Induction of self awareness in dreams through low current stimulation (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Induction of self awareness in dreams through low current stimulation (2014)

nature.com

181 pointsMichaelAO95 comments

That's so 2014

Please also regard the methodological problems that are posed by the study http://neurocritic.blogspot.nl/2014/05/does-gamma-tacs-reall... and that they only used 3 subjects. Furthermore they are not willing to share their data with other scientists. However, support comes from another group: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810013...

I read 27 subjects participating to the study in the paper. Where did you see only three?

The first link is pretty much my impression. This looks like the usual trick of people playing games with definitions (lucid dreams is such and such score on our "LuCiD" scale). The main part of the trick is to measure something that sounds similar to what people actually care about, then draw conclusions about that thing cared about.

By definition a person knows when they are having a lucid dream or not. If you will not trust their self report of that info there is no reason to trust anything else they report about the dream either. This scale is pointless for the purpose of identifying lucid dreaming.

Where is the result: "% of trials that the person reports lucid dreaming"? Perhaps that is in supplementary figure 1 where they show "Nb. of dreams rated as lucid"? But what does it mean to "rate as lucid"?

For this paper I see this is based on the scale:

"Lucidity was assumed when subjects reported elevated ratings (>mean + 2 s.e.) on either or both of the LuCiD scale factors insight and dissociation."

Going back to their earlier paper about creating the LuCiD scale all I find is this:

"Dreams were treated as lucid dreams if they were rated as such by the participants." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23220345

> By definition a person knows when they are having a lucid dream or not.

Do they? I mean, the qualia of "I'm having a lucid dream" might not have 100% overlap with the fact of having a lucid dream.

Certain drugs can give people something they will describe as "a feeling of being very sure about things" without that feeling having any particular referent—whatever they think about, they tend to describe experiencing an "epiphany" about. (The subset of people who think tend to frame things through a lens of religious faith tend to describe this drug experience as a "religious experience", a "contact with the divine." Mostly, it seems, because they direct their attention to their religious beliefs, and end up having a feeling of sureness about those, while other trippy things are happening.)

I wouldn't find it hard to believe that there is a thing you can do to the brain that makes it believe you are in conscious control of affecting the world you are sensorily experiencing. By itself, this would just make you experience dreaming as normal, but with a sensation that whatever you're doing in the dream—and however the dream is proceeding—it was your choice for you to do those things, and for the dream to proceed in that fashion. Without actual control of the dream, this would likely cause ego-dystonic thoughts: questioning why you directed the dream to go the way it did, because it seems so out-of-line with your normal waking desires.

> "Do they? I mean, the qualia of "I'm having a lucid dream" might not have 100% overlap with the fact of having a lucid dream."

I cover this objection in the next sentence:

>"If you will not trust their self report of that info there is no reason to trust anything else they report about the dream either."

If you don't trust the self report of such basic aspects of the dream, why would you believe anything they say about it at all? Either way, the "LuCiD" scale they came up with is unhelpful for identifying lucid dreaming.

Good luck proving that conscious will has any effect on the world whether waking or sleeping. People report that it does, and that's all we are sure about.

I wasn't really talking about "free will" or anything so airy; more about 1. your predictive model of your own behavior lining up with your actual behaviour; and 2. your predictive model of the causal effects of your behavior lining up with the actual observed world.

In dreams, neither of these are true: "you" don't behave the way you'd expect of your waking self, and the things "you" do don't result in what you'd expect out of the real world.

Re the last sentence. I have in fact deliberately behaved in ways I never would in life, in a lucid dream; and flown around which doesn't work in real life. Did you swap negative for positive.

That's not ego-dystonic decision-making; that's just different things being possible in the embodied environment and you being aware of that.

That is: you can fly in a dream; you can't fly in real life. But if you could fly in real life, you probably would. Therefore, it isn't shocking to "watch yourself" decide to fly, if flying is obviously an option.

