That being said, I eventually "gave up" lucid dreaming after 10 years or so. At a gut level it felt like sleep and dreams are best left to the subconscious -- a neural defrag, if you will. Personally I feel much more rested now that I make no effort to remember, much less control, my dreams.
I am more rested, and more awake the next day. It continues to enrich my life in many ways. But yes, it's just another arbitrary choice, we're both going by 'gut' instinct.
in my first LD at 10, i built a go-kart from tools I created on the wall (where the school black-board was), and then flew out of the window on it - Pretty much a win for a 10 yr old.
I also practice LD
This comment struck me as odd, since I thought LD wasn't something you can induce on your own, but when I Googled how to lucid dream I came across instructions for how to lucid dream: http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream
Another question: has anyone had the feeling when they are in a dream that they can't move? I want to force myself to roll over to the other side and something invisible holds me there. I noticed this happens mostly when it's cold.
If we were meant to do that, evolution-wise, they we'd be doing it at some point in our evolutionary history. Instead we sleep and dream normally, and during that stage we have a quite good grasp of the mechanisms involved and how beneficial it is.
I haven't really used it for anything very useful though, the laws and conditions of today makes it a bit difficult. But it can give a glimpse of how things could be in the future, when computers are directly connected to the brain and lucid dreams or psychedelics are not really relevant any more.
That person's experience could be a result of pre-conceived notions about 'effort vs reward', or any other number of intersecting belief systems. Who knows?
It is unique to everyone, and can be learnt in weeks or years depending on who you are (unless you are comfortable inducing it with gamma waves)
Do not rely on anecdotal evidence from others, only trust your own experience in matters that relate to the inner workings of your life. Find out for yourself if it's useful or not.
... it's, at the very least, an interesting adventure.
Of course, you never know how much you'd miss a thing until its gone. In this case, I didn't even know it was a thing before it started fading away.
I'd certainly let my brain be zapped to get this superpower back.
I have lost it and it is something I would like to get back.
Many were tied with sleep paralysis, which didn't give me the fear that most people associate with it. Sometimes I could extract my preceptual self from my body and experience walking around the room in a weird lucid dream world. All while simultaneously being aware of my pysical body lying in bed.
I would love to have those dreams again.
As an aside, because of being a naturally lucid dreamer, nightmares confuse me and on the rare event I have them -- once or twice a decade -- they freak me out a lot more. That absolute loss of control of one's subconscious mind is near unfathomable to me. I can remember being six or seven and my sister telling me about a nightmare she had and me being absolutely confused about them; the thoughts of being injured in a dream was just something that happened in movies.
So when I gain "control", the initial scenario is set. Sometimes, it's quite a fascinating "twist" on recent real-life events. Other times it's Alice and the Wonderland style craziness.
Often I think I'm in a partially Lucid dream. I know I'm dreaming, I can mostly do what I want (including completely changing the scenario) but I am also not in control of everything that happens, particularly what characters appear or what they say/do in response to me. It's a bit like living in an alternative universe.
The strangest aspect is how realistic the characters are, particularly the real-life people. I'll be talking to a friend, and get a conversation that is so like that person that I'll often forget that it was said in a dream. This has led to some strange real-life conversations, lol.
I believe that your brain is rendering the reality for your consciousness even when you are awake. There is a lot of filtering and processing between your senses and your consciousness. For instance, your eyes produces a lot of noise which is filtered away. They have a blind spot [1], but your consciousness is not even aware of it! So, what you see when you are awake is not really the noisy distorted vision that your eyes have.
In addition to that low level smoothing and filtering, your subconscious has reconstructed completely the reality for your conscious mind: "This is because our brains consist of two relatively distinct regions. One, the cognitive unconscious, makes informed guesses and delivers them to the second, conscious part, which supports our awareness of what we are seeing while knowing little or nothing of how what we see has been constructed." [2]
"All we’re actually doing is seeing an internal model of the world; we’re not seeing what’s out there, we’re seeing just our internal model of it. And that’s why, when you move your eyes around, all you’re doing is updating that model." [3]
So, when your are dreaming, the subconscious mind is just "rendering" something else than reality for your conscious mind.
[1] http://io9.com/5804116/why-every-human-has-a-blind-spot---an...
[2] http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2604
[3] http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/7722763662/david-eagleman-on...
I always wonder about this. It occurs to me that it may seem to perfectly real because the brain is able to reproduce all, or close to all, of the features it would use to try to classify that object in real life, which would lead to it seeming like a 100% match, or 100% real.
I guess you could think of it as passing a dataset back into a machine learning algorithm that was just trained using that dataset.
It also makes me wonder what would happen if you try to conjure a specific animal or place that you know a little about, but are fuzzy details. Would you brain feel like "yup. this is the thing because it's absolutely everything I know about the thing; it's perfect" or would it have problems?
