Induce Lucid Dreaming | Hacker News Reader

Induce Lucid Dreaming

propheticai.co

43 pointscharlieirish68 comments

It looks like they are still in the "we're not sure if this even works" phase of product development.

Basically, the Theranos stage of product development.

Judging from the fashionable nonsense in the homepage, this looks more like it's the Juicero stage of product development.

Why would I buy this when I can just squeeze the dreams out with my bare hands?

I'm not sure even she promised to come down from a mountain with the fire of the gods

If you go to sleep like 90-120 min later than usual, then wake up as usual and go to sleep again about 60-90 min later, entering lucid sleep is very easy. You can even leave music going on, or some video playing. No need for any devices.

It's true, the technique of being aware of the physical state while we literally fall asleep also helps me. I know it sounds strange, but this is what the transition from being awake to being asleep feels like, it's like losing gravity and falling into a dark stage as if it were a loading stage, then a few seconds later you sink into a dream. any.

I don't think I've ever had lucid dreams, but I do fly in my dreams a lot, and the "skill" of flying specifically gets carried over kind of like continuation dreams, except the dreams themselves are different (e.g., sometimes the dream world has magic and sometimes not).

My dream flying is odd; my ability to control my altitude fluctuates depending on whether I'm "concentrating" too little or too much. I suspect I'm balancing some kind of "partial lucidity" where I know I'm dreaming/I can fly but I can't think too hard about it. Another analogy would be like thinking about the game, or thinking too hard about a skill that has already become second nature.

Dream mental states are intriguing because you can be "in between". I don't think I'm the only person who has had "in between" dream states when you're trying to sleep in a stressful/uncomfortable situation and you drift in and out of consciousness (or maybe I am?).

> or maybe I am?

I've never heard of this.

I am curious if anyone knowd "manual" techniques to induce and maintain lucid dreaming?

A higher than usual dose of melatonin does it for me.

How do you increase your melatonin?

By taking an higher dosage of whatever they're taking for sleeping.

You might be mistaking melatonin for melanin (the skin colour one).

Melatonin also comes as a supplement.

What is your usual dose? Asking for a friend...

Not really high. I am a natural night owl but I was working at a job that had a more traditional 9-5 schedule, so I was taking them about 1.5mg about once or twice a week, just to help regulate my chaotic sleeping pattern. I used to buy 3mg pills and cut them in half. If I went for a long time without taking it, or if I took a whole pill instead of half it would be almost guaranteed that I would have lucid dreams.

Yeah. Read "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" book by Stephen LaBerge. It proposes a number of techniques, some of them works better than other for different people. If you are not predisposed to lucid dreaming (some people are), then the main obstacle is will or motivation to keep practicing.

One that worked for me is having a mechanical counter of some sort (like lap couter or just miniature code lock so you can use it as a counter), which you reset every morning and increment during the day every time after you ask yourself "Am I dreaming?" and doing some basic "reality check" (e.g. trying to breathe in through your nose when you pinch it, or checking clocks twice in a succession and validating that it makes sense, or just looking at your hands). The goal is to consistently do a number of reality checks during your waking life, which inevitably will increase the chance that you will do it in your dream. That will likely would cause you to wake up immediately for couple of times, but then you'll get used to it. It works simply because "if you don't ask yourself that you are dreaming during your waking life, what is the chance that you'll ask yourself it during sleep?".

There are number of other and more advanced techniques that borderline with "magic" to me, like falling asleep without loosing conciousness (and then waking up the same way), but I had this experience only a couple of times I guess.

It’s not the getting to lucid dreaming that’s the problem, it’s the “oh! I’m dreaming!” part. Wakes me up every time.

That and I have dreams about flying, but as soon as I realize I’m having dreams about flying, I wake up and the flying dreams stop.

It is a common problem when you starting to get lucid dreams. There are number of techniques to combat that too, but it will generally go away after you become used to it. You just get too excited when you get lucid dream.

