Dreams are the default for intelligence

Another way to tell is to try to read things or look at a clock/numbers in your dream. Often time the information will not make sense, and will change if you look away and back.

I've done this myself once or twice in a dream and I actually was able to tell I was dreaming but the shock of my realization woke me up.

I read a guide that suggested looking at your hands - that night I dreamt and recalled that and it worked. I guess most people do not see their own hands accurately while dreaming and it acts as a cue.

Just a little tangent!

Most of the time when I'm dreaming it never even occurs to me that I might be in a dream until I wake up.

I have even had some cases where it did occur to me, and I started lucid dreaming (which was very cool), but then I reverted to my default this-must-be-real dreaming state. That was very weird.

I would look at my hands in lucid dreams and they would appear in extreme detail, as if I could comprehend both its general form as well as every single grove in my fingerprints. I’m pretty sure I tried to turn them over and was able to see all around them.

One thing I find fascinating about dreaming is that it seems that the dream wants to prevent you from staying lucid. When I become aware that I am dreaming I “wake up” and start going about my day, only to realise I am still dreaming, at which point I “wake up” again, and this cycle continues. This is a perceptual barrier that can be broken through, at which point you instantly gain hyper awareness awareness and control over you dream.

Light switches and steering wheels never work properly in my dreams. I have to concentrate really hard to get things to follow the rules. Then I wake up.

Whenever my wonderful dog from 30 years ago appears in a dream, I start to do the math and realize that she would now be 41. And then I wake up.

I used to lucid dream regularly (need to get back to it - it's a lot of fun). I used a reality check where I would try to (lightly) blow air through my nose when my hand was closing it off. If I could I was dreaming. I did this randomly during my waking hours every so often when I had some indication that something was different and I needed to test reality.

Whenever I would come semi-aware when I was dreaming I would do this reality check and realize I was lucid and could do what I want. The interesting part to me is that blowing air through my nose and hand twigged me to the fact that I was dreaming, but the technicolor mega-gorilla screaming at the sky and throwing laser bolts did not.

I've tried that but am always foiled; the bike falls over or I'm distracted at the last minute by something else within the dream. Its like the mind is creating excuses not to wake up.

I am almost constantly trying telekinesis. If it works, I'm dreaming. It not, I'm here. It's a fun game to play during the day to day as well.

The method I found to work most consistent in getting to a lucid dream is to wear a wristwatch with a vibrating alarm (noisy alarm clock makes you too awake) and then set it to wake me after I've slept something like 4-5 hours. Then I'll be really tired and fall asleep again almost immediately, but when I'm falling asleep fast it's easier to notice and focus on hypnagogic patterns. Hypnagogic pattern are patterns of light you can see behind your eyelids as you fall asleep and then they become more and more focused until they turn into a dream. It's hard to keep the focus, but doing after waking up just slightly from a vibrating alarm clock and then not moving the body at all, makes it much easier as the patterns then come really fast and quickly turns into a dream and if you manage to keep the focus you basically just go from being awake and straight into a lucid dream. The problem is it fucks up sleep a bit, so should have a few hours extra to sleep in the morning.

Recently I switched from taking a lions mane supplement in capsule form to mixing some powder into my morning tea, since I can get the powder for far less $$ and it's usda organic on top of it.

For some reason this has resulted in persistent lucid dreaming before waking up, daily, for over a month now. The capsules rarely caused this, but something about the tea seems to be affecting the bio-availability, or maybe the powder is just different.

Whatever the root cause, it's been quite fun. But a bit distracting as it makes completely waking up difficult, now that there's this incredible interactive mind-movie I'd rather continue playing vs. start my day...

It does seem like a state of mind worth exploring with some potentially huge utility if mastered. I can't produce such immersive and vivid visuals to navigate mental models in my regular conscious thinking. I'd much rather do the equivalent of lucid dreaming to navigate things like interplaying algorithms and data structures for example.

The method that works most reliably that no one talks about is to pinch your nose closed and try to inhale through it. If you’re dreaming, you can still inhale through a pinched nose. Always a useful check to perform before hurling yourself off a cliff to see what it feels like.

It’s a first step for sure.

Look at the time or look at letters. They are all fractal gibberish if you look at them closely during dreaming.

But that might just be part of the dream.