Consider, by contrast, ripping your own limbs off. Perfectly possible in reality, but nobody does it. If you did it in a dream, you'd wonder why "you" wanted to do that. It wouldn't make sense for you to make that decision, so probably "you" aren't you at the moment.

You might try some stuff, e.g. stepping off a cliff in order to fly, only if you're really quite sure you're in a dream. But "being sure you're in a dream" means "being sure your actions have no long-term consequences in reality", which allows many more things to be ego-syntonic.

Actually, every decision you make while asleep is different from the one you'd make while awake. The mind is less organized; different parts of the brain are active. See the studies re EMG suppression of various parts of the brain, and the effect of that on artistic ability for a close parallel.

Rarely - you can recapture that very different way of being while awake and have skills you never had before.

There are ways to communicate from the REM state back to the real world used in research on lucid dreams:

> Previously to sleeping, volunteers like Worsley agreed on preset eye movements they would perform once they achieved lucidity in their dreams, which La Berge could record in the lab.

Source: http://dreamherbs.com/eminent-dreamers/stephen-laberge/

See the paper again (the methods are at the end of the paper). They reported 27 subjects.

Recently I found a way to induce lucid dreams nearly 50% of the time I try. I start by closing my eyes and looking at the blackness. Usually there is something else there, like a field of dots. I will the field of dots to uniformly move or become a tunnel. After a while more objects form, I try to control them in some way, or just observe them. Eventually this turns into a lucid dream or a deep meditative state where I am aware of my body but time passes faster.

It does not work when I cant get any images to form because I am not tired or distracted. It also requires a fair amount of attention to redirect yourself to 'keep looking'. Its easy to drift off and do normal sleep.

Wow! I thought I was the only one who did this. Never to accomplish lucid dreaming - but I noticed in classes in highschool (why was I closing my eyes in class?). When closing my eyes for a little bit, I'll see patches of glowing, slowly churning colors. Usually a paradoxically dark neon. Sometimes it's the afterimage effect from looking at a light - but I think some of it is just your eyes trying to make sense of the darkness.

When focusing on these for a while, and trying to force my mind to make sense of it, eventually these blobs turn into oddly abstract shapes with intricate patterns on them, that are very visible. I've never gone that far with it - very interesting.

You're definitely not alone. It makes sense on an intuitive level. Even when you "close" your eyes, you can't stop yourself from seeing. You're simply staring at the inside of your eyelids.

EDIT: I had not heard of the Ganzfield effect before, although I was familiar with the phenomenon itself. It does seem like this a manifestation of what they're referring to. As a side note, in sensory deprivation situations you also become keenly aware of the sound of your heart beating and the sound of your blood circulating in your veins. It's very odd.

> Never to accomplish lucid dreaming

Two easy techniques -

1. Ask yourself continually through the day "Am I dreaming?", which primes you to become self-aware while dreaming.

2. Wake up two hours before you normally get up for 10 mins, then go back to sleep.

I also find that a Magnesium and Zinc vitamin tablet before bed assists with dream recall, however I have no science to back this up.

I've never done it intentionally, but as someone who occasionally has lucid dreams #2 definitely seems accurate. Much of the time I lucid dream it's when I'm sleeping extremely lightly right before I wake up.

In fact, I know that I'm dreaming and that if I open my eyes (somehow separate from opening or closing my eyes in my dream) I will wake up. Sometimes I might shout or say something in my dream and I actually say it out loud and that wakes me up as well.

I already do step 1, if I do step 2 I worry that all my lucid dreams will involve meetings with management.

Do these patterns and transitions get more intense with music, like a mid-2000s music visualization, or is that just me?

Is this the ganzfield effect?

Seems more like you are describing what is called the hypnagogic state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia)

That is interesting, I also experience some strange state of consciousness before getting to sleep, however, every time I lose awareness after a while. Maybe that just works for people that have a REM cycle at the beginning of the night. But I will try harder knowing now that such practice leads somewhere.

