This branch really is my own branch (in a particular sense). What I experience as other people are really "my versions" of them, but this does not mean there aren't other perspectives analogous to mine.
This idealist perspective can be made internally consistent. At that point, deciding between it and materialism may seem like a matter of preference. The difference is that the idealist perspective can be confirmed, in the same way that a nighttime dream can be: you discover, very precisely, how you constructed the whole thing, including all the tricks you used to blind yourself to the ruse.
Okay, but if you thought it was all your dream, why would you write up that belief in a presumed attempt to communicate the same idea to another figment of your imagination?
In a dream, it's possible to gain and lose lucidity repeatedly, and in varying degrees. In the "breaks," one concocts all kinds of nonsensical strategies to regain it. I suppose one of mine is arguing with others about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to QM. In the best case, other people catch on and contribute missing pieces of the puzzle, which alleviates remaining doubts that were dissuading me from pursuing it in earnest.
The main difference is that if this is your dream, you can discover the mechanism by which you create it. In a simulation, that mechanism is external to you.
I had what seemed like a lucid dream recently but realized I couldn't know if I was merely dreaming that I knew that I was dreaming and was able to control the dream.
What's the difference between that and lucid dreaming, and how can you distinguish?
But what's the difference between that and merely dreaming that you are?
Don't you feel like you have control and are making decisions in every dream that you have?
Is it really that interesting if you happen to dream that you're controlling a dream vs dreaming that you're controlling your flight around the world or whatever nonsense we dream about?
Short version, if you're lucid dreaming, you're acutely aware that the laws of the world around you are generated by your mind (and you know why!)
I've had some lucid dreaming experiences. For a normal dream, when you wake up you realize your actions during the dream were more or less just reactive/instinctual. During lucid dreaming, you can actually pause and contemplate the situation and your actions before making them.
When you're lucid dreaming, you can choose to wake up or stay asleep, although eventually (usually very quickly) one will start to happen automatically: either your brain will wake up or it will trick you back into dreaming.
I know what you mean. I want to say I've had both types of dreams, but as you're pointing out, how could I know for sure?
I will say that when I'm having a genuine lucid dream, after I wake up, I know without a doubt it was a lucid dream. With regular dreams, I look back on them and don't exactly identify with my "dream self." That guy didn't realize how absurd the scenario was. He resembles me, but he wasn't me.
With a genuine lucid dream, I look back at the dreamer and can say, "yeah that was 100% me." Also, I find that becoming lucid always sort of pulls the dream into a more realistic scenario. It goes from chaotic and weird to just plain normal life (only, the rules have changed now).
So I guess what leads me to believe that I've had these "pseudo lucid dreams" is that I look back on them after waking and don't identify with the dreamer the same way I do with a genuine lucid dream. It feels more like I was watching someone else, like a recording, than as though it was a real firsthand experience
I wonder how lucid dreaming compares to a phenomenon where (A) we dream that we know we are dreaming and (B) it happens to line up with reality enough that we are convinced we had control.
Maybe philosophically there is no difference. But it would certainly dispel a lot of the folk magic around lucid dreaming.
The way that genuine lucid dreaming differs from those scenarios is that it's been shown empirically that the dreamer is in fact aware that he is asleep and is dreaming.
Check out Stephen LaBerge for more info. They found that while asleep, a person is basically paralyzed with exception to their eye movement. In a lab setting they were able to have the dreamer use a signal, using eye movement, that they were dreaming.
One thing they did was to test the theory that subjective dream time is different than time experience while awake. They did this by doing the eye signal, counting down 10 seconds, and then signalling again. They found that there was no "time dilution" when compared to wakefulness.
I think your are on something and that 'lucid dreaming' may just be a dream after all. And interesting question would be: under an MRI can we detect lucid dreaming? If yer then maybe it's more then just a dream.
I'd say you likely haven't lucid dreamed, because it's a you-really-know-it feeling. You realize you are dreaming "Oh, I'm dreaming right now. I'm lying in my bed, and dreaming this place", and you can decide to do things - but you also have to be careful not to become too lucid and wake yourself up (usually I do this by calming myself down) and not to fall into a "real" dream (I find that spinning in circles makes you more lucid... but don't do it too much, else you'll just wake up! It's hard to balance)
I used to be able to do it a lot when I was younger - it still happens to me every once in a while now. But you KNOW when it happens - it's not at all like "a really real dream", it's something completely different.
I had a dream where I was in my bedroom and noticed that it was arranged in an old way that I had since rearranged a month ago. I suggested to myself that I was in a dream and tried to wake myself up. I woke up into yet another dream where the room was in its current arrangement. I woke up shortly after for real this time, into reality.
I woke up to the sun beaming through the window into my eyes. Maybe I was more lucid/aware than usual for that reason.
But I have no way of knowing whether the control/awareness I had in that dream was any different than the illusion of control/awareness and decision-making I have in any other dream.
It seems like quite a leap to assume I was in control just because I dreamed I was.
Are you in control right now? Leaving the deep philosophical questions aside, you can have the same kind of control in a dream. As in, you feel 100% (or sometimes much more) awake, alert, and in possession of your full waking capacities, but what surrounds you isn't the physical world.
Just a fun anecdote: I once had a dream where I met someone who was introduced to me as being me, although he looked completely different. I thought it was a really boring "philosophical" statement about how we all have many sides to ourselves, got a little angry about how pseudo-intellectual this dream was and decided to wake up. I decided I didn't want anything to do with that dream and forced myself awake. It was a very odd feeling to force my eyes open into the real world, when in the dream my eyes were already open!
Yes. I dreamt I was sending psychic messages out of a dream, and woke up, and sent an SMS to apologise for the psychic message, and woke up again. So attempting to communicate out of dream layers two dreams deep.
Woke up to what I believe is reality. Am there still.
I've had this weirdly commonly (without Chantix ... just maybe some sleep deprivation), if you replace "psychic messages" with texts or other online messages. Though amusingly, "psychic messages" and "online messages" don't really seem so categorically different in this context.
I often wake up into a dream when I'm not currently on any drugs. Usually early in the morning when I'm dreading going to work or school. I dream I wake up, brush my teeth, change clothes, make breakfast etc... then I wake up for real and freak out about being late.
