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Comment by atentaten | Hacker News Reader

If you know you're dreaming and can control it, then it is lucid dreaming.

But what's the difference between that and merely dreaming that you are?

Don't you feel like you have control and are making decisions in every dream that you have?

Is it really that interesting if you happen to dream that you're controlling a dream vs dreaming that you're controlling your flight around the world or whatever nonsense we dream about?

I'd say you likely haven't lucid dreamed, because it's a you-really-know-it feeling. You realize you are dreaming "Oh, I'm dreaming right now. I'm lying in my bed, and dreaming this place", and you can decide to do things - but you also have to be careful not to become too lucid and wake yourself up (usually I do this by calming myself down) and not to fall into a "real" dream (I find that spinning in circles makes you more lucid... but don't do it too much, else you'll just wake up! It's hard to balance)

I used to be able to do it a lot when I was younger - it still happens to me every once in a while now. But you KNOW when it happens - it's not at all like "a really real dream", it's something completely different.

I had a dream where I was in my bedroom and noticed that it was arranged in an old way that I had since rearranged a month ago. I suggested to myself that I was in a dream and tried to wake myself up. I woke up into yet another dream where the room was in its current arrangement. I woke up shortly after for real this time, into reality.

I woke up to the sun beaming through the window into my eyes. Maybe I was more lucid/aware than usual for that reason.

But I have no way of knowing whether the control/awareness I had in that dream was any different than the illusion of control/awareness and decision-making I have in any other dream.

It seems like quite a leap to assume I was in control just because I dreamed I was.

Are you in control right now? Leaving the deep philosophical questions aside, you can have the same kind of control in a dream. As in, you feel 100% (or sometimes much more) awake, alert, and in possession of your full waking capacities, but what surrounds you isn't the physical world.

Just a fun anecdote: I once had a dream where I met someone who was introduced to me as being me, although he looked completely different. I thought it was a really boring "philosophical" statement about how we all have many sides to ourselves, got a little angry about how pseudo-intellectual this dream was and decided to wake up. I decided I didn't want anything to do with that dream and forced myself awake. It was a very odd feeling to force my eyes open into the real world, when in the dream my eyes were already open!

> I woke up shortly after for real this time, into reality.

I'm afraid not.

Short version, if you're lucid dreaming, you're acutely aware that the laws of the world around you are generated by your mind (and you know why!)

I've had some lucid dreaming experiences. For a normal dream, when you wake up you realize your actions during the dream were more or less just reactive/instinctual. During lucid dreaming, you can actually pause and contemplate the situation and your actions before making them.

When you're lucid dreaming, you can choose to wake up or stay asleep, although eventually (usually very quickly) one will start to happen automatically: either your brain will wake up or it will trick you back into dreaming.

I know what you mean. I want to say I've had both types of dreams, but as you're pointing out, how could I know for sure?

I will say that when I'm having a genuine lucid dream, after I wake up, I know without a doubt it was a lucid dream. With regular dreams, I look back on them and don't exactly identify with my "dream self." That guy didn't realize how absurd the scenario was. He resembles me, but he wasn't me.

With a genuine lucid dream, I look back at the dreamer and can say, "yeah that was 100% me." Also, I find that becoming lucid always sort of pulls the dream into a more realistic scenario. It goes from chaotic and weird to just plain normal life (only, the rules have changed now).

So I guess what leads me to believe that I've had these "pseudo lucid dreams" is that I look back on them after waking and don't identify with the dreamer the same way I do with a genuine lucid dream. It feels more like I was watching someone else, like a recording, than as though it was a real firsthand experience

I wonder how lucid dreaming compares to a phenomenon where (A) we dream that we know we are dreaming and (B) it happens to line up with reality enough that we are convinced we had control.

Maybe philosophically there is no difference. But it would certainly dispel a lot of the folk magic around lucid dreaming.

I think your are on something and that 'lucid dreaming' may just be a dream after all. And interesting question would be: under an MRI can we detect lucid dreaming? If yer then maybe it's more then just a dream.

The way that genuine lucid dreaming differs from those scenarios is that it's been shown empirically that the dreamer is in fact aware that he is asleep and is dreaming.

Check out Stephen LaBerge for more info. They found that while asleep, a person is basically paralyzed with exception to their eye movement. In a lab setting they were able to have the dreamer use a signal, using eye movement, that they were dreaming.

One thing they did was to test the theory that subjective dream time is different than time experience while awake. They did this by doing the eye signal, counting down 10 seconds, and then signalling again. They found that there was no "time dilution" when compared to wakefulness.

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