New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming | Hacker News Reader

New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

newyorker.com

463 pointsXzetaU8271 comments

I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access.

I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.

While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.

Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.

Did you try to harness this power again? I.e. seed your dreams to solve problems?

Only in my dreams! erm...

The closest I've come since is involuntary obsessions with playing video games in my dreams. Not something I'd ever want to seed. Quite the opposite, in fact.

i've had an experience at the cross section of the two where I dreamt factorio optimizations after obsessive play.

generally they don't work out.

While I grudgingly recognize that your brain is indeed significantly sharper the younger you are (so epiphanies like that become less likely through the years), I think this experience came from subconsciously recognizing patterns, and gathering enough experience and interest so it could be pieced together by sleeping on it.

In the 90s I was obsessed with Tetris, and actually found new strategies while dreaming. It is such a simple game that the dreams weren't unrealistic, contrary to other dream epiphanies that turned out to be gibberish to the awakened mind.

When I was young, I dreamt that I was playing guitar and made up a cool song. When I woke up I was so excited, that's something you would hear an old rockstar say about their best song, right? "Came to me in a dream". I jumped out of bed, grabbed the guitar, and started playing the song, every note still clear in my memory.

It was a completely random series of notes.

Richard James did an album of these using synthesizers to record from memory and lucid dreaming to compose.

Selected Ambient Works!

the 2nd one only

“Richard James” ok dude do you live in his submarine? Just call him Aphex Twin

A fee years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a very cool sounding riff playing in my head for a song that I was thinking about at that time. I am not a musician and that would be my first, if I would recruit enough help.

I made noises with my mouth, and it still sounded cool. Instead of recording those noises into any recording on my phone, I went back to sleep and couldn’t remember it the next morning :(

That's why Keith Richards kept a tape recorder on his bedside table. He credits it with capturing the famous riff for "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," which came to him in a dream.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/when-keith-ric...

Many years ago I had such a profound insight in one of my dreams that I woke up and wrote it down on an index card so I wouldn't forget.

Here's the pearl of wisdom I captured for posterity:

"Emotions — it's emotions that invented and fricasseed the invisible ravioli."

(I still have the card.)

At least you now have a title for your autobiography!

William James reported that a friend of his who was experimenting with nitrous oxide gas kept thinking he'd solved the riddle of the universe when high, but kept forgetting what he'd figured out when he woke up in the morning, so he kept a pen and paper next to him while high and rushed down the following morning to see that he'd written "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."

Love your pearl of wisdom. Don't know if this was the intent, but it made me laugh despite feeling a bit sad today.

Like Flaming Globes of Sigmund

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heart_Attack#Plot

"banana big but banana skin is bigger" - supposedly Orwell

Giuseppe Tartini claimed his violin sonata "Il trillo del diavolo" (Devil's trill) was played to him by the devil itself during a dream. However, unlike you, Tartini declared that he had been able to capture only a small part of the music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Trill_Sonata

Yea, I have composed song (music with lyrics) in my dream. But after waking up, didn't remember most of it.

I wonder if I did compose them, or did I just have a memory of having composed a great song?

What is experience, if not our very latest memory, right?

I have made poetry in some dreams which feels very profound and very rhyming (I have zero poeticness or interest in poetry) but I also remember that a few times when I did wake up with those words still in my head, it was a mish mash of words.

I often have the experience that I've discovered a really good idea in a dream. It happens often enough that I recognize it as a dream and I become curious about whether it will actually be a good idea when I wake up, because almost as often it is random and silly. I spend the rest of the dream intent on remembering it, and usually I do. Every once in a while I get a melody or an idea I want to run with, but it always makes me excited and ready to work.

Supposedly that's how Keith Richards came up with Satisfaction.

Happens to songwriters too, sometimes it goes somewhere. I had a dream once, on the morning of a July 4th, that for some reason took a really common cliche jazz/blues riff and slowed it way down while I was dreaming of a bunch of Americana images. It became this song, the riff is at the beginning: https://music.apple.com/us/album/so-beautiful/899061469?i=89...

I wish it would happen more often, that's only happened for one other song of mine. Most of the rest are a lot of gritted teeth and frustration.

so cool. that happens to me with music a lot.

At uni on an advanced algorithms class we had a take-home exam with 6 problems for 3 days or so.

