Lucid dreaming: Rise of a nocturnal hobby

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18277074

by gps408 • 14 years ago

112 95 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

lucian19002• 14 years ago

I occasionally have lucid dreams without trying to do so. They're almost always a lot of fun, basically the best sandbox game you can think of.

I've been pondering trying to trigger them, but I've been a bit spooked by suggestions that I'd have to try to learn tp distinguish dreams from reality.

josephkern• 14 years ago

That's a lie. It's not Inception.

wgx• 14 years ago

I think parent is referring to: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Induction_Techn...

FreeFull3• 14 years ago

I can distinguish any dream from reality, but the problem is that when I'm asleep I don't ask myself "Am I asleep?", I just continue following the dream's story. If I ever ask myself that question, or notice something isn't right (which is difficult in dreams, because what would be bizarre in reality will easily be considered normal by your brain in the dream) I will become lucid.

The article talks about flying. I often will fly in my dreams even if I am not lucid. When I am lucid, I am always able to fly.

One interesting thing you can do when you find yourself lucid dreaming is conducting experiments. You just have to remember what experiments you decided to conduct when you were awake or think of some on the spot. I found if you close your eyes and imagine something, it will be part of the world when you open them.

I found it is easier to become lucid when you are waking up, although by the time you are lucid you won't have much time left to do anything in the dream.

Cushman2• 14 years ago

One thing to try (if it's worth it to you) is to get in the habit of checking if you're dreaming, even in waking life. Try to read printed text, or use an electronic device, and really pay attention to whether it works the way you expect. It feels pretty silly to do this when you're awake, until you do it really thinking you're awake and realize you're actually dreaming.

You do need to be quite studious, though-- I've had dreams where I managed to convince myself that that shifting, swirling mass of words and characters probably says something in Russian.

One of my favorites is something I call the "five finger rule." This is a mnemonic for remembering how many fingers you have. Here's how it works: Hold out your hand. Now count your fingers, one at a time. One, two, three, four, five. Five fingers.

Any time you don't get five, you're probably asleep. Obviously this assumes you have five fingers per hand in waking life :)

lucian19002• 14 years ago

So when you're awake you never mistake it for a dream? If I could no longer do that reliably, I would be a bit spooked.

From what you're saying that's not the case, so I should go ahead and try.

I like lucid dreams as I'm waking up, I get to "fix" the ending of whatever dream I'd had until then.

rudilee• 14 years ago

There is subreddit for it: http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming

gaelian• 14 years ago

I wrote a blog post about my own lucid dreaming experiences a little while back[1].

People may also be interested in r/luciddreaming over on Reddit[2].

1. http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/2011/02/26/lucid-dreaming

2. http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming

tseabrooks2• 14 years ago

I had lucid dreams fairly regularly during my teen years (I suspect due to some strangeness caused by sleep apnea). These days it's treated and I don't have these anymore. Though, for anyone interested I think it's totally worth trying to trigger it. It's an interesting experience.

wiradikusuma• 14 years ago

after having such dream, did you stay awake less/more refreshed? any difference in your (real) life?

tseabrooks2• 14 years ago

Lucid dreams for me were a side effect of other things. They didn't effect the quality of my sleep, which was already very poor.

My sleep apnea was such that my brain "woke up" about 45 times an hour. This kept me from ever experiencing full REM cycles. One of the more jarring side effects is that, unlike other folks, I when I went to sleep I dropped from wakefullness directly into REM sleep without anything in the middle. This meant I would start dreaming immediately. I was able to remember extremely vivid dreams when someone would wake up up about 5 minutes after I'd fallen asleep (sometimes less). This slowly allowed me to realize I was dreaming after I'd fallen into this "fast REM" sleep.

Thankfully, the sleep apnea is treated now and I no longer suffer the somewhat debilitating side effects of not getting REM sleep. For me those side effects were constant drowsiness, inability to focus, falling asleep while driving (smashed into someone at 75mph at 3 in the afternoon because of sleep apnea thankfully my car was lower than theirs and I just slid under them and smashed up my hood), irritability, etc.

This is way off topic but anyone who thinks they might have sleep apnea should totally get checked out. There has been a huge quality of life change for me since getting this treated.

mrspeaker4• 14 years ago

I had lucid dreams as a teenager too, and completely forgot about it. Then about a year ago it happened again - and I remembered how cool it was.

I find I can nearly always do it if I wake up in the middle of the night then just think about it as I fall back asleep. I guess my subconscious then keeps a look out for weird stuff... "That elephant wasn't there when I looked a minute ago. Wait, elephant?! I'm dreaming!" Then it's flying time.

