A new way to control experimentation with dreams | Hacker News Reader

A new way to control experimentation with dreams

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I used to lucid dream a lot. Probably the most wonderful experiences of my life. I did everything you could think of. Flying, visit impossible places, superhero, wreck stuff, bang movie stars, deepest oceans, space. Sometimes you get into a wierd head space where everything is hyper real. Impossible colors, undescribable textures. I got good at keeping myself from waking up, and had lucid dreams that lasted seemingly hours.

It seems I've lost the ability with age :( . They became less common in middle age and I haven't had one in years now. How I wish I could have that skill back

Same here. More than once a week when I was a kid, once a week as a teen, now it's about once every few months in my late 30s. I have correlated it to body temperature though - the more blankets I use and the hotter I am over night, the more dreams remembered, lucid dreams, and nightmares I get. Although they're fun, I value my sleep more, and so these days sleep with the thinnest donna with the windows open (even in winter).

I've never had a natural lucid dream. I have had a few lucid dreams using an induction technique called SSILD. I haven't played with it for a while, but at one point I was having one LD per every two or three nights. Usually an LD followed by a string of false awakenings. This is in my early 50s. Very fun stuff.

Me too! I was quite obsessed as a teenager. People don't believe me when I tell them that a lucid dream can be indistinguishable from reality. I think to most people, a dream is a fuzzy unrealistic thing.

While reading Richard Feynman's biography, I was struck by one of his descriptions of lucid dreaming, which I found very relatable:

"The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how there's a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting -- the diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect vision!"

Don’t you need to be able to distinguish it from reality in order to convince yourself it’s a dream? Otherwise, aren’t you just dreaming of lucid dreaming?

Sorry, I meant visually indistinguishable. There's other ways to convince yourself you're in a dream. The one I found worked best for me was blocking both nostrils and trying to inhale through my nose. If you're dreaming, this will still work. If you're awake, you obviously won't be able to breathe.

Another simple one is to ask yourself "how did I get here?" If you're dreaming, there won't be a clear sequence of events leading up to where you are.

Even with these tricks, it can still be difficult to convince yourself you're dreaming. If you're about to leap off a cliff, you don't want to be 90% sure -- you want to be 100% sure. I'd often wake up with my heart pounding in my chest because my brain was convinced I was about to kill myself.

The only reliable dream test that worked for me was trying to put my finger through my palm. In dream world, there’s nothing stopping it and it goes through. Everything else I’ve tried, would lead to me convincing myself why is was behaving strangely.

> The one I found worked best for me was blocking both nostrils and trying to inhale through my nose. If you're dreaming, this will still work. If you're awake, you obviously won't be able to breathe.

Learned and practiced exactly this about 6-8 years ago. A little strange to observe, and a definite sign one's dreaming! No need for any interpretation like "clear sequence of events". Your nose is fully blocked yet you can breathe through. Dreaming!

This is interesting also as I felt it like a schism in body image. When dreaming, body representation is the dreamed one, separated from the actually perceptible body. Only airway (as "does air flow normally") does not have this separation, allowing you to block your dreamed nose and continue to dream peacefully because actual airway is not blocked.

> No need for any interpretation like "clear sequence of events". Your nose is fully blocked yet you can breathe through. Dreaming!

Most people I try to explain this to look at me like I'm crazy. I'm glad the internet could show me one other person who had the same experience!

This is also the reason I couldn't fully immerse into the movie Inception. The spinning totem doesn't make much sense once you're aware of the nostril trick.

I only ever lucid dreamed if I had a very bad nightmare, then I could realize it was a dream, take control and turn the tables on whoever was causing me problems in the dream.

That said I have periods of non-lucid extremely complicated dream narratives - for example maybe I'm not even a character in the dream and there is a narrator of a story that could span generations.

Some of mine definitely started that way, but there's many that didn't.

I used to have a ton of false awakenings, as I would go lucid in nightmares and attempt to wake myself. Often successful but sometimes trapped in a cycle. I would have 3-5 false awakenings sometimes, just like Inception. I'm sure a lucid dreamers experience with that is what inspired the movie

I used to have them too. They are rare now in middle age.

Though even in youth they were not as long as yours.

My started short, a few minutes, but I practiced to not wake myself until they would last presumably a whole REM cycle.

Of all the things from my youth, I probably miss lucid dreams the most :'(

The longest dreams I've had were layered ones. Like dreams within dreams.

They were not lucid though. But I've woken up mentally exhausted after such dreams. They seemed to go on forever.

Did you consciously develop lucid dreaming skill? Or was it natural? Any good/bad side effects?

Also, why do you think you lost it with age? Is this like physical abilities that degrade with age?

It was natural at the beginning. Of course once you realize how awesome it is, you try to do it as much as possible. For me this was mostly learning how to recognize the dream state and how to manipulate it without waking myself up.

I'm not sure how universal this is, but in my lucid dreams exercising too much control from the concious part of my brain would eventually wake me. It was a balance of manipulating the dream and riding the wave of what was playing out. Make a change then wait a few minutes. Don't try to fight it. No side effects of note, except for awesome memories of experiences that are quite difficult to explain.

No idea why I lost it with age. Probably declining sleep quality, less REM sleep. I doubt there's any studies on it but it's a sentiment echoed by many lucid dreamers I've talked to. It's quite unfortunate, a solid lucid dream could lift my mood for days.

>>I'm not sure how universal this is, but in my lucid dreams exercising too much control from the concious part of my brain would eventually wake me.

Man I could get a lot of flying, and fast running, and at times even leveling a sky scraper without waking up. But at times, you wake up for something as trivial as meeting your dream woman.