For those interested, galantamine is a prescription medication "indicated for the treatment of mild to moderate dementia of the Alzheimer's type." Nice long list of reported side effects:
Certainly. Here are a few starting points [1] [2] [3], but it would be best to enter "galantamine dosage" and "galantamine risks" into a few search engines. Perhaps report the wiki page.
I'm not sure which Wikipedia page you were looking at. There is an entire section on side effects. The original article also mentioned it, as have the comments.
This happens to me all the time, and I'm in my 50's. I'll be lying in bed thinking about some topic, and my wife will poke me and say, "Turn over, you're snoring", and as far as I can tell I never fell asleep at all. It doesn't affect my rest as far as I can tell. I find it enjoyable.
"Lucid dreaming is a remarkable state of consciousness..."
Like anything else, it's only remarkable until you've understood and experienced it. I look forward to the time when this is considered a normal state of consciousness and is just something people do to enhance their life experience.
We in the west have a pretty weak relationship to the limits of consciousness. It's great to see this changing with studies like this popping up more frequently.
That said, I've only achieved mixed results with my lucid dreaming experiments as I found the training to hamper my energy the next day. I'm going to give galantamine a try and see if I can get some more consistent results.
Ive been a fairly regular lucid dreamer for probably 8 years now. Having more regular LDs would certainly be welcome. Im also quite interested in this bit: "Galantamine also significantly increased dream recall, sensory vividness and complexity (p<0.05). Dream recall, cognitive clarity, control, positive emotion, vividness and self-reflection were increased during lucid compared to non-lucid dreams (p<0.0001)."
i usually try to materialize a hot chick and have sex ... afterwards i tend to blame myself for not having used the opportunity for constructive self-inspection.
Smoked it, the smoke is thick and a bit... sorta soapy. Apparently the tea is disgusting.
Next two nights I'd have a lot of dreams, but also sleep fitfully and not feel well rested. Definitely an interesting herb, but not a habit I'd want to make frequent because of the tiredness. That was a few years ago now.
Man, I see people describing their dreams as having vivid colours and sounds and weird stuff and I can't relate at all. I very rarely dream at all for some reason and the few times I can remember having dreamt there's only a very indistinct feeling of visual impressions and no detail.
makes me feel like I'm missing out on something...
Lucid dreaming is dangerous. I used it to debug code - no shit. I've spent the last 15 years trying to err.. 'become normal' and sleep (again) err.. properly. Currently I do 2 sleeps per night with a 1-2hour break in between. One day I hope to sleep through a whole night. On the plus side sunrises......
This comment is late so may not get noticed, but I've been able to trigger lucid dreams using kava. Get the good stuff, and avoid tinctures. Alcohol makes it seem good at first but I've had some bad hangovers from it, which shouldn't happen.
I’ve only ever had a small number of lucid-like experiences. I only remember my dreams 4-5 times a month, but those few lucid experiences were wonderful.
If anyone has any advice that’s worked for them on stimulating (lucid) dreaming, I would love to hear it.
Either do reality checking every day for an hour or so, or lay down, relax, and don't move for 5 hours while staying awake.
Keeping a dream journal will make the above less necessary.
I find my "bandwidth" limited during lucid dreams - I can't explore wide open spaces and if I look at details, I am prone to waking up. I never found the "just like being awake and being there" trope to be true. I spent a lot of time on detailed lucid dreaming - mainly, I wanted to test OBEs, so I would have an "OBE" and go to a place I have never been, but could check later, like a neighbor's house, or a store. It would always be absurd and "poorly rendered", nor would it match, when I checked it later irl (what a surprise).
I noticed I was dreaming and tried flying. It worked for a second, until “god” decided it wasn’t possible and I was pulled back to the ground by an invisible, irresistible force (EDIT: I think it’s called gravity?!). Trying to fight it just woke me up.
The poor rendering of places I’m not meant to go to is something I noticed when I gained control of a dream and tried going into a random building that was a “decoration”. The inside was completely empty, and the walls were gray. It seemed like a polite “fuck you” from my brain.
In a normal dream someone threw me a ball and it followed an “uncanny valley” trajectory. Almost right, but so wrong at the same time. Nice try, brain.
Lately I just try to enjoy my dreams. Paying attention to details can spoil a fun dream (I have to be careful to never check my wristwatch in dreams!)
"I noticed I was dreaming and tried flying. It worked for a second until I was pulled back to the ground by an invisible, irresistible force. Trying to fight it just woke me up."
This may be a Can't Unread sort of thing for some people, but... flying in my dreams is now a source of frustration for me since I noticed that no matter how "high" I fly, there is always something on the horizon higher than me. If I fly over this building, another one even taller will be behind it; if I fly over this tree, another one even taller will be behind it.
My theory is that dreams, unsurprisingly, come from your own personal experience and the neural nets you build, and my visual field in real life always has something above me; buildings, trees, etc. I essentially never stand on the top of the horizon, let alone personally fly for real in the cockpit. Consequently, it is essentially impossible for me to dream that I'm truly flying. (I've managed some exceptions a couple of times, but it's not reliable.) Real flying is frustrating because seeing it out the side through this tiny window is not enough visual stimulation to fix the problem; I really need the cockpit view, preferably during takeoff, and preferably more than once every few months.
However, as a compensating factor, I appear to have over the years watched enough Star (Gate/Trek/Wars) and played enough space flight sims that I can be "in space" with reasonable freedom. I have managed to jump from "the ground", which is as I described above where something is always above me no matter what, to "space", by closing my dream eyes and transitioning. It's a risky move, in the sense that it definitely pushes me closer to just plain waking.
When I was younger, flying was hard because I'd inevitably crash the experience by looking down. However, after spending a lot of time staring out of windows on planes I discovered that I could actually now "look down" in dreams and not crash.
Reflecting on your comment about there always being something on the horizon, I realized that I've always imagined being surrounded by a fairly sparse cloud layer while "in flight".