FreeFull3• 14 years ago

This is called a wake-initiated lucid dream. It is also possible to become lucid in the middle of a dream.

tagawa• 14 years ago

The first I heard of lucid dreaming was this introduction to it in Steve Pavlina's podcast. Highly recommended for anyone with a passing interest:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-pod...

kaeluka• 14 years ago

absolutely worth trying; had two lucid dreams I can remember, one of which was flying over the Swiss alps. It was as real as real life gets, it's quite weird and amazing. Unfortunately didn't succeed yet. r/luciddreaming is good to follow, as some already said.

mrspeaker4• 14 years ago

I'm convinced I could operate some kind of (very sensitive) input device while lucid dreaming. I can touch type well so I'm thinking of making "keyboard gloves" or something to communicate from the other side. Though I should have a look - I can probably already order them on Kickstarter.

FreeFull3• 14 years ago

Eyes would probably be the best way to communicate with the outside world, since during dreams you retain full control over their movement.

Monkeyget• 14 years ago

http://xkcd.com/269/

mrspeaker4• 14 years ago

Internet rule: there is xkcd of it. But actually, I found mention of communicating via eye movement here: http://daniel.erlacher.de/index.php/Time_required_for_motor_...

But that's a bit too low bandwidth for me ;)

jerf• 14 years ago

There's a guy setting up to experiment with morse code via eyeblinks: http://lsdbase.org/ I don't think he's quite got the hardware all done yet.

It's probably the best plan. It has been scientifically demonstrated that eye movements are under something like conscious control (for the relevant value of "conscious") during dreaming, as shown by the famous recording of someone's eye movements going back and forth very clearly, while the subject reporting watching a tennis match. There's nothing else you can count on being able to move; I'm not sure what typing you expect to occur in the real world no matter how strenuously you type in your dream.

Void_• 14 years ago

I wouldn't spend time trying to "cause" a lucid dream, I have enough goals to chase that affect my awake life.

But I have these dreams sometimes, it's always just fun. My two favorite things are to fly, and to make portals.

Yeah, portals like in computer games. You only decide that you wanna go somewhere else, and you let the passive part of your brain select that place.

I got this whole idea by reading an article about how to detect you're in a dream. It suggested you find a mirror and try to step through it, and that somehow turned into my portals.

That's the best thing about lucid dreaming, you can do whatever you want.

Now I don't have these dreams to often. When I realize I'm dreaming I'm too awake to have a realistic dream, so it's something between a dream and a day-dream or whatever.

planetguy• 14 years ago

While I've had a few "lucid" dreams in my life that I can remember, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims they can do this with some regularity. Don't forget, there's a comparable number of people who claim the ability to "astral travel".

When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you do.

Cushman2• 14 years ago

When you're dreaming, it feels real, but as soon as you wake you realize that it was not. In a lucid dream, it feels like a dream, and that feeling persists through waking. Perhaps you will wake in a moment and discover that your present feeling of consciousness is an illusion; until then, you kind of just have to trust it.

digitalsushi• 14 years ago

I believe the answer to that is that lucid dreamers have a token symbol they regularly keep in real life that cannot attain a specific state in reality; if they keep this token so persistent in their life that it inevitably ends up in the dream, they can interact with the token to determine the dreamstate by making the token do something impossible. This boolean answer hopefully trickles up to you just enough to go "whoa!" without waking you - at which point you're free to dream about the 3 things people do with lucid dreaming.

h0munculus• 14 years ago

As a lucid dreamer, the difference is pretty obvious. A memory of a dream feels like just that, a dream. Remembering a lucid dream feels more like a memory from everyday life- I remember actually being 'there'.

Waking up directly after a lucid dream makes it even more apparent, to transition from the dream-world into the real world with no apparent loss of consciousness in between.

gringomorcego• 14 years ago

yeah I thoguht it was bs too for a while.

then I met my boss. holy shit. he lucid dreamed every day. said it was awesome.

just remember, you have to take notes about your dreams if you want to remember them. do it every morning first thing.

2ndly, start asking yourself if you are dreaming a lot during the day. you won't ask yourself in a dream, because you think it's a normal day.

that's my 2 cents.

thatusertwo• 14 years ago

It's hard to know, but its like anything else, with practice you have increase your odds of success.

MichaelGG2• 14 years ago

Well first, you're right, you can't _prove_ something like that to yourself. But in that case, what's the difference? (Unsolvable, usually irrelevant philosophical question, I suppose.)

Second, folks claiming to astral travel are, as far as I can tell, just lucid dreaming. Otherwise, we'd see more cults doing amazing things because they could go around and view secret plans, codes, passwords, and whatnot.

trashcan• 14 years ago

I believe the answer to this is that you decide what you want to do in your dream before you go to sleep. If you do exactly what you planned, you were controlling your dream. If you were dreaming you controlled your dream, but you dreamt about what you wanted to, does it matter?

nirai• 14 years ago

planetguy, how do you know if you really have conscious control right now or just imagine that you have?

