7 ms·

Living in a Lucid Dream

127 points by holdit 2y ago

mentos 2y ago
“Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reckons we might see AI-generated games in less than 10 years” https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-reckons-we-might-see-ai-generated-games-in-less-than-10-years/ https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-... With some way to measure the players enjoyment/desire maybe in 50 years we’ll see ‘lucid gaming’
- deleted 2y ago
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alexpotato 2y ago
The below is not specific to lucid dreaming but more about experiments regarding consciousness and perceived passage of time: - Researchers wanted to see how the "time slows down under extreme events" worked - They created a watch that blinked a message at a time too fast for humans to see under normal circumstances - They then had people bungee jump and try to read the watch during the jump Turns out that people could not perceive the message even though they reported the "time slows down" effect during the jump. This has led researchers to believe that humans are not actually processing events more quickly and/or time is perceived to slow down but rather this is a coping mechanism for dealing with extreme events.
- gchamonlive 2y ago
  That is far from a definitive experiment. It's not testing the perception of time, just visual acuity during unrelated stress event.
  - 2four2 2y ago
    Most psychological experiments are far from difinitive due to the complexity and difficulty to measure abstract measurands like "perception".
    - gchamonlive 2y ago
      Can they produce useful results then? Do you know of any instance where even though the experiment was limited it led to breakthrough? Not asking to trap you into the induction problem (believing that something that happened in the past will happen in the future). I'm just curious.
      - munificent 2y ago
        A negative result is still a useful result. Before this experiment, no one knew if a high-stress environment would speed up visual perception. Now we have some evidence that it does not.
        gchamonlive 2y ago
        Only if paired with a follow-up hypothesis, otherwise you only mapped the outer boundaries of your domain, but gained no information about the domain of study itself.
  - aym62SAE49CZ684 2y ago
    >> read the watch > It's not testing the perception of time It's literally testing the perception of time?
    - saghm 2y ago
      It's testing the perception of reading numbers representing time while falling at a high speed and then bouncing a bit suspended off of a cliff or bridge or something. It's not obvious to me how you could conclude that the inability to read the numbers could be due to reading being hard when plummeting several hundred feet rather than due to any perception of time; if the experiment was trying to test whether the slowed perception of time could cause you to read times at finer granularity, how can you conclude whether it would be possible with slowed perception while stationary?
      - aym62SAE49CZ684 2y ago
        All objective observations of time involve reading numbers. You can't test subjective perception. Ok ok, so the experiment actually just tested whether an individual frame of a high frame rate display could be read while while falling. Since it could not, we do not have objective evidence for the subjective "time slowing down" experience. We just know that there was no difference from the control, i.e. subjects were unable to read display at high frame rate under normal conditions. That's all you know. Sure, maybe stressful conditions make it harder to read, but then again the watch is stationary with respect to the eye while falling.
        saghm 2y ago
        > All objective observations of time involve reading numbers. You can't test subjective perception. Not all experiments testing the perception of time require the person undergoing the experiment to read the time themselves, though. > Sure, maybe stressful conditions make it harder to read, but then again the watch is stationary with respect to the eye while falling. My point wasn't that the stress could cause it to be harder to read, but that the physical act of falling could cause it. The experiment intended to test if a psychological phenomenon (the slowed perception of time) could be caused by a certain psychological cause (stress), but they tested it in a way where both the cause _and_ the effect could be unrelated to their testing; we don't even know if falling makes it physically harder to read independent of stress, so I don't know how you can conclude anything psychologically about what might be going on. The watch being stationary relative to the eye also doesn't rule out vision impairment regardless of what's being looked at; the strain on the eyes from the air rushing by could be enough to make it hard to see clearly.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  That experiment seems a bit silly. Is anyone expecting time perception to actually take the form of basic sensory/cognitive processes running as if “overclocked”? I certainly wouldn’t expect basic stuff like perceiving blinking messages to change, since nothing is really changing optically (at least controlled for other things like pupil dilation). That’s just as silly as expecting someone to be able lift heavier weights when they’re perceiving time more slowly, since their muscles would exert the same energy in a shorter period of time (again, controlled for things like adrenaline).
  - kagakuninja 2y ago
    It is not silly at all, although the experiment may be flawed. Pro baseball players report that they can see 90+ MPH fastballs clearly, down to details like the stitches on the ball. Zen martial artists also have claims of being able to react as if time has slowed down.
    - pegasus 2y ago
      I find it plausible that this enhanced level of awareness cannot be directed at will to just any object, but is bound to whatever goal puts one into the zone. Which would be the flaw in the experiment.
    - sdeframond 2y ago
      > Pro baseball players report that they can see 90+ MPH fastballs clearly, Has it been tested? Like by putting marks on randomly thrown balls and asking the player to identify the balls?
  - thwarted 2y ago
    My own experience with edibles (of various ratios of the desired chemicals) is that, the only way I can describe it, the sample rate of my senses change and my brain isn't processing all the sensory input at the same rate—a different rate than when I'm sober and a different rate from each other. Time slows down as the sample rate for my perception of time passing increases. Meanwhile, the sample rate of my hearing decreases and I perceive music differently, low frequency tones (and background music) are significantly more prominent I my perception.
- hobs 2y ago
  It's possible, but completely anecdotally I was in a six car pileup and watched the stuff move from my backseat to the window to smash against it in what felt like 20-30 seconds. I remember clearly having several thoughts in what could not have been more than 1 second between getting hit and my entire car smashing into another at 60 mph. "Oh, that's my kleenex box, dang that's just hanging there huh?" "What's that noise? Oh, its me screaming." "I better hold my self against the steering wheel for the airbag... wait, if I am thinking this that means there's no airbag" I remember watching my seatbelt break and snap across my chest, moving like a languid snake, barely motivated to snap back to the wall. However, many other times in my life in extreme situations nothing like that happened, so I don't know if just jumping off a cliff is enough trauma or fear of death to cause it reliably.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Weird that your seat belt broke, they aren't supposed to do that. Was it damaged previously?
    - hobs 2y ago
      Not sure, I realized later that the car was made in 1986 and was 20 years old at the time of the crash (and so literally didn't come with airbags.) I just figured they were old as hell, and I ended up having to hold myself off the steering wheel with my arms. Ended up bending it significantly, which I can only put up to the time(not much!) that was actually spent transferring energy from me to the wheel.
