Well dang, I wrote a whole three paragraph comment about how much this sounded like woo before I looked deeper into this. Usually I expect this kind of thing to be about a consumer product ripping...
Well dang, I wrote a whole three paragraph comment about how much this sounded like woo before I looked deeper into this. Usually I expect this kind of thing to be about a consumer product ripping people off, but it appears that this is about a field that is going through a lot of study and experimentation right now.
I don't fault you for thinking that because the title is meaningless. I may be researching wormhole travel right now (well, tomorrow at the earliest), but it says nothing about my progress or...
I don't fault you for thinking that because the title is meaningless.
I may be researching wormhole travel right now (well, tomorrow at the earliest), but it says nothing about my progress or feasibility.
Lucid dreams are certainly a real thing (I experience them commonly), but this part definitely does sound like woo to me: I am highly skeptical. Lucid dreams can be fun, but I can't imagine that...
Lucid dreams are certainly a real thing (I experience them commonly), but this part definitely does sound like woo to me:
“The list of benefits of lucid dreaming is long,” noted Berry in the same call. “There’s everything from helping with PTSD, reducing anxiety, and improving mood, confidence, motor skills, and creativity. The benefits are really outstanding.”
I am highly skeptical. Lucid dreams can be fun, but I can't imagine that they come with these huge benefits. They are basically caused by your brain failing to enter REM correctly, and doing it frequently is symptomatic of sleep disorders. If you only have a lucid dream once in a blue moon, it's fine, but intentionally interrupting REM is probably not a healthy thing to do to yourself with any frequency.
Also, when you experience lucid dreams a lot, they lose their luster real quick. Yes, I can fly and do whatever I want, but it feels exactly as hollow and pointless as daydreaming (and daydreaming doesn't mess with my sleep). My favorite dreams by far are the ones where I am not lucid because they are so much more rich, unpredictable, and immersive.
That being said, the research on products like this me makes cautiously hopeful that we are closer to actually correcting abnormal REM (rather than just inducing it) for people who have issues with sleep paralysis, sleepwalking, narcolepsy, etc.
Agreed, I also have lucid dreams frequently but I struggle to see the therapeutic use. Maybe there are edge cases where trauma frequently represents itself and being able to take control of the...
Agreed, I also have lucid dreams frequently but I struggle to see the therapeutic use. Maybe there are edge cases where trauma frequently represents itself and being able to take control of the dream would allow someone to exert power over certain memories.
They also come in two flavors for me:
True lucid dreams, most likely what people imagine it is like. These are prompted in one of two ways for me. The first is in my dream I think something is going to happen and then it does, it breaks my dream immersion and I realize I'm in control of the dream. The second is an object shows up signaling that I'm in a dream, for me this is a cool retro VW van that I "remember" I own.
Fever dreams also have a lucid quality, they're a weird mix of lucidity and nightmare. Like I'm directing something that has already been written. Like my subconscious has to hit certain beats and I feel myself trying to force cohesion to it.
When I mention to people I can lucid dream they're usually impressed. As you say, it doesn't feel powerful, it's just like "yeah of course I can control this I'm just imagining things." Dreams are also really short and once you're lucid that becomes more evident so sure you might fly or something but you can fly for like 5 seconds and then you wake up.
My experience with lucid dreams is similar to yours. For most of my life, they started as a normal dream, then I became lucid, and then I woke up. Becoming lucid is usually a gradual process for...
My experience with lucid dreams is similar to yours. For most of my life, they started as a normal dream, then I became lucid, and then I woke up.
Becoming lucid is usually a gradual process for me. It typically starts with me noticing a continuity error in the dream or noticing that I can do things that I should not be able to do (e.g., jump higher than usual), and then I become more and more aware that I am dreaming — while, at the same time, the dream world stops being "filled in" automatically for me and I instead have to consciously imagine it if I want there to be anything there. As this continues, eventually I'm just lying awake in bed with my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
With concerted practice over the years, I have learned to catch early signs of lucidity and try to will myself back into a lower state of consciousness before it goes too far, which lets me sleep longer. For example, I'll notice something that doesn't quite make sense, and then I'll deliberately stop wondering about it before I realize I'm dreaming (once I fully realize it's a dream, it's almost impossible to stay asleep for much longer). So I spend a lot more of my dream life now in a semi-lucid state, where I know something weird is going on but I don't ponder it and I try not to influence what happens too much, and I think that has improved my quality of sleep a lot.