I'm not joking either.

The article mentioned the Hindu dream-yoga, the practice of which was meant to make you ask such questions on your "waking" life.

mrspeaker4• 14 years ago

You haven't had any lucid dreams then - it's not like wishy-washy pseudo-spiritual nonsense. It's nothing like astral projection. You're just fully awake inside your dream. You know 100% that you're dreaming, and that you are lying in your bed and you can control what happens in your dream (maybe "steer" is a better word than control).

The websites I've seen about it make out like there is a spiritual aspect - but that's just hippies trying to make it seem important.

rc02• 14 years ago

Most of the time a dream just like most people, but once in a while I experience being awake in a dream which I also call lucid dreaming. It's very interesting and the level of realism will vary. I find that it varies depending on how I have let my different desires (e.g. lust, hunger, laziness, etc) dictate my behavior during the day. The more control I exercise over them the better the experience is.

But I have also had a complete different kind of experience, one that is more realistic than lucid dreaming. It feels as real as being awake. I believe that this is what many call the astral. I can count the times I had such experiences with one hand. It's very rare for me and it requires such an effort that I fail most of the times. And by effort I mean not acting on the different desires that come during the day and trying to understand what triggers them and dismissing them without emotion.

mistercow2• 14 years ago

>Don't forget, there's a comparable number of people who claim the ability to "astral travel".

That is a rather uncompelling argument. How many people claim to be able to do something has very little to do with whether or not that thing is possible. Many, many people claim to have been helped by homeopathic remedies, and none of them have. Relatively few people claim to be able to walk on their hands, but many of them can.

"Number of claims" is evidence, but it is such weak evidence that its effect on your beliefs should almost always be overwhelmed by the effect of your prior. The plausibility of astral projection and homeopathy is incredibly low, and the weak evidence given by "number of adherents" doesn't significantly budge the needle.

On the other hand, having had personal experience with lucid dreams, your appraisal of the plausibility of regular, practiced lucid dreaming should be rather high. If, then, you encounter even a dozen people who claim to have done this successfully, you should believe that is probably possible. That is, of course, unless you have some appropriately strong justification based on your understanding of neuroscience for why it should not be possible.

>When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you do.

I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The part of your brain that perceives being in control is not the part of the brain that issues commands. So if we allow that it is possible to believe you have control over your actions without actually having control over your actions, then we must accept that this is in fact always the case, even while we are awake. The belief that you are an atomic unit which simultaneously perceives and manipulates the world is a form of essentialism which we can pretty well rule out by now.

Edit: I should also add that "lucid dreaming" doesn't technically imply control; it just means you're aware that you're in a dream.

aiscott• 14 years ago

Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately. The one dream that I remember where I suddenly realized I was dreaming but didn't wake up went pretty awry. I became very confused in the dream trying to figure out if I was awake or not. It was disturbing.

fghh45sdfhr35• 14 years ago

I bet you if you just stubbornly enough decide to lucid dream every night it won't be long before you have lucid dreams semi regularly. But I don't recommend that, see my other posts in this discussion as to why.

dsrguru• 14 years ago

LaBerge proved that people can have lucid dreams at will as part of his doctoral research at Stanford. Even if you haven't mastered the at-will inductions like MILD or WILD (see Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by LaBerge or consult Google), you can increase your frequency of lucid dreams (once or twice a week for me in my third year of high school) by using critical state testing, which practitioners of Tibetan dream yoga have supposedly been doing for hundreds of years. The idea is twofold.

First, it's usually very easy to tell if you're dreaming. If you're sober and you even have to think about whether you're dreaming then you can safely say you are. That's hard for some people to do, so you might want to use a more tangible method. If you pinch your nose and try to breathe through it, you will be able to breathe in almost all dreams (you can never 100% prove awakeness, but we only care about proving asleepness), and you will never be able to breathe if you're awake. So if you find you can breathe through a pinched nose, you know you're dreaming. If you don't want to pinch your nose in public all the time, you could look at your hand instead. Count the number of fingers and ask yourself if they are straight or deformed. The dreaming mind is really bad about accurately generating five-fingered realistic hands, but we never notice unless we deliberately look at our hands in a dream. This method is almost as surefire as the nose method.

The second part of the method is that if you make it a habit to check to see if you're dreaming whenever a certain kind of event comes up, let's say whenever you walk through a doorway, that behavior will carry over to your dreams once it has become a habit. Once you walk through a doorway in your dream, you will do the nose or hand test and discover that you're dreaming. It's fine to be skeptical of science when it sounds too good to be true, but seriously give it a try. Lucid dreaming is a lot of fun, and there are also a lot of practical benefits. One that comes to mind is being able to literally work out problems in your sleep. It's sometimes hard to keep text constant on a dream whiteboard, but you have the advantage of being able to manipulate text with the snap of your fingers--something that you can't even do yet with vim or emacs. Another advantage of lucid dreaming is nutrition and weight loss. It's a lot easier to say no to that piece of cake now if you'll have the opportunity to eat it while you sleep. Dream food tastes about the same as real food.