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        Steering wheels are designed to bend, for that exact reason.
jimbobimbo 2y ago
The article links to the study about bi-directional communication with lucid dreamers: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00059-2?_returnURL=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0960982221000592?showall=true https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...
photochemsyn 2y ago
The original "how can I tell if we're in a simulation" discussion: https://www.thelucidguide.com/the-butterfly-dream-chuang-tzu-zhua https://www.thelucidguide.com/the-butterfly-dream-chuang-tzu... False awakenings are another aspect of dreams: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/false-awakening https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/false-awakening
- MyFirstSass 2y ago
  First site: "For the security of our visitors and to avoid abuse of the site, this website runs a zero VPN, Tor, or Proxy. They must have extremely valuable info? Then i checked it through a cache, almost no content, affiliate links, a shop and huge popup. Is that site a complete joke or is this some new anti AI thing?
  - Aerbil313 2y ago
    Where is that? I can't find. I know the owner. One of the few contemporary LD teachers you can trust to not give fake info. Still posts videos with clickbait thumbnails on YouTube though. He is not technical at all. There is plenty of content on the site, as well as the archived old LD forum, but the navigation is rather cumbersome, yeah.
    - MyFirstSass 2y ago
      I see. And appreciate all "old web content" though the current setup seems pretty visitor hostile, with anti VPN lockout (you only see if you have VPN), huge popup etc.
- romseb 2y ago
  As a child, for a few years I had a recurring nightmare with multiple false awakenings, sometimes five or six until I would wake up for real. I would wake up in bed, get up and at a specific point, an overwhelming feeling of impending doom would overcome me. Then at the peak of this emotion, a monster would grab me by my ankles and violently drag me back up the stairs and into bed. I would then wake up and repeat the process. Sometimes, I was not sure anymore if I landed in reality or if this existence will turn into horror again.
deleted 2y ago
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andtheboat 2y ago
"They fulfill fantasies of control, seek personal thrills like flying, have sex with Jeremy Allen White." I really hope someone called Jeremy Allen White reads this.
- Bluestein 2y ago
  I'm (not) Jerry A. White, and I approve this message.-
crazygringo 2y ago
I frequently have lucid dreams, in that I'm entirely aware of that fact that I'm dreaming while in the dream. What I find interesting, however, is that if I have a dream I forgot to study for my test, or I'm naked at school because I left my clothes somewhere else, or the school play starts tonight and I haven't memorized a single line... the fact that I know I'm dreaming doesn't help at all. Because the problem is that, while lucid dreaming, I have no access to any real-life knowledge or memories. I figure that I'm having the dream because I actually am in school in real life, with an exam I forgot about in the morning. I simply have no access to the fact that I left school many years ago. And if there's a monster behind the door in my dream, it seems entirely plausible in my dream that that's simply because there are monsters in the real world too. And quite often my dreams are related to real-life situations that happened yesterday or are happening tomorrow or this week -- so it's not like I can try to convince myself of some "rule" that dream anxieties are never anything to worry about. So my whole anxious lucid dream I'm just thinking, "boy I really hope that I'm not actually in a play that opens tomorrow night..." And then I wake up and it is suddenly crystal-clear that I haven't been in a high school play in decades. But during my lucid dream, there's absolutely no way of knowing. Curious if this is universal or if other people who lucid dream do always know the details of their actual true reality -- their age, what city and home they live in, current job, etc.
- saghm 2y ago
  > Curious if this is universal or if other people who lucid dream do always know the details of their actual true reality -- their age, what city and home they live in, current job, etc. I have lucid dreams somewhat frequently since I was maybe 8 or 9 after I started getting prescribed medication to help me sleep (initially it had been almost nightly, but it reduced over the years to the point where it happens maybe a couple times a month now a couple decades later), and generally I do remember the details of my life in lucid dream, but I sometimes have trouble determining whether they're details of my life in the past or the present. If in my dream I'm back at school, it's usually not the case that I don't remember graduating, getting a job, and moving; often times I have a vague sense that all of that had happened, but then some issue was discovered with my records that forced me have to go back and retake a class or two. (This obviously is pretty implausible, but dream logic isn't always airtight!) > What I find interesting, however, is that if I have a dream I forgot to study for my test, or I'm naked at school because I left my clothes somewhere else, or the school play starts tonight and I haven't memorized a single line... the fact that I know I'm dreaming doesn't help at all. Having real world knowledge doesn't always mitigate the "issue" in the dream though; in my lucid dreams, I don't have any control over what happens beyond my own actions, so a teacher expecting me to hand in some assignment won't generally accept "it's a dream so I don't have to" as an excuse. There is a way that knowing that I'm dreaming helps though; I can just choose to wake up! I'm not sure whether being able to forcibly wake up is typical or not for people dreaming lucidly, but I've never had much trouble doing it. Sometimes I'll end up back in the same scenario if I fall back asleep again after though, so it might end up being worth it to suffer through the imaginary misfortune to get the real world benefit of sufficient sleep.
ggeorgovassilis 2y ago
Richard Feynman reports in his biography on his own experiments with lucid dreaming. He found sleep to not be restful enough anymore, found it impossible to switch the lucid part of dreaming off and eventually had a negative experience that caused him to stop.
- deleted 2y ago
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- ElDji 2y ago
  That's funny, I stopped lucid dreaming, exactly for the same reasons : I waked up not rested and stressed, because often I had false awakening happening in series.
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  Everything is best enjoyed in moderation. The current consensus among the LD community is the same: Lucid dreams aren't as charging as normal ones. There's no scientific definitive answer but many think it's because the prefrontal cortex is 'turned on' in LD while it remains off in normal dreams.
  - _def 2y ago
    The question is though, will there be a way to "enforce" lucid dreams? Would be nice to have the option, but as far as I understand it is not really achievable without training and thus getting into degrading sleep quality.
world2vec 2y ago
Every time I realise I'm dreaming I wake up immediately. Would love to lucid dream at least once to know what's it all about.
- wruza 2y ago
  It’s all about flying and meeting beautiful women.
  - 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
    can confirm ^^
- bibelo 2y ago
  there are technique to stabilize your dream like rubbing your hands or turning around
altruios 2y ago
The way I lucid dream is to 'stay awake' through the process of falling asleep. There are a few tricks I use... but I don't recommend the experience (It can be... uncomfortable {there is a reason you don't remember the point you loose consciousness}). I don't know if these are universally applicable tricks either. But focusing on a point (visualizing it as actively as you can) seems to be important to staying awake through the process of falling asleep...