So my two pieces of advice are: (1) Build up your neural network's ability to support large scenes by observing large scenes, and (2) consider things that would be reasonable to find around you while in flight (clouds, planes, other flying people, birds, etc) and actively try to find "yet larger buildings" as unreasonable.
Staying in a lucid dreaming state, for me, seems to be more about knowing when the density of ambient "plausible reality" drops too low and steering (or snapping) yourself away from those areas.
As strange as it sounds, I find that spinning on my axis to stabilize the dream reality really helps.
The dream getting unstable feels like how being extremely tired in real life feels like. Your vision might get slightly blurry, your head will feel like it is moving back and forth, left and right, if that makes sense. And then you lose control. Unless you do something to stabilize the scenery. I find that spinning helps in these situations. Brings you right back.
I understand the emotion just fine. It is superficial frustration from wanting to be able to do something and not being able to. The solution is just to let go of it. Sleep and dreaming being what it is, I often do not remember that this is a problem until I wake up a bit more enough to remember "oh, yes, this is a problem".
Many people certainly seem to dream about issues of great significance to them. I have before, but it is by far an exception and not the rule. My dreams give me a window into how I conceptualize the world and how I break things down and store them, but it's actually quite unusual for me to have anything that can be traced back to specific emotional experiences.
A useful technique, when you are clear on the emotion you are feeling, is to create some space with closed eyes to first feel the emotion in your body and then ask your body when the first time in your life was you felt such a feeling of frustration. You may be presented with an image or scene which you then can explore and integrate.
I work with a variety of folks, including some of the top founders in the valley, and this type of subtle exploration is one of the most useful tools to unlock deeper levels of clarity, performance and wellbeing.
I haven't intentionally tried to have lucid dreams, but I occasionally have them anyway. Usually there's a feeling of "slipperiness" to it, a knowledge that if I'm not very careful, I'll fall out of the dream. Sometimes that literally means falling out of it - I'll start to go through the ground and have managed to stay in by hopping back up repeatedly. Usually when I feel myself slipping out I feel that doing something that lets the dream mechanism keep grinding along will help - interacting with people for example. Also the dream world somehow feels like a movie set, as if it was only partially constructed and a lot of it just wasn't there to be seen.
Detail isn't really an issue in my experience. On a few occasions I've experimented with paying very close attention to reflections and things like water droplets. i found them not just remarkably realistic, but hyperreal, with much more detail than I think actually exists in the real world.
I'm also not sure how to tell the difference between a dream where I dream I'm lucid and an actual lucid dream. There's a definite feeling of being aware that I don't get in regular dreams, but maybe that's just part of the dream!
'I never found the "just like being awake and being there" trope to be true.'
I've naturally lucid-dreamed for decades now (which also means I have no useful advice on how to do it), and I consider this sort of statement to either mean A: they've got a wildly better visualization center than I do (and I know mine isn't tip-top but it's not terrible) or B: they don't really have a lot of experience at lucid dreaming and haven't noticed the limitations yet. It is far from a Virtual Reality simulation.
Keep a dream journal. This will improve dream recall and help you identify patterns in your dreams. Identifying patterns is good, for example, if I find myself in a classroom I know I'm dreaming. I never go into classrooms awake, but occasionally find myself in one while dreaming.
The best way to keep a dream journal is to spend 5-10 minutes while first awake in bed thinking about your dreams and writing them down. That is the time and location dream recall is the easiest.
What worked for me was making it a habit to 'reality check' (looking at my hands/fingers, doing a double take on a clock) every day for several weeks. Then, entering a lucid dream state worked best when taking an afternoon nap, or waking up a couple hours before my usual wake up time and going back to sleep after a brief period of mild activity.
I used to smoke the leaf occasionally. The next two nights I'd have insane amounts of dreams, but also not feel properly rested, like it kept you at a lighter level of sleep. Which makes some sense.
This is awesome, but scary. Lucid dreaming is s game where you try to figure out what is real and what is imagined, and your brain tries to trick you. Eventually, your brain wins.
I believe the first step is to train yourself to recognize a dream. It becomes easier once you've done it, so I assume a few lucid dreams can lead to many more. There are devices that supposedly trigger lucid dreams in many that have never had one, I highly recommend trying it. Example of one of these products: http://sleepwithremee.com/ . They detect REM cycles and signal you in-dream with light through your closed eyelids, since vision isn't actually suppressed during REM.
I've hit the point where I've had lucid dreams the seem to last over an hour. Its insane, not even something I can describe to someone that hasn't lived it. Like closing your eyes and thinking about flying, but with the same level of detail as the real world. The sound, sights, feeling of the sun and wind, even pain. To be a little inappropriate, sexual experiences also feel just the same as the real version. I've had hyper real dreams too, especially with vision. Colors that are impossibly bright and saturated, or impossible acuity.
Nowadays when I do end up lucid dreaming (most often by accident) I notice a fairly significant drop in sleep quality.
Even worse, I sometimes lucid dream, then "awaken" into another dream where I'm not lucid and those experiences really fuck with me.
On a different note I'd love to get a high quality sleep-tracking night mask. Most of the "smart" ones I know of have awful battery life. I don't want another device to charge every few days.
Such as?
Personally I've found them deeply disturbing. Throughout my life I have experienced moments of sleep paralysis at most on 10 occasions. They've left a big impact though, and I sympathize with anyone who has the misfortune of feeling as though you are trapped and unable to move.
After watching the film "Waking life" I spent a long time thinking about lucid dreaming and perhaps maybe had 1 or 2 myself. I had never connected the two however, definitely food for thought.
When I actually learned what it was I tried lucid dreaming and stuff with it. But, I always find the feeling uncomfortable. I don't like not being able to move or do anything while your dreams mix with your bedroom.
It doesn't happen so much now. Every once in a while if I wake up in the morning and go back to sleep, the second time I wake up it'll happen. I don't tend to sleep in any more and once i'm awake I get up.
I don't know if it's related but i've always had problems sleeping. When I was young I was scared to sleep, even as a baby i didn't sleep well. I can usually fall asleep alright now but the slightest noise in the night wakes me up and I still feel wary about losing conciousness.
Makes it very difficult to keep track of things.
So I think lucid dreaming is not necessarily a problem in itself but forcefully training yourself to do it can be rough going.
