
To sleep, perchance to control your dreams - djug
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/05/11/us-science-dreaming-idINKBN0DR0IV20140511
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bryans
I'm able to lucid dream intentionally, even to the point that I can take a
break, wake up to use the bathroom, and then return to the exact same point in
the dream. It is a strange experience to be "conscious" inside a dream, and I
have certainly had some interesting ones.

Contrary to what the article suggests, you can't really control the scenario
you are in. It is more like being awake. You take conscious control of
yourself and the brain makes the world react accordingly, but the actions of
others are still beyond your ability to change.

But I also find it to be quite useful in a practical way. I've written some of
my best music and developed some of my best business ideas or inventions
during lucid dreams. The bonus being that I can remember everything after
waking up, so retaining those ideas becomes much easier than it normally is.
In fact, if I play or hear a guitar riff while inside a lucid dream, I'm able
to pick up the guitar while awake and have retained noticeable "muscle memory"
for the chords or progressions or runs, as if I've played them thousands of
times.

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mmcdan
Is this intentional lucid dreaming a skill you've developed or did it come
naturally? I've heard you can increase the probability of having a lucid dream
by keeping a dream journal, doing "dream checks" in everyday life, etc... but
i've never heard of a surefire way to have them.

~~~
hosay123
It's pretty cliché, but an abundance of cheese during the day has occasionally
resulted in lucid experiences for me, or at least vivid dreams I remain
strongly aware of the next day.

That aside, the most reliable and intense series of lucid dreams occurred in
my teens while experimenting with psylocybin -- unlike the parent comment,
sometimes also affecting the dream's setting or the behaviour of people in it.

My favourite (and probably the simplest) experience from that period was
repeatedly exhaling steam on a frosty day, marvelling at how the steam and
everything else I could sense was a figment of my mind, before waking up
giggling and in a wonderful mood.

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DonGateley
It says 27 subjects experienced induced lucid dreaming. How many didn't? If
the rate is anywhere near 100% and the experimental setup description can be
obtained there will be DIY boxes galore to do this and soon.

Does anybody know where the paper is? This is a rare case where I don't give a
damn about a pay wall.

~~~
chestervonwinch
[http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.37...](http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.3719.html)

~~~
DonGateley
Thank you. $32 and on order.

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veb
I don't know about this. I know I can have rather nasty nightmares, but I
don't remember them when I wake up. That's a good thing. If I was lucid
dreaming, bad things would probably still happen.

Does anyone have any experience with lucid dreaming? It sounds like it would
be exhausting.

~~~
mrcsparker
I lucid dream almost every night. For a good deal of my life I thought that
everyone did.

When I am dreaming I have to check often that I am not actually awake, so I
have a trick I use to make sure that I am dreaming. I know, it sounds a lot
like Inception.

A little more - I had night terrors up until I was 12. I would walk though my
house in a frantic dream state, sometimes seeing things that weren't there on
top of things that were. Maybe the lucid dreaming and early night terrors were
connected.

~~~
tiler
Do you ever suffer from sleep paralysis?

~~~
Smirnoff
I am not the OP but I do experience sleep paralysis. I started experiencing it
during my late teens; it was scary at first but I learned to control it and
calm down when it happens.

The worst part about sleep paralysis is that things happen to you while you
are in bed in your room (or where ever you fell asleep) and things seem too
real-- ghosts trying to choke you, a monster slowly crawling towards you, or
just some person in the mask breaking into your house and you can't move or
scream to ask for help.

Sometimes it happens at night and you can move around (but that's a dream),
then you wake up and can't move (and that's either sleep paralysis or yet
another dream). Then you wake up for real but you don't know if that's still a
dream.

Sometimes it happens during the day when you nap. You can hear people around
you talking but no one seems to see/feel that building is about to be
destroyed or hear you screaming because you can't move your lips.