- smusamashah 2y ago
  Yesterday I was a having a very visual trip down the memory lane (2 decade old) while in the process of sleeping. And this memory was triggered by a smell. I was enjoying the memory (an old house and streets I was trying to remember in detail). This didn't make me lucid though, wasn't even trying to be anyway. But having actually followed the process, I can now understand how it can help with lucidity.
- cgriswald 2y ago
  I’ve been taking magnesium for a couple months now and one thing a I’ve noticed is that the line between wakefulness and asleep has blurred. I will sometimes watch some TV and I’ll be sitting there watching an episode and don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep and this is a dream until weird things start happening in the show. I often imagine floating outside my house (similar to what the article describes) as a method to fall asleep and since starting magnesium my thoughts softly blend into full blown dreams. My dreams in general have been far more lucid. I’ve only noticed one other side effect. I normally experience hypnogogic jerk and since starting magnesium, a few times the jerk itself has pulled me out of the descent into sleep.
- wruza 2y ago
  Feels like you found yourself some states similar to sleep paralysis.
  - altruios 2y ago
    I mean, yes... Everything I've read about sleep paralysis says it happens on waking (and is caused more often by sleeping on your back). Before you fall asleep the dark entity people sometimes feel/see isn't there (yet...).
jowdones 2y ago
When I lucid dream, usually I also have the ability to "fly" and in time I learned one thing. As much as I love to use the "fly" ability to explore, I must not steer too far away from the point I am currently. Otherwise I can examine in quite vivid details the stuff around but if I leap too far it's like my mind says "sorry dude, you've reached end of simulation area, here's where you wake up".
- godshatter 2y ago
  I learned to look closely at something nearby for a short while before looking around and doing things, this seems to give the simulation more time to load. Maybe because I was new to it.
- RandallBrown 2y ago
  I've had a handful of lucid dreams and I always try to fly. It works great for a little while but you're right, once you get too far away, it usually wakes you up or sometimes for me the flying just stops working and I come back down.
  - dalmo3 2y ago
    > the flying just stops working That's hilarious. I always come back down slowly unless I make an effort to fly up again.
- LawrenceKerr 2y ago
  Did you try moving & touching stuff while flying far away? The thing about flying very far is that you're probably in the same fixed Superman position, not really moving your dream body anymore. If you don't move, your consciousness shifts awareness towards your physical body and you wake up. Try it next time: just stop & don't move, don't do anything, you're likely to wake up. So doing the opposite, moving your dream body a lot & touching dream stuffs, tends to prolong your dream. That's why teleportation works better for moving to different areas. Funny enough, not moving your body is also how your consciousness shifts and enters the dream state when awake.
Aerbil313 2y ago
Yeah. You can practice lucid dreaming. I was a (not born, learned) lucid dreamer a few years ago, then I got into college and my sleep schedule got messed up, so I don't do it anymore. Had I learned DILD (dream-induced lucid dreaming) techniques I could continue but those require constant daytime effort no matter how little. I was lazy and went with WILD methods, and they work wonders when you have a consistent sleep schedule. Can attest that lucid dreams are as detailed and real as real life. Can't tell the difference. In one of my first attempts, I had a 30 minutes long lucid dream (I was able to precisely measure.). You know the feeling of wonder and awe? You feel it for at most a few minutes at a time usually. I was in constant amazement all through the whole half an hour. Because against my expectations, everything was as real as the real world. The texture of the ground beneath your feet, the feeling of air when you move fast, the taste when you eat. The weight and texture of stuff when you touch, the feeling of your own weight on your feet when you stand. The sun shining, reflections, brightness. Human eye level perfect quality and detail when you look. This feeling of awe didn't went away for me, I still get it when I LD. There was a thread about it recently, I wrote there some more: About learning resources too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399548
mapcars 2y ago
One of the biggest modern day spiritual gurus says that dreaming is just a fluctuation of mind activity during sleep, we can enjoy it but it has no significance in terms of spiritual development.
barber_the_dope 2y ago
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liendolucas 2y ago
Surprised to see that a lot of people experience lucid dreams. Are there any solid techniques to trigger them?
- pegasus 2y ago
  Lots. The internet is full of them. Most center around making a habit of periodically doing a "reality check" throughout the day, like reading a word from a note and then re-reading it to check whether it changed or not. I carried a note saying "Wake up!" in the pocket and after a few days of maybe a dozen checks a day, the check (like all daily habits) occurred in a dream. The realization when the inevitable discrepancy is discovered is pretty amazing, because it's so completely unexpected and has such deep implications for the experience of the moment. It's definitely worth experimenting with this stuff.
  - wruza 2y ago
    My method was “look at your fingers”. It’s easy, cause they are familiar and often in sight by default. I remember first time raising my hands and seeing that.
    - pegasus 2y ago
      I imagine it would be even more shocking when noticed, but possibly easier to go unnoticed - since visually, morphing is continuous in dreams, but word meanings are discrete and can't morph into one another like that. Btw. funny (and fascinating) how "dream-rendering" has similar issues with producing realistic hands as LLMs. Similar with continuity issues.
- godshatter 2y ago
  I haven't been into lucid dreaming for a while, but I used to use a technique called SSILD that worked great for me. Search for that name and you'll find discussions about it. You basically cycle between (with your eyes shut) "do I see anything abnormal?", "do I hear anything abnormal?" and "do I feel anything abnormal?" and just keep cycling between those, trying not to actually think about them too hard as you are falling asleep. If you're lucky, you'll end up transitioning into a dream straight from waking consciousness (wake induced lucid dream or WILD technique) or, failing that, you will fall asleep and have a much better chance or realizing you are dreaming (dream induced lucid dream or DILD), and failing that if you wake up in the middle of the night you can stay awake for a short while and then go back to sleep and have a good chance to fall into a dream you can become awake in (wake back to bed or WBTB) and if you do end up having a lucid dream and you wake up if you stay still you might just fall back into it (dream exit induced lucid dream or DEILD). I had quite a few lucid dreams using this technique, but it has a drawback that you end up having "false awakenings" where you think you just woke up but are actually still dreaming. I've had 7 or 8 of those in a row before. If you have a good reality test (my go-to was holding my nose closed and seeing if breathing lightly would still work) then they are kind of nice because now you have just become lucid again and go do whatever you want. The whole thing got to be too mentally exhausting for me and I was not feeling refreshed when I woke up so I stopped doing it. I occasionally try to start it up again, but I haven't had the gumption to continue it for very long. As you can see, there is a huge rabbit hole you can fall down if you look into this stuff, and a lot of places on the internet where people discuss it or give pointers. Also different people have better luck with different techniques. This one just happened to be my thing, I guess.
