Induce Lucid Dreaming

by charlieirish • 2 years ago

43 68 2 years ago

jruohonen• 2 years ago

Even if it is pseudo-science (I seriously cannot make the demarcation), it sounds cool! But as it stands, we now must also return seriously to the concepts of neuro-security and neuro-privacy (for lack of better terms).

Ref.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38238813

cranberryturkey2• 2 years ago

is this thing going to shock my brain or what? how does it work, the site doesn't really say. My main concern is whether or not its harmless.

SXX3• 2 years ago

There are already devices that detect REM and provide you with hints that you're in a dream while you asleep. This still require training and practice to use, but make it easier to get into lucid state.

Hints as simple as short bright light blinking in front of your eyes or specific sounds playing.

But as other comment say there is a good chance this particular device is just pseudo scientific BS.

noduerme10• 2 years ago

From what I read about machine-learning-powered devices like this that were in development, in the past year, it basically is reading your brainwaves and sending mild electrical interference patterns that adapt to interfere with them on an ongoing basis without waking you up, based on its training toward (1) not waking you up and (2) patterns that are known to trigger lucid dreams. As opposed to simply shining a light on your eyelid when you enter REM and training yourself to recognize that in your sleep.

Supposedly it works pretty well.

That said, will it fuck with your brain to have its wave patterns interfered with whenever you go to sleep? I could definitely see legions of people getting addicted and going stark raving mad just from not being able to tell if they were dreaming or awake; let alone long-term ramifications of denying the process of natural sleep. It's still a kind of mystery why every animal on this planet sleeps and dreams, and there's an inherent hubris (not exactly absent from the copy of this website) in trying to improve upon such an essential organic process.

cranberryturkey2• 2 years ago

that's why i returned my quest 2...i was scared i'd become addicted.

pr07ecH70r• 2 years ago

From my MedTec experience, this thing should be classified and regulated. Otherwise it is just another mumbo jumbo. The Lens org doesn't have any patent applicant by that name. So I would guess it is not what it seems to be.

sieste• 2 years ago

It looks like they are still in the "we're not sure if this even works" phase of product development.

xyst• 2 years ago

Basically, the Theranos stage of product development.

qsort• 2 years ago

Judging from the fashionable nonsense in the homepage, this looks more like it's the Juicero stage of product development.

noduerme10• 2 years ago

I'm not sure even she promised to come down from a mountain with the fire of the gods

3abiton• 2 years ago

I am curious if anyone knowd "manual" techniques to induce and maintain lucid dreaming?

rglullis2• 2 years ago

A higher than usual dose of melatonin does it for me.

nefrix• 2 years ago

How do you increase your melatonin?

throwaway2902• 2 years ago

What is your usual dose? Asking for a friend...

seletskiy3• 2 years ago

Yeah. Read "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" book by Stephen LaBerge. It proposes a number of techniques, some of them works better than other for different people. If you are not predisposed to lucid dreaming (some people are), then the main obstacle is will or motivation to keep practicing.

One that worked for me is having a mechanical counter of some sort (like lap couter or just miniature code lock so you can use it as a counter), which you reset every morning and increment during the day every time after you ask yourself "Am I dreaming?" and doing some basic "reality check" (e.g. trying to breathe in through your nose when you pinch it, or checking clocks twice in a succession and validating that it makes sense, or just looking at your hands). The goal is to consistently do a number of reality checks during your waking life, which inevitably will increase the chance that you will do it in your dream. That will likely would cause you to wake up immediately for couple of times, but then you'll get used to it. It works simply because "if you don't ask yourself that you are dreaming during your waking life, what is the chance that you'll ask yourself it during sleep?".

There are number of other and more advanced techniques that borderline with "magic" to me, like falling asleep without loosing conciousness (and then waking up the same way), but I had this experience only a couple of times I guess.

borbulon• 2 years ago

It’s not the getting to lucid dreaming that’s the problem, it’s the “oh! I’m dreaming!” part. Wakes me up every time.

That and I have dreams about flying, but as soon as I realize I’m having dreams about flying, I wake up and the flying dreams stop.

SXX3• 2 years ago

Just usual trick of practicing looking at hands often during the day to make it a habbit works well enough for inducing them.

rajamaka• 2 years ago

Why hands specifically?

wholinator2• 2 years ago

The only thing that ever reliably worked for me was laying down to sleep and staying entirely still but "typing" my name with my fingers in incredibly subtle motions over and over again. Something about it let's your body fall asleep but keeps your mind just barely awake. Also doing this after waking up in the middle of the night is highly effective.