I have learned to do the same with sleep paralysis, which is another common way that I wake up before I'm supposed to. I now get a sense that I'm about to have an attack while I'm still partially unconscious, and then gently push myself back into deeper unconsciousness before panic sets in. It's hard to describe exactly how I do it, but I basically try to take the hallucinations for granted and not try to make any sense of them. If I give them attention, they will coalesce into something that isn't supposed to be there (very scary) and I will become more aware of my paralyzed body (also very scary). But if I can push myself back into dream logic and away from lucid logic, then the hallucinations just evolve into a dream, and then I'm in that dream world rather than in my physical body in my bed.
I think because I so often experience consciousness while asleep, I also have a lot of non-lucid dreams about dreaming. I'll be walking around in a dream, and then I suddenly think that this must be a dream — which is true, but only by coincidence. I'm not actually any more lucid than I was before that realization; I'm just dreaming that I'm dreaming. The big signs of this are that the dream remains just as rich and outside of my control as it was before, it feels like it lasts a long time, and I don't wake up from it (even if I try extremely hard to wake myself up, as I do in some nightmares). Sometimes I'll even wake up in the dream and believe now I'm back in real life, but I'm actually still dreaming and have no idea.
The title is intentionally misleading if you ask me. There are scientists studying sleep and dreams, but the actual article is not about them. It's about a startup for profit tech company,...
The title is intentionally misleading if you ask me. There are scientists studying sleep and dreams, but the actual article is not about them. It's about a startup for profit tech company, centered on using AI. Psychology has a long history with people making money off unsuspecting people this way. This field of study (dreaming) sits between philosophy and science. The science part would never claim these benefits of lucid dreaming as fact, and they would also tell you the potential negative effects. It is telling that they don't mention those. It is preying on people's desire for something by claiming they can make it real at the push of a button. Like buying those electric stomach pads will give you abs without having to exercise. Check out their website with a critical eye, it's kind of wild they are allowed to make these claims.
"Lucid dreams give humankind an interface to explore the state space of consciousness, where one can test epistemological methods to answer some of the biggest fundamental metaphysical questions, such as: what is consciousness? What is reality?"
"they can be thought of as particle accelerators for consciousness" (what the fuck?)
The plan is this - send out eeg headsets to volunteers, collect the data from the self reported lucid dreamers. Combine this with data from a Sleep Institute's MRI study. Use the datasets to train an AI to determine which patterns of brain activity are lucid and which are not. Then, take ultrasound waves and move them through a persons brain to create the patterns generated by the AI. They claim that the main distinction between reguar dreaming and lucid dreaming is activation in the frontal lobe, and they go further by saying that stimulating those areas WILL induce lucid dreaming in an individual, despite having not even begun testing. High frontal brain activity during sleep is also associated with reduced brain metabolism while awake. This same brain region being active during sleep is highly correlated with insomnia and other harmful sleep disorders. I'm gonna call them juicero:sleep edition. They want that venture capital.
You can induce lucid dreaming with practice and strict sleep routines anyway.
You can, but for whatever reason, I only managed to get it working a few times. Despite knowing my dream patterns, I mostly only do reality check when I see something akin to them in real life,...
You can induce lucid dreaming with practice and strict sleep routines anyway.
You can, but for whatever reason, I only managed to get it working a few times. Despite knowing my dream patterns, I mostly only do reality check when I see something akin to them in real life, not when I'm dreaming.
Hah, I remember a Kickstarter project from, like, 2013 that basically promised exactly this, but using EEG sensors. It was vapourware, and very clearly photoshopped, but I've always wanted a...
