
Lucid dreaming: Rise of a nocturnal hobby - gps408
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18277074
======
fumar
I practiced becoming lucid in dreams. This was a about five years ago. I was
able to do it on a regular basis. I loved it. One of the greatest benefits was
solving my 'day' problems in my sleep. Of course, it was fun and surreal.

One of the side effects was sleep paralysis. Eventually, I realized my energy
level was dropping. Lucid dreaming was taking my rest away. I stopped. I
prefer to let my body sleep normally now.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "One of the side effects was sleep paralysis"

That's interesting. For me lucid dreaming is more a side effect of sleep
paralysis. I usually realise I am dreaming when I experience the symptoms of
sleep paralysis and am then able to continue the dream (aware that it is a
dream).

~~~
fumar
I would be lucid in a dream and want to wake up. I would force myself out of
the dream. Then, I would experience sleep paralysis. Usually, the best option
was to fall back asleep.

------
gaelian
I wrote a blog post about my own lucid dreaming experiences a little while
back[1].

People may also be interested in r/luciddreaming over on Reddit[2].

1\. <http://blog.binarybalance.com.au/2011/02/26/lucid-dreaming>

2\. <http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming>

------
FlyingTryangle
One of the few times I'm actually qualified to comment on an article. Top
comment by tokenadult has it all wrong. Sure you can do Wake Back to Bed ones
or mess up your sleep cycle to do it but you certainly don't have to. I never
did I lucid dream several times a week. It's much easier to just keep a dream
journal and do realit checks while you're awake.

Second, there's no need for piles of studies on lucid dreaming. I never feel
tired or anything like that after I have big lucid dreams. The opposite in
fact. After a particularly emotional or powerful dream I feel alive! I feel
exuberant and it's easier for me to get out of bed. It's a fantastic way to
practice skills as well. I'm an MMA fighter and I have many many fighting
dreams that feel perfectly fluid and natural. The pathways in my brain for
fighting are being stimulated for hours at a time while I sleep. Sure it's not
1:1 with real life practice but the opponents in my dreams often do novel
moves I have never been exposed to before and I have to come up with novel
counter techniques. It's clear to me that lucid dreaming practice is helpful
to real world skills.

Not to mention the entertainment value. My favorite most recent one was
telekinetic powers. I made forks and knives fly across the room then when I
wanted to test out more power I looked out the window and made a nice car
sized chunk of earth come rippping out of the ground. It was fucking awesome.

------
snitzr
The article has a section on dream interpretation. This is bunk Freudian
stuff. Even if it were true that dreams had meanings, it would be difficult to
prove scientifically. Just a warning before people start attaching meaning to
something where there is none.

------
pohl
Back when I was in high school, I had to write a term paper and selected the
topic of lucid dreaming. I probably put more effort into that paper than any
other assignment in all my years of schooling. I went to the local college and
looked up every article on the topic I could find. Stephen Laberge had a book
out back then (1985) according to Wikipedia, but all I could get were various
periodicals. I studiously practiced the techniques he was recommending at the
time (waking after a dream, noting it in a journal, staying awake for 5
minutes, repeating the mantra as you fall back to sleep: 'the next time I
dream, I will realize that I am dreaming'.

I was amazed at how well a little bit of consistent practice could bring out
this ability. I don't recall any negative side effects as others here have
mentioned, but then I was a teenager so who knows if I was really tuned-in to
how it was effecting me.

I remember being especially entranced by the idea of tests subjects sending
coded signals to the waking world through muscular contractions - but then
_Dreamscape_ was a relatively new film at the time, so maybe that had
something to do with it.

------
eof
I spent some time in college thinking about/wanting to lucid dream. The
techniques that I came to use were using a digital watch that I looked at
frequently, and making a habit of turning on and off lights.

The idea is that in a dream, looking at a watch won't reveal a time; and
turning off a light switch won't turn off the light. So you train yourself to
do these things habitually with the idea that eventually you will do it in
your dream, and have the knowledge that when something funny happens, you will
know you are dreaming.

I was also advised to have in mind the things I wanted to do when I became
lucid. I wanted to fly. So with that in mind, I got a cheap digital watch and
started flickign on and off light switches.

It was a couple weeks later when I had my first lucid dream; I looked at my
watch while at some type of fair; and noticed it was weird looking; which gave
me this sort of _poof_ aha moment where I realized I was in a dream. Then I
remembered I wanted to fly, so I made myself "fly" which this particular time
ended up being me going straight up like I was on a very fast space elevator.

I had my second, much nicer only a couple nights later.

Since then I stopped putting any effort into it, but I have been a lucid
dreamer pretty often ever since.

Very few of my dreams do I conciously take control, but the vast majority of
them I am what I have come to call/think of as 'semi-lucid'. That is, part of
the story line of the dream is that I am dreaming, it's essentially built into
the plot, but I am still just a passive observer.

The most common exception to this is when I want to wake up from a dream
because I have gotten myself into a shotty situation, so I will climb to the
top of a building and jump off or do something else drastic to wake myself up.

Recently, I have had more and more double-layer dreams, or inception-esque
dreams. Where I wake up from a dream, always semi-lucid, usually by my own
will as I described above; only to go about being in another dream still.

Usually when truly wake from these I feel similar to how I do after coming out
of a long meditation session. Uber uber focused; like my brain is on super
drive and reality is crystal clear.

Anyway, I recommend learning to lucid dream to everyone. Especially with apps
as it probably makes it even easier for the right people; but I had plenty of
luck like I said by just checking my wrist watch.

The only true benefit other than the 'fun' factor is that I basically never
have nightmares; as anything that is scary/bad is always met with a sense of
lightness or calm, since my dream character knows he is dreaming.