Try doing it when not going to sleep, like maybe when you have free time and might take a nap.

When I do it before bed, I often fall asleep before getting anywhere interesting. Napping works better for me because there is no pressure to get sleep. Maybe as I become better at this I'll have more success doing it before bed

I believe this is called Wake-Induced Lucid Dreaming (WILD).

Maybe my experience is different than others, but when I dream lucidly it is fun but my dreams lose a lot of spontaneity and richness because I realize I am in control of everything in the dream.

I suspect this is because the conscious mind is slow and single threaded compared to the unconscious mind which is faster and multithreaded. In a dream where the mind is in control of both the experiencing 'self' and all aspects of the environment, this difference causes a real loss in fidelity.

Thus, I don't understand the obsession with lucid dreaming and I really don't understand why people would want to do it every time they dream.

I see where you're coming from. When I was first learning how to do it, I would go from being in trippy, vivid non lucid dreams. Then I'd become aware of the dream. Then all of the craziness would immediately drop off and I'd just be standing in a room or something.

What I came to learn is that expectations drive the dream. When not conscious of the dream, it's almost like those Google deep dream images. If our mind thinks something strange could happen, well then that's very likely to happen, and this reiterates and can converge on strange and fantastic mindscapes.

When we're aware of the dream, then our expectations become much more dry and realistic. Also, I think there is a difference between being lucid and being lucid and in control. Simply being lucid in a boring dream would not be so great.

However, being in control is wonderful. You get to explore and experiment with what is possible. One thing I'd enjoy doing is talking to someone to see what they'd say (not knowing what they would say while being aware that it was my brain coming up with what they were saying). Those were some of my most memorable dreams. Also, I've definitely have had dreams where I've maintained the richness and trippiness after become aware.

I can't induce lucid dreaming, and for that reason it happens quite rarely, but oh how do I love it!!

When it happens I start flying and fly and fly. It's one of the best, if not the best experience ever. I usually wake up having convinced myself I can actually fly, or at least escape gracity at will. It takes a while to get back to "reality".

What's so cool about lucid dreaming is, it feels exactly like reality (unlike, say, daydreaming). And you get to decide what happens and what do.

What's not to like.

I have never had control of anything other than myself during a lucid dream. My dreams become lucid extremely rarely, and that is why I want to experience it.

I have opposite control. When I try to make a layup it won't go in, when I try to punch my arm feels heavy and slow. It's strange but predictable.

I recommend Stephen LaBerge’s work.

One bonus is that it's much much easier to remember what happened when lucid dreaming. There's no point to the high-fidelity if you can't retain any of it; My favorite dreams are ones that I'm constantly remembering and forgetting that I'm dreaming, as it gives the best of both worlds, but this probably happens for me once in a blue moon.

> when I dream lucidly it is fun but my dreams lose a lot of spontaneity and richness

For me this is a function of how many of my dreams I have been writing down. The more I work to remember my dreams, the richer and more detailed they appear. This is orthogonal to the dreams being lucid or not.

Totally agree. Some years ago, I was very interested. I even bought some eye shade with flashing LEDs.

But then, I got how much dreaming contributes to creative problem solving. And decided not to mess with it.

> I got how much dreaming contributes to creative problem solving. And decided not to mess with it.

Why not do that in lucid dreams? It's a common use-case. If you can't be as creative when you're lucid, then ask one of the NPCs in your dream to help.

Because lucid dreaming is messing with it.

Hah. I have only achieved lucidity in a dream once, after a period of trying to induce it. I can't really remember what was happening prior but when I realized I was in a dream I thought:

"I am in a dream, I want to fly."

Turns out my body doesn't actually know how to fly and I woke myself up it seems, in the process of trying to take off.

Last year, I was walking near a sports ground a couple of miles from where I live. Someone came up and started talking to me about something extremely odd, and I wondered what was going on. I thought to myself, "Am I dreaming?" So I asked her about the papers she was carrying, and if I could look at them. She gave me one to read, and when I looked at it a second time it was different. I realized that I was dreaming, so I decided to change where I was - suddenly I was in my childhood home, as it was about 30 years ago.

