

Tim Ferris: Beginner's Guide to Lucid Dreaming - DarrenMills
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/09/21/how-to-lucid-dream/

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mahmud
Sure, if you're only working 4 hours a week you have plenty of time to Lucid
Dream in your Polyphasic zombie sleeps induced by weeks of raw food diet,
kegel exercises and cold calling the A-F entries of the phone book to practice
the elevator pitch for your _personal-growth_ startup.

~~~
pavs
I think you are mixing him up with Steve Pavlina. While I find some of recent
entries of Pavlina borderline crazy, his old entries on personal development
are really good stuff.

With Steve, for the first time I learned that I can think of him as crazy and
admire some of his (early) writing at the same time.

I have my doubts about Tim Ferris though. He seems to run of hype.

~~~
petercooper
I'm not a TF fan but he does have the occasional piece of "unhype-y"
brilliance, such as this video on how to build a high traffic blog:
[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/06/29/how-to-
build...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/06/29/how-to-build-a-high-
traffic-blog-without-killing-yourself/)

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johnnybgoode
I've heard about this before but I do have one question. Isn't it possible
that there is some disadvantage to doing this frequently instead of having
regular dreams, even if one isn't immediately apparent?

~~~
mattjung
A friend of mine trained himself to be able of lucid dreaming, but stopped
with it when he began to have "nested" dreams - he thought that he woke up,
but found himself in another dream (and that multiple times). That made him
frightening.

~~~
herrherr
The only freightning thing I experienced is sleep paralysis
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia#Sleep_paralysis>). But this too
presents no dangers, it is just a weird and uncommon feeling =)

~~~
DougWebb
It's a weird feeling when you recognize what it is, and horribly frightening
when you don't know about it and think you've been visited by aliens, ghosts,
or demons. This is made even worse by thinking you're going nuts and being
afraid to tell anyone about it; people spend a lifetime with their secret
trauma, when they could have just told someone and found out that it was
nothing more than a fairly common effect of waking up at the wrong part of the
sleep cycle.

~~~
WilliamLP
But it helps if you're visited by aliens, ghosts, or demons, because you can
mistake that for sleep paralysis, making it not very frightening.

~~~
DougWebb
The trick is to ask them to read something twice; if it comes out the same
each time, they're really there. Otherwise you're experiencing sleep
paralysis. Or they're just messing with you.

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Mongoose
What can't Tim Ferris do, and subsequently blog, film, and self-promote about?

The one lucid dream I've had was awesome. I've thought about writing dream-
notes upon waking up, but now I think I'll actually try it.

~~~
dkersten
I've had two. One was really really short and the other was a bit longer. Both
were awesome. I've considered dream-notes, but its effort. Maybe one day.

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rms
On the topic, see this thread about an individual with total control over his
dreams, including time dilation. His longest dream lasted for what felt like
four years, which he spent "creating planets and landscapes, and then I just
sat back and watched the life/universe I'd created play out in super-fast
motion." It's IAmA so he could be a troll, but it seems believable to me.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9ebol/i_am_in_full_con...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9ebol/i_am_in_full_control_of_my_actions_when_i_dream/)

As far as techniques, I would recommend giving wake-induced lucid dreaming
(WILD) a try, as practiced by Richard Feynman. You basically just stay
conscious as you fall asleep, watching your body fall asleep and staying
aware. A very small amount of caffeine or chocolate an hour before bed can
help with this.

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flooha
I've had many lucid dreams, though I've never been able to hang on for very
long. I'll try the spinning technique next time for sure.

If this interests you, you might also be interested in "binaural beats".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats>

The most famous use of "bb" is probably the audio series produced by The
Monroe Institute.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monroe_Institute>

If you can get past the "new age" stigma of TMI, they seem to be surprisingly
scientific in their endeavors. They have audio series for LD and other
consciousness exercises. The idea is that binaural beats can be used to alter
your brainwave frequency and help you enter altered states of consciousness
(hack your brain).