Of course, I'm not an expert in brains or machine learning, so this is just my wild speculation on my thought.
http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/52-ways-to-have-lucid...
I know it's not a 'quick fix' - but (no offence intended, just IMHO) it feels rather disrespectful to randomly flood the brain with chemicals to make it 'perform.' The chemistry in there is extremely complex, I am terrified to mess around with it.
Much the same way I wouldn't dive into a complex dev project randomly changing methods, unless I knew the larger scope.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00...
In dreams you can have the same experiences you have in waking life but even more so. You can take these experiences with you when you are done dreaming. Lucid dreaming takes this even further. You can imagine a problem you have is a tangible object (a bug or something) in your dream and squish it. Although this seems purely symbolic, you can take the feeling of having dealt with a problem into waking life, which will give you more energy to do the same in your interactions with waking life.
Not to mention in lucid dreams you can fly everywhere you want to go, you can have sex with whoever you want however you want, you can be a bear or a toad or a tree, you can be three of yourself at the same time, you can slow down time, you can travel to the bottom of the ocean and you can see distant planets or the inside of a star. Is it real? Yes, because you are actually having these experiences, even if you are the only one having them.
Some people are terrified of these experiences, perhaps with their own 'demons' to deal with. Others, many others, consider it one of the grooviest gifts imaginable :)
It's a unique thing, individual, but as it gets more known - we're going to see people trying to fit it into a simple box (as we always do) - and nothing useful will come of that.
Re: Gamma waves, hmm - yeah, isn't that like reading a frequency coming off a CRT and then trying to retransmit that frequency back to derive the original image? You need a serious understanding of the device to be able to do that. Perhaps it might be able to help 'induce' the state with the individual's help - maybe.
Maybe, maybe not. Averages work for some things, not so much for others. Suppose 4-5 are no-fooling-definitely-lucid dreams, and 1-3 are questionable. If the average is being driven by a few dreams falling into '5' and otherwise scores are unchanged, you'd get a worthwhile effect but only a small shift in average on your 1-5 scale. I'd want to read http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/... more carefully looking at how the overall rating distribution looks split by condition and whether the rating scale is masking a binary effect.
Awfully, the standard deviations of almost every item in their validation study [1, Table 1] is greater than the means --in some cases even twice as big--, which themselves are very low (the majority are below 2, and several are below 1). This is, at a minimum, strongly indicative of bimodality --which would make sense since, among other things, participants were drawn mostly from Bonn University's lucid dreaming student club [p.11]. As a matter of fact, they report they threw away two data sets (!) precisely because of "extreme answering style (all items were scored as 0 or 5)" [ibid].
Why they didn't heed these warning signs (and at the very least use medians instead of means from then on) is beyond me.
[1] http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/...
For me this is really exhausting for three reasons:
1. the brain needs to properly sleep 2. they are so rich of details 3. they condense in 7/8 hours maybe 5/10 years of life
Basically they are what I think is a kind of parallel universe. I'm used to tell the entire "dream" to my GF. She always been astonished by them. They seems absolutely unrelated to anything I saw hear etc... during the day, they are in some case "boring" in the sense that I'm dreaming me in a totally different life, job etc... nothing "exciting" or "strange".
(Depending on how long one played, there are overlays of the game in normal vision for quite a while. Or your brain is trying to do the pattern matching of the game to normal objects. (I've seen reports that people's brains were trying to combine cars of the same colour for example.))
I'll pick a Stanley Parable any day over Garry's Mod.
I played around shooting things for awhile but it was draining to keep control so I gave up and became batman, was knocked off a bridge, and broke my back on a cement pillar. I woke up screaming "You just killed Batman!".
>Now if we look to see the scores they gave for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they had, we find that the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively.
I don't understand. A score of 0.6 for insight means, at best, 40% strongly disagreed that they knew they were dreaming and 60% perhaps moderately disagreed (score=1). Some higher scores for the successes would result in even more than 40% strongly disagreeing that they knew they were awake. I could see it having an effect for a small number of people, but how does that translate into "triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time."
"Despite the robust methodology, I think these headlines are getting carried away. Here’s why. Lucid dreaming was defined by higher scores in participants’ feelings of insight (knowing that they were dreaming); dissociation (taking a third person perspective); and control (being able to shape events). I looked up the paper where the researchers first described their scale for measuring these factors. If I understand correctly, the participants rated their experience of these three factors on a scale of 0 (strongly disagree that I had such an experience) to 5 (strongly agree). Now if we look to see the scores they gave for how much dream insight, dissociation and control they had, we find that the averages for the gamma stimulation condition are around 0.6, 1.3, and 0.5 respectively."
-The internet.