I do not blame you. I've experienced sleep paralysis more than once, and it is not pleasant at all. I remember trying to scream at the top of my lungs in my head for... I don't know how long but my perception of it was that it was for hours on end. Then all of a sudden something broke through, and I woke my wife up with the loudest scream she's ever heard out of anyone.
Took a while for me to sleep again after that.
Most of my paralysis episodes didn't involve the "evil presence" people often talk about. That is, until a recent one less than a year ago, where I woke up with a giant "invisible" spider on my chest
It's terrifying to be in this state of mind where you know what's happening, but you also really, really feel that presence. I wonder if this is similar to what schizophrenic patients feel.
I had the worst sleep paralysis I've ever had, I was laid facing the wall with the light and I would have sworn there was absolute evil behind me, it was frankly terrifying.
It broke suddenly and I kept out of bed and shot out the room, took me about 15 minutes for heart rate to come down.
I don't scare easily and I'm a life long atheist but I can see how if you where raised religious you'd assume it was whatever evil presence your religion has.
Do you know for sure that it actually wiggles? Because that's what I tried doing once, and my wife told me that my entire body was still and I just woke up all of a sudden.
A year or so ago, I woke up during the night and felt tingling in my feet. The tingling kept increasing in intensity and seemed to slowly rise along my limbs. A few seconds later, I suddenly heard someone shout with an aggressive but soft voice next to my ear, and felt eerily realistic hands grab my arms and vigorously scratch my right palm. In absolute terror, I remember trying to scream and shake it off, but I couldn't move. And it felt so real. A few seconds later I managed to snap off the paralysis, and rocketed out of my bed. I didn't sleep that night.
Once you come to terms with the fact that sleep paralysis is a thing, I think it's just another interesting mental experience. The lack of control is also kind of fun. Who knows what's going to happen next? But you probably won't die. Not the worst thing in the world.
Lucid or not, I realized a while ago that I don't experience physical pain in my dreams. I have started to wonder if this was a general experience. Experiences I'd expect to be painful (like getting shot or carried away by a wall of fire) simply startle me awake.
It's interesting to hear you do feel that. I've experienced all kinds of things emotionally - embarrassment, fear, anxiety. But never physical pain.
Self-aware nightmares are way more terrifying than the regular variety, a lucid dream where I sometimes can't take control. I usually try to wake myself immediately, but sometimes this leads to repeated false awakenings. The worst I remember is 5 false awakenings before waking up for real.
It is exactly as you described. Nobody can ever understand it until they experience it. Comparing it to the matrix might do it a little justice. But there are limitations -- waking up, falling back into non-lucidity, false awakenings and so on.
The first lucid dream I had was glorious. I was dreaming about being on a very tall grey building with overcast skies, on a wooden deck protruding from the side of the building. I became lucid and commanded the sky to crack with lightning and it did. I flew upward and created a swirl of clouds and was generally having an amazing time. This all was as if it were completely real. Then, too excited, I woke up. But it was a terrifying false awakening where a black figure sprinted toward me and attacked me. Then I woke up for real, absolutely terrified. It was so scary that I decided not to lucid dream anymore. But with recounting all of this, and thinking about it for the first time again, I think I might start doing it again.
I never consciously do reality checks, but I'm a very inquisitive and skeptical person. Easily distracted by cracks in the wall type.
I wouldn't let one bad experience stop you from lucid dreaming :( . I might be an outlier, but my experiences have been overwhelmingly amazing. Yes, I still have nightmares are the lucid ones are waaayyy worse. But lucid dreaming is such a great experience I would never wish it away
I am the same, I've never felt any pain in a dream, extreme fear is the strongest negative emotion or feeling I've ever experienced, but that usually wakes me up and ends the dream.
Interesting how we're all wired differently!
It makes for a really awkward discussion most of the time. And it's impossible to explain well to somebody that hasn't experienced it.
Might be generics or wiring, or just figuring out how to recognize dreams, who knows. Its real weird that some people can have this otherworldly incredible experience with no drugs, and yet most of the population never experiences it. I'm lucky I guess, but to me its normal
Its definitely unsettling at first. I started lucid dreaming by chance at ~11 so I guess I'm used to it. I don't think much of it when I look away from the window and it turns into a flock of birds, just roll with it ya know :)
I think the false awakenings are part of lucid dreaming. The awareness that you're not actually awake yet is a small step from control of your dreams.
How did you train yourself to recognise a dream; was it a particular kind of reality check? Do you find you also have great dream recall in general?
I don't do a certain reality check, but I've been lucid dreaming on and off since early teens so I just notice sometimes. Most often when I remember noticing its because I look away and things are different when I look back
Very odd experience, but it fits with my memories of trying to read in dreams. The words are either nonsense, mad-libs, or they make sense, but change the moment your attention shifts.
Such things made me think about the difference between actually reading or watching something in a dream, and merely having the feeling that I did. Did the writing I thought I read/wrote really exist in my mind such that I lost something on waking up?
There's definitely other psychedelics that produce "real" seeming illusions but I'm not aware of any that give you direct control over them like lucid dreaming can.
On psychedelics, I view the world and myself differently. I know I'm on drugs. My stream of thought is different I'm obviously still in my house, for example, and I know I can't fly or make things appear out of thin air. By the time any hallucinations would be dream-like (strong and heavy), I freaking know I'm hallucinating. Even with lighter things (much more common), I know it is a hallucination. I know that my painting doesn't really move like that, for example.
All conjecture of course because we know startling little about how dreams work :)
How do you differentiate between the two? Is it even possible?
I don't know if that helps or not, but that's what it does with me.
So at that moment I would realize I was dreaming. But I don’t see why you’d just jump off of a bridge neither in a dream nor IRL. Personally what I chose to do was to attempt to fly by imagining jet motors on my legs. And it worked! And then I got excited and woke up :P
Anyway, when you become lucid it is because of things that are not like reality, so it will be obvious that it really is a dream. I see your concern but I could never imagine anyone thinking they were dreaming when they were not.