Maybe sound absurd, one technique that worked for me is to just "start spinning" around in your dream, so you can't focus on any specific part of the dream for a long time. Continuous attention to one detail in a dream somehow starts to breaking it apart.

> Continuous attention to one detail in a dream somehow starts to breaking it apart.

But that doesn't make for a very interesting experience. I actively attempted lucid dreaming about 25 years ago, and was succesful after a while using the various reality check techniques and dream diary. And the habit has weirdly stayed with me over the years such that I still occassionally realise I am dreaming even now. But all I can ever do is wonder around for a minute or two. Over all that time I've never managed to do anything interesting like fly or conjure things or really scrutinise the dream. Those wake me up every time. I've tried the spinning technique, but that just dissolved the dream and then woke me up.

I guess it is a matter of experience and practice, as with anything else, really.

There is a very subtle mental state between "I am too aware that I am dreaming" and "there is no awareness of dreaming at all". I don't really know how to put it in words, but it seems that you BOTH need to supress part of the brain that wakes you up and prevent loosing awareness at the same time. It is very apparent during "ordinary" falling asleep, when you suddenly catch yourself that you are "seeing pictures" (hypnagogia phase) and become fully awake again. The trick is continue "falling asleep" without loosing awareness. Same applies during the lucid dream. You need to maintain balance.

You basically need to continue experimenting to notice those subtle changes to know which mental state would wake you up and which would not, so you'll get more precise control.

There are other factors at play for sure, like if you will manage to get your lucid dream right after first deep phase of sleep, your body would likely be not rested enough to quickly reach wakefulness, so you'll have more time.

I don't think that lucid dreaming is easy, and it was never easy for me. It was actually pretty hard work. It was almost impossible to get lucid dream if I was already mentally exhausted during the day. As soon as I stopped to practice, lucid dreams stopped too.

> It’s not the getting to lucid dreaming that’s the problem, it’s the “oh! I’m dreaming!” part. Wakes me up every time.

Yes, same here. I can sometimes manage to keep the dream going for what feels like a few minutes, if nothing extraordinary happens. If it is just mundane walking around and feeling the dream, it is fine. But when I start trying to make something interesting happen, I wake up.

Just usual trick of practicing looking at hands often during the day to make it a habbit works well enough for inducing them.

Why hands specifically?

It's like ChatGPT: hands are difficult to hallucinate and don't stay consistent throughout multiple viewings

Because ones hands are easy to remember and recognize how they suppose to look like. To achieve desired result you must build a habbit to look at your hands every once in a while so you'll do it as often as once in 15-30 minutes for at least a week. And looking at own hands from time to time in real life is one of least weird things you can do. So it's a perfect trigger to build habbit around.

And how it's actually work is already mentioned in other comment - when you look at your hands while dreaming they will look different or weird every single time. This is suppose to make your consciousness go into "wow I am in a dream" mode.

The only thing that ever reliably worked for me was laying down to sleep and staying entirely still but "typing" my name with my fingers in incredibly subtle motions over and over again. Something about it let's your body fall asleep but keeps your mind just barely awake. Also doing this after waking up in the middle of the night is highly effective.

The only thing was that instead of realizing i was in a dream while inside it, o was fully aware while undergoing the transition from awake to sleep which was... somewhat disturbing. Usually you forget the exact moment you fall asleep by the time you wake up, but i distinctly remember a dark cloud descending over my mind, flowing past me. Then a skeleton hand reached out from the cloud and i _felt_ it grab my shoulder. It tried to whisper something to me, maybe it did and i can't remember what it said. It was giving "you shouldn't be here" vibes though. Then as quickly as the state came, it left and i was fully awake and aware, standing on a street in my neighborhood. I tested the fidelity of the dream world by scrutinizing the tiniest details of the visuals, sounds, smells, physical sensations of the world and the acuity of simulation appeared perfect to me. I can't be sure that sensation wasn't part of the dream but i literally bent down and took a flower apart, piece by piece, it had water in the stem, smells grassy when i crushed it, and the closer i looked the more detail everything had. It honestly shifted my perception of reality a lot

Interesting. I have had success going into a lucid dreaming state by locking my hands together with the fingers interleaved with each other, with both hands resting on my chest.