~~~
MichaelGG
I've only had one or two fully lucid dreams. In one I realised I was dreaming,
I could not get myself to wake up. I was then convinced I should kill myself
to wake up, but could not fully determine if I was sleeping or not, so why
take the risk?

Unfortunately, clocks and text seem to work in my dreams. Another reality
check is covering your mouth and nose and trying to breathe. Supposedly, this
is a good test as in a dream you'll keep breathing. Plus, it's unobtrusive,
unlike turning lights on and off at offices and other people's houses.

~~~
nooneelse
For me, the best unobtrusive reality-check, by far, has been checking gravity.
Just by quickly changing my weight in a chair or rolling up a bit on the balls
of my feet, I can see if my weight is there or I start to float a bit.

Checking global light level control (light switches) is, like you say, not
unobtrusive. But I've tested, with moderate success, using more subtle
lighting features. Window blinds, for example, typically have far more subtle
shades of light and shadowing than gets rendered in my dream worlds. Paying a
few seconds of focused attention to a window or lamp shade doesn't stand out
in most social situations.

------
k-mcgrady
I regularly experience sleep paralysis and find it very easy to go from that
to lucid dreaming, especially as I can force myself into sleep paralysis (I
discovered that it triggers when I am too warm at night). Personally the only
benefit I've gotten from it is that it is fun to do occasionally.

~~~
woodall
If I eat before bed I experience the same thing. Didn't start happening till
my senior year in college. Freaky, but fun.

------
mrspeaker
I'm convinced I could operate some kind of (very sensitive) input device while
lucid dreaming. I can touch type well so I'm thinking of making "keyboard
gloves" or something to communicate from the other side. Though I should have
a look - I can probably already order them on Kickstarter.

~~~
Monkeyget
<http://xkcd.com/269/>

~~~
mrspeaker
Internet rule: there is xkcd of it. But actually, I found mention of
communicating via eye movement here:
[http://daniel.erlacher.de/index.php/Time_required_for_motor_...](http://daniel.erlacher.de/index.php/Time_required_for_motor_activity_in_lucid_dreams)

But that's a bit too low bandwidth for me ;)

------
EAMiller
I've tried lucid dreaming with limited success over the years. Here are a
couple of relevant links:

\- RadioLab is a great podcast, they did a lucid dreaming episode:
[http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-
blog/2012/jan/23/wake...](http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-
blog/2012/jan/23/wake-up-dream/)

\- After hearing said podcast, I wrote a quick twitter hack to occasionally
ask if you're in a dream (one of the techniques):
<https://twitter.com/#!/isdreaming>

------
jeromeparadis
I've had a lot of lucid dreams in my life. I never did anything special as far
as I know. I began having then fairly early, like 7-8 years old and I suspect
it happened as a way to take control of and avoid nightmares. Gaining the
ability to realize it's a dream and escape by flying was a great way to change
nightmares to fun experiences where I gained confidence by deciding to
tauntthese nightmares and fly off or whatever I wanted.