I just made the decision to do things that I knew I could do, and it happened. I think I eventually even visited a Star Trek set. (Nerrrrrrd.)

Didn't really try to fly, I just changed the situation I was in from "I'm in a room," but I imagine that I could change it to "I'm in the air, and there's no gravity," without a shock sufficient to wake me up.

I've only managed it twice, myself, the first time I woke up because I was so surprised that I was aware in a dream. I want to try it again, so I can see what limits I have before I wake myself.

I tried thinking this:

   Dreams about falling are just reminders that in dreams you can fly.

It worked.

I always wake up the moment I realize I'm dreaming, so I've never experienced the "totally in control" thing. Seems like it'd be fun. :)

Not me, but I've met people who have nightmares quite often and for them I imagine it would help them sleep a lot.

For people who don't dream lucidly, what are your dreams like? Do you experience them in third person? Is it like being on rails? My wife often tells me that, in her dreams, she's still herself but also not herself. Is it like a compulsion, where you know what's happening but you're not in control of yourself?

Most of my dreams aren't lucid, but I've had a few lucid dreams, so I can compare.

Typically in my dreams it feels like normal life, except that for some reason I'm gullible to dream logic. If something strange happens and I try to make sense of it, a bad explanation--one that I wouldn't accept in real life--will perfectly satisfy my dreaming brain.

However, occasionally dream logic totally breaks down and I realize it's a dream. In that instant I gain full control. But it doesn't take long before the control slips away, forgetting the revelation that happened moments ago.

What about you? Are all of your dreams always lucid?

For me it's more like it's all just a memory I suddenly have when I wake up, there does not really seems to be a "now" in the dreams.

Sometimes there is some sort of realization of being in a dream but it's always at the moment I'm waking up.

I'm pretty jealous of people with lucid dreams, it must be fantastic.

I've learned to induce lucid dreams somewhat reliably. For this I need to be physically tired but mentally awake. This usually works 30 min after waking up in the morning or when taking a nap in the afternoon. I then try to stay mentally awake while I realize that my body falls asleep. At some point my mind slips into a dream like mode, but I'm not dreaming of anything. At this point if I move myself, only my dream body moves, not my real body. This is when I "stabalise" the lucid dream by spinning my dream body around quickly. I think this kind of gives my mind the time to make up a dream in which I can move around. Otherwise I will wake up or lose control over the dream.

It's crucial that in the time your body falls asleep, you don't make any voluntary movements (just as if you were to fall asleep normally). I've also read about a trick that you can help you stay mentally awake. You have to pretend as if you were tapping with your index and middle finger, but only just so that they don't actually move. This also helps you realize when your body falls asleep. I'd say WBTB (Wake back to bed) is the most reliable method for lucid dreams.

> It's all just a memory I suddenly have when I wake up

Same here, very well worded. That's the case for me in maybe 3/4 dreams. The more emotionally intense ones have that "now" feeling though.

Search online for some practices to help induce lucid dreams. There are things that could help. For example, creating a habit throughout the day to check if you're dreaming. e.g. look in the mirror and ask if it's a dream, or look at a clock and ask if its a dream.

If you create this habit in normal life, the idea is that it will carry over to your dreams. Just realizing a dream is a dream should propel you into lucidity. Dreams rarely seem to get reflections and clocks right.

Oh, wow, this is exactly how I dream as well. I could never have expressed this, though! Thank you for that post.

I always wonder how "real" do dreams feel for people who dream lucidly, but then I realize that it wouldn't matter for me. The level of realism, details, the feelings - are irrelevant, since it would only be a memory, at no point in time I would ever be experiencing it. It would be just a faint, happy, memory of something that didn't happen.

Wow it's the first time I heard of this type of dreaming. It's intriguing that people dreams in so many different ways, I wonder what causes that.

