Living in a Lucid Dream(noemamag.com) |
Living in a Lucid Dream(noemamag.com) |
What I find interesting, however, is that if I have a dream I forgot to study for my test, or I'm naked at school because I left my clothes somewhere else, or the school play starts tonight and I haven't memorized a single line... the fact that I know I'm dreaming doesn't help at all.
Because the problem is that, while lucid dreaming, I have no access to any real-life knowledge or memories. I figure that I'm having the dream because I actually am in school in real life, with an exam I forgot about in the morning. I simply have no access to the fact that I left school many years ago. And if there's a monster behind the door in my dream, it seems entirely plausible in my dream that that's simply because there are monsters in the real world too.
And quite often my dreams are related to real-life situations that happened yesterday or are happening tomorrow or this week -- so it's not like I can try to convince myself of some "rule" that dream anxieties are never anything to worry about.
So my whole anxious lucid dream I'm just thinking, "boy I really hope that I'm not actually in a play that opens tomorrow night..." And then I wake up and it is suddenly crystal-clear that I haven't been in a high school play in decades.
But during my lucid dream, there's absolutely no way of knowing. Curious if this is universal or if other people who lucid dream do always know the details of their actual true reality -- their age, what city and home they live in, current job, etc.
This completely. I learned early on to not get excited, and to not immediately do the things I want to do, e.g. fly at breakneak speed into space, but gently learn to hover and then build speed and to undetail my surroundings so that a change in speed won't be too jarring that I wake up.
However, I've been in many shared spaces that have varying rules on how much things can be changed. Many of them are what I describe as "sim" spaces. There are also spaces where it is procedurally-generated -- for example, deliberately taking a path you know has not been used, and the whole space pauses, as things are procedurally generated to create that new area on the fly.
Finally, it's a two way street. Connection to a space has as much to do with how your consciousness is attuned to that space; trying to change the environment too much is as much as your consciousness shifting out of alignment with that space, and disconnecting as it is the space resisting changes.
As an example, I remember one interesting experience where I was talking to someone. Three people entered the space, with their own (subconcious) idea of things, which created changes in the environment to fit their consciousness state. It's similar to how Will Wight described things in his Traveler's Gate series, when someone from one realm goes into another, and that other realm starts morphing towards the first realm. I don't think those three knew what they were doing, and it was kinda rude.
This is referred to as different levels of lucidity. While lucidity is technically a binary state (know or don't know), it can sometimes be better described as a spectrum where you can "know" but not fully understand what it means.
Some levels you might think of are: Thinking it's 100% real. Having a "feeling" something is off. "Feeling" its a dream. Consciously expressing its a dream. Understanding its a dream. And then actually understanding the full consequences that its a dream.
Usually this comes down to a matter of thought clarity, not memories. If you understand its a dream, then it has no consequences period. Even if you think the worry is real, you still can't affect the physical world in a dream. Perhaps you could try practicing/studying in your dream, and writing stuff down when you awake, or just forcing yourself awake in order to study/practice more. However, outside of that, nothing you do affects the real world, so there's no logical reason to worry about it, even if you don't have the memories to understand "oh its entirely fabricated".
As for others, it obviously depends on the dream, as each have their own level of lucidity, but I can personally say I know basic facts that don't require any specific memory, like my dad being alive is impossible, because he passed. I probably couldn't take a quiz though. I can also remember specific goals, though again, more as a natural feeling than a specific memory.
If you want to try to get out of the dream's story, you have to be willing to accept that if something is impossible, no story can explain it; it has to just not be real.
So I believe there is different level of lucidity, depending on each individuals.
My problem was always maintaining the lucid state. Doing anything to change the dream risked awakening early and I never got great at maintaining the state for long.
I think this is because our brains will happily "predict the next token". We've never evolved to have to consider doing anything else. So when you're asleep and placed into a scenario with some context associated with yourself, the brain does the natural thing and performs prediction.
But in situations like yours, I am never sure where I am in my real life. I know that its a dream and I am sleep, but where and when are never certain.
In most other cases after I wake up, I think to myself I knew I was dreaming why didn't I try more stuff?! Waking up from lucid dreaming can be very smooth fade-out/fade-in and sometimes I can extend the lucid dream state after partially waking up by reimagining the world I was leaving then on finally waking up I just wish I could have stayed longer but is no surprise at all.