Hah, I remember a Kickstarter project from, like, 2013 that basically promised exactly this, but using EEG sensors. It was vapourware, and very clearly photoshopped, but I've always wanted a device like this. I've learned to lucid dream and get one maybe every few months since I don't actively put time in anymore, but if a product like this works reliably, I'll definitely buy one. Too cool an experience not to - and if anyone wants to try lucid dreaming, give it a shot - your first LD is pretty easy to achieve if you make like me and obsess over the practice and everything around it for a day or two.
Do you happen to remember any of the resources you used to learn how to practice? I’ve always been interested in “encouraging” a lucid dream, but nothing’s ever worked for me. Would love to know...
Do you happen to remember any of the resources you used to learn how to practice? I’ve always been interested in “encouraging” a lucid dream, but nothing’s ever worked for me. Would love to know what made it click for you.
I could always try another round of googling, if you don’t. Vaporware or not, the article’s got me motivated to try again lol
The most important thing is to train yourself to remember your dreams. You dream every time you enter REM sleep, so you actually have multiple dreams every night. The easiest way to do this is to...
The most important thing is to train yourself to remember your dreams. You dream every time you enter REM sleep, so you actually have multiple dreams every night.
The easiest way to do this is to make it a habit of journaling your dreams as soon as you wake up. If you wait, you will forget.
There are many ways to induce lucidity, but one of the easiest ways is to examine your hands at regular intervals. Once you have made that into a habit you will be doing it in your dreams. Your dreams will not be able to completely reconstruct every detail of your hands, so if they look weird, you know you are dreaming.
Sorry, I don't really, but I can give you the broad strokes. There's basically two components to lucid dreaming. One is, unsurprisingly, to actually lucid dream, the other one is to remember that...
Sorry, I don't really, but I can give you the broad strokes.
There's basically two components to lucid dreaming. One is, unsurprisingly, to actually lucid dream, the other one is to remember that you did. Otherwise it's worthless. Thankfully, both of these are reasonably easy to achieve.
Dream recall is something you can practice. The average adult has about 7-8 dreams a night, and we usually remember only one, if at all. A dream journal is a great thing, and because you're going to wake up in the middle of the night from a sequence-broken dream every now and again, I recommend a physical notepad instead of your phone. The light from the screen can mess up your brain's sleep/wake perception. Start writing down every dream you have, and do it as soon as possible after waking. Dream memories are ephemeral and will fade in minutes if not seconds. Hot tip that worked for me: Autosuggestion. I know it sounds cheesy, but telling yourself that "I will remember my dreams" over and over, out loud, in bed, worked surprisingly well.
Once you got a grip on dream recall, it's time to actually induce a lucid dream, or LD for short. Our brains are remarkably good at pretending everything is fine, we swear, so we need to prove it wrong. Easiest way to do this is by doing a reality check inside a dream. Thankfully, most reality checks are easy. Simplest is to just look at your hands and - this is the important part - count your fingers. Don't trust your mind when it says, yeah, five fingers, checks out - it lies in dreams. Count them. With your other hand. In a dream, that'll break the illusion and you'll find that you have more or less fingers, usually. Sounds freaky, but it's never knocked me out of a dream. Other reality checks include pinching your nose and trying to breathe through it, flipping a light switch on and off, or looking at a clock, glancing away and looking again. These are things our brain usually messes up simulating properly.
Once you're there, once you know you're in a dream, the main thing you have to do it stay calm. I've broken many LDs by getting too excited, so here's a trick you can do - press your palms against each other and rub, like you're a cartoon character about to have a tasty meal. That - don't ask me how - seems to reliably stabilise a dream. Once it's stable enough - you'll feel it, it's sort of like a sixth sense in the dream world - you've done it! Go do whatever you like. Fly around, visit fantastical places, create whatever you want, talk to fictional characters or people from your past - just, remember, that it's not real. I wouldn't trust my dream brain as far as I can throw it in the real world.
But that's all how I learned! The paradigms might have changed - I know where were different methods of inducing LDs, like WBTB or Wake Back To Bed that involved setting an alarm in the middle of the night, staying up for like 20 minutes while doing nothing but reality checks and then drifting right into a lucid dream, or MILD (mnemonic-induced lucid dreaming) which involves basically reciting mantras as you slip from awake to hypnagogia to sleep, but that's pretty hard to do in my experience - it's a whole world of experiences and tricks out there, so by all means, go and research on your own. If you find a new tehcnique, try it - worst thing that can happen is you lose a night's worth of lucid dream potential.