P.S. The experience of astral projection (in the sense of having a highly real-feeling dream in which you can roll out of your physical body and walk around your room, which looks virtually identical to how it does in real life) is actually a real phenomenon that's rather easy to induce using a variation of wake-initiated lucid dreaming (WILD). The vast majority of people who claim to achieve this are telling the truth. While there is no reason to accept the non-scientific explanation that they're actually leaving their body in some astral plane in real life, the actual experience they're reporting is very real.

eof• 14 years ago

I spent some time in college thinking about/wanting to lucid dream. The techniques that I came to use were using a digital watch that I looked at frequently, and making a habit of turning on and off lights.

The idea is that in a dream, looking at a watch won't reveal a time; and turning off a light switch won't turn off the light. So you train yourself to do these things habitually with the idea that eventually you will do it in your dream, and have the knowledge that when something funny happens, you will know you are dreaming.

I was also advised to have in mind the things I wanted to do when I became lucid. I wanted to fly. So with that in mind, I got a cheap digital watch and started flickign on and off light switches.

It was a couple weeks later when I had my first lucid dream; I looked at my watch while at some type of fair; and noticed it was weird looking; which gave me this sort of poof aha moment where I realized I was in a dream. Then I remembered I wanted to fly, so I made myself "fly" which this particular time ended up being me going straight up like I was on a very fast space elevator.

I had my second, much nicer only a couple nights later.

Since then I stopped putting any effort into it, but I have been a lucid dreamer pretty often ever since.

Very few of my dreams do I conciously take control, but the vast majority of them I am what I have come to call/think of as 'semi-lucid'. That is, part of the story line of the dream is that I am dreaming, it's essentially built into the plot, but I am still just a passive observer.

The most common exception to this is when I want to wake up from a dream because I have gotten myself into a shotty situation, so I will climb to the top of a building and jump off or do something else drastic to wake myself up.

Recently, I have had more and more double-layer dreams, or inception-esque dreams. Where I wake up from a dream, always semi-lucid, usually by my own will as I described above; only to go about being in another dream still.

Usually when truly wake from these I feel similar to how I do after coming out of a long meditation session. Uber uber focused; like my brain is on super drive and reality is crystal clear.

Anyway, I recommend learning to lucid dream to everyone. Especially with apps as it probably makes it even easier for the right people; but I had plenty of luck like I said by just checking my wrist watch.

The only true benefit other than the 'fun' factor is that I basically never have nightmares; as anything that is scary/bad is always met with a sense of lightness or calm, since my dream character knows he is dreaming.

kaybe2• 14 years ago

I'm the same, without having to do anything. Normally, if I don't like where things are going, I jump back in time and do them differently. But there is another kind of nightmare - those where the things I can find in my mind are.. let's say.. not what I normally perceive myself to be. And I can't say 'It's just a dream', because I'm at least partly concious imagining it, which means it's a part of me.. and you can't wake up from this kind of fact.

Jach• 14 years ago

This mirrors my typical experience with lucid dreaming, it's more exciting to relax whatever control I have and be entertained (or disturbed). A lot of lucid dreamers report flying, that's so boring compared to the rest! Time control of the situation I'm imagining and experimenting with multiple paths concurrently ranks higher on the fun list than flying for me.

Don't be too disturbed by the weird imaginings. If they're particularly weird you could probably write a modestly successful Bizarro genre story. (In my favorites is http://www.amazon.com/Ass-Goblins-Auschwitz-Cameron-Pierce/d... which may be banned in Germany.)

A quote: "We don't have thoughts, we are thoughts. Thoughts are not responsible for the machinery that happens to think them." --John K Clark.

MichaelGG2• 14 years ago

I've only had one or two fully lucid dreams. In one I realised I was dreaming, I could not get myself to wake up. I was then convinced I should kill myself to wake up, but could not fully determine if I was sleeping or not, so why take the risk?

Unfortunately, clocks and text seem to work in my dreams. Another reality check is covering your mouth and nose and trying to breathe. Supposedly, this is a good test as in a dream you'll keep breathing. Plus, it's unobtrusive, unlike turning lights on and off at offices and other people's houses.

nooneelse6• 14 years ago

For me, the best unobtrusive reality-check, by far, has been checking gravity. Just by quickly changing my weight in a chair or rolling up a bit on the balls of my feet, I can see if my weight is there or I start to float a bit.