The first objective is "mind awake, body asleep", which is exactly what it
sounds like. It involves relaxation techniques, "resonant tuning" (which is
basically chanting like a monk), an affirmation of your goal (to expand your
consciousness etc...) and then deeper relaxation.

I have achieved this state a few times, but never had the discipline to keep
up with the exercises. The few times it happened, the initial feeling was that
my body parts had all melded together and I couldn't feel where one part
stopped and the other started. Then, I felt a peculiar detachment and a very
intense feeling of "energizing" which I can only describe as something similar
to holding a 9volt to your tongue, but all over your body. At that point I
would always become too excited and "wake up".

The main reason I didn't persist with the exercises is because chanting and
wearing headphones when you go to bed isn't very pleasant for the person
laying next to you. The other roadblock is discipline. If you want to have LDs
on purpose, you really do have to stick with the dream journal and make a
conscious effort to make it happen and keep up with it.

My LDs were natural and not the result of practice, but were definitely very
cool. I know what it's like to fly like Superman. :)

~~~
korch
I second recommending the Monroe Institute audio guides. I nabbed them off
BitTorrent years ago, and I play a few of them on an iPod shuffle while
falling asleep. It's worth seeing past the New Age (rhymes with "sewage")
stigma--the point isn't some non-sense about metaphysical "energy", rather the
point is to get you used to putting your body into a quasi-hypnotic suggestive
state where visualization can be much more active in your perception.

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antipaganda
Is there anything useful you can do while lucid dreaming?

I've done it once in a fever, and it was admittedly a fantastic experience (I
was a multiverse god and made lots of multiverses full of happy people in
awesome landscapes having really great sex), but it would be nice to be able
to get something out of it that could be shared with other people.

I'm wondering if one could use the immense processing power of the human brain
in a consciously directed way; for problem-solving, or simulating a complex
system, for instance. That would prove that you're not just watching pretty
lights while the "this thing that's going on right now is really cool" part of
your brain is stimulated.

~~~
beza1e1
I don't think system simulation is possible. The dreaming tests essentially
work by prooving that you can't keep much "state".

Learning by repetition is something i heared repeatedly. I have no personal
experience, but it seems to be a Matrix-style "I know Kung Fu". So you seem to
have access to your memories and can reinforce them. Maybe some self-
psychoanalysis is possible, since you may access your subconsciousness.

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fgimenez
Technical question: He states that you should look at a pattern, look away,
and then check to see if it changes. Supposedly it will change because your
memory can only hold 7 +- 2 bits. Now if your memory is too small to keep this
supposed pattern consistent, how the hell are you supposed to memorize this
pattern for a consistency check? I.e. you need your memory to assert that your
memory failed. Is there a separate memory he is talking about here? Even if
that technique worked, couldn't the pattern stay the same just based off the
chance that you get horizontal/vertical stripes twice in a row?