I’ve more than once floated into letters that would reveal more and more shapes just like zooming animations of fractals. But it hasn’t caused me to realize it was a dream, let alone take control of it.

Lots of crazy and spacey things happens in dreams, that you just accept.

The technique a few people mentioned of looking at words or writing and then looking away and looking back is pretty effective for me. You would have to have some reason to suspect you were dreaming first.

I can do it, I first figured it out when I was 6 or 7, but why? Might be better to just get some sleep.

My thinking is not coherent enough while asleep to run all those experiments. A few times I've asked "am I dreaming?" in dreams, but following any step-by-step process after that thought is just not in the cards. My thought patters are just as disjointed as the scenery and events "inside".

Interesting. Could you please share some links about it?

I see a few problems with that. For example that we can freely act and think in reality but cannot in (non-lucid) dreams. Things like meditation seem more convincing.

Though it is an interesting thought experiment, which implies that we evolved much farther than necessary for dreaming simply because the environment outside dreams as an energy source is so competitive, to a point we're now able to create different kinds of alternate realities as well. Which as so often leads to questions like the purpose of our existence.

To me the idea that dreams exist in order to let the brain filter out unimportant experiences from the day before - or highlight important ones - seems more plausible, especially considering sleep deprivation can lead to hallucinations and more, I don't think this can be explained purely with other processes like the self-cleaning mechanisms of the brain during sleep.

From an evolutionary perspective, letting animals think/dream is an optimal way for them to explore things without risk.

I can tell you from firsthand experience that dogs dream. Some dogs "talk" in their sleep, move their legs as if walking or running -- the sequence from Cinderella (1950) when Bruno is dreaming of chasing Lucifer is only a slight to moderate exaggeration. A dreaming dog is definitely in a place far removed from waking life -- perhaps one where steaks grow on trees and blood-soaked frisbees fly through the air for no reason.

My (uninformed!) theory is that dreams are just what brains/neurons appear to do when the driving signal (thought) is mostly disconnected, but the filter (interpretation) is still active.

I.e. just neural noise, following pathway patterns by biological necessity, but shaped into conceptual patterns by our overactive pattern matchers which do a ton of work to arrange input into a limited set of "observations".

If that's true, nothing we ever dream is truly novel, but just assembled or permuted from the giant set of our own known or imagined pieces.

Which seems pretty consistent with my dreams, at least. And it explains the phenomenon be being unable to recognize the dream state without altering it. Heisendreams!

> Which may have existed in human populations from the beginning

Well, autism is said to related to percent of Neanderthal. e.g. (2016) https://newsroom.uw.edu/story/human-neanderthal-gene-varianc...

It’s not just the visual processing aspect but also the ability to assemble completely novel mental imageries. There’s a link between those with ADHD and having hyperphantasia, or having extremely vivid imaginations. Can someone daydream if they can’t imagine objects?

Would you mind defining 'glut' in the context of your post? What you're saying seems very interesting but I can't quite wrap my head around it.

That's an interesting theory. I don't know if this helps you draw a distinction but you may find this this paper by the NIH interesting, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4153434/

They state that generally females are diagnosed adhd-pi higher, but there may be other factors. However, Females are generally diagnosed less with autism:

(From wikipedia) "Several theories exist to explain the sex-based discrepancy, such as a genetic protective effect,[7][8][9] the extreme male brain theory[10][11] and phenotypic differences in the presentation between sexes,[9][12][13][14] which may all be intertwined. Researchers have also debated whether a diagnostic gender bias has played a role in females being underdiagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.[15] Researchers have also speculated a gender bias in parental reporting due to the expectations and socialization of gender roles in society.[16]"

Thought I would indulge your theory, and give more food for thought.

> This can really only be partially true for lucid dreaming, though, right?

I've had a lot of lucid dreams over the years (starting when I first was prescribed medication to help me sleep when I was a kid, where I'd have them several times a week, and gradually becoming less common over the years to maybe once a month). At least in my experience, being aware that I'm dreaming gives me the ability to choose how to act, the ability to force myself to wake up, and occasionally the ability to break minor "physics" rules (I pretty commonly find in lucid dreams that I can hover a few inches above ground and float around that way instead of walking), but I've never experienced the ability to change my environment, and the "people" in my dreams I interact with continue to act independently.