"Last week, Wollberg announced that his wildly successful company, Prophetic, has been acquired by Meta. In a statement on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the New York-based tech startup...
"Last week, Wollberg announced that his wildly successful company, Prophetic, has been acquired by Meta. In a statement on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the New York-based tech startup would be consolidated with it's own Reality Labs to form a new company, WATIcorp."
Well, being associated with Facebook is solid nope from me. Particularly anything associated with consciousness, VR or neurology. Just imagining that that dead-eyed skin creature Zuckerburg having...
Well, being associated with Facebook is solid nope from me. Particularly anything associated with consciousness, VR or neurology.
Just imagining that that dead-eyed skin creature Zuckerburg having any influence over my dreams or perception of reality creeps me out.
While I'm sure you know we're just having a bit of fun in the comments, to clarify for anyone else: this company has nothing to do with Facebook. We're both making joking allusions to sci-fi...
While I'm sure you know we're just having a bit of fun in the comments, to clarify for anyone else: this company has nothing to do with Facebook. We're both making joking allusions to sci-fi inventions called dream consoles. The DC Mini is one such appliance from the film Paprika. The range of addictive to dangerous devices in Dreamfall, Paprika, and the like are derived from a novel by Roger Zelazny called The Dream Master (not to be confused with Nightmare on Elmstreet IV, mind you).
Well dang, I wrote a whole three paragraph comment about how much this sounded like woo before I looked deeper into this. Usually I expect this kind of thing to be about a consumer product ripping people off, but it appears that this is about a field that is going through a lot of study and experimentation right now.
I don't fault you for thinking that because the title is meaningless.
I may be researching wormhole travel right now (well, tomorrow at the earliest), but it says nothing about my progress or feasibility.
Lucid dreams are certainly a real thing (I experience them commonly), but this part definitely does sound like woo to me:
I am highly skeptical. Lucid dreams can be fun, but I can't imagine that they come with these huge benefits. They are basically caused by your brain failing to enter REM correctly, and doing it frequently is symptomatic of sleep disorders. If you only have a lucid dream once in a blue moon, it's fine, but intentionally interrupting REM is probably not a healthy thing to do to yourself with any frequency.
Also, when you experience lucid dreams a lot, they lose their luster real quick. Yes, I can fly and do whatever I want, but it feels exactly as hollow and pointless as daydreaming (and daydreaming doesn't mess with my sleep). My favorite dreams by far are the ones where I am not lucid because they are so much more rich, unpredictable, and immersive.
That being said, the research on products like this me makes cautiously hopeful that we are closer to actually correcting abnormal REM (rather than just inducing it) for people who have issues with sleep paralysis, sleepwalking, narcolepsy, etc.
Agreed, I also have lucid dreams frequently but I struggle to see the therapeutic use. Maybe there are edge cases where trauma frequently represents itself and being able to take control of the dream would allow someone to exert power over certain memories.
They also come in two flavors for me:
When I mention to people I can lucid dream they're usually impressed. As you say, it doesn't feel powerful, it's just like "yeah of course I can control this I'm just imagining things." Dreams are also really short and once you're lucid that becomes more evident so sure you might fly or something but you can fly for like 5 seconds and then you wake up.
My experience with lucid dreams is similar to yours. For most of my life, they started as a normal dream, then I became lucid, and then I woke up.
Becoming lucid is usually a gradual process for me. It typically starts with me noticing a continuity error in the dream or noticing that I can do things that I should not be able to do (e.g., jump higher than usual), and then I become more and more aware that I am dreaming — while, at the same time, the dream world stops being "filled in" automatically for me and I instead have to consciously imagine it if I want there to be anything there. As this continues, eventually I'm just lying awake in bed with my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
With concerted practice over the years, I have learned to catch early signs of lucidity and try to will myself back into a lower state of consciousness before it goes too far, which lets me sleep longer. For example, I'll notice something that doesn't quite make sense, and then I'll deliberately stop wondering about it before I realize I'm dreaming (once I fully realize it's a dream, it's almost impossible to stay asleep for much longer). So I spend a lot more of my dream life now in a semi-lucid state, where I know something weird is going on but I don't ponder it and I try not to influence what happens too much, and I think that has improved my quality of sleep a lot.
