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Comment by speff | Hacker News Reader

I used to be heavily into lucid dreaming back in the early 00s along with others in the Dream Views forum. That was a wild time with people making new ways to induce a lucid dreaming (with techniques usually ending in -ILD). If you told us this back then

> This research could lead to wearable devices programmed with algorithms that detect opportune moments to induce lucidity in people as they sleep

-we would’ve lost our minds. Above most other recent inventions, this really feels like the future

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Why did you stop? Did you gain any insights from your experience.

I think many of us nerds are intrigued by the concept of lucid dreaming but haven't actually explored the space. I skimmed a book on the subject in the mid 80's, but only tried the techniques a couple of times. Oddly, I still remember a couple of my lucid dreams.

At the time, the two most popular ways for getting lucid in a dream was

1. Doing a reality check habitually in real life. Eventually you'll start doing it in dreams and have it fail. This _usually_ kicks you into lucid territory

2. Estimating when you're going to be in a REM state and setting a timer to wake yourself up. Then, after gaining consciousness fully, trying to make your body go to sleep while your mind is awake

Can you spot why I stopped doing it after a period of time? It end up feeling like a lot of work every day just for a chance (a low one in my and most people's cases) of having a lucid dream. Sleeping was no longer a passive, let's-relax type of activity. I just wanted to reclaim that period of time in a way.

I think my biggest takeaway from my lucid dreams was just the feeling of being in one. It's hard to describe, but the rush that comes along with the realization you can do anything you want is quite exhilarating.

What are examples of reality checks.

A few are: Look at a digital time twice, in a dream the numbers will usually change. Try to read fine print. Perfect vision with no glasses if you wear them.

I would just ask myself “Am I dreaming?”

When I’m awake, I immediately answer “no,” but when I’m asleep, I’m not sure. That’s enough to know that I’m not awake.

You could simply look this up on the internet, but for those of us who are exceptionally lazy, here goes:

Every now and then, say every hour, or whenever you think of it, look around you. Try to check if what you see is real. Are things floating around and is gravity not working as expected? When you look over your shoulder and back, did the room change color, and did the table just turn into a tree? Try to touch something with your hand. Do you not feel any resistance when your hand drops through the couch? If so, you are probably dreaming.

Two that I used was:

1. Trying to put your index finger through the other palm. In a dream this works, it just goes through;

2. Press your nose closed and continue breathing normally. In a dream this works.

I stopped for a similar reason as the other poster. It really interfered with my ability to get the much needed rest while sleeping. It doesn’t come free (but is awesome when it works)

Nice - these two were my go-tos as well. The nose-plug one felt especially weird once you realized what was happening.

Mine as well -- nose-plug was most effective but also least discrete and most awkward to do in public. Checking a clock was my second go-to..

Close your lips and try to breath through your mouth. If you can, you're dreaming.

Check the time on your phone/watch twice in a short time.

The famous example from the movie Inception is spinning a top; if it never stops you are probably asleep (or maybe reality broke, oops!). But most people don't carry around a top to do this, so the other replies give some more practical examples that LD practitioners have come up with over the years.

My favourite was "how did I get here?". In walking life a story immediately appears, in the dream you were just kind of always there.

I can reliably meditate myself into a lucid dream if you're interested in learning the technique. You've probably encounteted it before. I also just regularly find myself in lucid dreams because I'm constantly looking for discrepancies and gain control the moment I find one.

The basic technique is just to meditate to sleep by counting your breaths, while not moving at all. It is really hard to pull off until you get used to it, but with some dedication you can get decent success. If you do it right, your body enters sleep paralysis while your brain is still awake, and you get dropped into a dream.

Counting your breaths seems like a better way to do it. When I tried wake-induced LD'ing, I didn't have any strategy in mind when it came to what I should be thinking of. When I was right at the boundary of dreaming, my thoughts would start racing and I would usually snap myself awake. Your advice would likely have saved me from a few failures.

Yeah, I've had some success with WILDs, which I'd typically practice on a Saturday or Sunday morning, but ultimately it was a crapshoot compared to just meditating myself to sleep.

I'd also recommend lying on your back when attempting to lucid dream, it always made it much more likely to occur for me, along with sleep paralysis. There is some unexplored physiological reason for this, but it's real and many sleep experts have found the same results.

I would also recommend not getting caught up in losing track of the count, simply starting over from 0 the moment you realize that you lost your place.

I have severe chronic insomnia, ADHD, tourettic OCD and a predisposition for body-focused repetitive behaviors so if I can meditate myself to sleep, I'm pretty sure anyone can with some practice. The reason why I can't do it every night and "beat" insomnia is two-fold:

One, because it paradoxically aggravates sleep avoidance for me. It's an excruciating experience spending 30-60 minutes lying completely still while alarm bells are going off in my head, paired with intense urges commanding me to scratch an itch or adjust a limb, and it's anything but meditative until the very moment sleep paralysis kicks in and my body goes numb.

Two, it usually puts me into sleep paralysis which is just rolling the dice for a metric ton of adrenaline to get released during a paralysis hallucination. I've had sleep paralysis encounters keep me up for the next few days, shit gives me the creeps.

Yeah that's exactly why I never actually got deep into these techniques, I dunno about any diagnosed mental conditions but I used to have the sleep paralysis thing just as like what felt as my brains last resort to knock me out or something, and sometimes it would flip me into a lucid dream while others I'd just have like intense nightmares where I'd get sucked into a black hole appearing in the sky or creepy faced creatures from beyond would show me future technologies. It just felt way too close to insanity lol

I remember a friend of mine saying how he went manic and hadn't slept for days after trying some stuff he read in a book about 'dream yoga'. Always honestly left the impression that you can fuck this up just like you can pulling a muscle in your leg, except this is your mind you're talking about

I like the analogy to pulling a muscle. You also got me reading about dream yoga, which I hadn't encountered before. Going to try that! I've done dream math and dream poetry/freestyle before, but I haven't tried dream meditating. Fascinating idea.