Perhaps something about hands is a unique sensory input?

Variations of this technique is what has worked for me also. The trick is to focus your attention on something as you fall asleep, it doesn't have to be imaginary typing. Keeping attention focused as you fall asleep after you go to bed is hard, but doing it after you awake at night is quite easy if you don't wake up too much. The best way I have found to wake up just the right amount is to use a wristwatch with a vibrating alarm and set that to go off maybe two hours before I'd normally wake up. When it goes off, turn it off with as little movement as possible. It seems important to keep almost perfectly still. Using this I have been able to observe the transition to a dream quite gradually by watching hypnagogic patterns (the noise you see in the dark) turn from colored blobs and noise slowly into objects before transition gradually into an immersive scene. I find it quite hard to stay in the dream though, and usually wake up after a couple minutes.

Meditation before bed and going to bed early after taking some melatonin tends to give me more vivid dreams. The wake-back-to-bed technique often works to give me short lucid dreams. I think the trick is that when you wake yourself up in the early morning, you become awake and alert after the early-night deep sleep phase that would otherwise leave you groggy and completely out of it. Then when you go back to sleep you go to lighter REM sleep because your sleep cycle is still running, but are more likely to be alert and recognize it's a dream.

I learned how to lucid dream regularly and taught a few others.

These are the things that work the best:

1. Record or note down your dreams right after you wake up.

2. Put an alarm clock every hour or so and do a reality check: cover your nose and try to breathe (in dreams it works), turn off and on a light (in dreams they don’t work very well), see yourself in a mirror (in dreams mirrors tend to act funny).

3. Repeat a mantra while trying to get asleep. Something like “I’m going to have a lucid dream tonight.”

4. Wake up ~5 hours after you’ve gone to sleep. Recall your dream and then try to go back to sleep repeating the mantra or imagining you’re having a lucid dream (MILD technique).

My last lucid dream was ~20 years ago but what worked for me back then was just saying to myself (over and over again) before falling asleep that "My name is $NAME, whenever something weird happens now, think carefully about what was the last thing you remember".

Then while I was dreaming that I'm jumping off buildings etc, I started to realize that wait, this is weird.. what's my name? What's the last thing I rember before.. oh, right, I was falling asleep..therefore, this has to be a dream. Yay!

Apropos of nothing, non-lucid (i.e. regular) dreaming has become a great aid to my songwriting and story-writing over the past few years. I have really long and vivid dreams where I'm other people in other parts of the world - sometimes other worlds altogether. I've been gay, straight, woman, man. I've been an otter and a pelican. I've spent weeks holding off an army of zombies. I've fought in post-nuclear wars. Each dream can last days or weeks of dream-time. The high level of detail of the situations - and their total lack of relation to my quotidian life - makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe. But wherever they come from, I find they tell me things about my own life and help me answer questions, sometimes really practical questions about code, other times emotional questions about what I want to do. And they're a great source of novel creative material.

I've never tried to lucid dream, but I'm afraid that if I could control them my dreams would lose the thing that makes them so valuable to me, which is that from their strangeness and randomness, I get to interpret what my other selves are trying to tell me. If my conscious mind controlled them, I think I would lose insight into that; I even wonder whether losing those voices and other lives in my sleep would be a step toward going insane in waking life.

What do you think makes you have these vivid dreams?

Typically medications. E.g. SSRIs, antiretroviral drugs, and a lot of others.

My gut answer is that they're real, and that when we're sleeping or when we die our consciousness slips seamlessly into parallel universes. But it may just be that my brain has really long-form ways of trying to solve puzzles by turning them into audio-visual experiences.