From my teens to my early thirties, I would say that more than 50% of my
dreams were lucid and were more about fun with friends and showing off. With
time, I even gained the ability to wake up on demand from my dream. My cue is
that I can close my eyes in my dream and when I open them, I wake up in real
life. With practice, I can even close my eyes again and get to sleep again to
join back the dream if I do it fast enough. I sometimes was able to wake up
and join back a dream this 2-3 times per dream.

Now at 40, lucid dream are much less frequent but happen from time to time.

By the way, I could never decide what to dream about before going to sleep
(except joining back a dream). Then again, it never occurred to me it could be
possible.

But, it always cool and a joy to experience. I suspect Neo go his idea to hack
the Matric because of lucid dreaming!

Most people I talked to about this have trouble believing me it's possible.
It's usually the few who experienced lucid dreams who believe me.

------
tokenadult
I've heard a lot of claims about lucid dreaming among some young people I know
well locally (some of whom post here from time to time). I don't get the
impression that lucid dreaming is really as beneficial as they think it is.
Some cases I know about from personal observation involve disturbing sleep
cycles so much in pursuit of lucid dreams that the young people failed in work
environments or crashed and burned in their university studies. Getting a
normal amount of sleep (for you, that leaves you feeling rested when you wake
up in the morning) is very important. It's a lot more important than what kind
of dreams you have.

I read through the whole submitted article, and I didn't see any reporting on
rigorous study of the waking state health or performance of long-term lucid
dreamers. All we see in the article is anecdotes, summed up by

"For Hobson, the neuroscientist, the benefits of being able to achieve lucid
dreaming are much simpler.

"'We don't really know if there are real psychological advantages, but I can
tell you that it has huge entertainment value. It's like going to the movies
and not paying for your ticket.'"

An issue to consider whenever participants on Hacker News discuss self-help
strategies is how reliable the research base is. People who only use the
University of Google Library to do research will often find websites by
advocacy groups that are pushing a solution that may not have been tested.
Fortunately, Google's own director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, has
written a guide to reading research reports

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

that reminds us all about what to look for when someone reports some new,
amazing treatment. Check out whether lucid dreaming has really been well
evaluated with sufficiently large sample sizes, control groups, and other
marks of good research.

I think a writing intervention

[http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/H...](http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Home2000/WritingandHealth.html)

may do more for many people in high-creativity careers than lucid dreaming.
There is a better research base, by far, for the writing self-help than for
lucid dreaming. Try it and see how it works.

I've always been able to enjoy interesting movie-like experiences by DAY-
dreaming, and it's not explained here why anyone should alter their sleep
cycle (which has known risks, up to and including psychotic symptoms) just to
be entertained. A lot of researchers over the years have done a lot of
research on human dreams in particular and sleep cycles more generally. Where
is there any evidence that lucid dreaming is helpful rather than harmful,
long-term?

Best wishes for much success in improving your personal insight and problem-
solving.

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
I tried lucid dreaming and it was quite easy for me to control my dreams. But
after I woke up, despite the fact that I had slept 8+ hours, I felt mentally
exhausted. Physically I was fine, no yawning or anything, but mentally I felt
like I hadn't slept. It was a weird disassociation of physical vs mental
exhaustion.

I've tried it a few times and it's the same every time. To me the slightly
more fun lucid dreams are not worth the exhausted feeling in the morning.

~~~
ralfd
Fghh45sdfhr3, what did you dream lucidly?

When I could control my dreams I would probably just stop whatever my brain is
trying to figure out and start a sex dream.

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
Flying, building a great world - much like creative Minecraft 10 years before
it was invented. And yeah sex too, but that kept waking me up.

~~~
nooneelse
Fellow lucid dreamer here. I've tried some explorations of the interface
between sleep and waking from within dreams. In my experience/opinion, sex
dreams might tend to break up because they use the tactile sense a lot and
vision not so much. That can lead to inadvertently paying attention/letting-in
one's real-body proprioceptive sense channel or attempting to give motor
commands out to one's real muscles (rather than sticking with the dream-sense
channels and the more expectation-based moment to moment control of one's
dream).