The "getting sucked into the sky" dreams are always incredibly exhilarating. Had some like that.

I had an extraordinarily rare moment a few years ago wherein I actually had one single 8-hour interrupted sleep session. For the entire 8 hours, I was sucked in a single, continuous lucid dream that took place over a full day of school. I was completely convinced that I'd died or was dying in my sleep and was experiencing an extended DMT-fueled hallucination.

I was literally running my hand across surfaces and studying reflections in the CRT monitors trying to find imperfections or proof that it was just a normal dream. But everything was hyperrealistic and vivid and continuous. The dream even started out with me waking up, getting ready, getting on the bus and arriving to school. Even the clocks were behaving.

During the dream, between classes, there was a hole in floor of the main hallway which just got bigger and bigger each time I saw it. And each time, there was a larger crowd of people surrounding it. Eventually, I saw someone jump in. Towards the end of the day, there was a full-blown hole cult worshiping and praying to the hole, wearing religious garb, making offerings, etc. It took a few weeks to recover from that dream.

Yeah just be careful with all this stuff. People end up doing these things and having experiences I barely understand like 'kundalini awakenings' which to all appearances to me just look like mania or light psychosis, these aren't particularly enjoyable experiences to go through and alot of the time I see people who seek that kind of thing out, they end up going through it for like a whole year or so before getting back on their feet. You can lose your job and all sorts of other life disrupting side effects which is why I'm pretty sure there's religious infrastructure to handle people who take this path in life in cultures where doing this kind of thing is normal. Maybe start with reading a book or some meditation classes or something before jumping into the advanced techniques right away I think is the wise way to go with anything that requires discipline

Thanks for the advice. I'm mainly curious if some of the neurological or psychological benefits of yoga or other meditative techniques might still exist or at least be simulated during a directed dream.

For example, I once had a dream that I smoked DMT and had a full-blown psychedelic experience during my dream. I then woke up and felt "high", in some kind of altered state, for over 12 hours. Under the right circumstances or simulated environment, the brain seems able to induce a variety of sudden or gradual psychological and neurological changes.

Imagine someone without control of their limbs being able to benefit from practicing tai chi or yoga in their sleep. Obviously, feedback from an instructor is important, but imagine a distant future where we are able to record and decode our dreams and allow instructors to review footage.

I kind of figured we already had that on a basic level [1], no idea how accurate it is or if it's just some nonsense but I seem to recall research even like ten years ago which was around these lines, also from Japan, on way earlier iterations of the technology [2], this is just through stable diffusion now...

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-re-creates-what-p...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22031074

Similar story happened to me once: I had recently got my drivers license, and one day went to bed early (completely sober). In my dream that night I got drunk, took my dads car and wrecked it. When I woke up next morning, first thing I did was to take dads car to pick up a friend of mine. I felt so hung over, and was driving like I was "still drunk". I had that feeling the whole day. Still remember it well today, even 20 years later.

Is WILD something that needs to be done in the morning after having been in REM phase or can you do it at night when getting into bed?

I was casually into this stuff like twenty years ago–read the forums, tried various techniques etc. I did have a bit of real success with it, also having some lucid dreams that are memorable years later, however I didn't actually like the experience of consistently remembering lots of details from my dreams, which was, I think, most of why I stopped.

At the time, at least, the recommended starting point was dream journaling–writing down everything you can remember as soon as you wake up. Practicing that even for a few days has the effect of helping you retain quite a bit more detail from your dreams. It wasn't so much that I had unpleasant dreams as it was that remembering them made the night seem somehow less restful, as though I needed the relatively blank gap of sleep in the filmstrip of my memory to be able to wake up with a clear head.

I found another method: after waking up in the morning (with time to doze off again), nicotine pouch under the gum just after the heavy breathing starts. Super vivid lucid dreams, with obvious gotchas of using nicotine

That sounds like a stupid way to suffocate and die on something in your sleep but it does affect a neurochemical (acetylcholine) which are implicated in how dreams and the entire sleep/wake cycle work. There's safer alternatives in my mind, 'oneirogics' [1] as I remember them being called, which affect the same neurotransmitters with none of the horrible addiction or choking risk - can be as simple as some ancient shamanic technique one researcher in central america told me, which was a maracuya leaf placed in your pillow to remind you in your dream of the distinct smell from the waking world that you're dreaming so you may control it

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

AFAIK galantamine is the only drug with actual studies[0] for inducing lucidity. Participants would practice dream recall and reality checks each day, and fall asleep after reciting lucid dream affirmations. Then be awoken in the middle of the night to take galantamine, and fall back asleep while visualizing a continuation of the dream they were in last.

Anecdotally, I become lucid whenever I take it without doing the rest of the study's rituals, but I've worked on improving my dream recall for years now.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30089135/

Yeah, I used to be really into knowing a ton about this stuff because it was something I kept on having out of my control before - I used to have worsening sleep paralysis when I was young and into my 20s, and lucid dreaming would be sort of a side effect of it... I guess this is what that WILD (wake-induced lucid dreaming) thing tries to actually induce, like from what I was reading you sort of meditate your way into that state and flip your consicousness into a lucid dream. Honestly my sleep was crazy back then and I talked to a doctor who said it was grounds for going for a sleep study and getting tested to see if I had narcolepsy, but I just ended up moving way closer to the equator instead and something about the seasonality of the sun coming up and down at the same time all year round is what a doctor there said could have reset my circadian rhythm as it got more pronounced in dark winter time.

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