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Lucid dreaming: Rise of a nocturnal hobby

112 points by gps408 14y ago

lucian1900 14y 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 14y ago
  That's a lie. It's not Inception.
  - wgx 14y ago
    I think parent is referring to: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Induction_Techniques#Reality_checks https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Induction_Techn...
- FreeFull 14y 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.
  - Cushman 14y 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 :)
  - lucian1900 14y 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 14y ago
There is subreddit for it: http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming
gaelian 14y 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 http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/2011/02/26/lucid-dreaming 2. http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming
tseabrooks 14y 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 14y ago
  after having such dream, did you stay awake less/more refreshed? any difference in your (real) life?
  - tseabrooks 14y 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.
- mrspeaker 14y 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.
tagawa 14y 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-podcast-010-lucid-dreaming/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-pod...
deleted 14y ago
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kaeluka 14y 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.
mrspeaker 14y 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.
- FreeFull 14y 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 14y ago
  http://xkcd.com/269/ http://xkcd.com/269/
  - mrspeaker 14y 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_activity_in_lucid_dreams http://daniel.erlacher.de/index.php/Time_required_for_motor_... But that's a bit too low bandwidth for me ;)
- jerf 14y ago
  There's a guy setting up to experiment with morse code via eyeblinks: http://lsdbase.org/ 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_ 14y 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 14y 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.
- Cushman 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
eof 14y 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.
- kaybe 14y 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.
fumar 14y 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 14y 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).
  - fumar 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
    Hallucinations? The origins of the "demonic attack" myth of sleep paralysis?
    - evincarofautumn 14y ago
      I cannot describe how awful it is. In an episode of sleep paralysis, I have been genuinely convinced that the darkest abominations of my imagination are real, present, and about to do unspeakable horrors to me or my sleep partner. The worst thing is that you feel that ordinary people simply cannot sense them, and you are powerless to do anything. Let me tell you, it doesn’t help your fellow sleeper’s sense of security when you wake up screaming and trying to protect them from something they can’t see.
pawelwentpawel 14y 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 14y ago
  Modafinil definitely has a similiar effect, if you sleep when it's active..
snitzr 14y 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 14y 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 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/Home2000/WritingandHealth.html 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.
jmsduran 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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)
rsaarelm 14y 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.
FlyingTryangle 14y 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.
garindra 14y 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 14y 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.
- jmonegro 14y 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.
- nooneelse 14y 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.
pohl 14y 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 14y ago
Reminds me of "Summer Dream Job." http://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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-up-dream/ 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 https://twitter.com/#!/isdreaming
no_more_death 14y 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.

112 points by gps408 14y ago

lucian1900 14y 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 14y ago
That's a lie. It's not Inception.
- wgx 14y ago
  I think parent is referring to: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Induction_Techniques#Reality_checks https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Induction_Techn...
FreeFull 14y 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.
- Cushman 14y 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 :)
- lucian1900 14y 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 14y ago

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

gaelian 14y 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 http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/2011/02/26/lucid-dreaming 2. http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming

tseabrooks 14y 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 14y ago
after having such dream, did you stay awake less/more refreshed? any difference in your (real) life?
- tseabrooks 14y 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.
mrspeaker 14y 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.

tagawa 14y 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-podcast-010-lucid-dreaming/ http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-pod...

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kaeluka 14y 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.

mrspeaker 14y 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.

FreeFull 14y 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 14y ago
http://xkcd.com/269/ http://xkcd.com/269/
- mrspeaker 14y 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_activity_in_lucid_dreams http://daniel.erlacher.de/index.php/Time_required_for_motor_... But that's a bit too low bandwidth for me ;)
jerf 14y ago
There's a guy setting up to experiment with morse code via eyeblinks: http://lsdbase.org/ 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_ 14y 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 14y 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.

Cushman 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

eof 14y 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.

kaybe 14y 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.

fumar 14y 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 14y 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).
- fumar 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  Hallucinations? The origins of the "demonic attack" myth of sleep paralysis?
  - evincarofautumn 14y ago
    I cannot describe how awful it is. In an episode of sleep paralysis, I have been genuinely convinced that the darkest abominations of my imagination are real, present, and about to do unspeakable horrors to me or my sleep partner. The worst thing is that you feel that ordinary people simply cannot sense them, and you are powerless to do anything. Let me tell you, it doesn’t help your fellow sleeper’s sense of security when you wake up screaming and trying to protect them from something they can’t see.

pawelwentpawel 14y 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 14y ago
Modafinil definitely has a similiar effect, if you sleep when it's active..

snitzr 14y 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 14y 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 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/Home2000/WritingandHealth.html 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.

jmsduran 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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)

rsaarelm 14y 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.

FlyingTryangle 14y 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.

garindra 14y 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 14y 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.
jmonegro 14y 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.
nooneelse 14y 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.

pohl 14y 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 14y ago

Reminds me of "Summer Dream Job." http://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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-up-dream/ 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 https://twitter.com/#!/isdreaming

no_more_death 14y 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.