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.
I’ve explored it in my 30s and it wasn’t like you described. Once I’m aware, I can change the plot by soft transition, remove the eerie elements, somewhat control flights, etc. But not too much because something monitors “glitches the matrix” and disconnects me for cheating. Not that I didn’t know who I am or what is or isn’t absurd, but thinking about it long enough wakes me up. I believe your lucidness is not too deep or something. Maybe you just found a way to see dreams in which you believe it’s lucid but it’s really not? Maybe this whole lucid dreaming thing is just a coincidence - we remember being aware, but it’s just a dream of us being aware, and mine for some reason has this “not too much” rule.
This completely. I learned early on to not get excited, and to not immediately do the things I want to do, e.g. fly at breakneak speed into space, but gently learn to hover and then build speed and to undetail my surroundings so that a change in speed won't be too jarring that I wake up.
Exactly. If I find myself in a school taking an exam I did not study for I have to realize I’m dreaming, remember I have total control of my surroundings, stand up, walk out of the classroom while thinking about where I want to go. Sometimes the dream throws roadblocks like “I can’t find the door out of this classroom.” The trick when a roadblock happens is to remain clam, remain confident, and find an alternative “Oh yea, the door is behind me.” If I begin losing control I often begin losing lucidity. If I exert too much control (Let’s just walk through the wall, I can do anything) then I will wake up.
I think that depends upon the dream space you find yourself in. If it is an internal dream space for yourself, you tend to have more control (if you do have control).
However, I've been in many shared spaces that have varying rules on how much things can be changed. Many of them are what I describe as "sim" spaces. There are also spaces where it is procedurally-generated -- for example, deliberately taking a path you know has not been used, and the whole space pauses, as things are procedurally generated to create that new area on the fly.
Finally, it's a two way street. Connection to a space has as much to do with how your consciousness is attuned to that space; trying to change the environment too much is as much as your consciousness shifting out of alignment with that space, and disconnecting as it is the space resisting changes.
As an example, I remember one interesting experience where I was talking to someone. Three people entered the space, with their own (subconcious) idea of things, which created changes in the environment to fit their consciousness state. It's similar to how Will Wight described things in his Traveler's Gate series, when someone from one realm goes into another, and that other realm starts morphing towards the first realm. I don't think those three knew what they were doing, and it was kinda rude.
Hi hosh, you mention shared dream space, how do you know for certain the others are real dreamers and not just imagined, anticipated or dreamed ones by your own consciousness?
If they were real this would imply solid proof of ESP - which I think would be all over the news, or at least mentioned in the Noema magazine article by Claire Evans.
Is there a subculture of dream parapsychologists publishing this in underground channels I am not aware of? Are these hypothetical dream parapsychologists using scientific rigor and peer review I wonder? Or do people 'just know'?
You mention "procedurally generated" and the dream "sim" space pausing because of computation, I am working in IT and can't square that with with a dream space taking place in the mind.
The mind doesn't operate like a computer or has procedures that take so much time that the dream space is paused. My dreams do not pause. How do you know the pause itself is not your imagination of an imagined procedurally generated dream scene? The idea of perceived reality as computational simulation was popularized by the The Matrix, that this is a popular metaphor doesn't mean shared lucid dreaming are computed somehow.
Because of these questions I wondered if this comment is LLM generated or a kind of fantasy or metaphor. After reading your profile this doesn't seem to be the case, you are serious and generally knowledgable about matters of consciousness. I am puzzled.
Sometimes I see threads here on HN related to the occult or the very weird spaces psychonauts explore and I forget the audience I am talking to. I generally have to compartmentalize; this is the kind of stuff I talk to in other communities, forums, and private Discord channels, not here. I would have thought other lucid dreamers here would have encountered this kind of stuff, but I guess not. What I said here is relatively tame compared to the weirdness you can get diving into this.
Put it this way, permaculture is weird for all but a minority of folks here, even if it stays within the bounds of known science. This stuff with consciousness is the kind of hill people die on.
I don’t know if you really want to jump into this rabbit hole. There are many entrances, and given the reception, I am reluctant to speak further. But if you are really curious, Hank Wesselman’s work can be a good starting point. One of his books specifically talks about “reenchantment”, in reference to the disenchantment of the scientific inquiries of the 19th century that lead us to our modern worldview.
Thanks for the pointer hosh, as a psychonaut, vajrayana practitioner reading books from for example bernardo kastrup, zoe7's void books, robert anton wilson, dean radin and robert bruce I can relate.
