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.
First, it's usually very easy to tell if you're dreaming. If you're sober and you even have to think about whether you're dreaming then you can safely say you are. That's hard for some people to do, so you might want to use a more tangible method. If you pinch your nose and try to breathe through it, you will be able to breathe in almost all dreams (you can never 100% prove awakeness, but we only care about proving asleepness), and you will never be able to breathe if you're awake. So if you find you can breathe through a pinched nose, you know you're dreaming. If you don't want to pinch your nose in public all the time, you could look at your hand instead. Count the number of fingers and ask yourself if they are straight or deformed. The dreaming mind is really bad about accurately generating five-fingered realistic hands, but we never notice unless we deliberately look at our hands in a dream. This method is almost as surefire as the nose method.
The second part of the method is that if you make it a habit to check to see if you're dreaming whenever a certain kind of event comes up, let's say whenever you walk through a doorway, that behavior will carry over to your dreams once it has become a habit. Once you walk through a doorway in your dream, you will do the nose or hand test and discover that you're dreaming. It's fine to be skeptical of science when it sounds too good to be true, but seriously give it a try. Lucid dreaming is a lot of fun, and there are also a lot of practical benefits. One that comes to mind is being able to literally work out problems in your sleep. It's sometimes hard to keep text constant on a dream whiteboard, but you have the advantage of being able to manipulate text with the snap of your fingers--something that you can't even do yet with vim or emacs. Another advantage of lucid dreaming is nutrition and weight loss. It's a lot easier to say no to that piece of cake now if you'll have the opportunity to eat it while you sleep. Dream food tastes about the same as real food.
P.S. The experience of astral projection (in the sense of having a highly real-feeling dream in which you can roll out of your physical body and walk around your room, which looks virtually identical to how it does in real life) is actually a real phenomenon that's rather easy to induce using a variation of wake-initiated lucid dreaming (WILD). The vast majority of people who claim to achieve this are telling the truth. While there is no reason to accept the non-scientific explanation that they're actually leaving their body in some astral plane in real life, the actual experience they're reporting is very real.
That is a rather uncompelling argument. How many people claim to be able to do something has very little to do with whether or not that thing is possible. Many, many people claim to have been helped by homeopathic remedies, and none of them have. Relatively few people claim to be able to walk on their hands, but many of them can.
"Number of claims" is evidence, but it is such weak evidence that its effect on your beliefs should almost always be overwhelmed by the effect of your prior. The plausibility of astral projection and homeopathy is incredibly low, and the weak evidence given by "number of adherents" doesn't significantly budge the needle.
On the other hand, having had personal experience with lucid dreams, your appraisal of the plausibility of regular, practiced lucid dreaming should be rather high. If, then, you encounter even a dozen people who claim to have done this successfully, you should believe that is probably possible. That is, of course, unless you have some appropriately strong justification based on your understanding of neuroscience for why it should not be possible.
>When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you do.
I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The part of your brain that perceives being in control is not the part of the brain that issues commands. So if we allow that it is possible to believe you have control over your actions without actually having control over your actions, then we must accept that this is in fact always the case, even while we are awake. The belief that you are an atomic unit which simultaneously perceives and manipulates the world is a form of essentialism which we can pretty well rule out by now.
Edit: I should also add that "lucid dreaming" doesn't technically imply control; it just means you're aware that you're in a dream.
The websites I've seen about it make out like there is a spiritual aspect - but that's just hippies trying to make it seem important.
But I have also had a complete different kind of experience, one that is more realistic than lucid dreaming. It feels as real as being awake. I believe that this is what many call the astral. I can count the times I had such experiences with one hand. It's very rare for me and it requires such an effort that I fail most of the times. And by effort I mean not acting on the different desires that come during the day and trying to understand what triggers them and dismissing them without emotion.
Second, folks claiming to astral travel are, as far as I can tell, just lucid dreaming. Otherwise, we'd see more cults doing amazing things because they could go around and view secret plans, codes, passwords, and whatnot.
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.
I'm not joking either.
The article mentioned the Hindu dream-yoga, the practice of which was meant to make you ask such questions on your "waking" life.