Checking global light level control (light switches) is, like you say, not unobtrusive. But I've tested, with moderate success, using more subtle lighting features. Window blinds, for example, typically have far more subtle shades of light and shadowing than gets rendered in my dream worlds. Paying a few seconds of focused attention to a window or lamp shade doesn't stand out in most social situations.

meric2• 14 years ago

Can you only have a lucid dream only if you were dreaming in the first place? I only infrequently dream - like once a month. When I do dream it's usually something really boring, like watching the water bucket (with a beach ball inside) in a well going up and down - and if I do realise I'm in a dream, I immediately wake, but paralysed for like half a minute... no chance to do any lucid dreaming. :(

I am feeling a lot of envy reading about everyone's experiences in lucid dreaming. :(

accoinstereo• 14 years ago

You dream every night (several times, actually) in REM, you just only remember it once a month. If you journal the times that you do remember your dreams, it could help you remember more. You can also still use the various tricks to "check" if you're dreaming and achieve lucidity in a dream that would have otherwise been forgotten

Xurinos• 14 years ago

I used to have nightmares. I had died from falling, been injected with deadly painful poison, been shot up by various kinds of projectiles, or simply kept running. I built up a certain confidence in my waking life and my dream life where, rather than run from or be taken out by the enemy, I eagerly hunted them instead when they manifested. I tackle problems head-on and face danger boldly. In the dreamworld, in spite of the initial spark of fear, it is enough that I suddenly start doing the extraordinary, be it shrugging off bullets and lasers, becoming immune to poison, or sending out waves of power to overcome my foes. I once stopped an elevator from crashing on the ground while I was in it (that situation required a replay because something in me did not like how it ended when I started to escape to the waking world). After the first time I turned a situation around, it became easier. In a way, you could compare my attitude/behavior change to the light switch and watch check; it just became a part of my psyche to defy the darkness. I do not bother to actively control the dream, though: I just respond in kind to the events and take as much control as I need in order to succeed. Once success is met, the dream usually changes, and I am adrift again. "Well, we didn't get him this time..."

fumar2• 14 years ago

I practiced becoming lucid in dreams. This was a about five years ago. I was able to do it on a regular basis. I loved it. One of the greatest benefits was solving my 'day' problems in my sleep. Of course, it was fun and surreal.

One of the side effects was sleep paralysis. Eventually, I realized my energy level was dropping. Lucid dreaming was taking my rest away. I stopped. I prefer to let my body sleep normally now.

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

>> "One of the side effects was sleep paralysis"

That's interesting. For me lucid dreaming is more a side effect of sleep paralysis. I usually realise I am dreaming when I experience the symptoms of sleep paralysis and am then able to continue the dream (aware that it is a dream).

fumar2• 14 years ago

I would be lucid in a dream and want to wake up. I would force myself out of the dream. Then, I would experience sleep paralysis. Usually, the best option was to fall back asleep.

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

Have you ever opened your eyes during a sleep paralysis incident? I did it once and what happened was so scary that I always close my eyes and let it pass from then on.

creamyhorror• 14 years ago

Hallucinations? The origins of the "demonic attack" myth of sleep paralysis?

evincarofautumn2• 14 years ago

Yeah, for some people the cost is just too high. I used to enjoy regular lucid dreams—I’m always dream-aware—but it’s not worth it to deal with fatigue and sleep paralysis.

I regularly have episodes of sleep paralysis anyway, almost any time I sleep on my back. The kind with terror, hallucinations, coming out of it bellowing and attacking things that aren’t there, the whole bit. So unfortunately lucid dreaming isn’t for me.

It’s all kinds of fun though, and I miss it. :(

pawelwentpawel• 14 years ago

I used to get them quite a lot a few years ago. First thing was usually white noise followed by the "lucid dream".

The funny thing is that when you put on a nicotine patch right before going to sleep the dreams become way more accurate. I guess it has something to do with dopamine. It's like having a lucid dream... in HD ;)

njs12345• 14 years ago

Modafinil definitely has a similiar effect, if you sleep when it's active..

snitzr• 14 years ago

The article has a section on dream interpretation. This is bunk Freudian stuff. Even if it were true that dreams had meanings, it would be difficult to prove scientifically. Just a warning before people start attaching meaning to something where there is none.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

I've heard a lot of claims about lucid dreaming among some young people I know well locally (some of whom post here from time to time). I don't get the impression that lucid dreaming is really as beneficial as they think it is. Some cases I know about from personal observation involve disturbing sleep cycles so much in pursuit of lucid dreams that the young people failed in work environments or crashed and burned in their university studies. Getting a normal amount of sleep (for you, that leaves you feeling rested when you wake up in the morning) is very important. It's a lot more important than what kind of dreams you have.

I read through the whole submitted article, and I didn't see any reporting on rigorous study of the waking state health or performance of long-term lucid dreamers. All we see in the article is anecdotes, summed up by

"For Hobson, the neuroscientist, the benefits of being able to achieve lucid dreaming are much simpler.