I've had various interesting experiences and entertained a variety of 'reality tunnels' and am for sure in favor of 're-enchantment'. Still the comment didn't compute for me, I understand and respect your reluctance!
> 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.
This is referred to as different levels of lucidity. While lucidity is technically a binary state (know or don't know), it can sometimes be better described as a spectrum where you can "know" but not fully understand what it means.
Some levels you might think of are: Thinking it's 100% real. Having a "feeling" something is off. "Feeling" its a dream. Consciously expressing its a dream. Understanding its a dream. And then actually understanding the full consequences that its a dream.
Usually this comes down to a matter of thought clarity, not memories. If you understand its a dream, then it has no consequences period. Even if you think the worry is real, you still can't affect the physical world in a dream. Perhaps you could try practicing/studying in your dream, and writing stuff down when you awake, or just forcing yourself awake in order to study/practice more. However, outside of that, nothing you do affects the real world, so there's no logical reason to worry about it, even if you don't have the memories to understand "oh its entirely fabricated".
As for others, it obviously depends on the dream, as each have their own level of lucidity, but I can personally say I know basic facts that don't require any specific memory, like my dad being alive is impossible, because he passed. I probably couldn't take a quiz though. I can also remember specific goals, though again, more as a natural feeling than a specific memory.
If you want to try to get out of the dream's story, you have to be willing to accept that if something is impossible, no story can explain it; it has to just not be real.
When I have lucid dream, I know that i'm sleeping in my bed (street location, city) and which day of week it is. So I have access to real life knowledge.
So I believe there is different level of lucidity, depending on each individuals.
Yes, I used to practice lucid dreaming and parent post's description is different than what I experienced. When entering the lucid state I was similarly fully (or nearly fully) context aware.
My problem was always maintaining the lucid state. Doing anything to change the dream risked awakening early and I never got great at maintaining the state for long.
I used to have lucid dreams regularly until I was 17, until I told a friend and never had a "real" one since. I am not sure if it is connected.
I mostly used it to avoid nightmares as a child, unfortunately after a while, I got psychological nightmares instead. Waking up multiple times within a dream (There is no Limbo from Inception for me) with something really stressful having happened (dead body under the bed and police knocking on the door, it's just a dream there are no police, but the body is there, type stuff).
I still have partially aware lucid-dreams occationally.
Same for the most part. I get the rare "super lucid" dream where it's almost 1:1 to being awake, but 99% of the time it's like how you describe.
I think this is because our brains will happily "predict the next token". We've never evolved to have to consider doing anything else. So when you're asleep and placed into a scenario with some context associated with yourself, the brain does the natural thing and performs prediction.
Mine are like yours in that I am never certain where and when I am in real life. But they don't last very long, I become too conscious and wakeup or just go with the flow and forget being lucid. They rarely last very long to think and experiment.
But in situations like yours, I am never sure where I am in my real life. I know that its a dream and I am sleep, but where and when are never certain.
I've had a handful of clear lucid dreams with different levels of awareness/control. In most of them I know that there's no real consequences but I rarely try things that would seem dangerous/extreme. One time I was flying and knew it was a dream, I could control how/where I was flying but for whatever reason I couldn't fly above a certain height like there was yet another unconscious limit to my lucid dream control. At least in that one I was trying and testing what I could do in the dream.
In most other cases after I wake up, I think to myself I knew I was dreaming why didn't I try more stuff?! Waking up from lucid dreaming can be very smooth fade-out/fade-in and sometimes I can extend the lucid dream state after partially waking up by reimagining the world I was leaving then on finally waking up I just wish I could have stayed longer but is no surprise at all.
> 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.
> 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.
REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep has paralysis on every part of your body except one part: Your eyes. As such, anyone can indeed force themselves away by attempting to open their eyes. Note though that you can "open" your eyes and it still be a dream, so you have to be sure open your eyes in real life, which requires actually physically moving the muscles.
There is of course also other ways of doing it, but this is probably the most universal and has an associated logic to it.
Similar to my experience. I also find my control of my body is still somewhat linked to my real body.
For example, one way of maintaining and strengthening the lucid experience is supposedly spinning around in place with your arms spread. When I do that, I find a dream sensation that feels a bit like my arms trying to move out from under my pillow or caught in the sheets. I then wake up shortly after that.
Other times I'll know I'm lucid and can do some tricks, but still feel a bit limited, whether by the dream or my beliefs of what I think I can do in the dream. I cannot manifest scenery or people. Mostly I can get a small hop glide for flying, sometimes I can shoot a magic projectile. This may be due to limited control and practice.