I have learned to do the same with sleep paralysis, which is another common way that I wake up before I'm supposed to. I now get a sense that I'm about to have an attack while I'm still partially unconscious, and then gently push myself back into deeper unconsciousness before panic sets in. It's hard to describe exactly how I do it, but I basically try to take the hallucinations for granted and not try to make any sense of them. If I give them attention, they will coalesce into something that isn't supposed to be there (very scary) and I will become more aware of my paralyzed body (also very scary). But if I can push myself back into dream logic and away from lucid logic, then the hallucinations just evolve into a dream, and then I'm in that dream world rather than in my physical body in my bed.
I think because I so often experience consciousness while asleep, I also have a lot of non-lucid dreams about dreaming. I'll be walking around in a dream, and then I suddenly think that this must be a dream — which is true, but only by coincidence. I'm not actually any more lucid than I was before that realization; I'm just dreaming that I'm dreaming. The big signs of this are that the dream remains just as rich and outside of my control as it was before, it feels like it lasts a long time, and I don't wake up from it (even if I try extremely hard to wake myself up, as I do in some nightmares). Sometimes I'll even wake up in the dream and believe now I'm back in real life, but I'm actually still dreaming and have no idea.
The title is intentionally misleading if you ask me. There are scientists studying sleep and dreams, but the actual article is not about them. It's about a startup for profit tech company, centered on using AI. Psychology has a long history with people making money off unsuspecting people this way. This field of study (dreaming) sits between philosophy and science. The science part would never claim these benefits of lucid dreaming as fact, and they would also tell you the potential negative effects. It is telling that they don't mention those. It is preying on people's desire for something by claiming they can make it real at the push of a button. Like buying those electric stomach pads will give you abs without having to exercise. Check out their website with a critical eye, it's kind of wild they are allowed to make these claims.
"Lucid dreams give humankind an interface to explore the state space of consciousness, where one can test epistemological methods to answer some of the biggest fundamental metaphysical questions, such as: what is consciousness? What is reality?"
"they can be thought of as particle accelerators for consciousness" (what the fuck?)
The plan is this - send out eeg headsets to volunteers, collect the data from the self reported lucid dreamers. Combine this with data from a Sleep Institute's MRI study. Use the datasets to train an AI to determine which patterns of brain activity are lucid and which are not. Then, take ultrasound waves and move them through a persons brain to create the patterns generated by the AI. They claim that the main distinction between reguar dreaming and lucid dreaming is activation in the frontal lobe, and they go further by saying that stimulating those areas WILL induce lucid dreaming in an individual, despite having not even begun testing. High frontal brain activity during sleep is also associated with reduced brain metabolism while awake. This same brain region being active during sleep is highly correlated with insomnia and other harmful sleep disorders. I'm gonna call them juicero:sleep edition. They want that venture capital.
You can induce lucid dreaming with practice and strict sleep routines anyway.
You can, but for whatever reason, I only managed to get it working a few times. Despite knowing my dream patterns, I mostly only do reality check when I see something akin to them in real life, not when I'm dreaming.
Hah, I remember a Kickstarter project from, like, 2013 that basically promised exactly this, but using EEG sensors. It was vapourware, and very clearly photoshopped, but I've always wanted a device like this. I've learned to lucid dream and get one maybe every few months since I don't actively put time in anymore, but if a product like this works reliably, I'll definitely buy one. Too cool an experience not to - and if anyone wants to try lucid dreaming, give it a shot - your first LD is pretty easy to achieve if you make like me and obsess over the practice and everything around it for a day or two.
Do you happen to remember any of the resources you used to learn how to practice? I’ve always been interested in “encouraging” a lucid dream, but nothing’s ever worked for me. Would love to know what made it click for you.
I could always try another round of googling, if you don’t. Vaporware or not, the article’s got me motivated to try again lol
The most important thing is to train yourself to remember your dreams. You dream every time you enter REM sleep, so you actually have multiple dreams every night.