Another couple of times I’ve realized I was dreaming because the text in books or in papers were a jumbled floating mess rather than the static arrangement of letters that one would expect, and no information was conveyed as opposed to real life where most books and magazines are written to present some form of information in writing.
And one time I had a nightmare where my fingers and hands got holes in them and something was coming for me and I said “this is not possible”, and I realized then that I was dreaming and I took control and turned the nightmare into a pleasant dream by projecting the disease over on my assailant and escaping from it :)
I'm also not able to generate a complex text in a dream, so trying to read a book can also work, and I suppose there are many similar possible tests based on the limitations of your dreaming mind. But the advantage of the wristwatch is that I always wear it in real life, so I know I will also be wearing it in dreams, so I can always do that test, while a book may not be available in a dream.
If you want to kill me, give me a wristwatch that does weird stuff and I might jump from a skyscraper trying to fly in real life at some point :)
I've always been a little scared that I would be awake, think I'm in a dream, and then do something stupid, like try to fly.
So, no harm in accidentally trying to fly in reality. Except looking weird.
What has helped me stimulate higher consciousness is drinking a half cup of coffee right as I go to bed. Caffeine does not amp me out like most, but it does make the dreams more vivid & memorable.
However, the NIH research suggests(which I am more inclined to trust over commercial sites): Sunlight, happiness, exercise and diet. Fatigue even reduces amino acids that may inhibit absorption of serotonin. As for the diet part:
"Although purified tryptophan increases brain serotonin, foods containing tryptophan do not."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2077351/
Once I get there, I have complete control and can fly however I want as fast as I want. I've never been able to hold on for more than a minute or so though before I wake up.
I heard an old tale (pre-internet days) where dreaming happens in a different part of the brain than reading, so supposedly it isnt possible to read in a dream and thus being able to read is a litmus test of whether you're dreaming or not....but i often read during dreams so I couldnt figure it out.
Searching the internet (present day) reveals a spectrum of opinions on whether one can or cannot read during dreams (and thus whether it can be used as a litmus test for reality.) Do you know if there is a definitive opinion on this?
I suppose I can always use a totem.
Yes, this seems a difficult exercise, but it is exactly what your mind is against in a dream. And while a few people can read things in dreams, many cannot. Some folks can read simple signs. For me, most times, letters move around - if they are even latin letters at all. That said, sometimes I know what they say regardless. I get the illusion of reading, but not the actual experience.
Reading is sometimes a trigger for lucid dreams for me. It was unsettling at first :)
For me those things were very new and out of curiosity I often tried to verify if dream reality is some kind of "real" reality or connected to it. Among my curious quest, I also tried to read newspapers in my dreams and was also able to read pars of it, e.g headline/date. I even wrote the information down afterwards at that time (dream journal). The headline was not interesting btw and the date was in the future.
Had some dreams which I think were really interesting, maybe they are also interesting to read for you:
* becoming lucid in dream, all dark, a noise, flying towards me like a fly, emitting a sound which terrifies me to the bones. The entity comes from far distance, swiftly flying closer and closer whirling like mad around me. Had this dream multiple times - till I decided in real life that I should stop being afraid of imaginary noises in dreams. Next time the dream came up I remembered my decision and I tried to not panic with all my courage and it worked. First few times this dreams occurred, when the noise approached, I woke/sprung up from sleep which so much sheer panic, I did not believe I was able to feel so much fear/panic (sweaty + heart beats like crazy). * flying through a purple tunnel (like near death experience), while flying through (I could influence speed), my body was shaking as if in roller-coaster (but not my real body was shaking, since I was aware of it), it felt like something within my body was shaking, which was not muscles/bones, also feeling like my body was charging up with some kind of electricity. I could control the speed, finally reached end of tunnel, saw sky, mountains, nice landscape: since I was lucid, I thought: "Wait, am I going to die now?" -> I then hesitated to go further, the tunnel dissolved in a million threads and I woke up. * becoming lucid in a dream, with a new kind of peaceful mind-state, I felt like void, but was still aware of existing/being (everything was dark, I did not identify as something, but still was aware). A desire to "wish" something came up and with it my nice mind-state was broken and the wished scenery appeared. At the same time I felt, that my control/awareness of the dream diminished, till it was completely gone. In hindsight, I came up with the theory, that a dreaming-mind without desire (Scale: longing <---> fearing) is complete and aware (but nothing is there, no self, but still awareness). It splits up as desire arises and creates two halves: the desired (observed) scenery and the observer. I wonder if spiritual/religions people learned their theories from lucid dreams: at least for me this would make sense to me. * lucid dreams where I felt my body in bed and small orbs flying through my body, as the flew through, voices appeared in my head and some of the orbs tried to take my body resp. pushed me awareness out. I resisted and woke up. (After this dreams I thought I might have some schizophrenic disorder) * same dream as above, this time a wasp tried to enter my head, as it was trying to enter my head, I heard millions of voices talking at the same time. (Waking up -> schizophrenic disorder barometer rises) * waking up and for about 5 sec. had no memory of who I am, where I am, what this is all about what I am seeing. Very strange experience, like being completely out of this world. Had this 2 times (After each time, slight concerns that something might not be ok with my brain/circulation). * Impressing art dream: looking at ancient stone bridge, which was made of thousands of horses emerging out of each other like a wave (sculptured horses), similar to the painting from "The Great Wave" from Kanagawa. The bridge was broken in the middle. * Many dreams with fake awakening, also some with >5 times in a row and aware in paralysis. It often happened to me that I fell back to sleep with increased body awareness. Most of the time I then dreams to rob through a desert with numb limbs trying to move on and fighting to open my heavy eyelids. In such meta-state, heavy eyelids resp. problems opening my eyes seeing something was dominant. Often I could really see, what was around me, but my eyes were not focused and I misinterpreted the image I was perceiving. * Some dreams where I saw things from the future, e.g. I once dreamed about a scenery where I saw people with some kin of liquid space suite. They turned it on and I was impressed to see such superb sci-fi suits with such cool effects when activating them. Turns out, weeks later, I went to the cinema and saw the scenery in some superman movie. Critic: does brain gave me false memories about it? Did I unconsciously see some trailer and then had a dream about it?