"'We don't really know if there are real psychological advantages, but I can tell you that it has huge entertainment value. It's like going to the movies and not paying for your ticket.'"

An issue to consider whenever participants on Hacker News discuss self-help strategies is how reliable the research base is. People who only use the University of Google Library to do research will often find websites by advocacy groups that are pushing a solution that may not have been tested. Fortunately, Google's own director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, has written a guide to reading research reports

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

that reminds us all about what to look for when someone reports some new, amazing treatment. Check out whether lucid dreaming has really been well evaluated with sufficiently large sample sizes, control groups, and other marks of good research.

I think a writing intervention

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/H...

may do more for many people in high-creativity careers than lucid dreaming. There is a better research base, by far, for the writing self-help than for lucid dreaming. Try it and see how it works.

I've always been able to enjoy interesting movie-like experiences by DAY-dreaming, and it's not explained here why anyone should alter their sleep cycle (which has known risks, up to and including psychotic symptoms) just to be entertained. A lot of researchers over the years have done a lot of research on human dreams in particular and sleep cycles more generally. Where is there any evidence that lucid dreaming is helpful rather than harmful, long-term?

Best wishes for much success in improving your personal insight and problem-solving.

fghh45sdfhr35• 14 years ago

I tried lucid dreaming and it was quite easy for me to control my dreams. But after I woke up, despite the fact that I had slept 8+ hours, I felt mentally exhausted. Physically I was fine, no yawning or anything, but mentally I felt like I hadn't slept. It was a weird disassociation of physical vs mental exhaustion.

I've tried it a few times and it's the same every time. To me the slightly more fun lucid dreams are not worth the exhausted feeling in the morning.

ralfd• 14 years ago

Fghh45sdfhr3, what did you dream lucidly?

When I could control my dreams I would probably just stop whatever my brain is trying to figure out and start a sex dream.

altrego99• 14 years ago

Care to elaborate on what you mean by "mentally exhausted"?

tassl• 14 years ago

I tried lucid dreaming a few years ago. Initially, the main problem that I was having was to wake up as soon as I realized I was in the middle of a dream. It took me almost no time to go back to sleep but I "was missing" the dream every time I woke up.

After a few days, I was able to control most of my dreams. I never had full control of those (there was a moment where something got out of control) but I liked the experience. I think the best experience I had dreaming was flying.

In any case, I always woke up fully rested (which might have to do with not being able to control it 100%).

FlyingTryangle3• 14 years ago

"Some cases I know about from personal observation involve disturbing sleep cycles so much in pursuit of lucid dreams that the young people failed in work environments or crashed and burned in their university studies."

That is laughable ignorance my friend. The Wake Back To Bed method might mess your sleep schedule up a little, but you're only supposed to be up for about 30 minutes or so then you go back to sleep. That's not even the most common way of lucid dreaming. To say people have ruined their lives trying to lucid dream is, frankly, completely ridiculous and I'm embarrassed for the HN community for upvoting this post.

alexsb92• 14 years ago

It wouldn't be too far of a stretch. Starting simply with the knowledge that dreaming happens while in REM, someone could find it logically to switch to an Uberman-type Polyphasic sleep schedule, since one of the biggest advertised advantage of such sleep schedule is dropping into REM a lot quicker due to exhaustion. If Uberman doesn't actually help them in terms of the sleep they need, but they also don't want to give it up, hoping to get all that lucid dreaming, a student could continue it for a a few months, which coincidentally is a school semester. Now you've got a student who is really burned out, and once exam time will crash and burn. Depending on the program, university they attend, and the person themselves, failing a semester could really screw them over one way or another.

rsaarelm2• 14 years ago

For me, the Wake Back to Bed, when it does work, generally involves first the 30 minutes staying up, then 40 to 90 minutes of lying awake in bed before falling asleep. So that does unfortunately mess a bit with the sleep cycle, even though it should be just a blip in the radar in theory. Haven't managed to get any other method to work reliably. I guess what works and how varies by individual.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

I get the feeling that lucid dreaming provides similar benefits to psilocybin in terms of letting you rewire your emotional responses to certain situations, as well as letting you rewire your muscle memory. Lucid dreaming is never something that I've been particularly interested in, although I think there are certain use cases where it makes, e.g. if you want to teach yourself how to link turns on a snowboard.

jmsduran• 14 years ago

There was a phase in my life not too long ago where I experienced lucid dreams and/or night terrors, granted I had a very bad diet and sleep cycle at the time.