The only thing was that instead of realizing i was in a dream while inside it, o was fully aware while undergoing the transition from awake to sleep which was... somewhat disturbing. Usually you forget the exact moment you fall asleep by the time you wake up, but i distinctly remember a dark cloud descending over my mind, flowing past me. Then a skeleton hand reached out from the cloud and i _felt_ it grab my shoulder. It tried to whisper something to me, maybe it did and i can't remember what it said. It was giving "you shouldn't be here" vibes though. Then as quickly as the state came, it left and i was fully awake and aware, standing on a street in my neighborhood. I tested the fidelity of the dream world by scrutinizing the tiniest details of the visuals, sounds, smells, physical sensations of the world and the acuity of simulation appeared perfect to me. I can't be sure that sensation wasn't part of the dream but i literally bent down and took a flower apart, piece by piece, it had water in the stem, smells grassy when i crushed it, and the closer i looked the more detail everything had. It honestly shifted my perception of reality a lot

Scubabear68• 2 years ago

Interesting. I have had success going into a lucid dreaming state by locking my hands together with the fingers interleaved with each other, with both hands resting on my chest.

Perhaps something about hands is a unique sensory input?

macrolime• 2 years ago

Variations of this technique is what has worked for me also. The trick is to focus your attention on something as you fall asleep, it doesn't have to be imaginary typing. Keeping attention focused as you fall asleep after you go to bed is hard, but doing it after you awake at night is quite easy if you don't wake up too much. The best way I have found to wake up just the right amount is to use a wristwatch with a vibrating alarm and set that to go off maybe two hours before I'd normally wake up. When it goes off, turn it off with as little movement as possible. It seems important to keep almost perfectly still. Using this I have been able to observe the transition to a dream quite gradually by watching hypnagogic patterns (the noise you see in the dark) turn from colored blobs and noise slowly into objects before transition gradually into an immersive scene. I find it quite hard to stay in the dream though, and usually wake up after a couple minutes.

rsaarelm• 2 years ago

Meditation before bed and going to bed early after taking some melatonin tends to give me more vivid dreams. The wake-back-to-bed technique often works to give me short lucid dreams. I think the trick is that when you wake yourself up in the early morning, you become awake and alert after the early-night deep sleep phase that would otherwise leave you groggy and completely out of it. Then when you go back to sleep you go to lighter REM sleep because your sleep cycle is still running, but are more likely to be alert and recognize it's a dream.

dcastm• 2 years ago

I learned how to lucid dream regularly and taught a few others.

These are the things that work the best:

1. Record or note down your dreams right after you wake up.

2. Put an alarm clock every hour or so and do a reality check: cover your nose and try to breathe (in dreams it works), turn off and on a light (in dreams they don’t work very well), see yourself in a mirror (in dreams mirrors tend to act funny).

3. Repeat a mantra while trying to get asleep. Something like “I’m going to have a lucid dream tonight.”

4. Wake up ~5 hours after you’ve gone to sleep. Recall your dream and then try to go back to sleep repeating the mantra or imagining you’re having a lucid dream (MILD technique).

tauntz• 2 years ago

My last lucid dream was ~20 years ago but what worked for me back then was just saying to myself (over and over again) before falling asleep that "My name is $NAME, whenever something weird happens now, think carefully about what was the last thing you remember".

Then while I was dreaming that I'm jumping off buildings etc, I started to realize that wait, this is weird.. what's my name? What's the last thing I rember before.. oh, right, I was falling asleep..therefore, this has to be a dream. Yay!

Idisneb2• 2 years ago

I recently started having lucid dreams every day again (two or three a week). But wearing a halo seems ridiculous, it just seems to be placebo

867-5309• 2 years ago

title should be prepended with "buy a headband that may help"

feverzsj• 2 years ago

Frequent lucid dream usually implies poor sleep quality, because it interferes with deep sleep.

broscillator• 2 years ago

Elaborate? Link some research?

volemo• 2 years ago

Could you elaborate or point me somewhere I can read more about that?

I'd think lucid dreaming is an altered state of REM sleep. How does it affect deep sleep stage?

bitshiftfaced• 2 years ago

To my knowledge it's physiologically not an altered state of REM as it is just regular REM sleep. Hypothetically, you can have a lucid dream just as you would a regular dream, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's no real difference from your body's point of view. Maybe parts of your brain is more active, since you have conscious awareness.

I can't speak for the parent poster, but maybe they meant that you tend to have more lucid dreams (and also remember your dreams altogether) whenever your sleep is broken up more during the night. In other words, lucid dreams don't necessarily interrupt sleep, but interrupted sleep tends to make them more likely (at least in my experience).

throwaway2902• 2 years ago

Dreaming of a Theory of Consciousness
Everything that exists was once either a dream of man or a dream of God.

What a dumpster fire of hype!