[edit] I'm not on any meds, never taken antidepressants, and I've never done psychedelics. I do smoke pot occasionally, but oddly it tamps down the intensity of the dreams; the most vivid or memorable ones occur when I'm completely sober.

Do you drink black or green tea? L-Theanine can make you have vivid dreams.

no... 3-4 cups of coffee a day, then usually some whisky or vodka.

To be honest, I don't think my dreams are more vivid than other people's; I just think I remember them better because I focus on trying to save them when I wake up. My father and brother both claim they never dream, but once in awhile they've remembered bits of one and they sound as wild as mine.

Take what I say with a grain of salt — please do your own research — but I think both THC (to which you allude earlier in this thread) and alcohol affect REM sleep/deep sleep. In fact, THC might suppress REM sleep, rebounding when sober. That is why frequent smokers (specially before-sleep smokers) experience very tough nightmares when trying to sober up.

What you say rings true. I'm not much of a THC user. Maybe once every couple months. When I do, I sometimes have very wild dreams early in the night, but I'm less likely to remember them. I don't use it much before bed, because although it feels as if I slept soundly, it always makes me wake up tired. I'm much more familiar with alcohol, and my sleep is divided by it each night into two parts. The first four hours of sleep are usually dreamless. At almost exactly four hours, I wake up and drink water. The next 3-4 hours are where the dreams occur. If I'm really catching up and can stay in bed for a full 9-10 hour sleep, the extra hours contain the most vivid, hallucinogenic dreams. So in my experience, I think both those substances impede good dreaming.

I don't mind nightmares. I kind of like them. Even if they're horrific I end up recalling them to help myself get back to sleep; then usually the ending changes.

You drink whisky or vodka every day??

Yes. Well, sometimes I drink wine or beer. I do my best thinking when the caffeine is at a maximum, my mind is racing, and the first 1-2 drinks are starting to lower my blood pressure and calm me down. Does that seem unusual to you?

> makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe

I think dreams illustrate the human brain's remarkable ability to 3D render detailed fictional events, which explains a lot of the crazy stuff people have believed throughout history.

Definitely. I also love the notion that dreaming is a kind of multimedia LLM that feeds your physical output back into your input channels and causes you to autocomplete yourself; although it's less romantic, it seems more likely than a many-worlds hypothesis.

There are reasons to suspect that the many-worlds hypothesis might be true, but none of them have anything to do with the content of our dreams.

Trying to explain everyday experience using quantum mechanics usually leads to pseudoscientific hogwash.

I know it sounds like hogwash. I'm not trying to make a case for it scientifically. But viscerally it seems plausible, given that we don't know how our "consciousness" interacts with these many-worlds. As a mental exercise, imagine you died and your consciousness carried on in another branch of the multiverse. How might you subjectively experience merging those branches? Could it be that waking up from a violent dream of one world and finding your current consciousness in a different one is how we experience a flattened version of the tree of possible outcomes?

I would not be so quick to say, with such certainty, that I know to what degree any organism can experience the division of universes.

I believe I've died many times in many timelines and wake up each day in one I'm still alive in... sometimes with fading memories of the one I just left. (Obviously, there's no way to prove or disprove this, so I normally don't trouble to tell people; they'll either find it out for themselves or I'm wrong, just a broken set of neurons seeking some higher order in its own chaos).

I think the branches only merge if they're similar enough to merge by random chance. That means no meaningful transfer of memories, per the "no communication theorem" for quantum entanglement.

Why would the universe be more likely to send me memories from one of my distant branches, than from another currently-living person? I don't think telepathy exists in either case.

Have you ever woken up from a dream where you're sure you've forgotten 90% of it, but remember the portions most relevant to your reality?

No information has to be transfered in these cross-universe death/wake-ups. You can simply wake up with no recollection of the dream.

I'm not suggesting that branches containing separate information ever merge. I think my language was imprecise. I'm suggesting that one's perception of self-awareness and consciousness merges. The consciousness you have access to leaps to the next available branch.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was known to use dreams for deep mathematical insights.

