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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience."

Does it really? It doesn't feel that real when you know it's a dream. All the dreams I can remember are always ones that I know it's a dream.

"rare phenomenon and lucid dreams can seldom be summoned at will, which has made it difficult for researchers to capture them in the lab in a reliable manner."

I mean, I can't summon them at will, but I do tend to dream most nights, and they're (as far as I can remember) always lucid.

I'm looking forward to more info about dreams and lucid dreams. I wonder if there's any correlation to stuff like dementia or early death. It seems like lucid dreaming is very tiring and that I don't wake well rested (I should add that I can generally control or struggle to control what goes on in the dream, so that might be part of it).

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> All the dreams I can remember are always ones that I know it's a dream.

In my dreams I observe two orthogonal-ish aspects of lucidity: one is to know it's a dream, the other is to control my actions.

In most dreams I control myself but don't know it's a dream until I wake up. At times realising it's a dream immediately wakes me up.

The opposite is also common, where I know it's a dream but have no volition, it just plays out as a movie.

I'm sure there are dreams which are fully random but I can't seem to remember those.

Finally, I can only remember a single time when both combined. At first I just had control of my actions, then realised it was a dream. Then I remember proving to other people they were in a/my dream. That didn't last long before I woke up.

I would say the opposite is true for me. I never know I am dreaming while I’m dreaming. You never have nightmares then, I take?

I also have never been able to lucid dream. Even the few instances where I realized I was dreaming I almost instantly woke up involuntarily.

I have heard keeping a dream-journal and using a few techniques inside the dream can give you the ability to lucid dream, but these haven't worked for me.

Yeah this is interesting, it's maybe only a few times a DECADE where I'll realize I'm dreaming. Well, that I remember at least. I have pretty good dream recall most days but of course I lose a lot pretty soon after getting going.

Not OP, but I can't think of a dream that I remember where I didn't know I was dreaming. Sometimes they are nightmares, but if it gets too bad I just remind myself that it's just a dream, and then that's pretty much that.

Not really. I can find myself in a nightmare situation, but I can then force it to play out differently. I don't wake up scared or anything, but I will wake up tired from forcing the dream to change or go a certain way.

I'm just commenting here to say that you're not the only one. My dreams always go wherever my mind wanders, so any nightmare events are just moments in a longer episode in which I'm aware that I'm dreaming. Any bad dream can be turned around as long as the thoughts inducing it are not intrusive.

Exception to the above are only 5 one-off "nightmare" dreams:

1. When I was a very little, I had a nightmare after watching/about The Little Toaster. Probably a lot of kids did.

2. Slightly older, I dreamt that flowers were growing out of my skin and I was becoming a plant.

3. Same age range, dreamt an evil clown had provoked me into a fight and none of my swings could hit him.

4. When I was a tween, I had a nightmare that my mother kept a small wooden box full of my father's freshly severed fingers.

5. In my 20s, I had a nightmare where I told my sister (I don't actually have one IRL) that I shot and killed a demonic horse who was actually myself.

Keep asking yourself "am I dreaming" throughout the day. You'll lucid dream that night.

I find it interesting that lucid dreaming has an impact on your feeling of restfulness. I can't say I've experienced the same, but I'll try to reflect on this more given that almost 100% of my dream states are lucid and have been for almost all of my adult life. As an adolescent, I would lucid dream only occasionally.

My personal experience with lucid dreaming is that I am almost always aware that I'm dreaming, and most of the time I'm content to let the dream play out. Sometimes I do intervene and become an active participant in the dream, rather than letting it happen like a cut-scene in a game. And, on occasion, I will rewind a scene that I'm unhappy with or I want to revisit.

I'll also sometimes find myself in a dream location and suddenly remember all the prior occurrences that I've visited the setting. It's the weirdest feeling because I'll have what feels like years worth of memories from experiences in that dream setting that come rushing back to me. Memories that I can only vaguely grasp when I'm conscious, but as soon as I'm back in a particular setting all those prior experiences are remembered -- things that happened in the environment, character interactions, etc.

It's a bit unsettling when I wake up because for a moment I feel like I have these parallel life experiences from different realities stored in my head, mostly partitioned from each other.

If you lucid dream every night you may find Tibetan Dream Yoga interesting. It can be secular or spiritual since it is a Buddhist practice.

See this book by a well-regarded teacher for more information: https://www.amazon.com/Tibetan-Yogas-Dream-Sleep/dp/15593910...

>It seems like lucid dreaming is very tiring and that I don't wake well rested

I spent a lot of time in my teens learning to lucid dream and I do credit it with worsening my sleep quality. If nothing else because I have to force myself to wake up when lucid dreams repeatedly turn creepy with their occupants unhappy with me for being the dreamer.

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