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.
I read through the whole submitted article, and I didn't see any reporting on rigorous study of the waking state health or performance of long-term lucid dreamers. All we see in the article is anecdotes, summed up by
"For Hobson, the neuroscientist, the benefits of being able to achieve lucid dreaming are much simpler.
"'We don't really know if there are real psychological advantages, but I can tell you that it has huge entertainment value. It's like going to the movies and not paying for your ticket.'"
An issue to consider whenever participants on Hacker News discuss self-help strategies is how reliable the research base is. People who only use the University of Google Library to do research will often find websites by advocacy groups that are pushing a solution that may not have been tested. Fortunately, Google's own director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, has written a guide to reading research reports
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
that reminds us all about what to look for when someone reports some new, amazing treatment. Check out whether lucid dreaming has really been well evaluated with sufficiently large sample sizes, control groups, and other marks of good research.
I think a writing intervention
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/H...
may do more for many people in high-creativity careers than lucid dreaming. There is a better research base, by far, for the writing self-help than for lucid dreaming. Try it and see how it works.
I've always been able to enjoy interesting movie-like experiences by DAY-dreaming, and it's not explained here why anyone should alter their sleep cycle (which has known risks, up to and including psychotic symptoms) just to be entertained. A lot of researchers over the years have done a lot of research on human dreams in particular and sleep cycles more generally. Where is there any evidence that lucid dreaming is helpful rather than harmful, long-term?
Best wishes for much success in improving your personal insight and problem-solving.
I've tried it a few times and it's the same every time. To me the slightly more fun lucid dreams are not worth the exhausted feeling in the morning.
After a few days, I was able to control most of my dreams. I never had full control of those (there was a moment where something got out of control) but I liked the experience. I think the best experience I had dreaming was flying.
In any case, I always woke up fully rested (which might have to do with not being able to control it 100%).
When I could control my dreams I would probably just stop whatever my brain is trying to figure out and start a sex dream.
That is laughable ignorance my friend. The Wake Back To Bed method might mess your sleep schedule up a little, but you're only supposed to be up for about 30 minutes or so then you go back to sleep. That's not even the most common way of lucid dreaming. To say people have ruined their lives trying to lucid dream is, frankly, completely ridiculous and I'm embarrassed for the HN community for upvoting this post.
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.
Unfortunately, clocks and text seem to work in my dreams. Another reality check is covering your mouth and nose and trying to breathe. Supposedly, this is a good test as in a dream you'll keep breathing. Plus, it's unobtrusive, unlike turning lights on and off at offices and other people's houses.
Checking global light level control (light switches) is, like you say, not unobtrusive. But I've tested, with moderate success, using more subtle lighting features. Window blinds, for example, typically have far more subtle shades of light and shadowing than gets rendered in my dream worlds. Paying a few seconds of focused attention to a window or lamp shade doesn't stand out in most social situations.
I am feeling a lot of envy reading about everyone's experiences in lucid dreaming. :(
Don't be too disturbed by the weird imaginings. If they're particularly weird you could probably write a modestly successful Bizarro genre story. (In my favorites is http://www.amazon.com/Ass-Goblins-Auschwitz-Cameron-Pierce/d... which may be banned in Germany.)
A quote: "We don't have thoughts, we are thoughts. Thoughts are not responsible for the machinery that happens to think them." --John K Clark.
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.
I regularly have episodes of sleep paralysis anyway, almost any time I sleep on my back. The kind with terror, hallucinations, coming out of it bellowing and attacking things that aren’t there, the whole bit. So unfortunately lucid dreaming isn’t for me.
It’s all kinds of fun though, and I miss it. :(
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).
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
But that's a bit too low bandwidth for me ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
People may also be interested in r/luciddreaming over on Reddit[2].
1. http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/2011/02/26/lucid-dreaming
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.
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.
- RadioLab is a great podcast, they did a lucid dreaming episode: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jan/23/wake...
- After hearing said podcast, I wrote a quick twitter hack to occasionally ask if you're in a dream (one of the techniques): https://twitter.com/#!/isdreaming
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-pod...
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.