I only remember one lucid dream, when I was a kid, and it was fantastic.

I researched a little and found this book, may be you find it interesting, so here it is:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_dreaming

This describes exactly how it is for me, and I've never been able to put it in to words until now.

My dreams are never third person. I'm swept up in a sequence of more or less bizarre events and happenings, and I don't question it, or otherwise bring my rational faculties to bear on the situation. It feels like passive participation; reflective deliberation is rare. Often, there's a strong emotional tone or undercurrent to it, and disproportionately often, I'm escaping or confronting some danger. Sometimes the danger gets me, at which point the sequence always ends, like a "game over" type of moment.

My dreams are all first person. I have no idea it’s a dream. I’m convinced that scenario has always been my life. It’s not quite on rails. I feel like it’s really me living another life, and I have about as much choice as ever. But I sort of inherit my motives from the scenario. When the scene changes, I don’t notice.

No, it's just like if you were living real life.

Imagine you reading this paragraph at this moment, but in reality you are dreaming of it, it is not real.

How can you tell? can you even ask yourself that question at a moment like that? will it make sense to ask that question since you "think" you are awake?

I experience them in a first-person, just like in a real life. I have never had a dream in which I`m observing what happening as a third person, but it`s always on rails and can`t consciousness control the dream. In some cases, I even have real sensations like pain or physical pleasure. Sometimes the experience is so real that when I wake up for a short period of time I am wondering if that was a dream or something that actually happened before I fall asleep.

I once had a dream where I grew a second body out of my spine, then it separated and I was both. I saw what both pairs of eyes were seeing, and had independent motor control over both bodies. So I experienced that one in plural first-person, I guess, as an "us".

As I recall it, the major problem was trying to decide which would be the one to go to work, and which would stay home, and whether making the obvious choice was sexist or not. The bodies were not identical. And they could have an argument of sorts. I eventually sent the "wrong" one to work, and I was disappointed when no one noticed that I was a different me that day. I spent most of my day at work playing video games at home.

Even just remembering this one makes my head hurt. Our brains are definitely not designed for that kind of multitasking.

I do both. When I dream lucid I'm aware of it being a dream and can think and choose. When I don't dream lucid, I'm not aware and instead of choices I have reactions to what is happening. I wouldn't consider it being on rails, rather you act without thinking or having a long internal monologue about it.

Sometimes it can be a dream in which you are mentally awake and have full recollection of going to sleep, mental presence and full control of the dream state, sometimes just a dream about the subject of lucid dreaming that often ends in a digression or false awakening. Sometimes I've had dreams where my thoughts are separate from the dream character I am acting as, like when watching a film. It doesn't occur to me then to affect events in such a case, since I'm kind of a passive observer even though I'm aware I'm witnessing a dream. Lucidity doesn't automatically guarantee full mental awareness, or dream control.

I have had lucid dreams, but rarely. In "ordinary" dreams, yes, I am myself and also not myself. I often feel like a character in a movie that I'm watching passively at the same time. The degree of compulsion vs. agency varies over time within a dream, and from one dream to another.

>people who don't dream lucidly, what are your dreams like?

While asleep - no sensation whatsoever just black. Essentially passed out. After waking up there is either no memory (i.e. the time is completely missing) or small fragments of a dream that are more memory than sensation.

Depends on the dream. Sometimes, I'll wake up and "remember" the dream as a first person experience. Other times it's not so clear.

Neat. When do they release the home lucid dream inducer?

Blue tooth

IOT enabled (Blink the lights while exploring the underside)

Spotify integrated

Tinder enhanced

Facebook dreams comparability

Google drive flow (work in your dreams!)

Udemy stream (I know kung fu)

Tesla wheel dream (dream while you drive? / dream about your next car..?)

Hackers exploit the platform leaving 1000's trapped in their dreams, demand btc.

Black Mirror, season 5. Make it happen Mr. Brooker.