Obviously my dreams are entirely a creation of my own mind, so some part of my brain is in control of it, but being aware of that isn't sufficient to let me control it arbitrarily any more than I can stop myself from feeling physical pain or disliking the taste of some food in real life. Ultimately, we're not really in "full" control of how our mind and body react to real-life stimulus either; if we were, things like depression and phobias wouldn't exist.

Oddly enough, we've been saying that since... The Terminator. NN's and LLM's are cool but not even close to the power of the human brain (maybe quantum llm's?). I'm keen to see how we can tap into our own minds as CPU's or at least drivers thereof. Consciousness is awareness and perception so one could say we are close to a rudimentary consciousness but we have a long way to go before it's aware.

Still, even though we've been saying it for 30 years, exciting times indeed! #skynet

There are devices made to detect and disturb you (with light, vibrations, etc) during REM sleep, to help with lucid dreaming. If you want to experience a dream, something like that might help, with the fairly safe assumption that you do enter REM sleep.

Interestingly enough, I could be considered the opposite. Having aphantasia, I've never had a mental image, but I have very vivid dreams. Talking to my dad, he only dreams in black and white. It's just awesome the variability we humans have.

People who go under anesthesia routinely have significant amounts of time where they are conscious and interacting with doctors, that are completely lost to memory. Everyone is configured uniquely, and you could just be someone whose memory is more shut off during sleep and still be "dreaming", if we just define dreaming as the brain continuing to operate on its model of the world in some capacity while sleeping.

Don't worry about it. There are no such things as dreams; they're the brain bullshitting itself when you wake up in an inconsistent state. If you have a very complicated or imaginative life, your brain has to do a lot of work at night doing a very lossy compress of everything interesting that happened that day. If your sleep is restless or interrupted, you're more likely to still be in this process when you awake. Your mind can then attempt to rationalize how it reached this state [edit: filled with malformed images, associations and features that lack wholes.]

If you have some combination of a life of habit and adequate rest, you'll less often fool yourself into thinking you dreamed. If you immediately start writing when you wake up, you'll fool yourself into thinking you have the most elaborate and profound dreams ever, although you'll code this as remembering.

Dreams are so insubstantial that we very recently believed that everybody dreamed in black and white, and that dreaming in color was a sign of mental illness. This is a belief that faded completely and quickly alongside the rise of color tv and film. The implications of this are pretty devastating. People themselves believed they only dreamed in black and white, and later largely forgot that this was their experience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/health/02real.html

Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/DreamB&W.htm

Media Influences How We Recall Our Dreams -- Do We Dream In Black And White Or Technicolor?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/12/021224091445.h...

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edit: so I disagree with the OP. There are no dreams, only recollections of dreams. When you look at the "dreamlike" imagery of generative AI, you're looking at something similar to what awake people construct dreams from, not dreams themselves.

You almost certainly dream. I believe there are medical tests to confirm that you are indeed dreaming. As to why you do not remember them? Beats me!

If you're really curious you could use the Salvador Dali method: hold cutlery in your hand. When you sleep, you drop the cutlery and wake up from the noise. Repeat until hallucination.

Probably not healthy for you though!

I liked it (unusually enough for some random blog) so I'll volunteer my take on it.

Remember how Stable Diffusion works? It's essentially noise reduction cranked up to eleven. You train a neural network to clean up slightly noisy images. When it gets good at it you turn up the noise a notch and repeat. You keep doing that until the network will look at pure noise and "repair" it into an image of whatever.

Animal brains have to do something similar, because our senses suck. Take our eyes; the part of your field of view which is actually in focus is tiny [1], so you are constantly updating an internal 3D model of the world, one small patch at a time [2], interpolating between patches and editing out things like your nose to replace it with a hallucination of whatever it happens to be occluding (except right now, because I reminded you of it).

In this sense, what you "see" is not so much the real world as a hallucination guided by your sensory input.

What happens when you reduce the information content of that sensory input, either by making it "unstructured" [3] or by removing it altogether [4]? Same thing that happens to Stable Diffusion when you present it with pure noise: it hallucinates freely.

So it makes sense that lying down on a comfortable bed in a dark, quiet room and shutting your eyes - all steps toward sensory deprivation - should have a similar effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_span

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_deprivation