Haha same! Attempting... Relations... Always ended with waking up :) . Sometimes too early. Sometimes not.

You can develop lucid dreaming abilities.

I don't think it goes with age.

Basically the problem is with dream recall after you wake up. And establishing a routine so frequent you could witness that routine even in dream, so that you can spot anomaly in the routine in the dream.

Basically there are certain things you can't do properly in a dream. Things like adding numbers, counting, reading a watch correctly twice in a row etc. For some reasons our brains seem to have a hard time maintaining state in dreams. So you establish a stateful routine in wakefulness which would not be possible in dream, making you realize you are now in a dream.

As you can see there are a range of things that need to happen. Routines in wakefullness(like counting, repeating clock check), well rested body, low stress, ability to remember a dream etc.

I think with age a lot of parameters are hard to keep up with.

I have had it very rarely but it is quite amazing how much control one has over how the dream pays out, what you want to see etc. I could literally do a walkthrough in a house, checking out rooms one by one, houses I was familiar with.

I have heard that you cannot see your face reflected in a mirror in a dream. So sure enough when I got my next one I had to try it. I did not see my face, but not sure how much of that was affected by my expectation.

It could indeed just be declining sleep quality. No more 13 hour nights on weekends. Waking up to alarms every day even without work. Constant stress of the grind.

I've considered getting one of those REM signalling masks to recapture my lucid adventures. Haven't taken the plunge yet though

Any resources that you have used and can recommend?

Here is the PDF of the thesis dissertation for the project:

https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/x/2020/06/09/Incubating+Dream...

Last night I had a dream that I woke up from and went to my computer to find a video file of that dream. I went to watch it but then I woke up for real. Kinda funny.

Had something similar where I had a terrible nightmare about some humanoid thing and woke up as it grabbed me.

I remember feeling a huge relief as I opened my eyes to see my bedroom and be in bed, only to tilt my chin and see the thing sitting on my chest, which then lept at my face.

I woke up for real, almost falling out of bed shouting expletives.

That's the only time I have had a dream (or sub-dream?) so lucid it felt no different to real life ( for that brief moment).

I've had very similar experience - a dream that turned into horror (I was visiting family when I remembered my grandpa is dead and they all turned into zombies and started pursuing me) - then I "woke up", sit up in my bed (and my room mate seen me sit up with open eyes), I looked at him, and he turned into a zombie and attacked me, then I woke up for real, already siting.

It was very scary. It might have something to do with the fact that we were studying before an exam late into night and I drank about 2 liters of pretty strong tea to keep studying (and fell asleep anyway eventually).

I've had multi-level deep false awakenings before, 3-4 levels or so. But a few weeks ago I actually had one that was maybe around 20 consecutive false awakenings, waking up something scary happening then waking up again repeated well into the double digits.

Freaked me out a lot because normally when I'm having a nightmare I know how to force myself awake instantly but that wasn't working that time. Honestly started to wonder if I'd died towards the end of it and had to pull myself together a bit when I did wake up for real.

No doubt this can help do some "creative work" while sleeping, but does it also mean that you wake up tired?

> sleep-tracking device that can alter dreams by tracking hypnagogia and then delivering audio cues based on incoming physiological data

Neither the press release article nor the actual paper abstract seem to mention how is a hypnagogia phase detected? Anyone with access to the full paper can expand on this?

For what is effectively the most important/novel part of this device it seems fairly handwavy on details.

Thanks to duopixel! Found the answer in the thesis pdf. Jump to figure 19. They found a good enough relation between finger muscle relaxation (EMG electrodes) and EEG sleep signals.

This is really cool because you bypass all the other issues/disconfort with other headband devices. I would be much more willing to have something on my fingers during sleep than strapped to my head.

Edit:typo

In the early 2010s I remember reading about a eye mask that detected when you were in REM sleep by the literal rapid movements of your eyeballs while you slept. When REM was sufficiently detected it would flash three red LEDs over your eyes. The idea being that in your dream you would see the three red LEDs faintly, and realise that you were in a dream.

I'm not sure if this actually works or how accurate it was however.

But Rapid-Eye-Movement cycles happens at some point in between deeper sleep cycles.

In this case they claim to detect hypnagogia which from the article is the early transition from wakefulness to sleep.

In this stage you might have muscle relaxation or breathing pattern changes but probably not rapid eye movement.

I see

Aside, but I find it fascinating that the inventor of Modafinil, Michel Jouvet[1], was also a dream researcher and even wrote a novel on dreams.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Jouvet

in ancient times, dreaming was rare, says the legend. when a king had a dream, it was seen as a great sign

I've talked to some neuroscience friends and was interested to learn that lucid dreaming hasn't been studied much if at all in lab conditions. I welcome such research and hope more people get inspired to study deeper.

Not at all true, there's been a ton of study on lucid dreams. Check out a summary of the research by Jennifer Windt: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/dreaming

Basically "Inception" alpha version.

> a sleep-tracking device that can alter dreams by tracking hypnagogia and then delivering audio cues based on incoming physiological data, at precise times in the sleep cycle, to make dream direction possible.

Inception via smart speaker.

>Inception via smart speaker.

add small electrical impulses upon the muscles (electronic massager style) and you will feel running. Add temperature changing clothes/blankets - and you're running away from a polar bear... Especially if to add a smell of the bear.

Yep, I'm halfway through watching Inception for the first time and I was thinking exactly this.

What are you doing?! Get off HN and finish it up.

It’s a great movie (though I think they could’ve chosen better actors for a few of the roles). Enjoy it.

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