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Comment by lialuna | Hacker News Reader

I’m 33, when I was ~17 I took a discrete math course. During class teacher posed a challenge- to find algorithm for minimal number of cross beams to make an n by m lattice rigid, so it can’t flex like a parallelogram because triangles are fixing angles. I was asleep, realized I was dreaming, and decided to “work” on the problem. I found a solution, woke up and wrote it down. I think it was helpful to be dreaming because usually I cannot visualize more than simple shape, but while dreaming, I could try things out without using paper and pencil.

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During my maths degree I would often try to solve problems last thing at night. If I could not solve a problem. I’d Go to sleep. I would have no recollection of solving the problem but in the morning I would often be able to immediately solve the problem.

This could have been down to a fresh brain but the speed at which I would solve the problem in the morning and pretty much just know the solution I’m convinced I was solving the problem in my sleep and then basically just writing it down when I woke.

In the programming fields, we call this putting in 'on the back burner'... don't spend too long on a single problem. Just put in the back of your brain and come back to it.

Background Thread Processing ( Learning ).

I wrote the story about Rust where the programming concepts were hard to grasp and most just give up the first time trying to learn Rust. Normally months or years later, it clicked the 2nd time around for whatever reason.

It's an effective method of learning. Expose your brain to the concept, then walk away, come back the next day it later on, repeat. Continue to do this and you'll eventually understand. Repetition is the key to mastery, after all.

This! The subconscious mind is FAR more powerful than the conscious mind..

It's the part of the mind which is always operating.. A sure-fire tactic is to ask yourself a question right before bed, and allow it to do it's thing

It is also very chaotic, so your answer might not come and you just dream of slicing pickles for Angela Merkel or something similarly ludicrous.

You nailed it. Most of the time, we don't even know why we just did a particular action. Our subconscious expresses an urge, and we usually just do it. Afterwards, our conscious mind rationalizes the decision with some sort of logic which people will defend to the death.

It is possible to communicate with the subconscious. In fact, it is always communicating with us. Our society is so focused on the conscious mind that we tend to not notice. This is what anxiety is. The subconscious is trying to express an unmet need. The medical field tries to suppress and numb the symptoms instead of listening to your body.

Source: Nobody told me this. I discovered this while dealing with massive personal problems over many years. Operating under this assumption is how I overcame serious addiction, anxiety and depression. Meditation is a good way to calm to conscious mind so you can "hear" your subconscious and body.

This happens to me constantly with CS problems. I work on a problem at night, go to sleep and the answer suddenly comes to me when I'm driving to work.

I have the issue where if I'm stuck on a problem and try to sleep on it, I wake up as tired as if I had stayed up working. My brain seems to never completely shutdown and rest. Have you ever experienced that? Any suggestions?

I guess I don't try to "sleep on it". I just tell myself I'll tackle it another time and go to bed. I have amazing sleep hygiene and I tend to use one dream from a set of dreams to fall asleep. Somehow I still wake up and have the solution the next day even though it was never my intent.

Well, that's how we work.

Even if you design the whole thing today, wait at least till tomorrow: you'll have a much better solution.

This is the first time I had heard of this rigid lattice problem and I thought it sounded very interesting; if anyone else is interested, here's a link to some details: http://datagenetics.com/blog/november12014/index.html

Fascinating. I don't know how the two can relate (might be worth some weekend googling/research) but this reminds me of the lattices in the 7th row problem!

https://youtu.be/cmdOmOCfo90

I used to be able to do the same thing when I was younger; I'm 30 now. I wouldn't ever study growing up, wasting my waking time consuming content --stuff you can't dream up since it's made by others. I would essentially practice what I did know in my sleep (using 'lucid dreaming') being conscious while asleep, as you were. Needless to say this isn't healthy, as now I'm not able to be as conscious while asleep, or seemingly not dream at all, and I'm now a narcoleptic, as I was diagnosed years ago... Essentially asleep while awake, ironically. Something that's not in my favor when I need to get work done. The extra thinking time while your body rests was really nice, though.

I'm not clear -- you believe your narcolepsy was caused by overdoing (so to say) lucid dreaming in your youth? I've not heard of this but I am very curious.