munificent 2y ago
I broke my ankle and the pain from that and the related surgeries has messed up my sleep in some interesting ways: When the pain was at its worst, I basically wasn't getting any sleep at all and after a few days, I was practically delirious. I had a few times where in the middle of the day, while awake, I would start dreaming. Not like a daydream, but not exactly falling asleep either. Hard to explain but it's like the boundary between "this is what I'm perceiving about the real world" and "this is what I'm imagining" got very thin and permeable. My mind would wander off into dreamspace and I'd think it was real until I would realize "No, that's some crazy dream shit." I also ended up with several days of nerve pain. I would be fine sometimes for hours and then completely out of the blue I'd get an intense (like 9/10 on a pain scale) stabbing pain in my ankle. Like someone snuck up and nailed me with an electric cattle prod. When this happened while I was asleep, I would be jolted awake. But, also, my dreaming brain would try to incorporate the pain into the dream somehow. And since those two things were happening simultaneously, I would be yanked awake with a head still full of some crazy dream involving nerve pain that I was actually feeling. Sometimes, it would take a good ten minutes of sitting there to sort out what the hell was going on versus what was just dream nonsense. Overall, would not recommend.
yokoprime 2y ago
I usually fall asleep fast, sleep through the night and wake up without any recollection of dreaming. I guess it’s usually a good thing, but it feels like im missing this whole thing a lot of other people experience.
- septic-liqueur 2y ago
  Me too. I did have a couple of LD in my early life and the experience was amazing that I remember it to this day. But I can't seem to be able to experience it again
- simion314 2y ago
  >I usually fall asleep fast, sleep through the night and wake up without any recollection of dreaming. I guess it’s usually a good thing, but it feels like im missing this whole thing a lot of other people experience. Probably depends on people, but dreams can mess your entire next day up, it does not happen often to me but I have bad dreams like I lost my child in a crowed, or something bad happened and someone I loved died. This emotional pain in the dream I think causes something in the body to trigger sicne the next day I am still feeling like shit. Then you might have good dreams, where all is perfect and happey and you have the thing you desired but then you wake up and you realized that it is not real and things are not good. And for soem god dam reason like many others there is the dream with the exams.
zackmorris 2y ago
I've been thinking about the flip side of this, the incomprehensible waking life. For me, daily life is an unending series of setbacks, negative reinforcement loops and disappointments. I know going into nearly all endeavors that they will end in some kind of failure, but decide to be brave and enter them anyway. I understand that this is the opposite of manifestation, and that I am creating self-fulfilling prophecies. But feel that a neural net would create a model of reality that matches my lived experience of suffering, so there's a basis in fact here. That this is truly all there is unless something changes. A small example: I decided to go on the Bacon app to see what walk-on gigs are available in my city to raise some quick cash. There are 2: garbage man and warehouse worker. Now, I knew going in that the odds were grim, and that the gigs would be things that nobody wants to do. Had I gone in with a positive mindset, and imagined fun afternoons helping people set up for events or something, is that what I would have received? I just don't know. I've experienced both, but an overwhelming percentage of the time, the negative outcome matches the prediction of my negative mindset. Another small example: the other day I helped an acquaintance with handyman work for $100 for an afternoon, but got a traffic ticket on the way home that skimmed away 2/3 of what I had earned. It was an uncanny reflection of my experience of hustling, similar to movies like The Pursuit of Happyness. Two steps forward and one step back. Another day older and deeper in debt. No win until the end - but the epiphany never comes. Where i'm going with this is that what we think of as "the real world" is the dream. Or in my case, the nightmare, or at the very least the night terror. Whereas in our dreams, we can be anything and do anything. Not only that, our subconscious provides rich plot lines far more creative than what our ego comes up with as it co-creates this 3D realm. I often wonder if the point of daily suffering is actually to dream in the spirit world where source consciousness originated. Except in my case, my dreams are mostly night terrors as well, spilled over from the suffering of my lived experience. I know why, it has to do with sleep apnea, and living a sober life after decades of self-medicating, and finally doing shadow work in middle age. But I just wish that the sun would rise on this long night of the soul, because my basic beliefs in hope for a better tomorrow are growing more tattered with every news cycle and seeing the very worst in humanity expressed in the most powerful and influential people, who are unwittingly bringing about hell on Earth.
zw123456 2y ago
I have been lucid dreaming for many years and about five years ago, I started keeping my tablet on the nightstand and when I wake up, if I remember it, which I generally do, I use speech to text to record it. If I don't do that I often forget them. I have categories, the movie type are like 3rd person and it plays out like I am watching a movie. A ride along dream is like first person, I feel like I am riding along with someone else, but I know it's not me, but I know their thoughts. The me dream is when I am me in the dream. Some of them repeat multiple times over several nights In all cases I know I am dreaming. I started turning some of them into short stories. No idea where some of them come from. Often it seems like I just tuned into someone's story, but the subconscious is a funny thing.
- dalmo3 2y ago
  I have a very similar experience. A worthy distinction is that in my dreams I'm either a) fully aware it's a dream but have no control or b) fully in control of myself without realising it's a dream. Only once I was both aware and in control, but it didn't last long.
frank_bb 2y ago
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PaperOliver 2y ago
After I learned to lucid dream real life became much less interesting in comparison. It felt like I came alive at night in my sleep, everything in the dream world was so vivid. I learned I could create any environment I wanted, like when Neo trains in the matrix. I would practice things (like tai chi) but it is a bit boring when the other characters don't have free will, so it was like interacting with robots. The end game for me was going behind the curtain - into the dream control room. It was a room filled with screens each showing a dream I had experienced, even abstract dreams from the age of 3 or 4. From here I could enter any of the dreams through the screen. In the room was a man, like Morgan Freeman (it was like in the film The Dark Knight where he tracks everyones phone), he was the only person I ever met while lucid dreaming who seemed like a real person. After some visits to this dream control room, I overcame my addiction to lucid dreaming, I stopped being active in my dreams and watched them like someone would watch a film. I knew it was a dream but I chose not to participate. At this time I was also experimenting with astral projection. I really wanted to have a shared out-of-body experience which could be validated. I got my flatmate to place things in certain areas around our flat to see if I could find them while meditating, but I couldn't. Being deeply involved in spirituality really distances you from most people in our society. I gave up meditating to better connect with the kind of people I am surrounded by.