Luckily, I learned to control it. All you need to do is calm down and say that
it is a dream. Personally, there are clues that give up the fact that I am in
sleep paralysis-- I can't see faces clearly, regardless of the thing being
alive or inanimate (like stuffed toys). So I just calm down, admit that it is
a dream, and fall asleep again.

PS: I also wouldn't call it "suffering sleep paralysis". It happened
frequently (several times per month) when I was young but after I turned 22 it
might have happened 3 or 4 times only.

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3stripe
"Voss does not foresee a commercial market in lucid-dreaming machines."

Yet...

~~~
guiambros
_" I think there is a world market for maybe five computers"_

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somnabulis
The first time I heard about lucid dreaming, I was a freshman in college. This
guy was explaining it to me in this salacious manner, which he claimed was
easily accessible to him now that he had gotten the hang of it, and I just
found myself completely unimpressed by his masturbatory fantasies.

Thinking it over, I've never been able to conceive of an obvious benefit to
it, other than as a means to avoid bad dreams. But beyond that, why bother?
What kind of absurd escapism is this? And then, just to wake up to a piss-poor
reality, where I'd rather be asleep? Feh!

In the long run, I found that my diet had a strong relationship with the bad
dreams I was having, and after I got out of college, and started buying food
with my own money, when I purchased the foods I actually felt hungry for,
instead of just raiding the refidgerator for whatever my parents had stocked
with (or otherwise resorting to fast food), that bad dreams disappeared, and
now I rarely have memorable dreams.

Sleep is restful and uneventful, when I get enough of it, and I'm thankful for
that.

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PeterWhittaker
tl;dr: Lucid dreaming is accompanied by increase in gamma waves in the brain.
Inducing gamma waves can induce lucid dreaming. Applications are theoretical,
but may include therapy for stress disorders, e.g.

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wildpeaks
I am reminded of the game Dreamfall[1] where part of the backstory include a
company putting on the market a lucid dreaming device, hence would trigger a
decline of sales of traditional entertainment systems because why would you
buy movies when you can dream anything you want on demand.

(Although the game backstory goes further with its machine being able to not
only trigger but also shape and even download the contents of the dream,
posing copyright and mind-control issues, but that's another thing :)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamfall%3A_The_Longest_Journ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamfall%3A_The_Longest_Journey)

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tiler
I would pay quite a bit to have lucid dreams every night. The more control I'd
have over the dreams the more I'd pay. Imagine never really losing
consciousness. Would be a whole new world.

~~~
mhitza
I'm with you on this, and that it's why this line from the article seemed odd
to me "Voss does not foresee a commercial market in lucid-dreaming machines.".

Maybe just people aren't generally aware of lucid dreaming to know what the
market size is.

~~~
aetherson
She doesn't foresee a commercial market in lucid-dreaming because she thinks
it's dangerous to induce an electrical current in the brain without an
overseeing physician, not because she doesn't imagine any demand for it.

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tshadwell
Essentially: electrical stimulation of the brain can cause some to wake up,
and some to enter a state between awake and asleep; sounds fairly intuitive.

I have had personal experience of lucid dreams, when I was very young I would
stare at my bedroom wall until I fell asleep, the concentration must have kept
me awake to some degree.

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fsiefken
Perhaps the shakti design, a God helmet, could be used for this purpose?
[http://www.shaktitechnology.com/shiva/god%20helmet/index.htm](http://www.shaktitechnology.com/shiva/god%20helmet/index.htm)

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Aurel1us
Does anyone have additional links for that field of research? Favored without
charge PDFs.

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AliAdams
I wonder how rested you would feel in a lucid dream versus a 'normal' one.

You'd think accessing the decision making functions of the brain would give
you a worse rest overall.

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wisienkas
Be you inner self and you cant but control your dreams. Because you are you.
So in reality you do already control your dreams. you are just not being you
then dreaming.

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domness
I wonder how effective this method compares to that of using something like
binaural beats.