The easiest way to do this is to make it a habit of journaling your dreams as soon as you wake up. If you wait, you will forget.
There are many ways to induce lucidity, but one of the easiest ways is to examine your hands at regular intervals. Once you have made that into a habit you will be doing it in your dreams. Your dreams will not be able to completely reconstruct every detail of your hands, so if they look weird, you know you are dreaming.
Sorry, I don't really, but I can give you the broad strokes.
There's basically two components to lucid dreaming. One is, unsurprisingly, to actually lucid dream, the other one is to remember that you did. Otherwise it's worthless. Thankfully, both of these are reasonably easy to achieve.
Dream recall is something you can practice. The average adult has about 7-8 dreams a night, and we usually remember only one, if at all. A dream journal is a great thing, and because you're going to wake up in the middle of the night from a sequence-broken dream every now and again, I recommend a physical notepad instead of your phone. The light from the screen can mess up your brain's sleep/wake perception. Start writing down every dream you have, and do it as soon as possible after waking. Dream memories are ephemeral and will fade in minutes if not seconds. Hot tip that worked for me: Autosuggestion. I know it sounds cheesy, but telling yourself that "I will remember my dreams" over and over, out loud, in bed, worked surprisingly well.
Once you got a grip on dream recall, it's time to actually induce a lucid dream, or LD for short. Our brains are remarkably good at pretending everything is fine, we swear, so we need to prove it wrong. Easiest way to do this is by doing a reality check inside a dream. Thankfully, most reality checks are easy. Simplest is to just look at your hands and - this is the important part - count your fingers. Don't trust your mind when it says, yeah, five fingers, checks out - it lies in dreams. Count them. With your other hand. In a dream, that'll break the illusion and you'll find that you have more or less fingers, usually. Sounds freaky, but it's never knocked me out of a dream. Other reality checks include pinching your nose and trying to breathe through it, flipping a light switch on and off, or looking at a clock, glancing away and looking again. These are things our brain usually messes up simulating properly.
Once you're there, once you know you're in a dream, the main thing you have to do it stay calm. I've broken many LDs by getting too excited, so here's a trick you can do - press your palms against each other and rub, like you're a cartoon character about to have a tasty meal. That - don't ask me how - seems to reliably stabilise a dream. Once it's stable enough - you'll feel it, it's sort of like a sixth sense in the dream world - you've done it! Go do whatever you like. Fly around, visit fantastical places, create whatever you want, talk to fictional characters or people from your past - just, remember, that it's not real. I wouldn't trust my dream brain as far as I can throw it in the real world.
But that's all how I learned! The paradigms might have changed - I know where were different methods of inducing LDs, like WBTB or Wake Back To Bed that involved setting an alarm in the middle of the night, staying up for like 20 minutes while doing nothing but reality checks and then drifting right into a lucid dream, or MILD (mnemonic-induced lucid dreaming) which involves basically reciting mantras as you slip from awake to hypnagogia to sleep, but that's pretty hard to do in my experience - it's a whole world of experiences and tricks out there, so by all means, go and research on your own. If you find a new tehcnique, try it - worst thing that can happen is you lose a night's worth of lucid dream potential.
The DC Mini?
"Last week, Wollberg announced that his wildly successful company, Prophetic, has been acquired by Meta. In a statement on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the New York-based tech startup would be consolidated with it's own Reality Labs to form a new company, WATIcorp."
Well, being associated with Facebook is solid nope from me. Particularly anything associated with consciousness, VR or neurology.
Just imagining that that dead-eyed skin creature Zuckerburg having any influence over my dreams or perception of reality creeps me out.
While I'm sure you know we're just having a bit of fun in the comments, to clarify for anyone else: this company has nothing to do with Facebook. We're both making joking allusions to sci-fi inventions called dream consoles. The DC Mini is one such appliance from the film Paprika. The range of addictive to dangerous devices in Dreamfall, Paprika, and the like are derived from a novel by Roger Zelazny called The Dream Master (not to be confused with Nightmare on Elmstreet IV, mind you).
Ah, the joke was indeed over my head.