127 points by holdit 2y ago

“Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reckons we might see AI-generated games in less than 10 years” https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-reckons-we-might-see-ai-generated-games-in-less-than-10-years/ https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-... With some way to measure the players enjoyment/desire maybe in 50 years we’ll see ‘lucid gaming’

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

alexpotato 2y ago

The below is not specific to lucid dreaming but more about experiments regarding consciousness and perceived passage of time: - Researchers wanted to see how the "time slows down under extreme events" worked - They created a watch that blinked a message at a time too fast for humans to see under normal circumstances - They then had people bungee jump and try to read the watch during the jump Turns out that people could not perceive the message even though they reported the "time slows down" effect during the jump. This has led researchers to believe that humans are not actually processing events more quickly and/or time is perceived to slow down but rather this is a coping mechanism for dealing with extreme events.

gchamonlive 2y ago
That is far from a definitive experiment. It's not testing the perception of time, just visual acuity during unrelated stress event.
- 2four2 2y ago
  Most psychological experiments are far from difinitive due to the complexity and difficulty to measure abstract measurands like "perception".
  - gchamonlive 2y ago
    Can they produce useful results then? Do you know of any instance where even though the experiment was limited it led to breakthrough? Not asking to trap you into the induction problem (believing that something that happened in the past will happen in the future). I'm just curious.
    - munificent 2y ago
      A negative result is still a useful result. Before this experiment, no one knew if a high-stress environment would speed up visual perception. Now we have some evidence that it does not.
      - gchamonlive 2y ago
        Only if paired with a follow-up hypothesis, otherwise you only mapped the outer boundaries of your domain, but gained no information about the domain of study itself.
- aym62SAE49CZ684 2y ago
  >> read the watch > It's not testing the perception of time It's literally testing the perception of time?
  - saghm 2y ago
    It's testing the perception of reading numbers representing time while falling at a high speed and then bouncing a bit suspended off of a cliff or bridge or something. It's not obvious to me how you could conclude that the inability to read the numbers could be due to reading being hard when plummeting several hundred feet rather than due to any perception of time; if the experiment was trying to test whether the slowed perception of time could cause you to read times at finer granularity, how can you conclude whether it would be possible with slowed perception while stationary?
    - aym62SAE49CZ684 2y ago
      All objective observations of time involve reading numbers. You can't test subjective perception. Ok ok, so the experiment actually just tested whether an individual frame of a high frame rate display could be read while while falling. Since it could not, we do not have objective evidence for the subjective "time slowing down" experience. We just know that there was no difference from the control, i.e. subjects were unable to read display at high frame rate under normal conditions. That's all you know. Sure, maybe stressful conditions make it harder to read, but then again the watch is stationary with respect to the eye while falling.
      - saghm 2y ago
        > All objective observations of time involve reading numbers. You can't test subjective perception. Not all experiments testing the perception of time require the person undergoing the experiment to read the time themselves, though. > Sure, maybe stressful conditions make it harder to read, but then again the watch is stationary with respect to the eye while falling. My point wasn't that the stress could cause it to be harder to read, but that the physical act of falling could cause it. The experiment intended to test if a psychological phenomenon (the slowed perception of time) could be caused by a certain psychological cause (stress), but they tested it in a way where both the cause _and_ the effect could be unrelated to their testing; we don't even know if falling makes it physically harder to read independent of stress, so I don't know how you can conclude anything psychologically about what might be going on. The watch being stationary relative to the eye also doesn't rule out vision impairment regardless of what's being looked at; the strain on the eyes from the air rushing by could be enough to make it hard to see clearly.
tshaddox 2y ago
That experiment seems a bit silly. Is anyone expecting time perception to actually take the form of basic sensory/cognitive processes running as if “overclocked”? I certainly wouldn’t expect basic stuff like perceiving blinking messages to change, since nothing is really changing optically (at least controlled for other things like pupil dilation). That’s just as silly as expecting someone to be able lift heavier weights when they’re perceiving time more slowly, since their muscles would exert the same energy in a shorter period of time (again, controlled for things like adrenaline).
- kagakuninja 2y ago
  It is not silly at all, although the experiment may be flawed. Pro baseball players report that they can see 90+ MPH fastballs clearly, down to details like the stitches on the ball. Zen martial artists also have claims of being able to react as if time has slowed down.
  - pegasus 2y ago
    I find it plausible that this enhanced level of awareness cannot be directed at will to just any object, but is bound to whatever goal puts one into the zone. Which would be the flaw in the experiment.
  - sdeframond 2y ago
    > Pro baseball players report that they can see 90+ MPH fastballs clearly, Has it been tested? Like by putting marks on randomly thrown balls and asking the player to identify the balls?
- thwarted 2y ago
  My own experience with edibles (of various ratios of the desired chemicals) is that, the only way I can describe it, the sample rate of my senses change and my brain isn't processing all the sensory input at the same rate—a different rate than when I'm sober and a different rate from each other. Time slows down as the sample rate for my perception of time passing increases. Meanwhile, the sample rate of my hearing decreases and I perceive music differently, low frequency tones (and background music) are significantly more prominent I my perception.
hobs 2y ago
It's possible, but completely anecdotally I was in a six car pileup and watched the stuff move from my backseat to the window to smash against it in what felt like 20-30 seconds. I remember clearly having several thoughts in what could not have been more than 1 second between getting hit and my entire car smashing into another at 60 mph. "Oh, that's my kleenex box, dang that's just hanging there huh?" "What's that noise? Oh, its me screaming." "I better hold my self against the steering wheel for the airbag... wait, if I am thinking this that means there's no airbag" I remember watching my seatbelt break and snap across my chest, moving like a languid snake, barely motivated to snap back to the wall. However, many other times in my life in extreme situations nothing like that happened, so I don't know if just jumping off a cliff is enough trauma or fear of death to cause it reliably.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Weird that your seat belt broke, they aren't supposed to do that. Was it damaged previously?
  - hobs 2y ago
    Not sure, I realized later that the car was made in 1986 and was 20 years old at the time of the crash (and so literally didn't come with airbags.) I just figured they were old as hell, and I ended up having to hold myself off the steering wheel with my arms. Ended up bending it significantly, which I can only put up to the time(not much!) that was actually spent transferring energy from me to the wheel.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Steering wheels are designed to bend, for that exact reason.