After a couple of weeks it ended up taking a toll on me both physically & mentally, I would not recommend that anyone willingly pursue this type of sleeping/dreaming.

jeromeparadis• 14 years ago

I've had a lot of lucid dreams in my life. I never did anything special as far as I know. I began having then fairly early, like 7-8 years old and I suspect it happened as a way to take control of and avoid nightmares. Gaining the ability to realize it's a dream and escape by flying was a great way to change nightmares to fun experiences where I gained confidence by deciding to tauntthese nightmares and fly off or whatever I wanted.

From my teens to my early thirties, I would say that more than 50% of my dreams were lucid and were more about fun with friends and showing off. With time, I even gained the ability to wake up on demand from my dream. My cue is that I can close my eyes in my dream and when I open them, I wake up in real life. With practice, I can even close my eyes again and get to sleep again to join back the dream if I do it fast enough. I sometimes was able to wake up and join back a dream this 2-3 times per dream.

Now at 40, lucid dream are much less frequent but happen from time to time.

By the way, I could never decide what to dream about before going to sleep (except joining back a dream). Then again, it never occurred to me it could be possible.

But, it always cool and a joy to experience. I suspect Neo go his idea to hack the Matric because of lucid dreaming!

Most people I talked to about this have trouble believing me it's possible. It's usually the few who experienced lucid dreams who believe me.

basisword• 14 years ago

I regularly experience sleep paralysis and find it very easy to go from that to lucid dreaming, especially as I can force myself into sleep paralysis (I discovered that it triggers when I am too warm at night). Personally the only benefit I've gotten from it is that it is fun to do occasionally.

woodall• 14 years ago

If I eat before bed I experience the same thing. Didn't start happening till my senior year in college. Freaky, but fun.

duwease• 14 years ago

Are the companies pushing the lucid dreaming glasses nowadays the same people that sold them in the old "Johnson-Smith Things You Never Knew Existed" catalogs when I was young? I distinctly remember wanting to buy those, but I always blew my money on the other stuff in the catalog (fake dog poop, a "Hoof Arted" t-shirt)

rsaarelm2• 14 years ago

I've been able to get poor-quality "wake-induced lucid dreams" reasonably regularly lately by waking myself with an alarm 3 or 4 hours before my usual wakeup time, walking around for ten to thirty minutes so I won't immediately fall back to sleep and then getting back to bed and meditating while I wait to fall asleep. More often than not, I go straight into a dream state without the in-between stage of deep unconscious sleep, and remain lucid.

Amusingly, these types of lucid dreams are basically false awakenings with my brain still running on the assumption that I'm lying in my bed in my bedroom, so they kind of resemble the stereotypical astral projection. I'm guessing something like this is what's really going on with the people who claim they can astral project.

I'm not doing the thing all the time since it's hard to keep up a regular sleep cycle while doing it, and the dreams have so far mostly been too short to be much fun. Still, it's a nice proof-of-concept.

FlyingTryangle3• 14 years ago

One of the few times I'm actually qualified to comment on an article. Top comment by tokenadult has it all wrong. Sure you can do Wake Back to Bed ones or mess up your sleep cycle to do it but you certainly don't have to. I never did I lucid dream several times a week. It's much easier to just keep a dream journal and do realit checks while you're awake.

Second, there's no need for piles of studies on lucid dreaming. I never feel tired or anything like that after I have big lucid dreams. The opposite in fact. After a particularly emotional or powerful dream I feel alive! I feel exuberant and it's easier for me to get out of bed. It's a fantastic way to practice skills as well. I'm an MMA fighter and I have many many fighting dreams that feel perfectly fluid and natural. The pathways in my brain for fighting are being stimulated for hours at a time while I sleep. Sure it's not 1:1 with real life practice but the opponents in my dreams often do novel moves I have never been exposed to before and I have to come up with novel counter techniques. It's clear to me that lucid dreaming practice is helpful to real world skills.

Not to mention the entertainment value. My favorite most recent one was telekinetic powers. I made forks and knives fly across the room then when I wanted to test out more power I looked out the window and made a nice car sized chunk of earth come rippping out of the ground. It was fucking awesome.

garindra2• 14 years ago

This is a question that I've had for quite a long time about lucid dreaming : is it possible to use the lucid dream time as a time to think deeply about things that usually require a lot of real world time but don't usually require access to real-world material?

For example (this list is completely non-exhaustive):

1. figure out high-level software architectural design

2. write the high-level plot of a novel

3. think how to solve personal problems (personal relationships, etc.)

4. come up with product marketing campaign ideas

etc.