Things I assume could have triggered my lucid dreams: * bad nutrition (fast food, almost just microwave food) * noisy room (under my room was a street) - it was like a bridge, below street, low traffic * snoring / maybe apnea in sleep? * very dark room (closed roller blinds) * to much sleeping * to less outdoor action/interaction * meditation (focusing on a point e.g corner of wall, not letting it go, not allowing yourself to blink or to look shortly away (surely its not good for your eyes!) - after a short period of time, if you keep your eyes on a point, vision blanks out and you become blind)
I suppose it's all a matter of practice or of becoming more lucid, though.
Yes, like a holodeck :)
Have they done any fMRI studies on this phenomena?
Two way communication is theoretically possible by measuring eye movements and signaling back with light flashes, but not sure its been done.
And yeah I have a feeling it affects sleep in some way, especially because being lucid for long periods of time tends to wake you up randomly at night
hit zoom button to undo the horrible default zoom
Risks are often greatly overestimated, and appealing to the corporate mindset disgusts me. I'm the type that loves risk and doesn't hesitate to call bullshit as long as it wont get me canned. Figuring out if you're in a dream is superficially similar to realizing someone is screwing with you lol.
Could be related to lucid dreaming but who knows.
Do you find that you have pretty much full control, or are you just along for the ride a lot of the time?
It flashes the lights at a predetermined time.
There are devices which detect REM, then flash, but the Remee is not one of them.
Do you use some device yourself? Which one do you recommend?
I turned off collisions once, and spent like twenty minutes just putting my hands through walls and giggling.
Clothes > Off
Libido > Increase by 200%
Plus I really wanted to point out that 99% of the straight males in the world would do sexual things in their dreams if they TRULY could control their dreams, if lucid dreaming wasn't just another vapid fantasy about being able to control one's brain.
I can do sexual things in real life. I can't fly or walk through walls in real life though.
Why do you think that lucid dreaming is not real?
Lucid dreaming is real, being able to control what happens there is not (lack of evidence shows so)
I enjoy music and programming, where does that fit into that narrative? I also dream about a lot more varied things than those you list. Including flying, when I have a lucid dream.
Controlling what you do during a dream makes it a lucid dream. Saying there is an issue with them because nobody talks about satisfying their sexual desires is an odd argument to make, and may show your biases more than anything.
HN is a specific kind of web site and all we care about is keeping it on track for its particular purpose. I'm sure those comments are entirely acceptable in many other contexts.
It goes rather less well than he expects. Great series, incidentally.
It's highly likely that participants were unblinded by side effects, a common problem in many placebo-controlled trials that is rarely addressed. If you're a lucid dreamer, and interested enough to participate in a clinical trial, you might be more apt to report the outcome of interest during active drug (= side effect) periods. Note that this need not be a conscious decision, just an unconscious bias.
Many RCT's include some language about asking participants to guess treatment assignment - but this result is rarely reported...
It seems as if anything that allowed many non-lucid dreamer to lucid dream consistently would have to be more than a placebo effect.
I was actually first taught how to do this by my Chinese martial arts teacher, he recommended I spend any time I had in lucid dreams shadowboxing and sparing with opponents and in situations (often against weapons) I fear the most. It has actually increased my ability to think objectively during stressful situations. Especially because when you get too excited in a dream it usually collapses (look up deepening techniques if this is a problem for you).
One way I have heard people use this technique outside of martial arts is practicing public speaking in the dream state to increase confidence and create a realistic practice environment. Of course the possibilities are wide, however I find it very difficult to do things I have not experienced in real life, for example I can jump really high like I would if I was on a trampoline but I can not fly around like superman.
This is the Guidebook that taught me the fundamental techniques: https://www.obe4u.com/files/the_phase/the_phase.html
Happy Dreaming all, it's the weekend give it a try!
I do solve programming problems in those dreams, at least I think so; I wake up with a clear path to attacking those problems I went to sleep with and I do have lucid dreams where I am discussing those issues with someone. Always someone who I 'feel' I know, but who looks very different than they do in real life. I definitely would find going to sleep a lot more boring without these dreams. Advantage I find as well (I am not sure if everyone has this, but the book I learned lucid dreaming from says it's one of the side effects) is that I remember all my dreams.
I have long been curious about the following; since I have been wearing wristbands like the Fitto, which measures sleep, I notice something which could be related (or Fitto etc sleep measurement is just bullshit; I had it with multiple brands though); compared to everyone I know, I spend far more time in REM and deep sleep; far more than my comparable age group. I spend, comparatively, very little time in light or awake state every night. Wonder how this is for other lucid dreamers.
Sometimes wish I could turn it off, though - it can be exhausting. I'd like sleep to be more restful by default but have a way to choose to have a lucid dream if desired.
I was going to ask you how you learned and practiced lucid dreaming. What book was that?
The all fail the tests that come later in the same book (I will try to find it); the book trains you to fall through your bedroom floor and check the table in your own house for something. Then to prove it is OBE, someone puts something there, like an ace of spades and the next day you tell what it was. Cool so ofcourse I tried this; I fell through my bed, through the floor (which was made of wood which it was not) and floated over the livingroom table, saw a big white paper with a square. Told my sister this: there was no square, there was an ace of spades. It was, ofcourse, a dream but I was far more amazed I could get my brain so far as to do what I set out to do: create a dream in which I do what I wanted before I went to sleep. That I can no longer do at will; that required a lot of training.
I had a friend of 16 years and more who is in love with a singer in a popular 90s band(obsessed) and it's no way reciprocated. She says he loves her in another dimension and she controls her dreams to speak to him. I use to have to listen to her talk about her fantasy conversations with him until i could no longer take talking about some delusion. She is no longer the fun person I use to know... just lost in a delusion and I and all her family/friends tried to make her snap out of it.. but no one is more important then the delusion :-(
Is there another reason why one would want to lucid dream other then to create another reality that doesn't exist?
I've occasionally experienced lucid dreams. You don't have to get lost in them...
It simply plays a song when you aren't pressing left mouse button. I go to sleep with a mouse taped to my hand and try to keep pressing he button. After around 5-15 minutes the song starts playing on my laptop speakers. For some reason, even if the music is plays, I lucid dream.