jimbobimbo 2y ago

The article links to the study about bi-directional communication with lucid dreamers: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00059-2?_returnURL=https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0960982221000592?showall=true https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

photochemsyn 2y ago

The original "how can I tell if we're in a simulation" discussion: https://www.thelucidguide.com/the-butterfly-dream-chuang-tzu-zhua https://www.thelucidguide.com/the-butterfly-dream-chuang-tzu... False awakenings are another aspect of dreams: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/false-awakening https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/false-awakening

MyFirstSass 2y ago
First site: "For the security of our visitors and to avoid abuse of the site, this website runs a zero VPN, Tor, or Proxy. They must have extremely valuable info? Then i checked it through a cache, almost no content, affiliate links, a shop and huge popup. Is that site a complete joke or is this some new anti AI thing?
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  Where is that? I can't find. I know the owner. One of the few contemporary LD teachers you can trust to not give fake info. Still posts videos with clickbait thumbnails on YouTube though. He is not technical at all. There is plenty of content on the site, as well as the archived old LD forum, but the navigation is rather cumbersome, yeah.
  - MyFirstSass 2y ago
    I see. And appreciate all "old web content" though the current setup seems pretty visitor hostile, with anti VPN lockout (you only see if you have VPN), huge popup etc.
romseb 2y ago
As a child, for a few years I had a recurring nightmare with multiple false awakenings, sometimes five or six until I would wake up for real. I would wake up in bed, get up and at a specific point, an overwhelming feeling of impending doom would overcome me. Then at the peak of this emotion, a monster would grab me by my ankles and violently drag me back up the stairs and into bed. I would then wake up and repeat the process. Sometimes, I was not sure anymore if I landed in reality or if this existence will turn into horror again.

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andtheboat 2y ago

"They fulfill fantasies of control, seek personal thrills like flying, have sex with Jeremy Allen White." I really hope someone called Jeremy Allen White reads this.

Bluestein 2y ago
I'm (not) Jerry A. White, and I approve this message.-

crazygringo 2y ago

I frequently have lucid dreams, in that I'm entirely aware of that fact that I'm dreaming while in the dream. What I find interesting, however, is that if I have a dream I forgot to study for my test, or I'm naked at school because I left my clothes somewhere else, or the school play starts tonight and I haven't memorized a single line... the fact that I know I'm dreaming doesn't help at all. Because the problem is that, while lucid dreaming, I have no access to any real-life knowledge or memories. I figure that I'm having the dream because I actually am in school in real life, with an exam I forgot about in the morning. I simply have no access to the fact that I left school many years ago. And if there's a monster behind the door in my dream, it seems entirely plausible in my dream that that's simply because there are monsters in the real world too. And quite often my dreams are related to real-life situations that happened yesterday or are happening tomorrow or this week -- so it's not like I can try to convince myself of some "rule" that dream anxieties are never anything to worry about. So my whole anxious lucid dream I'm just thinking, "boy I really hope that I'm not actually in a play that opens tomorrow night..." And then I wake up and it is suddenly crystal-clear that I haven't been in a high school play in decades. But during my lucid dream, there's absolutely no way of knowing. Curious if this is universal or if other people who lucid dream do always know the details of their actual true reality -- their age, what city and home they live in, current job, etc.

saghm 2y ago
> Curious if this is universal or if other people who lucid dream do always know the details of their actual true reality -- their age, what city and home they live in, current job, etc. I have lucid dreams somewhat frequently since I was maybe 8 or 9 after I started getting prescribed medication to help me sleep (initially it had been almost nightly, but it reduced over the years to the point where it happens maybe a couple times a month now a couple decades later), and generally I do remember the details of my life in lucid dream, but I sometimes have trouble determining whether they're details of my life in the past or the present. If in my dream I'm back at school, it's usually not the case that I don't remember graduating, getting a job, and moving; often times I have a vague sense that all of that had happened, but then some issue was discovered with my records that forced me have to go back and retake a class or two. (This obviously is pretty implausible, but dream logic isn't always airtight!) > What I find interesting, however, is that if I have a dream I forgot to study for my test, or I'm naked at school because I left my clothes somewhere else, or the school play starts tonight and I haven't memorized a single line... the fact that I know I'm dreaming doesn't help at all. Having real world knowledge doesn't always mitigate the "issue" in the dream though; in my lucid dreams, I don't have any control over what happens beyond my own actions, so a teacher expecting me to hand in some assignment won't generally accept "it's a dream so I don't have to" as an excuse. There is a way that knowing that I'm dreaming helps though; I can just choose to wake up! I'm not sure whether being able to forcibly wake up is typical or not for people dreaming lucidly, but I've never had much trouble doing it. Sometimes I'll end up back in the same scenario if I fall back asleep again after though, so it might end up being worth it to suffer through the imaginary misfortune to get the real world benefit of sufficient sleep.

ggeorgovassilis 2y ago

Richard Feynman reports in his biography on his own experiments with lucid dreaming. He found sleep to not be restful enough anymore, found it impossible to switch the lucid part of dreaming off and eventually had a negative experience that caused him to stop.

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ElDji 2y ago
That's funny, I stopped lucid dreaming, exactly for the same reasons : I waked up not rested and stressed, because often I had false awakening happening in series.
Aerbil313 2y ago
Everything is best enjoyed in moderation. The current consensus among the LD community is the same: Lucid dreams aren't as charging as normal ones. There's no scientific definitive answer but many think it's because the prefrontal cortex is 'turned on' in LD while it remains off in normal dreams.
- _def 2y ago
  The question is though, will there be a way to "enforce" lucid dreams? Would be nice to have the option, but as far as I understand it is not really achievable without training and thus getting into degrading sleep quality.

world2vec 2y ago

Every time I realise I'm dreaming I wake up immediately. Would love to lucid dream at least once to know what's it all about.

wruza 2y ago
It’s all about flying and meeting beautiful women.
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
  can confirm ^^
bibelo 2y ago
there are technique to stabilize your dream like rubbing your hands or turning around

altruios 2y ago

The way I lucid dream is to 'stay awake' through the process of falling asleep. There are a few tricks I use... but I don't recommend the experience (It can be... uncomfortable {there is a reason you don't remember the point you loose consciousness}). I don't know if these are universally applicable tricks either. But focusing on a point (visualizing it as actively as you can) seems to be important to staying awake through the process of falling asleep...