I know this defeats the purpose of sleep itself, which is to completely let the brain to rest completely, but I'm genuinely wondering.

jmonegro• 14 years ago

Yes, you can. I've even used lucid dreaming for practicing motor skills. By the time you can achieve lucid dreaming on demand, you have near perfect dream recall, so this is especially useful.

nooneelse6• 14 years ago

I've spent most of my attention in my LDs on poking at the nature of the simulation rather than on trying things like those. But somewhat relevant to your question, in my experience, the passage of time can go rather strangely in dreams. As one example of weirdness, if I start to do something like count to twenty, it would be rather easy for me to start counting, then have the dream kind of, almost or perhaps entirely imperceptibly, "skip", and I'm saying twenty with plenty of memories that I did the counting if I try to remember the middle, but never having actually done so--in whatever best sense that phrase works for dreams--. That is to say, memories seem to me like just another sense channel that the dream world can fake in realistic or shoddy fidelity as the case may be.

So how would you know if you really thought through designing some software "beginning to end" so to speak, actually considering sub-cases, instead of having just skipped to feeling like you did all that when really your dreamworld is just elaborating its first guess at a design on the fly as you look at one facet or another. Now in some cases, that distinction might not matter, in which case I'd say a LD might be what you are looking for. In other cases, it will matter, and I'd say dream worlds can be tricky (another important way here is that one's "criticality" is not usually up to par in dreams, normally glaring problems, omissions, strangeness can just glide by one's attention; one is usually better at this in LD but not anything like infallibly so).

Now the interpersonal relationship thing... that I have more directly tested. And instead of sitting and trying to use dream-time to ponder the matter, LDing provides a different sort of possibly useful trick; calling up simulation(s) of the person in question and chatting with them while their dispositions are somewhat under your control. Unless one gets a/the trickster wearing a them-mask instead, which is always a worry for me, but maybe not for you.

garindra2• 14 years ago

Memory integrity is definitely an important thing in order to get any decent result out of a supposedly productive lucid dream, but can't it be improved by "training" though? I remember reading through a lucid dreaming thread on Reddit, and they said you can actually train yourself and have increasingly stable lucid dreams overtime; I would think memory integrity is one huge part of the whole dream stability spectrum.

pohl• 14 years ago

Back when I was in high school, I had to write a term paper and selected the topic of lucid dreaming. I probably put more effort into that paper than any other assignment in all my years of schooling. I went to the local college and looked up every article on the topic I could find. Stephen Laberge had a book out back then (1985) according to Wikipedia, but all I could get were various periodicals. I studiously practiced the techniques he was recommending at the time (waking after a dream, noting it in a journal, staying awake for 5 minutes, repeating the mantra as you fall back to sleep: 'the next time I dream, I will realize that I am dreaming'.

I was amazed at how well a little bit of consistent practice could bring out this ability. I don't recall any negative side effects as others here have mentioned, but then I was a teenager so who knows if I was really tuned-in to how it was effecting me.

I remember being especially entranced by the idea of tests subjects sending coded signals to the waking world through muscular contractions - but then Dreamscape was a relatively new film at the time, so maybe that had something to do with it.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

Reminds me of "Summer Dream Job."

http://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/summer-dream-job/

I had a semi-lucid dream once. I was flying after my then girlfriend. I knew I was dreaming, and I knew that I could will myself to fly as fast as I wanted. That's when I lost control, because my dream girlfriend just willed herself to fly faster than me. I willed so hard, I "broke" the dreamworld. Everything was flying apart as I woke.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

Huh, reading the comments here make me feel like a lucid dreaming wizard. I'd figured out all of these tricks and many more personal ones before I left highschool. It was the basis of more than one Informative forensics speech.

Can't say I use it for the "insight" that some comments talk about though, or that it affects my quality of rest or restedness.

drrory• 14 years ago

Lucid dreaming is the tip of a very big ice berg, one which may extend beyond the menial dimensions of spacetime, as we know it... A brash satement...? Perhaps, but I, Dr Rory Mac Sweeney, can only offer the melted ice of my memories from what I have seen in the oneiric paradigm and hope more people will take the time to elevate their opinion from material reductionism, through direct experience with open, yet skeptical mind This subject will gain more momentum in the coming months and we will all be facing bigger questions about our reality, I can be found on line and am happy to chat @R

EAMiller• 14 years ago

I've tried lucid dreaming with limited success over the years. Here are a couple of relevant links:

- RadioLab is a great podcast, they did a lucid dreaming episode: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jan/23/wake...

- After hearing said podcast, I wrote a quick twitter hack to occasionally ask if you're in a dream (one of the techniques): https://twitter.com/#!/isdreaming

no_more_death• 14 years ago

I almost always remember my dreams upon waking. Frequently I suddenly realized I was dreaming and would wake partly up. Usually I notice that my eyes are closed, like while I'm driving, and I'm afraid. Then I force my eyelids open and realize, "Stink, I was trying to sleep" :-)

But I never struggle with getting to sleep. I just concentrate on "nothing" and try really hard to not think about anything, and soon enough I'm asleep. For me it just takes discipline.

Lucid dreaming: Rise of a nocturnal hobby

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