If you are 30 now, maybe you just experienced the typical narcolepsy onset pattern in your early 20s.

I have narcolepsy. The daytime drowsiness started when I was 19 and got progressively worse during the later years of my university study. I pretty much abandoned attending class by my 3rd year.

What you describe as 'lucid dreaming' sounds similar to what I used to call my 'party trick': I would sleep soundly through the compulsory PhD seminars or a few years later my MBA classes, then wake up as the speaker asked for questions. Straight away I would ask a relevant and insightful question! People around me would look stunned: "How could you do that? You were asleep!"

So somehow while sleeping, my subconscious mind was still absorbing the talk. When I woke up, I had no idea what the talk was about, but bizarrely I usually knew what question to ask. Even today, 20-25 years later, my MBA and uni friends remark on it.

"Needless to say" lucid dreaming isn't healthy? What?

I also did a lot of lucid dreaming and seemingly had it very adversely affect my ability to sleep normally and have 'normal' dreams. It does seem that at least some non-lucid dreams may be a requirement for normal functioning. I have gently suggested to a few friends interested in lucid dreaming that they not get into it too much, for that reason.

In my case, I've learned to stop at all controlling the dreams, despite being aware of whether or not I am dreaming, and that seems to have helped.

However, both of us are simply relating anecdotes; we may both have had significant sleep issues arise even without the lucid dreaming (albeit in a slightly different form).

I’ve sort of experienced the same thing—never quite to the same extent, but close. I wish there were some way to trigger this productive lucid dreaming, because it does feel very cool to wake up with a solution to something you were stumped on while awake.

If you reduce the problem to "some way to trigger lucid dreaming" there is a lot of information to be found on that subject. If you read a bunch of different guides you start to see a few common techniques.

I can't say I've gotten anywhere near the state of attaining lucid dreaming on a regular basis by applying them but there's been some interesting moments in my on-and-off attempts.

Here's an experiment.. ask a question, out-loud, with intent, immediately before a nap..

There's a community of people online who employ dietary supplements to stimulate lucid dreaming.

I accidentally discovered it when taking Methylcobalamin B12 supplements. For the first week or so I'd lucid dream every morning for a few hours before fully waking up. It was quite interesting, but would cease happening if I continued taking the MB12. Only after stopping for a few weeks would they recur upon reintroducing the MB12.

There are more reliable supplements for stimulating lucid dreaming in particular, I'm pretty sure my MB12 experience is just a minor side effect. I've read it affects melatonin production, and I did find myself growing sleepy earlier and more consistently when taking it. I don't know if that's related to the lucid dreaming though.

I learned this when taking Vitamin E for an injury. I would have dreams that I remembered when I woke and that is unusual for me. I tried to buy vitamin E for the purpose, recently, and failed to reproduce the result.

Codeine gave me sleep paralysis a few times.

Discrete math at 17? But can't visualize more than a simple shape? Quite the opposite from myself. Vivid spatial imagination, but abstract ideas take lots of mental effort to assimilate. In calc 1 at 30; after spending three decades hating math I found an interest in it, had just never been 'taught' the right way. It took an acid trip to see the beauty of mathematics.

I had a similar problem when I was 19 and working on a statistics problem. It was finals week and was very tired. Frustrated, I decided to take a nap, except my mind was "awake" during the nap if that makes any sense. Solved the problem in this state quite readily.

Unfortunately, I was unable to replicate that "mind awake, body asleep" effect since then. I suspect it is because I was never as tired as I was back then.

This is something people with aphantasia like me will never be able to do. But I would love to have this kind of visual thinking once in my life, just for the experience. This seems to offer a lot for problem solving skills :)

I also have aphantasia, but a significant subset of my dreams do include visuals (and some don't), so don't count yourself out on learning-while-sleeping.

Dreaming actually means you are not sleeping well...

In your case, you probably were under pressure. But if it continues, it might cause damage to your brain.

> Dreaming actually means you are not sleeping well...

I'm fairly sure you're the one misinformed. Do you have any source on that? I recently read Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep and why it didn't feel comprehensive, the book did NOT mention anything about dreaming while sleeping being a negative.

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