------
rudilee
There is subreddit for it: <http://www.reddit.com/r/luciddreaming>

------
rsaarelm
I've been able to get poor-quality "wake-induced lucid dreams" reasonably
regularly lately by waking myself with an alarm 3 or 4 hours before my usual
wakeup time, walking around for ten to thirty minutes so I won't immediately
fall back to sleep and then getting back to bed and meditating while I wait to
fall asleep. More often than not, I go straight into a dream state without the
in-between stage of deep unconscious sleep, and remain lucid.

Amusingly, these types of lucid dreams are basically false awakenings with my
brain still running on the assumption that I'm lying in my bed in my bedroom,
so they kind of resemble the stereotypical astral projection. I'm guessing
something like this is what's really going on with the people who claim they
can astral project.

I'm not doing the thing all the time since it's hard to keep up a regular
sleep cycle while doing it, and the dreams have so far mostly been too short
to be much fun. Still, it's a nice proof-of-concept.

------
duwease
Are the companies pushing the lucid dreaming glasses nowadays the same people
that sold them in the old "Johnson-Smith Things You Never Knew Existed"
catalogs when I was young? I distinctly remember wanting to buy those, but I
always blew my money on the other stuff in the catalog (fake dog poop, a "Hoof
Arted" t-shirt)

------
pawelwentpawel
I used to get them quite a lot a few years ago. First thing was usually white
noise followed by the "lucid dream".

The funny thing is that when you put on a nicotine patch right before going to
sleep the dreams become way more accurate. I guess it has something to do with
dopamine. It's like having a lucid dream... in HD ;)

~~~
njs12345
Modafinil definitely has a similiar effect, if you sleep when it's active..

------
tseabrooks
I had lucid dreams fairly regularly during my teen years (I suspect due to
some strangeness caused by sleep apnea). These days it's treated and I don't
have these anymore. Though, for anyone interested I think it's totally worth
trying to trigger it. It's an interesting experience.

~~~
mrspeaker
I had lucid dreams as a teenager too, and completely forgot about it. Then
about a year ago it happened again - and I remembered how cool it was.

I find I can nearly always do it if I wake up in the middle of the night then
just think about it as I fall back asleep. I guess my subconscious then keeps
a look out for weird stuff... "That elephant wasn't there when I looked a
minute ago. Wait, elephant?! I'm dreaming!" Then it's flying time.

~~~
FreeFull
This is called a wake-initiated lucid dream. It is also possible to become
lucid in the middle of a dream.

------
Void_
I wouldn't spend time trying to "cause" a lucid dream, I have enough goals to
chase that affect my awake life.

But I have these dreams sometimes, it's always just fun. My two favorite
things are to fly, and to make portals.

Yeah, portals like in computer games. You only decide that you wanna go
somewhere else, and you let the passive part of your brain select that place.

I got this whole idea by reading an article about how to detect you're in a
dream. It suggested you find a mirror and try to step through it, and that
somehow turned into my portals.

That's the best thing about lucid dreaming, you can do whatever you want.

Now I don't have these dreams to often. When I realize I'm dreaming I'm too
awake to have a realistic dream, so it's something between a dream and a day-
dream or whatever.

------
drrory
Lucid dreaming is the tip of a very big ice berg, one which may extend beyond
the menial dimensions of spacetime, as we know it... A brash satement...?
Perhaps, but I, Dr Rory Mac Sweeney, can only offer the melted ice of my
memories from what I have seen in the oneiric paradigm and hope more people
will take the time to elevate their opinion from material reductionism,
through direct experience with open, yet skeptical mind This subject will gain
more momentum in the coming months and we will all be facing bigger questions
about our reality, I can be found on line and am happy to chat @R

------
garindra
This is a question that I've had for quite a long time about lucid dreaming :
is it possible to use the lucid dream time as a time to think deeply about
things that usually require a lot of real world time but don't usually require
access to real-world material?

For example (this list is completely non-exhaustive):

1\. figure out high-level software architectural design

2\. write the high-level plot of a novel

3\. think how to solve personal problems (personal relationships, etc.)

4\. come up with product marketing campaign ideas

etc.

I know this defeats the purpose of sleep itself, which is to completely let
the brain to rest completely, but I'm genuinely wondering.