smusamashah 2y ago
Yesterday I was a having a very visual trip down the memory lane (2 decade old) while in the process of sleeping. And this memory was triggered by a smell. I was enjoying the memory (an old house and streets I was trying to remember in detail). This didn't make me lucid though, wasn't even trying to be anyway. But having actually followed the process, I can now understand how it can help with lucidity.
cgriswald 2y ago
I’ve been taking magnesium for a couple months now and one thing a I’ve noticed is that the line between wakefulness and asleep has blurred. I will sometimes watch some TV and I’ll be sitting there watching an episode and don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep and this is a dream until weird things start happening in the show. I often imagine floating outside my house (similar to what the article describes) as a method to fall asleep and since starting magnesium my thoughts softly blend into full blown dreams. My dreams in general have been far more lucid. I’ve only noticed one other side effect. I normally experience hypnogogic jerk and since starting magnesium, a few times the jerk itself has pulled me out of the descent into sleep.
wruza 2y ago
Feels like you found yourself some states similar to sleep paralysis.
- altruios 2y ago
  I mean, yes... Everything I've read about sleep paralysis says it happens on waking (and is caused more often by sleeping on your back). Before you fall asleep the dark entity people sometimes feel/see isn't there (yet...).

jowdones 2y ago

When I lucid dream, usually I also have the ability to "fly" and in time I learned one thing. As much as I love to use the "fly" ability to explore, I must not steer too far away from the point I am currently. Otherwise I can examine in quite vivid details the stuff around but if I leap too far it's like my mind says "sorry dude, you've reached end of simulation area, here's where you wake up".

godshatter 2y ago
I learned to look closely at something nearby for a short while before looking around and doing things, this seems to give the simulation more time to load. Maybe because I was new to it.
RandallBrown 2y ago
I've had a handful of lucid dreams and I always try to fly. It works great for a little while but you're right, once you get too far away, it usually wakes you up or sometimes for me the flying just stops working and I come back down.
- dalmo3 2y ago
  > the flying just stops working That's hilarious. I always come back down slowly unless I make an effort to fly up again.
LawrenceKerr 2y ago
Did you try moving & touching stuff while flying far away? The thing about flying very far is that you're probably in the same fixed Superman position, not really moving your dream body anymore. If you don't move, your consciousness shifts awareness towards your physical body and you wake up. Try it next time: just stop & don't move, don't do anything, you're likely to wake up. So doing the opposite, moving your dream body a lot & touching dream stuffs, tends to prolong your dream. That's why teleportation works better for moving to different areas. Funny enough, not moving your body is also how your consciousness shifts and enters the dream state when awake.

Aerbil313 2y ago

Yeah. You can practice lucid dreaming. I was a (not born, learned) lucid dreamer a few years ago, then I got into college and my sleep schedule got messed up, so I don't do it anymore. Had I learned DILD (dream-induced lucid dreaming) techniques I could continue but those require constant daytime effort no matter how little. I was lazy and went with WILD methods, and they work wonders when you have a consistent sleep schedule. Can attest that lucid dreams are as detailed and real as real life. Can't tell the difference. In one of my first attempts, I had a 30 minutes long lucid dream (I was able to precisely measure.). You know the feeling of wonder and awe? You feel it for at most a few minutes at a time usually. I was in constant amazement all through the whole half an hour. Because against my expectations, everything was as real as the real world. The texture of the ground beneath your feet, the feeling of air when you move fast, the taste when you eat. The weight and texture of stuff when you touch, the feeling of your own weight on your feet when you stand. The sun shining, reflections, brightness. Human eye level perfect quality and detail when you look. This feeling of awe didn't went away for me, I still get it when I LD. There was a thread about it recently, I wrote there some more: About learning resources too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399548

mapcars 2y ago

One of the biggest modern day spiritual gurus says that dreaming is just a fluctuation of mind activity during sleep, we can enjoy it but it has no significance in terms of spiritual development.

barber_the_dope 2y ago

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liendolucas 2y ago

Surprised to see that a lot of people experience lucid dreams. Are there any solid techniques to trigger them?

pegasus 2y ago
Lots. The internet is full of them. Most center around making a habit of periodically doing a "reality check" throughout the day, like reading a word from a note and then re-reading it to check whether it changed or not. I carried a note saying "Wake up!" in the pocket and after a few days of maybe a dozen checks a day, the check (like all daily habits) occurred in a dream. The realization when the inevitable discrepancy is discovered is pretty amazing, because it's so completely unexpected and has such deep implications for the experience of the moment. It's definitely worth experimenting with this stuff.
- wruza 2y ago
  My method was “look at your fingers”. It’s easy, cause they are familiar and often in sight by default. I remember first time raising my hands and seeing that.
  - pegasus 2y ago
    I imagine it would be even more shocking when noticed, but possibly easier to go unnoticed - since visually, morphing is continuous in dreams, but word meanings are discrete and can't morph into one another like that. Btw. funny (and fascinating) how "dream-rendering" has similar issues with producing realistic hands as LLMs. Similar with continuity issues.
godshatter 2y ago
I haven't been into lucid dreaming for a while, but I used to use a technique called SSILD that worked great for me. Search for that name and you'll find discussions about it. You basically cycle between (with your eyes shut) "do I see anything abnormal?", "do I hear anything abnormal?" and "do I feel anything abnormal?" and just keep cycling between those, trying not to actually think about them too hard as you are falling asleep. If you're lucky, you'll end up transitioning into a dream straight from waking consciousness (wake induced lucid dream or WILD technique) or, failing that, you will fall asleep and have a much better chance or realizing you are dreaming (dream induced lucid dream or DILD), and failing that if you wake up in the middle of the night you can stay awake for a short while and then go back to sleep and have a good chance to fall into a dream you can become awake in (wake back to bed or WBTB) and if you do end up having a lucid dream and you wake up if you stay still you might just fall back into it (dream exit induced lucid dream or DEILD). I had quite a few lucid dreams using this technique, but it has a drawback that you end up having "false awakenings" where you think you just woke up but are actually still dreaming. I've had 7 or 8 of those in a row before. If you have a good reality test (my go-to was holding my nose closed and seeing if breathing lightly would still work) then they are kind of nice because now you have just become lucid again and go do whatever you want. The whole thing got to be too mentally exhausting for me and I was not feeling refreshed when I woke up so I stopped doing it. I occasionally try to start it up again, but I haven't had the gumption to continue it for very long. As you can see, there is a huge rabbit hole you can fall down if you look into this stuff, and a lot of places on the internet where people discuss it or give pointers. Also different people have better luck with different techniques. This one just happened to be my thing, I guess.