I have lucid dreams somewhat frequently since I was maybe 8 or 9 after I started getting prescribed medication to help me sleep (initially it had been almost nightly, but it reduced over the years to the point where it happens maybe a couple times a month now a couple decades later), and generally I do remember the details of my life in lucid dream, but I sometimes have trouble determining whether they're details of my life in the past or the present. If in my dream I'm back at school, it's usually not the case that I don't remember graduating, getting a job, and moving; often times I have a vague sense that all of that had happened, but then some issue was discovered with my records that forced me have to go back and retake a class or two. (This obviously is pretty implausible, but dream logic isn't always airtight!)
> What I find interesting, however, is that if I have a dream I forgot to study for my test, or I'm naked at school because I left my clothes somewhere else, or the school play starts tonight and I haven't memorized a single line... the fact that I know I'm dreaming doesn't help at all.
Having real world knowledge doesn't always mitigate the "issue" in the dream though; in my lucid dreams, I don't have any control over what happens beyond my own actions, so a teacher expecting me to hand in some assignment won't generally accept "it's a dream so I don't have to" as an excuse. There is a way that knowing that I'm dreaming helps though; I can just choose to wake up! I'm not sure whether being able to forcibly wake up is typical or not for people dreaming lucidly, but I've never had much trouble doing it. Sometimes I'll end up back in the same scenario if I fall back asleep again after though, so it might end up being worth it to suffer through the imaginary misfortune to get the real world benefit of sufficient sleep.
REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep has paralysis on every part of your body except one part: Your eyes. As such, anyone can indeed force themselves away by attempting to open their eyes. Note though that you can "open" your eyes and it still be a dream, so you have to be sure open your eyes in real life, which requires actually physically moving the muscles.
There is of course also other ways of doing it, but this is probably the most universal and has an associated logic to it.
For example, one way of maintaining and strengthening the lucid experience is supposedly spinning around in place with your arms spread. When I do that, I find a dream sensation that feels a bit like my arms trying to move out from under my pillow or caught in the sheets. I then wake up shortly after that.
Other times I'll know I'm lucid and can do some tricks, but still feel a bit limited, whether by the dream or my beliefs of what I think I can do in the dream. I cannot manifest scenery or people. Mostly I can get a small hop glide for flying, sometimes I can shoot a magic projectile. This may be due to limited control and practice.
> Mostly I can get a small hop glide for flying
I can do that very often in dreams, even when I don't realize I'm dreaming and the dream is about something completely different - somehow I often remember that it's a "superpower" I have. I have to run very fast and jump and then if I focus I can slow down the fall and eventually start to ascend. Feels very weird but also very "physical" - I have a lot of intertia and can't decide where I want to fly - just very slowly add some acceleration going up.
A lot of limits in lucid dreams are entirely self-imposed and often broken through or bypassed with conscious intention.
I participated in lucid dream research years ago, and definitely could recall exactly where I was sleeping and more details about my waking state, while executing the experiment task inside the lucid dream.
- Researchers wanted to see how the "time slows down under extreme events" worked
- They created a watch that blinked a message at a time too fast for humans to see under normal circumstances
- They then had people bungee jump and try to read the watch during the jump
Turns out that people could not perceive the message even though they reported the "time slows down" effect during the jump.
This has led researchers to believe that humans are not actually processing events more quickly and/or time is perceived to slow down but rather this is a coping mechanism for dealing with extreme events.
The end game for me was going behind the curtain - into the dream control room. It was a room filled with screens each showing a dream I had experienced, even abstract dreams from the age of 3 or 4. From here I could enter any of the dreams through the screen. In the room was a man, like Morgan Freeman (it was like in the film The Dark Knight where he tracks everyones phone), he was the only person I ever met while lucid dreaming who seemed like a real person.
After some visits to this dream control room, I overcame my addiction to lucid dreaming, I stopped being active in my dreams and watched them like someone would watch a film. I knew it was a dream but I chose not to participate.
At this time I was also experimenting with astral projection. I really wanted to have a shared out-of-body experience which could be validated. I got my flatmate to place things in certain areas around our flat to see if I could find them while meditating, but I couldn't.
Being deeply involved in spirituality really distances you from most people in our society. I gave up meditating to better connect with the kind of people I am surrounded by.