~~~
nooneelse
I've spent most of my attention in my LDs on poking at the nature of the
simulation rather than on trying things like those. But somewhat relevant to
your question, in my experience, the passage of time can go rather strangely
in dreams. As one example of weirdness, if I start to do something like count
to twenty, it would be rather easy for me to start counting, then have the
dream kind of, almost or perhaps entirely imperceptibly, "skip", and I'm
saying twenty with plenty of memories that I did the counting if I try to
remember the middle, but never having actually done so--in whatever best sense
that phrase works for dreams--. That is to say, memories seem to me like just
another sense channel that the dream world can fake in realistic or shoddy
fidelity as the case may be.

So how would you know if you really thought through designing some software
"beginning to end" so to speak, actually considering sub-cases, instead of
having just skipped to feeling like you did all that when really your
dreamworld is just elaborating its first guess at a design on the fly as you
look at one facet or another. Now in some cases, that distinction might not
matter, in which case I'd say a LD might be what you are looking for. In other
cases, it will matter, and I'd say dream worlds can be tricky (another
important way here is that one's "criticality" is not usually up to par in
dreams, normally glaring problems, omissions, strangeness can just glide by
one's attention; one is usually better at this in LD but not anything like
infallibly so).

Now the interpersonal relationship thing... that I have more directly tested.
And instead of sitting and trying to use dream-time to ponder the matter,
LDing provides a different sort of possibly useful trick; calling up
simulation(s) of the person in question and chatting with them while their
dispositions are somewhat under your control. Unless one gets a/the trickster
wearing a them-mask instead, which is always a worry for me, but maybe not for
you.

~~~
garindra
Memory integrity is definitely an important thing in order to get any decent
result out of a supposedly productive lucid dream, but can't it be improved by
"training" though? I remember reading through a lucid dreaming thread on
Reddit, and they said you can actually train yourself and have increasingly
stable lucid dreams overtime; I would think memory integrity is one huge part
of the whole dream stability spectrum.

~~~
nooneelse
(Sorry for the lack of brevity.)

Well, I don't mean to paint anything as a strong defeater of the project. More
of a hurdle, and perhaps not one that everyone would have; the nature of
dreams is very individualized and varies so much with so many things. Mine are
usually very visual, but if I'm doing a lot of programing for a few days, they
become abstract and syntactic in ways I find it hard to recall clearly. Maybe
I've trained my dream-recall to overuse spatial aspects as a crutch.

And I would think short and mid-term time contiguity amenable to training (one
can certainly learn to spot the skips more readily). And the more common,
persistent dream-stabilizing methods would be a good place to start (I find
having one dream-hand constantly scratching at its palm, or the palm of the
other dream-hand to be a pretty good, persistent I'm-in-a-dream-
reminder/stabilizer). Apply one to stabilize the dream, and then keep doing it
even with the dream largely stable while thinking through the problem. I
didn't try that (when I noticed the time skipping, I started trying to figure
out how to use them, like control the skipped interval, rather than reduce
their frequency).

My worry is that "filling in what you attend to" is a pretty general
thing/feature/mechanism across all the senses I've tested in dreams. Along
with "one's expectations", it is near to the foundations of what I think
dreams are made of (speaking internally that is; speaking externally, they are
made of brain region activations and neuron spikes and such). So there may be
a limit to how much one can reduce/corral it on each sense modality. Well
exercised short-term memory will probably help with that on the memory
channel, since it does on the visual/spatial one... like with objects
persisting when you turn your back to them and then look again. But then the
capacity limit to working memory comes into play.

And there seems to be only so much I can split my in-dream attention between
maintaining awareness that I'm in a dream (so as to keep it stable) and giving
room in my working memory for new dream developments/updates to take place.
Which is somewhat weird, because if I just look out on a dream vista (or just
some wood grain), the landscape can be amazingly complex and rich with shape
and color. But the more or longer I control my attention and hold fixed the
way the dreamworld is allowed to update (no random stuff insertions or
location shifts), the less those richly productive, autonomous visual updates
seem to even try. The dream gets duller, and the fewer things around the more
unstable it gets. I seem to have to allow the dream production mechanisms some
free reign of randomness to maintain the sensation-expectation feedback loop
going with content.