munificent 2y ago

I broke my ankle and the pain from that and the related surgeries has messed up my sleep in some interesting ways: When the pain was at its worst, I basically wasn't getting any sleep at all and after a few days, I was practically delirious. I had a few times where in the middle of the day, while awake, I would start dreaming. Not like a daydream, but not exactly falling asleep either. Hard to explain but it's like the boundary between "this is what I'm perceiving about the real world" and "this is what I'm imagining" got very thin and permeable. My mind would wander off into dreamspace and I'd think it was real until I would realize "No, that's some crazy dream shit." I also ended up with several days of nerve pain. I would be fine sometimes for hours and then completely out of the blue I'd get an intense (like 9/10 on a pain scale) stabbing pain in my ankle. Like someone snuck up and nailed me with an electric cattle prod. When this happened while I was asleep, I would be jolted awake. But, also, my dreaming brain would try to incorporate the pain into the dream somehow. And since those two things were happening simultaneously, I would be yanked awake with a head still full of some crazy dream involving nerve pain that I was actually feeling. Sometimes, it would take a good ten minutes of sitting there to sort out what the hell was going on versus what was just dream nonsense. Overall, would not recommend.

yokoprime 2y ago

I usually fall asleep fast, sleep through the night and wake up without any recollection of dreaming. I guess it’s usually a good thing, but it feels like im missing this whole thing a lot of other people experience.

septic-liqueur 2y ago
Me too. I did have a couple of LD in my early life and the experience was amazing that I remember it to this day. But I can't seem to be able to experience it again
simion314 2y ago
>I usually fall asleep fast, sleep through the night and wake up without any recollection of dreaming. I guess it’s usually a good thing, but it feels like im missing this whole thing a lot of other people experience. Probably depends on people, but dreams can mess your entire next day up, it does not happen often to me but I have bad dreams like I lost my child in a crowed, or something bad happened and someone I loved died. This emotional pain in the dream I think causes something in the body to trigger sicne the next day I am still feeling like shit. Then you might have good dreams, where all is perfect and happey and you have the thing you desired but then you wake up and you realized that it is not real and things are not good. And for soem god dam reason like many others there is the dream with the exams.

zackmorris 2y ago

I've been thinking about the flip side of this, the incomprehensible waking life. For me, daily life is an unending series of setbacks, negative reinforcement loops and disappointments. I know going into nearly all endeavors that they will end in some kind of failure, but decide to be brave and enter them anyway. I understand that this is the opposite of manifestation, and that I am creating self-fulfilling prophecies. But feel that a neural net would create a model of reality that matches my lived experience of suffering, so there's a basis in fact here. That this is truly all there is unless something changes. A small example: I decided to go on the Bacon app to see what walk-on gigs are available in my city to raise some quick cash. There are 2: garbage man and warehouse worker. Now, I knew going in that the odds were grim, and that the gigs would be things that nobody wants to do. Had I gone in with a positive mindset, and imagined fun afternoons helping people set up for events or something, is that what I would have received? I just don't know. I've experienced both, but an overwhelming percentage of the time, the negative outcome matches the prediction of my negative mindset. Another small example: the other day I helped an acquaintance with handyman work for $100 for an afternoon, but got a traffic ticket on the way home that skimmed away 2/3 of what I had earned. It was an uncanny reflection of my experience of hustling, similar to movies like The Pursuit of Happyness. Two steps forward and one step back. Another day older and deeper in debt. No win until the end - but the epiphany never comes. Where i'm going with this is that what we think of as "the real world" is the dream. Or in my case, the nightmare, or at the very least the night terror. Whereas in our dreams, we can be anything and do anything. Not only that, our subconscious provides rich plot lines far more creative than what our ego comes up with as it co-creates this 3D realm. I often wonder if the point of daily suffering is actually to dream in the spirit world where source consciousness originated. Except in my case, my dreams are mostly night terrors as well, spilled over from the suffering of my lived experience. I know why, it has to do with sleep apnea, and living a sober life after decades of self-medicating, and finally doing shadow work in middle age. But I just wish that the sun would rise on this long night of the soul, because my basic beliefs in hope for a better tomorrow are growing more tattered with every news cycle and seeing the very worst in humanity expressed in the most powerful and influential people, who are unwittingly bringing about hell on Earth.

zw123456 2y ago

I have been lucid dreaming for many years and about five years ago, I started keeping my tablet on the nightstand and when I wake up, if I remember it, which I generally do, I use speech to text to record it. If I don't do that I often forget them. I have categories, the movie type are like 3rd person and it plays out like I am watching a movie. A ride along dream is like first person, I feel like I am riding along with someone else, but I know it's not me, but I know their thoughts. The me dream is when I am me in the dream. Some of them repeat multiple times over several nights In all cases I know I am dreaming. I started turning some of them into short stories. No idea where some of them come from. Often it seems like I just tuned into someone's story, but the subconscious is a funny thing.

dalmo3 2y ago
I have a very similar experience. A worthy distinction is that in my dreams I'm either a) fully aware it's a dream but have no control or b) fully in control of myself without realising it's a dream. Only once I was both aware and in control, but it didn't last long.

frank_bb 2y ago

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PaperOliver 2y ago

After I learned to lucid dream real life became much less interesting in comparison. It felt like I came alive at night in my sleep, everything in the dream world was so vivid. I learned I could create any environment I wanted, like when Neo trains in the matrix. I would practice things (like tai chi) but it is a bit boring when the other characters don't have free will, so it was like interacting with robots. The end game for me was going behind the curtain - into the dream control room. It was a room filled with screens each showing a dream I had experienced, even abstract dreams from the age of 3 or 4. From here I could enter any of the dreams through the screen. In the room was a man, like Morgan Freeman (it was like in the film The Dark Knight where he tracks everyones phone), he was the only person I ever met while lucid dreaming who seemed like a real person. After some visits to this dream control room, I overcame my addiction to lucid dreaming, I stopped being active in my dreams and watched them like someone would watch a film. I knew it was a dream but I chose not to participate. At this time I was also experimenting with astral projection. I really wanted to have a shared out-of-body experience which could be validated. I got my flatmate to place things in certain areas around our flat to see if I could find them while meditating, but I couldn't. Being deeply involved in spirituality really distances you from most people in our society. I gave up meditating to better connect with the kind of people I am surrounded by.