From my MedTec experience, this thing should be classified and regulated. Otherwise it is just another mumbo jumbo. The Lens org doesn't have any patent applicant by that name. So I would guess it is not what it seems to be.

Frequent lucid dream usually implies poor sleep quality, because it interferes with deep sleep.

Elaborate? Link some research?

Could you elaborate or point me somewhere I can read more about that?

I'd think lucid dreaming is an altered state of REM sleep. How does it affect deep sleep stage?

To my knowledge it's physiologically not an altered state of REM as it is just regular REM sleep. Hypothetically, you can have a lucid dream just as you would a regular dream, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's no real difference from your body's point of view. Maybe parts of your brain is more active, since you have conscious awareness.

I can't speak for the parent poster, but maybe they meant that you tend to have more lucid dreams (and also remember your dreams altogether) whenever your sleep is broken up more during the night. In other words, lucid dreams don't necessarily interrupt sleep, but interrupted sleep tends to make them more likely (at least in my experience).

If I really need to induce lucid dreaming I just use the proofen method of taking a nap ingest a high dose of caffeine and going back to sleep again. Depending on your fav way of consuming caffeine it runs from 1-3 dollars.

Straight out of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21942866/

Which is a fun watch btw

is this thing going to shock my brain or what? how does it work, the site doesn't really say. My main concern is whether or not its harmless.

There are already devices that detect REM and provide you with hints that you're in a dream while you asleep. This still require training and practice to use, but make it easier to get into lucid state.

Hints as simple as short bright light blinking in front of your eyes or specific sounds playing.

But as other comment say there is a good chance this particular device is just pseudo scientific BS.

From what I read about machine-learning-powered devices like this that were in development, in the past year, it basically is reading your brainwaves and sending mild electrical interference patterns that adapt to interfere with them on an ongoing basis without waking you up, based on its training toward (1) not waking you up and (2) patterns that are known to trigger lucid dreams. As opposed to simply shining a light on your eyelid when you enter REM and training yourself to recognize that in your sleep.

Supposedly it works pretty well.

That said, will it fuck with your brain to have its wave patterns interfered with whenever you go to sleep? I could definitely see legions of people getting addicted and going stark raving mad just from not being able to tell if they were dreaming or awake; let alone long-term ramifications of denying the process of natural sleep. It's still a kind of mystery why every animal on this planet sleeps and dreams, and there's an inherent hubris (not exactly absent from the copy of this website) in trying to improve upon such an essential organic process.

that's why i returned my quest 2...i was scared i'd become addicted.

I recently started having lucid dreams every day again (two or three a week). But wearing a halo seems ridiculous, it just seems to be placebo

I'm not sure lucid dreaming is all it's cracked up to be. I've experienced it every night for most of my life. It's all quite entertaining -- I have some really awesome dreams -- but the dreams are also very visceral and a negative[1] dream can leave me emotional throughout the day.

Unsure if related, but I rarely wake feeling refreshed. Need to get a referral for sleep study...

[1] Sadly, none of the dreams are positive.

I'll stick to nonfrequent mushroom use, thanks. My sleep and dreams are fine.

title should be prepended with "buy a headband that may help"

The psychobabel on the front page makes me wary of touching it.

My dad had similar bs for lucid dreaming from the 80s.

> Dreaming of a Theory of Consciousness

> Everything that exists was once either a dream of man or a dream of God.

What a dumpster fire of hype!

On a serious note though did anyone try using sleep tracking smart watch for lucid dreaming? Allegedly it knows when you REM or deep sleep, seems like hooking up into that and sending some specific vibration pattern should do the trick?

Even if it is pseudo-science (I seriously cannot make the demarcation), it sounds cool! But as it stands, we now must also return seriously to the concepts of neuro-security and neuro-privacy (for lack of better terms).

Ref.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38238813

Reply on news.ycombinator.com