One night, right before bed, make the mental note that you need to remember your dream when you wake up. Maybe even write yourself a reminder on your phone or post-it note. When you wake up, seeing the note might help you remember what you dreamed off. Maybe the first time you still won't remember, but I'm sure after a few nights you probably finally will remember your dream.
If you do remember your dream, have a piece of paper close by and write it down immediately, otherwise you might forget about it after your shower.
The future is daunting.
"the future is already here. it just isn't evenly distributed"
I have been a lucid dreamer since a long time. It definitely is an amazing thing. I have never really got tempted to wear VR headsets or such devices. I can achieve this state just before I have fallen asleep completely. I get a stronger control over dreams usually in the morning when I have mentally woke up but have not opened my eyes yet.
1. I can fly, hover, experience 0 G. Helps me save the money which I might have spent in doing it in real life.
2. I can solve problems. Programming problems or other real world problems.
3. I meet people whom I may not get a chance to meet with in real life.
4. I can "continue" a dream after waking up and going back to bed.
The best thing about this ability is that you have complete control on your dream. You are aware that you are dreaming. You can direct the dream to go whereever and however you want.
Egyptians were supposedly obsessed with being lucid during dreams so they don't "lose" themselves in the afterlife. Seems quite logical, since you essentially lose track of yourself during a dream.
Add to this, a very strong insistence that everything is in a perpetual state of flux, that there is no perpetual "you" or "me" (or indeed anything). Trivial physical example - a molecule in your body is exhaled, and now inhaled by me... (cue "we are all one..."). A part of the earth turns into a banana plant, you eat the banana, and the banana turns into a human being. Now where are the boundaries of "you" and "the Earth"? See first paragraph reminding you about the very limited nature of your sense perceptions and memories.
The foregoing is stuff "we all know" but push into the background while we "get on with real life", but the yogic/Buddhist approach asks us to foreground it, and ask ourselves how we would conceive of and live life with those understandings in the foreground. Further, what if dynamics beyond those limited senses were at play? Psychology and ethics which takes the above as a starting point, rather than exisiting power relations, ends up looking different from what we have now.
The whole thing is like a snake swallowing its own tail. If what "they" are saying is correct, then this is "my" dream. The Buddha is a character I dreamed up to remind me how to wake up.
Why isn't this solipsism? First, because it's not my personal dream (the person being a character himself). Second, for a similar reason as MWI is not solipsism. This branch really is my own branch (in a particular sense). What I experience as other people are really "my versions" of them, but this does not mean there aren't other perspectives analogous to mine.
This idealist perspective can be made internally consistent. At that point, deciding between it and materialism may seem like a matter of preference. The difference is that the idealist perspective can be confirmed, in the same way that a nighttime dream can be: you discover, very precisely, how you constructed the whole thing, including all the tricks you used to blind yourself to the ruse.
What's the difference between that and lucid dreaming, and how can you distinguish?
Don't you feel like you have control and are making decisions in every dream that you have?
Is it really that interesting if you happen to dream that you're controlling a dream vs dreaming that you're controlling your flight around the world or whatever nonsense we dream about?
I've had some lucid dreaming experiences. For a normal dream, when you wake up you realize your actions during the dream were more or less just reactive/instinctual. During lucid dreaming, you can actually pause and contemplate the situation and your actions before making them.
When you're lucid dreaming, you can choose to wake up or stay asleep, although eventually (usually very quickly) one will start to happen automatically: either your brain will wake up or it will trick you back into dreaming.
I will say that when I'm having a genuine lucid dream, after I wake up, I know without a doubt it was a lucid dream. With regular dreams, I look back on them and don't exactly identify with my "dream self." That guy didn't realize how absurd the scenario was. He resembles me, but he wasn't me.
With a genuine lucid dream, I look back at the dreamer and can say, "yeah that was 100% me." Also, I find that becoming lucid always sort of pulls the dream into a more realistic scenario. It goes from chaotic and weird to just plain normal life (only, the rules have changed now).
So I guess what leads me to believe that I've had these "pseudo lucid dreams" is that I look back on them after waking and don't identify with the dreamer the same way I do with a genuine lucid dream. It feels more like I was watching someone else, like a recording, than as though it was a real firsthand experience
Maybe philosophically there is no difference. But it would certainly dispel a lot of the folk magic around lucid dreaming.
Check out Stephen LaBerge for more info. They found that while asleep, a person is basically paralyzed with exception to their eye movement. In a lab setting they were able to have the dreamer use a signal, using eye movement, that they were dreaming.
One thing they did was to test the theory that subjective dream time is different than time experience while awake. They did this by doing the eye signal, counting down 10 seconds, and then signalling again. They found that there was no "time dilution" when compared to wakefulness.
I used to be able to do it a lot when I was younger - it still happens to me every once in a while now. But you KNOW when it happens - it's not at all like "a really real dream", it's something completely different.
I woke up to the sun beaming through the window into my eyes. Maybe I was more lucid/aware than usual for that reason.
But I have no way of knowing whether the control/awareness I had in that dream was any different than the illusion of control/awareness and decision-making I have in any other dream.
It seems like quite a leap to assume I was in control just because I dreamed I was.
I'm afraid not.
Woke up to what I believe is reality. Am there still.
Or Hell.
Same same.
https://www.rxlist.com/consumer_galantamine_razadyne/drugs-c...
However...
https://www.amazon.com/Galantamine-Dreaming-Nootropic-Supple...
Hmmm.....
[1] - https://reference.medscape.com/drug/razadyne-galantamine-343...
[2] - https://www.drugs.com/dosage/galantamine.html
[3] - https://medlineplus.gov/druginfo/meds/a699058.html#side-effe...
Like anything else, it's only remarkable until you've understood and experienced it. I look forward to the time when this is considered a normal state of consciousness and is just something people do to enhance their life experience.
We in the west have a pretty weak relationship to the limits of consciousness. It's great to see this changing with studies like this popping up more frequently.
That said, I've only achieved mixed results with my lucid dreaming experiments as I found the training to hamper my energy the next day. I'm going to give galantamine a try and see if I can get some more consistent results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calea_ternifolia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entada_rheedii
Smoked it, the smoke is thick and a bit... sorta soapy. Apparently the tea is disgusting.