Already happened in season 4 episode 1.

You forgot to mention the ads. Subconscious impressions have to be worth a lot.

Just as Futurama predicted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHSDb-oI808

Oh yes this. Ideally we want it closed source but with a backdoor or ten so that you can control anyone’s dreams though the Internet.

If you're into video games, you should play Dreamfall Chapters.

The Longest Journey was one of my favorite games. I've been holding off on Dreamfall, but I should probably get it when I can find the time.

Mine too. I felt Dreamfall was a bit 'light' compared to the depth and charm of The Longest Journey. But I feel that Dreamfall Chapters is finally a worthy successor (though still not at the same height of 'all-time classic' as the original is for me, but few things are).

I liked The Longest Journey a lot back in the day. A bit too talkative for my taste, but I loved the world-building, the characters -- I especially loved April, of course -- and the unconventional "plot twist" at the end.

I didn't like Dreamfall. I didn't like what they did to April, and found the new characters uninteresting. Never played Dreamfall Chapters.

and your fidget spinner can function like the spinning tops in Inception to tell you whether or not you are in a dream (so there really is a purpose for those things!)

Just look at your hand. In a lucid dream, your hand doesn't quite look like a normal hand.

The nose-plug check is more reliable and physiologically based: pinch your nose so that your nostrils are blocked, shut your mouth and breathe in. If you're dreaming you'll breathe in anyway since your nostrils aren't actually blocked.

Doesn't always work though. "Let's see... Seven fingers - yep, I'm awake."

Don't even look; just poke a finger through your palm. When dreaming, the rendering engine is still turned on, but clipping is off, and the physics engine is switched to a simplified model.

You can also breathe without an open airway, so the Valsalva maneuver does not work. As I need to do this several times during the day to relive underpressure due to my crap eustachian tubes, this is an immediate tell for me. Then I poke my finger through my palm, and usually get so excited about figuring out that I'm dreaming that I wake myself up. I've heard that you can spin around as though you were trying to make yourself dizzy to avoid waking, but it never seems to work for me.

Intel Management MEDC Dream Control

So this is how inception starts.

Integrates with fitbit to track your exercise in your dreams...

"Alexa, what is the weather like in my dreamscape?"...

> Google drive flow (work in your dreams!)

Pomodoro sleeping for a double win.

Work in your dream could be nice

1. Buy an EEG headset. 2. Train a neural network to determine when you're asleep. 3. Apply current when asleep.

Then maybe this will face the same legal regulation as drugs ;) I think that devices can help a bit more but are not really needed if you read the publications of researchers like Stephen Laberge. Because there are also other tricks which increase the chance, and still all seem to require practiced awareness and during daytime.

What I'd like to know is if lucid dreaming attains the same quality of rest as normal dreaming. I doubt long-term effects of lucid dreaming have been studied.

It’s called DMT

Calea Zacatechichi too.

I wonder if this can help people who suffer from depersonalization and derealization disorder, an endless hell from which there is no escape.

Interesting. How would this be related?

I’m not sure it would help, but maybe stimulating self-awareness can help victims come “back to reality”.

Do you have experience with that?

No, but have met some people that have and I’ve also read the tortured writings of victims all throughout the internet. Someone has to do something!

To reliably lucid dream, become more lucid (mindful, through careful observation of sense perceptions) in waking life.

Also, get a watch or app with hourly beep and do a reality check. Mine is 3 things: (1) close eyes (2) pinch nose and try to breathe through it (3) check out my hands.

All 3 of these are weird in dreams & reliably indicate that I am dreaming.

I feel like I also might wake up a bit if somebody gave me an electric shock while I was asleep... :-)

I feel like control over dreaming is a much better direction of AR development. In dreams you can pretty much come up with any type of action and all the sensations are exactly like they are in real life, pleasure, pain etc...

Brilliant - the scale to measure higher order consciousness in sleep is called the ‘LuCiD’ scale. Nice.

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