MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

I’ve experienced some of these same things. But more than that, I applaud you for experimenting!!

I recently read "A mind for numbers" which leans on this concept of working hard on a problem (focus mode) and then stepping away from it for some time (diffuse mode) very heavily. I also realized that this works really well for me and i guess for most people.

How have you developed that faculty?

These have happened intermittently through my life when my stress is high. This is only personal clue I can give to you "why" otherwise maybe you're just getting good at it.

In my last episode, I was floating toward a wall and all these thoughts were firing, "you're in a dream", "you'll go through the wall", "don't be afraid" but the rational side that felt like I was going to slam into a wall freaked out just at the wall & I woke. I still wish I just let myself slip through the wall..

Did you have a kid or start traveling more? I noticed that when I am on a plane (usually very sleepy b/c I can only afford red eyes), I drift off a lot, but get woken up a lot too (PA announcement, food cart to the knee, etc.)

I had something like what you're describing as I was developing mild sleep apnea. Starting using those nasal separator strips religiously and got back to having consistently deep "dreamless" sleep ... but no lucid dreams.

>"I don't know what changed in my body to cause the difference"

For me it was gaining a better understanding of basic physics. Something I was never taught at an early age due to a cult like upbringing. Now questioning all I have ever been taught is second nature in my waking life. Even basic things like was that shadow normal? "Oh right, nothing divine there." So now that has leaked into my dream state, whenever physics goes weird (mostly water not flowing right or objects that don't respond in a proper manner) I instantly question it and then become aware of my dream state.

I get this a lot too and had to look up the term. The first time I tried acupuncture I went into this state right away.

That moment when your brain falls asleep in class and tells you it unveiled the deep connection between carnival blister peanut texture and the quantum variational bound. And then you wake up suddenly and get scared because you think you might have yelled out something stupid.

Or maybe I’m just the only one.

>It feels like I am dreaming while I am still awake in some kind of transitional state, where I am not conscious and also not asleep

I've had this start happening to me in the past year. When I was a kid I would have horrible, recurring nightmares for months on end that were difficult to remember. At some point in middle/highschool I stopped having dreams altogether (or at least stopped remembering them entirely). It was great as I would no longer wake up in a panic or stay up incredibly late in order to get to sleep. Recently however, I've started having dreams like you describe. My sleep schedule has changed as well. I get up at 5AM, but recently I've found that I'll naturally wake up between 2-4AM at which point I'll drift in and out of consciousness having negative, vivid dreams that I partially remember in the morning.

I had the exact same experience, it was really freaky and I had to turn it off.

That is an excellent point. I do agree that the converse is true. Together, now we are talking.

The advantage to opening yourself to what is loosely called 'right brained' thinking, is that you don't have to wait around for someone to publish a rigorous study in a journal about the subject you're seeking a solution for. If I waited around for science as much as some HN users imply they do, I'd be paralyzed and barely ever make progress on things that matter to me.

I believe great scientists often start in wooville before they are able to distill science out of it. “Why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research?” -Freud

I don't think science will be able to say as much on the subject as one would like. "Navigating your own dream state" is a person making decisions about a world they themselves have created. There isn't much room for an objective observer there. In general, I don't think science is ever going to get a grip on consciousness. The whole "self observing the self" business makes it way too slippery a concept to get a grasp on in any satisfactory manor.

any/all of Joseph Campbell

Works by Robert Monroe https://www.amazon.com/Robert-A.-Monroe/e/B000AQ8V5A

Works by Dr. Lilly https://www.amazon.com/Center-Cyclone-Looking-Inner-Space/dp...

Carlos Castanteda (take it with a grain of salt :) https://www.amazon.com/Carlos-Castaneda/e/B000APXVFG/

D. Scott Rogo's "Leaving Body" is good compilation of various techniques https://www.amazon.com/Leaving-Body-D-Scott-Rogo/dp/06717639...

"The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep" by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is excellent. The terminology can feel alien or intimidating, but if you're receptive you can see results quickly. Bonus: The author & his organization give many workshops, in the US and abroad, even online.

Hello!

I have written a blog on this topic. It relates to work I have done working with Shaman and plant medicines in Peru. Here you go: https://goodroot.ca/post/2018/03/06/the-garden-axiom/ !

Thanks, I haven't thought of this but it sounds plausible as well.

Also see Déjà Rêvé.

I was thinking even simpler: Maybe she started talking about the orange ball earlier, but he was asleep (or mostly asleep) at that point, and so started dreaming about it. Then he woke up at the last bit of the story.

Interesting. I've had several strange experiences in the last year which could be explained this way (as I have no other way to explain me "seeing the future"). In one example, my brain told me there was a 5 euro note under a chair at a cafe, and then I looked, saw it and picked it up. In another example, I saw a fruit had fallen from a tree and imagined an older man come and pick it up and then look up at the tree. This exact thing occurred 10 seconds later.

Other weird experiences include living in a new country and having at least 20 instances of deja vu there within a short time (not of having been there, but just random moments I had seen before in my head).