There are a few tricks I use... but I don't recommend the experience (It can be... uncomfortable {there is a reason you don't remember the point you loose consciousness}).
I don't know if these are universally applicable tricks either. But focusing on a point (visualizing it as actively as you can) seems to be important to staying awake through the process of falling asleep...
I’ve only noticed one other side effect. I normally experience hypnogogic jerk and since starting magnesium, a few times the jerk itself has pulled me out of the descent into sleep.
But having actually followed the process, I can now understand how it can help with lucidity.
Usually Wake-Initiated Lucid Dream involves remaining completely static, to make your body believe it's sleeping. Never worked for me.
When your body locks up, test it. try to use as much force as you can without 'breaking' that lock... it keeps you in the present moment and 'close to being able to move'...
The standard: focus on your breathing is also applicable.
What has helped the most is imagining a dot, and moving that dot around, changing its color, moving it along the z-direction (closer). Focusing your mind on that keeps it active.
The thing about flying very far is that you're probably in the same fixed Superman position, not really moving your dream body anymore. If you don't move, your consciousness shifts awareness towards your physical body and you wake up. Try it next time: just stop & don't move, don't do anything, you're likely to wake up.
So doing the opposite, moving your dream body a lot & touching dream stuffs, tends to prolong your dream. That's why teleportation works better for moving to different areas.
Funny enough, not moving your body is also how your consciousness shifts and enters the dream state when awake.
That's hilarious. I always come back down slowly unless I make an effort to fly up again.
Only once I was both aware and in control, but it didn't last long.
Can attest that lucid dreams are as detailed and real as real life. Can't tell the difference. In one of my first attempts, I had a 30 minutes long lucid dream (I was able to precisely measure.). You know the feeling of wonder and awe? You feel it for at most a few minutes at a time usually. I was in constant amazement all through the whole half an hour. Because against my expectations, everything was as real as the real world. The texture of the ground beneath your feet, the feeling of air when you move fast, the taste when you eat. The weight and texture of stuff when you touch, the feeling of your own weight on your feet when you stand. The sun shining, reflections, brightness. Human eye level perfect quality and detail when you look. This feeling of awe didn't went away for me, I still get it when I LD.
There was a thread about it recently, I wrote there some more: About learning resources too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399548
https://www.thelucidguide.com/the-butterfly-dream-chuang-tzu...
False awakenings are another aspect of dreams:
I really hope someone called Jeremy Allen White reads this.
For me, daily life is an unending series of setbacks, negative reinforcement loops and disappointments. I know going into nearly all endeavors that they will end in some kind of failure, but decide to be brave and enter them anyway. I understand that this is the opposite of manifestation, and that I am creating self-fulfilling prophecies. But feel that a neural net would create a model of reality that matches my lived experience of suffering, so there's a basis in fact here. That this is truly all there is unless something changes.
A small example: I decided to go on the Bacon app to see what walk-on gigs are available in my city to raise some quick cash. There are 2: garbage man and warehouse worker.
Now, I knew going in that the odds were grim, and that the gigs would be things that nobody wants to do. Had I gone in with a positive mindset, and imagined fun afternoons helping people set up for events or something, is that what I would have received? I just don't know. I've experienced both, but an overwhelming percentage of the time, the negative outcome matches the prediction of my negative mindset.
Another small example: the other day I helped an acquaintance with handyman work for $100 for an afternoon, but got a traffic ticket on the way home that skimmed away 2/3 of what I had earned.
It was an uncanny reflection of my experience of hustling, similar to movies like The Pursuit of Happyness. Two steps forward and one step back. Another day older and deeper in debt. No win until the end - but the epiphany never comes.
Where i'm going with this is that what we think of as "the real world" is the dream. Or in my case, the nightmare, or at the very least the night terror.
Whereas in our dreams, we can be anything and do anything. Not only that, our subconscious provides rich plot lines far more creative than what our ego comes up with as it co-creates this 3D realm. I often wonder if the point of daily suffering is actually to dream in the spirit world where source consciousness originated.
Except in my case, my dreams are mostly night terrors as well, spilled over from the suffering of my lived experience. I know why, it has to do with sleep apnea, and living a sober life after decades of self-medicating, and finally doing shadow work in middle age. But I just wish that the sun would rise on this long night of the soul, because my basic beliefs in hope for a better tomorrow are growing more tattered with every news cycle and seeing the very worst in humanity expressed in the most powerful and influential people, who are unwittingly bringing about hell on Earth.