But maybe all of this is a product of my outlook. I look for the limits of
dreams like the rendering limits of a game-engine. So maybe my dreamworlds
oblige me and provide all manner of limits built around the kinds of limits I
expect our wet-ware simulated worlds to have. If so, sorry to have infected
your dream-thinking with these things.

And heck, just thinking for a bit in a dream about the rough shape, the
requirements a solution must have so as to setup some very strong
expectations, and then skipping forward in time a bit (or expecting to find
the solution in a drawer and opening the drawer) and looking over your
subconscious' creative "fill it in as I look" solution could very well be a
good tool for seeing possibilities you wouldn't arrive at through more
straight-forward thinking.

------
stcredzero
Reminds me of "Summer Dream Job."

<http://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/summer-dream-job/>

I had a semi-lucid dream once. I was flying after my then girlfriend. I knew I
was dreaming, and I knew that I could will myself to fly as fast as I wanted.
That's when I lost control, because my dream girlfriend just willed herself to
fly faster than me. I willed so hard, I "broke" the dreamworld. Everything was
flying apart as I woke.

------
no_more_death
I almost always remember my dreams upon waking. Frequently I suddenly realized
I was dreaming and would wake partly up. Usually I notice that my eyes are
closed, like while I'm driving, and I'm afraid. Then I force my eyelids open
and realize, "Stink, I was trying to sleep" :-)

But I never struggle with getting to sleep. I just concentrate on "nothing"
and try really hard to not think about anything, and soon enough I'm asleep.
For me it just takes discipline.

------
jmsduran
There was a phase in my life not too long ago where I experienced lucid dreams
and/or night terrors, granted I had a very bad diet and sleep cycle at the
time.

After a couple of weeks it ended up taking a toll on me both physically &
mentally, I would not recommend that anyone willingly pursue this type of
sleeping/dreaming.

------
tagawa
The first I heard of lucid dreaming was this introduction to it in Steve
Pavlina's podcast. Highly recommended for anyone with a passing interest:

[http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-
pod...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-
podcast-010-lucid-dreaming/)

------
lucian1900
I occasionally have lucid dreams without trying to do so. They're almost
always a lot of fun, basically the best sandbox game you can think of.

I've been pondering trying to trigger them, but I've been a bit spooked by
suggestions that I'd have to try to learn tp distinguish dreams from reality.

~~~
FreeFull
I can distinguish any dream from reality, but the problem is that when I'm
asleep I don't ask myself "Am I asleep?", I just continue following the
dream's story. If I ever ask myself that question, or notice something isn't
right (which is difficult in dreams, because what would be bizarre in reality
will easily be considered normal by your brain in the dream) I will become
lucid.

The article talks about flying. I often will fly in my dreams even if I am not
lucid. When I am lucid, I am always able to fly.

One interesting thing you can do when you find yourself lucid dreaming is
conducting experiments. You just have to remember what experiments you decided
to conduct when you were awake or think of some on the spot. I found if you
close your eyes and imagine something, it will be part of the world when you
open them.

I found it is easier to become lucid when you are waking up, although by the
time you are lucid you won't have much time left to do anything in the dream.

~~~
Cushman
One thing to try (if it's worth it to you) is to get in the habit of checking
if you're dreaming, even in waking life. Try to read printed text, or use an
electronic device, and _really_ pay attention to whether it works the way you
expect. It feels pretty silly to do this when you're awake, until you do it
really thinking you're awake and realize you're actually dreaming.

You do need to be quite studious, though-- I've had dreams where I managed to
convince myself that that shifting, swirling mass of words and characters
probably says something in Russian.

One of my favorites is something I call the "five finger rule." This is a
mnemonic for remembering how many fingers you have. Here's how it works: Hold
out your hand. Now count your fingers, one at a time. One, two, three, four,
five. Five fingers.

Any time you don't get five, you're probably asleep. Obviously this assumes
you have five fingers per hand in waking life :)

------
kaeluka
absolutely worth trying; had two lucid dreams I can remember, one of which was
flying over the Swiss alps. It was as real as real life gets, it's quite weird
and amazing. Unfortunately didn't succeed yet. r/luciddreaming is good to
follow, as some already said.

------
planetguy
While I've had a few "lucid" dreams in my life that I can remember, I'm
skeptical of anyone who claims they can do this with some regularity. Don't
forget, there's a comparable number of people who claim the ability to "astral
travel".