Yeah, exactly. Sorry, the description was a bit rough.

Essentially; lie down on your back. Raise your arm from the elbow as if you were about to point to the ceiling, while keeping the elbow resting on the bed. When you are about to fall asleep, the arm falls down, waking you up (hopefully).

The point is to give you the opportunity to sort of traverse back and forth over the line separating waking and sleeping consciousness quickly.

The goal is first of all to be able to "spot" the state of mind. Since it's usually just something we pass by on the way to sleep, we don't normally have a very clear sense of what the state is like. Therefore it's hard to hold for any amount of time. Familiarizing yourself with the characteristics of the state of mind helps when trying to hold on to it.

Which is the eventual goal: to remain in the state for a longer time before waking up or falling asleep.

The arm thing is rigged to wake you up rather than letting you fall asleep. This is to increase chances that you're able to bring something useful back to full waking consciousness. If you have a very successful session in the liminal state, but then you fall asleep, chances are you won't remember the details later on.

A friend of mine achieves the same effect by putting his arms behind his head, tucked under his pillow. He finds it very uncomfortable to sleep like this, so eventually he gets tired enough to slip into hypnagogia, but he never quite falls asleep.

It doesn't work for me, I find that position very comfortable.

But basically, you can be creative in this regard. Anything that helps you hover back and forth between waking and sleeping mind helps you chase down the elusive middle bit.

Another friend swears by taking a double espresso and laying down in the afternoon. Apparently this is enough to keep her from going deeper into sleep than desired. I haven't had much success with this particular method either.

Reminds me of Brave New World.

queue of cues

I'm not who you're replaying to, but...

When I was learning how to lucid dream, one of the triggers that I used to tell I was in a dream was flipping a light switch on and off. When I saw nothing happened, I knew it was a dream. Another big one I use is looking at any words, numbers or clocks to see if they were legit, or random characters / garbage.

I started to "feel" what a lucid dream was because I would get some nightmares that would eventually wake me up. It felt real and I could remember everything about it (for a few minutes). The big ones always involved me falling from a building, and waking up once I hit the pavement.

Over time, I forced myself to try to mostly stay asleep during these nightmares. I remember falling from stuff, hitting the pavement, waking up, but keeping my eyes closed and trying to keep from waking up. It got to the point where I would "half" wake up, but still be in the nightmares. Then with some practice, I could do that to normal dreams too.

I can't really do it on demand, so it's more if I am having a crazy dream, I can usually snap out of it and fully control everything about it.

Its funny you say that one twchnique for lucid dreaming is focusing on mundane things that you do in everyday life and within a dream the behavior is different. A friend actually used light switches as anchors so whenever there was one in a dream he would realize he was dreaming. Im not a practitioner so im not 100% sure how this works in practice but I remember him talking about light switches specifically

Lucid dreaming is a skill. There's varying levels of experience and control that can be exerted via different methods. It comes naturally to some people, but is very much also a learnable skill (to varying degrees of difficulty for different people).

I spent about a month practicing methods to lucid dream before being able to achieve a few lucid dreams over a couple weeks. It became difficult for me to keep up some of the exercises in order to do so (such as waking up to write down my dreams in my dream journal in the middle of the night would interrupt my wife's sleep). It can be time-consuming for some people as well, as learners benefit from being able to get 7.5+ hours of sleep each night. I still attempt to lucid dream when convenient, but I don't practice every day like I used to.

Great resources to get started with learning lucid dreaming:

- Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold

- https://www.dreamviews.com/

If you find yourself semi-lucid within a dream, it's beneficial to immediately try to "anchor" yourself in your surroundings, by slowing turning around in-place, touching yourself, smelling things; activate all of your senses and your grounding to the dream will be much stronger allowing you to stay lucid and control the narrative.

> Tech to create a feedback loop to keep you in a particular state.

We already invented this and named it “television.”

> When I was a kid I really had this thing for switching a light switch between off and on. Know what I mean? There's a spot you can hold it between off and on where the light flickers, and buzzes, at low power, sort of randomly.

I relate to this on a spiritual level. When I was a child, I would go around the house and set all the switchs to that "in-between" state.

Yes. You start by having a dream journal. Before going to sleep, tell yourself with focus and mental expectation you will have dreams that you remember. Prep your mind. Each time you wake up, try to remember anything you might have dreamed jotting it down. This will increase awareness and number of dreams you have. Many also find taking naps during the day increases number of dreams. Most of mine came with them. You're also wanting to maximize REM sleep at least per previous research. That's where you get more dreaming and dream recall. There were devices built that supposedly detected when you were in REM vs NREM that could wake you up in REM. You could then journal stuff. I worried it might condition the brain to interrupt dreams, though. Never tried them.