Sorry if I'm nitpicking, maybe my cs theory courses just ruin these things.

~~~
DougWebb
You notice the inconsistency, even if you can't quite recall what the pattern
was before. I've only had a few lucid dreams and I don't have great dream
recall, but when I wake up at the right moment I can remember my dreams
vividly, and think through the dream events with my fully conscious mind. I
don't notice patterns changing that much, but I do know that text changes. For
example, I've had dreams where I fell asleep while reading, then continued to
read in my dream making up the story as I went. But then it gets confusing so
I back up to reread a page, and the story changes.

Another common event is that people and things in my dreams can be indistinct
until I pay close attention to them. Just recently I was with a woman in my
dream who appeared as just a silhouette in a shadow until I really wanted to
know who she was and focused on her, at which point she became perfectly clear
and vibrant. That can happen to the entire setting of my dream too, and people
and settings can also change as I pay attention to different parts of them.

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pizza
Great, as Tim usually is. I pretty much know all there is to Lucid dreaming,
but I didn't know much about huperzine prior to that post.

Also, if you're really interested in lucid dreaming, there's a wonderful
community filled with dream-veterans @ <http://www.dreamviews.com/>

Hands down, the best suggestion of what to do during a dream was, "your finger
is an orgasm gun."

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swombat
Personal experience: I have tried lucid dreaming, and had some moderate
success at it (got two lucid dreams that I can remember). It's a lot of fun,
and not all that hard. I warmly recommend it to anyone who can be bothered to
keep a dream journal by their bedside.

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Ben65
This is a great way to keep working even when your body forces you to sleep.

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korch
A decade ago I picked up a copy of the La Berge book that Ferris mentions. I
highly recommend it as it seems to be the canonical book on the topic since La
Berge was credited with being first to medically prove in a lab that lucid
dreaming even exists. It takes like 3 months of daily dedicated practice to
get the knack, but once you've trained your mind to do it, it gets easier to
induce with repetition. Regular lucid dreaming is an incredible experience,
and I can't even begin to explain the impact it has had on my own creativity
and self of self. If you haven't done it--GO DO IT!!

And I agree with what others said about using LD'ing to aid in learning. For
me it is hugely useful to get unconstrained "practice" time to quickly go
through steps I need to remember when awake. I call it dream kata. I mean both
mental steps, like learning math proofs in my case, and steps for physical
things, like learning to rock climb(falling off cliffs and flying away is
seriously fun). What's weird is after routinely LD'ing such practice
scenarios, when I go back to regular dreaming, I will have non-lucid dreams of
doing the same kinds of practices. We dream about what we regularly do each
day, so it's a way of tricking the mind to watch and mimic itself. Somehow it
engages a part of the subconscious to constantly practice and learn.

While LD'ing sounds trivial, the time can add up and I think it has huge
potential to give those who employ it an edge. Let's say you lucid dream for 2
hours every night for just 3 years--then you've got 2k+ hours of practice time
in whatever you do. Take Gladwell's book Outliers and his account that
"geniuses" in any field excel simply because they have had so much more raw
practice than others. While we don't know how common lucid dreaming is amongst
these "geniuses", it might be another explantion of this "practice == genius"
phenomenon. The way I see it, if you can get 20% of the way to 10,000 hours
just in your sleep, there's no reason to not be doing it.

~~~
jerf
I always feel obligated to post a contrarian point, since I think only people
who A: succeed at training and B: have a great experience actually post,
whereas all those who don't succeed or have a "meh" experience don't actually
post, and these people may be the majority.

I naturally LD with some frequency, especially if the room is a bit too cold.
In that case, I'll LD for days in a row at a time, and, well, here's a hint:
my reaction is to go turn up the heat.

I think what people are reporting is like riding a roller coaster. It's great
fun the first time, and still fun occasionally, but reading about LD being a
"life changing experience" is like reading about riding a roller coaster being
a life changing experience. Maybe it feels like it the first time, but... no,
it really isn't. Well, I will concede that there probably is a small set of
people for whom it might be important for some psychological reasons, but in
general I doubt it. (Same is true for roller coasters, someone who is afraid
of them may see it as a big deal that they got over their fear, but in
general, it's not a lifechanger.)

On the other hand, I have to admit that I am also fairly creative and do have
a strong sense of self, so perhaps I'm just jaded.

I really doubt it's useful for training though. The brain naturally
"practices" (some think that's what dreaming _is_ ), and I think all the LD
experience is doing is observing stuff that happens anyhow; I doubt the
observation actually adds that much.

(Oh, and if you do have problems with recurring nightmares, LD is definitely
worth pursuing. In my experience, the best approach once you know you are
dreaming is to just let the scary thing happen; if you're scared of heights,
fall, if you're chased by the monster, let it eat you, etc. Nothing bad can
happen, and eventually your brain will work it out. My dreams are routinely
filled with imagery that could be scary in the "wrong context" now, but it's
never a problem anymore.)

~~~
oscardelben
I can see your point, but training is very important at the mind level. Many
athletes use it when they can't physically train.

Anyway, I don't have the data but I guess 80% of results are still from
physical training, although adding that 20% for free wouldn't be bad. I'm
going to try it.