On a serious note though did anyone try using sleep tracking smart watch for lucid dreaming? Allegedly it knows when you REM or deep sleep, seems like hooking up into that and sending some specific vibration pattern should do the trick?

bedane• 2 years ago

I'll stick to nonfrequent mushroom use, thanks. My sleep and dreams are fine.

noduerme10• 2 years ago

Apropos of nothing, non-lucid (i.e. regular) dreaming has become a great aid to my songwriting and story-writing over the past few years. I have really long and vivid dreams where I'm other people in other parts of the world - sometimes other worlds altogether. I've been gay, straight, woman, man. I've been an otter and a pelican. I've spent weeks holding off an army of zombies. I've fought in post-nuclear wars. Each dream can last days or weeks of dream-time. The high level of detail of the situations - and their total lack of relation to my quotidian life - makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe. But wherever they come from, I find they tell me things about my own life and help me answer questions, sometimes really practical questions about code, other times emotional questions about what I want to do. And they're a great source of novel creative material.

I've never tried to lucid dream, but I'm afraid that if I could control them my dreams would lose the thing that makes them so valuable to me, which is that from their strangeness and randomness, I get to interpret what my other selves are trying to tell me. If my conscious mind controlled them, I think I would lose insight into that; I even wonder whether losing those voices and other lives in my sleep would be a step toward going insane in waking life.

NukedOne3• 2 years ago

What do you think makes you have these vivid dreams?

meindnoch2• 2 years ago

Typically medications. E.g. SSRIs, antiretroviral drugs, and a lot of others.

noduerme10• 2 years ago

My gut answer is that they're real, and that when we're sleeping or when we die our consciousness slips seamlessly into parallel universes. But it may just be that my brain has really long-form ways of trying to solve puzzles by turning them into audio-visual experiences.

[edit] I'm not on any meds, never taken antidepressants, and I've never done psychedelics. I do smoke pot occasionally, but oddly it tamps down the intensity of the dreams; the most vivid or memorable ones occur when I'm completely sober.

p1mrx3• 2 years ago

makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe

I think dreams illustrate the human brain's remarkable ability to 3D render detailed fictional events, which explains a lot of the crazy stuff people have believed throughout history.

noduerme10• 2 years ago

Definitely. I also love the notion that dreaming is a kind of multimedia LLM that feeds your physical output back into your input channels and causes you to autocomplete yourself; although it's less romantic, it seems more likely than a many-worlds hypothesis.

thelastparadise2• 2 years ago

Srinivasa Ramanujan was known to use dreams for deep mathematical insights.

Zetobal• 2 years ago

If I really need to induce lucid dreaming I just use the proofen method of taking a nap ingest a high dose of caffeine and going back to sleep again. Depending on your fav way of consuming caffeine it runs from 1-3 dollars.

Ferret7446• 2 years ago

I don't think I've ever had lucid dreams, but I do fly in my dreams a lot, and the "skill" of flying specifically gets carried over kind of like continuation dreams, except the dreams themselves are different (e.g., sometimes the dream world has magic and sometimes not).

My dream flying is odd; my ability to control my altitude fluctuates depending on whether I'm "concentrating" too little or too much. I suspect I'm balancing some kind of "partial lucidity" where I know I'm dreaming/I can fly but I can't think too hard about it. Another analogy would be like thinking about the game, or thinking too hard about a skill that has already become second nature.

Dream mental states are intriguing because you can be "in between". I don't think I'm the only person who has had "in between" dream states when you're trying to sleep in a stressful/uncomfortable situation and you drift in and out of consciousness (or maybe I am?).

thelastparadise2• 2 years ago

or maybe I am?

I've never heard of this.

Euphorbium• 2 years ago

If you go to sleep like 90-120 min later than usual, then wake up as usual and go to sleep again about 60-90 min later, entering lucid sleep is very easy. You can even leave music going on, or some video playing. No need for any devices.

Idisneb2• 2 years ago

It's true, the technique of being aware of the physical state while we literally fall asleep also helps me. I know it sounds strange, but this is what the transition from being awake to being asleep feels like, it's like losing gravity and falling into a dark stage as if it were a loading stage, then a few seconds later you sink into a dream. any.

lazyweb• 2 years ago

Straight out of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21942866/

Which is a fun watch btw

indigo00862• 2 years ago

My dad had similar bs for lucid dreaming from the 80s.

jkmcf• 2 years ago

I'm not sure lucid dreaming is all it's cracked up to be. I've experienced it every night for most of my life. It's all quite entertaining -- I have some really awesome dreams -- but the dreams are also very visceral and a negative[1] dream can leave me emotional throughout the day.

Unsure if related, but I rarely wake feeling refreshed. Need to get a referral for sleep study...

[1] Sadly, none of the dreams are positive.

indigo00862• 2 years ago

The psychobabel on the front page makes me wary of touching it.

Induce Lucid Dreaming

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