When the pain was at its worst, I basically wasn't getting any sleep at all and after a few days, I was practically delirious. I had a few times where in the middle of the day, while awake, I would start dreaming. Not like a daydream, but not exactly falling asleep either. Hard to explain but it's like the boundary between "this is what I'm perceiving about the real world" and "this is what I'm imagining" got very thin and permeable. My mind would wander off into dreamspace and I'd think it was real until I would realize "No, that's some crazy dream shit."
I also ended up with several days of nerve pain. I would be fine sometimes for hours and then completely out of the blue I'd get an intense (like 9/10 on a pain scale) stabbing pain in my ankle. Like someone snuck up and nailed me with an electric cattle prod.
When this happened while I was asleep, I would be jolted awake. But, also, my dreaming brain would try to incorporate the pain into the dream somehow. And since those two things were happening simultaneously, I would be yanked awake with a head still full of some crazy dream involving nerve pain that I was actually feeling. Sometimes, it would take a good ten minutes of sitting there to sort out what the hell was going on versus what was just dream nonsense.
Overall, would not recommend.
Probably depends on people, but dreams can mess your entire next day up, it does not happen often to me but I have bad dreams like I lost my child in a crowed, or something bad happened and someone I loved died. This emotional pain in the dream I think causes something in the body to trigger sicne the next day I am still feeling like shit.
Then you might have good dreams, where all is perfect and happey and you have the thing you desired but then you wake up and you realized that it is not real and things are not good.
And for soem god dam reason like many others there is the dream with the exams.
like rubbing your hands or turning around
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-...
With some way to measure the players enjoyment/desire maybe in 50 years we’ll see ‘lucid gaming’
I certainly wouldn’t expect basic stuff like perceiving blinking messages to change, since nothing is really changing optically (at least controlled for other things like pupil dilation).
That’s just as silly as expecting someone to be able lift heavier weights when they’re perceiving time more slowly, since their muscles would exert the same energy in a shorter period of time (again, controlled for things like adrenaline).
Pro baseball players report that they can see 90+ MPH fastballs clearly, down to details like the stitches on the ball. Zen martial artists also have claims of being able to react as if time has slowed down.
> It's not testing the perception of time
It's literally testing the perception of time?
I remember clearly having several thoughts in what could not have been more than 1 second between getting hit and my entire car smashing into another at 60 mph.
"Oh, that's my kleenex box, dang that's just hanging there huh?"
"What's that noise? Oh, its me screaming."
"I better hold my self against the steering wheel for the airbag... wait, if I am thinking this that means there's no airbag"
However, many other times in my life in extreme situations nothing like that happened, so I don't know if just jumping off a cliff is enough trauma or fear of death to cause it reliably.
I would wake up in bed, get up and at a specific point, an overwhelming feeling of impending doom would overcome me. Then at the peak of this emotion, a monster would grab me by my ankles and violently drag me back up the stairs and into bed. I would then wake up and repeat the process.
Sometimes, I was not sure anymore if I landed in reality or if this existence will turn into horror again.
They must have extremely valuable info? Then i checked it through a cache, almost no content, affiliate links, a shop and huge popup.
Is that site a complete joke or is this some new anti AI thing?
First consciously cultivate interest in your own dreams (through dream journaling, and consciously looking forward to your dreams before sleep). That's the basis.
Then, if it doesn't happen spontaneously, to force a breakthrough you can always set multiple alarms (tip: a smart watch with a vibratory alarm, or... make a baby), to wake yourself and keep yourself on the edge of sleep - into that hypnopompic state (between 2-4 AM works best for most people). It takes a lot of effort, concentration & patience. The only thing about this way of entering a lucid dream, is that you're likely to consciously experience sleep paralysis first, and many people don't like that even though it's harmless and a perfect gateway into lucid dreams.
I had quite a few lucid dreams using this technique, but it has a drawback that you end up having "false awakenings" where you think you just woke up but are actually still dreaming. I've had 7 or 8 of those in a row before. If you have a good reality test (my go-to was holding my nose closed and seeing if breathing lightly would still work) then they are kind of nice because now you have just become lucid again and go do whatever you want.
The whole thing got to be too mentally exhausting for me and I was not feeling refreshed when I woke up so I stopped doing it. I occasionally try to start it up again, but I haven't had the gumption to continue it for very long.