Next two nights I'd have a lot of dreams, but also sleep fitfully and not feel well rested. Definitely an interesting herb, but not a habit I'd want to make frequent because of the tiredness. That was a few years ago now.
This book from 2006 detailed Galantamine and other nootropic stacks that stimulate lucid dreaming long before noots were "cool":
http://a.co/f30L9Ub
makes me feel like I'm missing out on something...
If anyone has any advice that’s worked for them on stimulating (lucid) dreaming, I would love to hear it.
Keeping a dream journal will make the above less necessary.
I find my "bandwidth" limited during lucid dreams - I can't explore wide open spaces and if I look at details, I am prone to waking up. I never found the "just like being awake and being there" trope to be true. I spent a lot of time on detailed lucid dreaming - mainly, I wanted to test OBEs, so I would have an "OBE" and go to a place I have never been, but could check later, like a neighbor's house, or a store. It would always be absurd and "poorly rendered", nor would it match, when I checked it later irl (what a surprise).
I noticed I was dreaming and tried flying. It worked for a second, until “god” decided it wasn’t possible and I was pulled back to the ground by an invisible, irresistible force (EDIT: I think it’s called gravity?!). Trying to fight it just woke me up.
The poor rendering of places I’m not meant to go to is something I noticed when I gained control of a dream and tried going into a random building that was a “decoration”. The inside was completely empty, and the walls were gray. It seemed like a polite “fuck you” from my brain.
In a normal dream someone threw me a ball and it followed an “uncanny valley” trajectory. Almost right, but so wrong at the same time. Nice try, brain.
Lately I just try to enjoy my dreams. Paying attention to details can spoil a fun dream (I have to be careful to never check my wristwatch in dreams!)
This may be a Can't Unread sort of thing for some people, but... flying in my dreams is now a source of frustration for me since I noticed that no matter how "high" I fly, there is always something on the horizon higher than me. If I fly over this building, another one even taller will be behind it; if I fly over this tree, another one even taller will be behind it.
My theory is that dreams, unsurprisingly, come from your own personal experience and the neural nets you build, and my visual field in real life always has something above me; buildings, trees, etc. I essentially never stand on the top of the horizon, let alone personally fly for real in the cockpit. Consequently, it is essentially impossible for me to dream that I'm truly flying. (I've managed some exceptions a couple of times, but it's not reliable.) Real flying is frustrating because seeing it out the side through this tiny window is not enough visual stimulation to fix the problem; I really need the cockpit view, preferably during takeoff, and preferably more than once every few months.
However, as a compensating factor, I appear to have over the years watched enough Star (Gate/Trek/Wars) and played enough space flight sims that I can be "in space" with reasonable freedom. I have managed to jump from "the ground", which is as I described above where something is always above me no matter what, to "space", by closing my dream eyes and transitioning. It's a risky move, in the sense that it definitely pushes me closer to just plain waking.
Reflecting on your comment about there always being something on the horizon, I realized that I've always imagined being surrounded by a fairly sparse cloud layer while "in flight".
So my two pieces of advice are: (1) Build up your neural network's ability to support large scenes by observing large scenes, and (2) consider things that would be reasonable to find around you while in flight (clouds, planes, other flying people, birds, etc) and actively try to find "yet larger buildings" as unreasonable.
Staying in a lucid dreaming state, for me, seems to be more about knowing when the density of ambient "plausible reality" drops too low and steering (or snapping) yourself away from those areas.
The dream getting unstable feels like how being extremely tired in real life feels like. Your vision might get slightly blurry, your head will feel like it is moving back and forth, left and right, if that makes sense. And then you lose control. Unless you do something to stabilize the scenery. I find that spinning helps in these situations. Brings you right back.
I’ve found that my dreams are a space for me to integrate experiences.
Many people certainly seem to dream about issues of great significance to them. I have before, but it is by far an exception and not the rule. My dreams give me a window into how I conceptualize the world and how I break things down and store them, but it's actually quite unusual for me to have anything that can be traced back to specific emotional experiences.
I work with a variety of folks, including some of the top founders in the valley, and this type of subtle exploration is one of the most useful tools to unlock deeper levels of clarity, performance and wellbeing.
Detail isn't really an issue in my experience. On a few occasions I've experimented with paying very close attention to reflections and things like water droplets. i found them not just remarkably realistic, but hyperreal, with much more detail than I think actually exists in the real world.
I'm also not sure how to tell the difference between a dream where I dream I'm lucid and an actual lucid dream. There's a definite feeling of being aware that I don't get in regular dreams, but maybe that's just part of the dream!
I've naturally lucid-dreamed for decades now (which also means I have no useful advice on how to do it), and I consider this sort of statement to either mean A: they've got a wildly better visualization center than I do (and I know mine isn't tip-top but it's not terrible) or B: they don't really have a lot of experience at lucid dreaming and haven't noticed the limitations yet. It is far from a Virtual Reality simulation.
Keep a dream journal. This will improve dream recall and help you identify patterns in your dreams. Identifying patterns is good, for example, if I find myself in a classroom I know I'm dreaming. I never go into classrooms awake, but occasionally find myself in one while dreaming.
The best way to keep a dream journal is to spend 5-10 minutes while first awake in bed thinking about your dreams and writing them down. That is the time and location dream recall is the easiest.
Just pepper your angus bruh. The effects of this stuff lasts 4 to 6 months after only smoking it a few times.
Perhaps with Miracle fruit I could drink it but no way on its own.
Just smoke it two or three times. Then prepare for journeys to other worlds.
This is utterly awful advice if you don't want to acquire a nicotine addiction.
That being said I only lucid dreamed once but I went from no dreams (which is why I started) to remembering 5 a night. But I don't keep it anymore.
;)
Looks like it may impair your working memory if you have normal cognitive function.
Then I woke up and realized I was at work.
Then I fell asleep and dreamed I was in Inception.
Then I had a lucid dream that I was taking galantamine.
Then my self driving epistemology went into an infinite loop with my AI's sense of self awareness.