So, now you're dreaming a lot. You now have to wake up in the dream. Techniques to do that are called "reality checks" since they tell you what's real and isn't. You do them all throughout the day of waking life to make a habit out of them. The habit kicks in during the dream either on autopilot (script) or when you remember to do it. You spot a discrepency between what's expected from reality and what you're seeing. You're therefore dreaming. You will probably wake up immediately with a mental rush. Lucid dreaming websites or books will give you techniques for "anchoring" from there like spinning around that hold the dream together. You can also do it with mental focus. You can also prime your subconscious to do it for you for a while but we're in tricky territory there with a lot to debate. Here's some reality checks I use to get your started:

First, ask yourself if you're awake. When you're awake, you know you're awake. If you're not sure, assume you're dreaming unless you prove otherwise. There's apparently some sense we have for that.

Second, there's often something to write with in dreams from a pen to your fingers on a surface. Write something down. Look at it to take in the words themselves plus their visual details. Hold it in your head while looking at other stuff in the room in similar detail. Then, look back at original writing to see if it changes. For some reason, the words will be different or start doing weird things like moving. You can do this with configuration of objects you find in room around you, too, but I find semi-cursive handwriting to be best. I speculate the difficulty is that the simulator has trouble telling what you're focusing on. That they're different components of the brain is already predicted by research on intuition vs reason.

Third, reflective surfaces like mirrors. They'll often have no reflection or reflect something unexpected. I'm probably the only person my friends meet who doesn't care about appearance much but always looks at mirrors. Get interesting reactions when I tell them I was just making sure the world was real instead of a dream. "No, I'm not worried or confused: just a good habit of mine." Another interesting reaction as that doesn't make it better haha. I take it as an opportunity to tell them about lucid dreaming or start a "how do you know what's real?" philosophy discussion. Or ensure they've seen The Matrix.

These three techniques have woken me in every dream I've ever had where I at least was aware enough to check them. Two of them are instances of a general pattern of simply observing the world in detail with a questioning mind. In my dreams, I similarly observe and question what I'm seeing with the WTF's going through the roof at some point. There's actually a compound effect where more simulation failures happen as I start noticing them. Confusion is how it starts. Then, my barely-functional, scripted mind starts wondering off script noticing things "aren't right." The second I'm partly independent of the dream's control I attempt a reality check out of habit. Then, I either wake up or have lucid control of the dream. My sneaky imagination sometimes counters, though, by switching to a new script to block my awareness. It adapts. The worst adaptation was, after seeing Inception, it incorporating the dream in a dream concept where I had to wake up 10+ times on occasion before I was awake. The dreams became inescapable.

That leads to the last point about practicing lucid dreams that people should know about: we can also get lucid nightmares. They're like all the creativity of your brain channeled in to writing your own personal, horror movie staring you as the perp, victim, or both. All depends on what you've seen/read previously and luck given dreams are semi-random connections between a vast array of thoughts/memories. ;) Most people can just wake yourself up to escape or at least nullify it knowing it's not real. That even feels empowering when you do it as you awaken to take on life's petty challenges after conquering something much worse. Some of us can't escape or make it go away, though. Nobody is sure how to determine that ahead of time either. One subset that was obvious was that any mental condition that brings anything from anxiety to paranoia can cause this since the same brain components are used in dream creation/control far as anyone can tell. My PTSD from head injury, aka "always-on worrying," turned some of lucid dreams from beautiful vacations I was used to into Freddy Krueger shit I couldn't escape from. Started happening a lot. Now, I just wake up the second I can since good ones aren't worth the bad ones to me.

Again, doens't happen to most people either anxious or not. I'm just giving the warning since anyone in that category will wish they knew ahead of time to make an informed decision about taking the risk. Everyone else, get a dream journal, start doing the reality checks, start taking naps, and prepare to have a blast just when you thought your day was "over." Also, you'll be the most experienced person in any conversation about what's real and isn't since you're ability to assess that will have been tested many times. ;)

What is the value? I've never been able to do it, nor have I tried much, as I don't see the difference in my life between controlling my dreams or simply allowing them to happen. My dreams are, to me, a vacation from the chore of trying to control the awake state. Why should I learn to bring that stress into my sleep state? Is there any evidence that lucid dreaming makes being awake any easier or more satisfying?

That is one explanation. The alternative explanation is that someone found something cool and decided to write a blog post. How many front-page posts have there been on some algorithm or bloom filters or seemingly "advanced cool stuff" that people have already figured out decades ago?

Yeah, I’m quite experienced with lucid dreaming, but this particular hypnogogic state is something I actually try to avoid lingering around in, because it’s very uncomfortable for me.

The process of falling asleep feels like having my mind squeezed through a narrow gap, surrounded by random proto-thoughts like fragments of words and images. I wonder if that’s just my perception of the lower frontal lobe activity they describe in the article. Once I’m out on the “other side” in a dream, I feel like my mind can stretch out and relax again.

Oh my. I spent years trying to track down the source of that sample and eventually gave up and forgot about it. A John Carpenter movie I wasn't aware of? Thanks!!

Specifically these. Scared the crap out of me as a 13 year old.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGsv0pJemTY