As you can see, there is a huge rabbit hole you can fall down if you look into this stuff, and a lot of places on the internet where people discuss it or give pointers.
Also different people have better luck with different techniques. This one just happened to be my thing, I guess.
I love the parent comment's description about the system detecting a "glitch in the matrix".
Though I feel it is just if you rouse your consciousness enough you will just break the sleep state.
I do wonder if lucid dreaming affects how rested you are from sleep.
My intuition is that the mind resting comes during deeper sleep and during REM the mind is kind of freewheeling anyway.
Has it been tested? Like by putting marks on randomly thrown balls and asking the player to identify the balls?
Or did you? Wake up Janicc, it's still 1999, we miss you.
Btw. funny (and fascinating) how "dream-rendering" has similar issues with producing realistic hands as LLMs. Similar with continuity issues.
I just figured they were old as hell, and I ended up having to hold myself off the steering wheel with my arms.
Ended up bending it significantly, which I can only put up to the time(not much!) that was actually spent transferring energy from me to the wheel.
Ok ok, so the experiment actually just tested whether an individual frame of a high frame rate display could be read while while falling. Since it could not, we do not have objective evidence for the subjective "time slowing down" experience. We just know that there was no difference from the control, i.e. subjects were unable to read display at high frame rate under normal conditions.
That's all you know. Sure, maybe stressful conditions make it harder to read, but then again the watch is stationary with respect to the eye while falling.
Not all experiments testing the perception of time require the person undergoing the experiment to read the time themselves, though.
> Sure, maybe stressful conditions make it harder to read, but then again the watch is stationary with respect to the eye while falling.
My point wasn't that the stress could cause it to be harder to read, but that the physical act of falling could cause it. The experiment intended to test if a psychological phenomenon (the slowed perception of time) could be caused by a certain psychological cause (stress), but they tested it in a way where both the cause _and_ the effect could be unrelated to their testing; we don't even know if falling makes it physically harder to read independent of stress, so I don't know how you can conclude anything psychologically about what might be going on. The watch being stationary relative to the eye also doesn't rule out vision impairment regardless of what's being looked at; the strain on the eyes from the air rushing by could be enough to make it hard to see clearly.
Not asking to trap you into the induction problem (believing that something that happened in the past will happen in the future). I'm just curious.
Before this experiment, no one knew if a high-stress environment would speed up visual perception. Now we have some evidence that it does not.
If they were real this would imply solid proof of ESP - which I think would be all over the news, or at least mentioned in the Noema magazine article by Claire Evans. Is there a subculture of dream parapsychologists publishing this in underground channels I am not aware of? Are these hypothetical dream parapsychologists using scientific rigor and peer review I wonder? Or do people 'just know'?
You mention "procedurally generated" and the dream "sim" space pausing because of computation, I am working in IT and can't square that with with a dream space taking place in the mind. The mind doesn't operate like a computer or has procedures that take so much time that the dream space is paused. My dreams do not pause. How do you know the pause itself is not your imagination of an imagined procedurally generated dream scene? The idea of perceived reality as computational simulation was popularized by the The Matrix, that this is a popular metaphor doesn't mean shared lucid dreaming are computed somehow.
Because of these questions I wondered if this comment is LLM generated or a kind of fantasy or metaphor. After reading your profile this doesn't seem to be the case, you are serious and generally knowledgable about matters of consciousness. I am puzzled.
Put it this way, permaculture is weird for all but a minority of folks here, even if it stays within the bounds of known science. This stuff with consciousness is the kind of hill people die on.
I don’t know if you really want to jump into this rabbit hole. There are many entrances, and given the reception, I am reluctant to speak further. But if you are really curious, Hank Wesselman’s work can be a good starting point. One of his books specifically talks about “reenchantment”, in reference to the disenchantment of the scientific inquiries of the 19th century that lead us to our modern worldview.
If you get a positive result with your wacky experiment, then you go back and control for confounding variables. If you get a negative result, you can't really conclude anything other than you need more grant money to do some other click bait.
This is just how the business of science works. It's sort of like the economy. You try a bunch of random things as quickly as possible and follow up on what looks promising. Or, like in this case, you just try to do click bait and you skip even really bothering with delivering value at all. It's stupid and I don't like it either.