I hurt my hand once when I had a dream I was playing basketball and I woke up in the middle of throwing a 3-pointer - so I "jumped" and raised my hands in my bed and hit my hand against the wall.
> Mostly I can get a small hop glide for flying
I can do that very often in dreams, even when I don't realize I'm dreaming and the dream is about something completely different - somehow I often remember that it's a "superpower" I have. I have to run very fast and jump and then if I focus I can slow down the fall and eventually start to ascend. Feels very weird but also very "physical" - I have a lot of intertia and can't decide where I want to fly - just very slowly add some acceleration going up.
Did you ever try though? Did you try to initiate a lucid dream with the conscious intention of recalling your waking state?
A lot of limits in lucid dreams are entirely self-imposed and often broken through or bypassed with conscious intention.
I participated in lucid dream research years ago, and definitely could recall exactly where I was sleeping and more details about my waking state, while executing the experiment task inside the lucid dream.
Interesting. I lucid dream quite frequently, and not only am I perfectly aware of my waking reality, but I have full dual body control. Like if I’m flying around but I can tell that my real leg is uncomfortable I can make the adjustment without thinking twice about it.
This is fascinating. I had a period where I was really trying to be able to lucid dream but never could. It’s interesting that this sounds so much like my normal dreams, but just adding that you do realize it’s a dream. I didn’t think it would be so similar.
They aren't always. I got lucky one time, I read about lucid dreaming techniques and when I fell asleep was able to use one. The dream was otherwise a nightmare but when it became lucid that stopped being a consideration. What I remember is immediately trying to fly, succeeding somewhat, then finding that my attempts to exert control over the dream were waking me up (which I guess is a not uncommon experience).
As a kid, I detected it to be a dream when I was reading something in a dream. The text kept changing. That was the start. You will have to notice something in a dream which can not be real (for you in your dream, because its perfectly normal for a watch to become TV and people to change their faces)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
The hypothesis here is that bungee jumping -> stress -> slowed perception of time -> increased ocular frame rate -> increased ability to perceive short frames. It's either difficult or impossible to properly test for stress, perception, and ocular frame rate (whatever that's called), so you use the ends of the chain.
If you get a positive result with your wacky experiment, then you go back and control for confounding variables. If you get a negative result, you can't really conclude anything other than you need more grant money to do some other click bait.
This is just how the business of science works. It's sort of like the economy. You try a bunch of random things as quickly as possible and follow up on what looks promising. Or, like in this case, you just try to do click bait and you skip even really bothering with delivering value at all. It's stupid and I don't like it either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yep. During the first parts of sleep your body locks to prevent you from acting out your dreams.
Here are a few:
When your body locks up, test it. try to use as much force as you can without 'breaking' that lock... it keeps you in the present moment and 'close to being able to move'...
The standard: focus on your breathing is also applicable.
What has helped the most is imagining a dot, and moving that dot around, changing its color, moving it along the z-direction (closer). Focusing your mind on that keeps it active.
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...).
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had a dream like that a few months ago. Woke up around 5 times in my supposed bed. Each wakeup became more and more realistic but there was always something out of place like my lamp suddenly not being there or my door being open which then would make me "wake up" again. I was pretty damn conscious/lucid by the last wakeup but I didn't realize I was dreaming until I turned on the light, turned on the TV, switched to YouTube, selected a video, watched some of it and saw the video controls being wrong.
Being aware of me having woken up so many times already at this point and this also being fake gave me the biggest sense of dread I've felt in a long long time. Luckily then I actually woke up for real.
I have the same style of dream too. Except it's not scary just annoying. I dream my alarm went off, I got up, got ready and then boom, my alarm is backing going off, "oh that was just a dream", cycle repeats. This happens most of the night until I eventually wake up for real 2-3 minutes before my alarm actually goes off. This will also happen as I'm in some other dream. Like the first iteration, I'm dreaming something weird and the alarm wakes me up, but it's just a dream wake up. Annoying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's pretty easy. If you're the type of person who rarely dreams, it takes about a month or so.
First consciously cultivate interest in your own dreams (through dream journaling, and consciously looking forward to your dreams before sleep). That's the basis.
Then, if it doesn't happen spontaneously, to force a breakthrough you can always set multiple alarms (tip: a smart watch with a vibratory alarm, or... make a baby), to wake yourself and keep yourself on the edge of sleep - into that hypnopompic state (between 2-4 AM works best for most people). It takes a lot of effort, concentration & patience. The only thing about this way of entering a lucid dream, is that you're likely to consciously experience sleep paralysis first, and many people don't like that even though it's harmless and a perfect gateway into lucid dreams.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.