When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid
dreaming or just _dreaming_ that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that
distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream
while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you
do.

~~~
mistercow
>Don't forget, there's a comparable number of people who claim the ability to
"astral travel".

That is a rather uncompelling argument. How many people claim to be able to do
something has very little to do with whether or not that thing is possible.
Many, many people claim to have been helped by homeopathic remedies, and none
of them have. Relatively few people claim to be able to walk on their hands,
but many of them can.

"Number of claims" is evidence, but it is such weak evidence that its effect
on your beliefs should almost always be overwhelmed by the effect of your
prior. The plausibility of astral projection and homeopathy is incredibly low,
and the weak evidence given by "number of adherents" doesn't significantly
budge the needle.

On the other hand, having had personal experience with lucid dreams, your
appraisal of the plausibility of regular, practiced lucid dreaming should be
rather high. If, then, you encounter even a dozen people who claim to have
done this successfully, you should believe that is probably possible. That is,
of course, unless you have some appropriately strong justification based on
your understanding of neuroscience for why it should not be possible.

>When you wake up in the morning, how can you tell whether you were lucid
dreaming or just dreaming that you were lucid dreaming? I don't mean that
distinction as a joke; in one case you have conscious control over the dream
while in the other case you don't have conscious control but dream that you
do.

I don't think the distinction is meaningful. The part of your brain that
perceives being in control is not the part of the brain that issues commands.
So if we allow that it is possible to believe you have control over your
actions without actually having control over your actions, then we must accept
that this is in fact _always_ the case, even while we are awake. The belief
that you are an atomic unit which simultaneously perceives and manipulates the
world is a form of essentialism which we can pretty well rule out by now.

Edit: I should also add that "lucid dreaming" doesn't technically imply
control; it just means you're aware that you're in a dream.

~~~
aiscott
Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake
up immediately. The one dream that I remember where I suddenly realized I was
dreaming but didn't wake up went pretty awry. I became very confused in the
dream trying to figure out if I was awake or not. It was disturbing.

~~~
mistercow
>Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake
up immediately.

Most, but not all of my experiences have been similar, although I actually
suspect that in at least some cases I have not actually woken up, but have
merely _dreamt_ that I woke up. At one point I "woke up" from a lucid dream to
find myself in bed in the middle of the night, went back to sleep, and then
was awoken moments later by my alarm and found that the sun was fully risen.
Not conclusive, as I may have just slept dreamlessly in the interim (although
that's uncommon after waking from a dream and going back to sleep), but
suspicious.

Another time, I woke up immediately after realizing I was dreaming, looked
around my room, and found that my dream had persisted and was visually
composited over the real world around me. This was, of course, extremely
disconcerting, and my solution was to close my eyes and go back to sleep. But
looking back, it seems far more likely that I dreamt that entire experience,
including the waking up and looking around, than that my brain actually had
that kind of catastrophic system failure.

In any case, losing your grasp on lucid dreams is a common and frustrating
problem, and people have gathered a few tricks for holding on. One that has
sometimes worked for me is, when I feel things beginning to slip, rather than
panicking, to spin gently in place with my eyes closed (although closing your
eyes in a dream is not always

~~~
nooneelse
> "(although closing your eyes in a dream is not always"

I've been lucid dreaming for a good many years now. Losing visual sensations
in a dream typically leads me to waking up. I attribute this to me being a
rather visual learner/thinker while awake. Early on I tried the spinning-
around trick, but it led to confusing visual-blurs and often me
unintentionally sensing my real-body's proprioceptive channel, all leading to
waking up.

My best dream-stabilizing trick so far has been to look at my dream hands and
use one to scratch the palm of the other. That ties my visual perceptions to
my dream-body's tactile sensations. Once I get a dream stabilized like this, I
can just keep one hand scratching its own palm all the time, serving as a
good, constant reminder that I'm still dreaming.

Or, if I'm flying/hovering, I just crash into something or the ground (the
harder the better), also linking the visual to the tactile.

Just my personal experience, ymmv.

------
drivebyacct2
Huh, reading the comments here make me feel like a lucid dreaming wizard. I'd
figured out all of these tricks and many more personal ones before I left
highschool. It was the basis of more than one Informative forensics speech.

Can't say I use it for the "insight" that some comments talk about though, or
that it affects my quality of rest or restedness.