On Saturday I already had some ideas for most problems, but there was one that I didn't knew how to approach and stayed a bit late thinking about it.

On Sunday morning I woke up really exited as I solved the damn problem. I immediately knew that probably like dreams, the memory was fragile, so I rushed to my desk to write the sketch for the idea, which after grabbing coffee turned into my solution to it.

There's no way I didn't spent my sleep thinking about it and solving it, likely around the last sleep cycle when I woke up.

Had a very similar one, I wasn't working frontend but had a dream about a frontend vulnerability that also proved to be true. I dreamed about it, and assume it was because it's the kind of thing that bugs me and while dreaming I had some time to think about things other than the code at hand.

I think it was franklin who would ponder himself to sleep with metal balls in his hands so it'll wake him up.

Thomas Edison.

Can't say I have had such a productive dream for work, but I have had dreams that helped me process emotions. For example, on separate occasions many years apart (thankfully), I've dreamt I saw a recently departed pet or family member one more time. In one specific instance, I had been so caught up in other things I hadn't actually processed the grief of the loss. Can safely say it was super helpful, if painful, and necessary.

There's research out there that supports dreams as places we process emotions. I wouldn't be surprised if that tied in to other kinds of problems.

I remember in uni two days after taking an exam I dreamed about the professor asking me to explain the calculationd I made, and while I was going through them I realized at some point I did an addition instead of a subtraction.

I woke up and indeed I made that mistake. (This was during covid so the exam was done remotely and I still had the paper with the calculations at home).

My experience was with building a new computer. I had gotten all of the parts needed to completely upgrade my pc, keeping only the case.After installing all of them, the computer refused to boot and just showed a generic error with a blinking light. I tried multiple things to troubleshoot like taking out each ram stick, different hdd, reseating cables, different hdd, change to internal gpu, nothing worked.

Then I fell asleep and when I woke up in the morning, I had a very strong feeling that the issue was definitely the memory and I had to move the ram to the set of slots for the other channel. And that was the issue, broken slots.

What's impressive is not that it worked, but that after waking up I had no doubt that was the problem, even though practically I couldn't conciously identify why I was so confident about it.

Reminds me of one childhood experience, which was much less serious, but for me quite amazing:

I had an old MSDOS computer, which had a mouse, but the mouse did not work at all. Perhaps that computer didn't have the drivers or maybe no such thing existed at that time. That computer had DOS games on it. Just that I could not access some of the applications, when their executables were not immediately children of a top level folder, because I didn't know how to expand folders in the tree view pane, without having the mouse to click on the + in front of the folder name.

One day I had a dream of me sitting at the computer (I spent a lot of time playing as a kid). In my dream I was lamenting, that I could open those folders. Suddenly a voice in my head said: "Well, why don't you simply try pressing the + key?"

I woke up and was excited. Immediately I started that computer to try it. And what do you know ... it actually worked!! More games for me to play!

Years later I also found myself often dreaming of chess games and thinking about best moves, only to have the board grow dynamically and somewhere far away a bishop appearing, pinning exactly the piece I needed for my best move ... back to the drawing board. Those chess dreams were actually somewhat exhausting.

I wonder if you have, but that normally what dreams provide is often just delivered subconsciously. You might be regarding a lot of great ideas as having occured when you were awake even though maybe some would never have come had you not slept/dreamt on them.

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems.

For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.

Yeah, when you are stuck, put away that red bull and step away from the keyboard, kids.

This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...

Then you're not challenging yourself with hard enough problems (those include the set of problems Claude cannot solve)

Most software doesn't really have "hard enough problems" unless you're working in deep tech. The majority of SWEs are probably working on some sort of SaaS which isn't super challenging for a model like Opus 4.7. Most of the problems I face are on the product side, which I do need to take time to think through, but it's not as challenging as debugging in the good old days.

How do you go from SaaS to “not super challenging”? The part of a SaaS product that I’m working on uses graph algorithms to work with what’s essentially an interactive form. There’s some mildly university-level computer science stuff and it’s mixed with enough domain expertise that Opus 4.7 is still unable to make even small changes without breaking everything or going against the architecture.

So far I’m not that impressed.

Are you guys hiring?

Then get a better, more challenging job. Its your responsibility to make sure you stay sharp and keep growing, by pushing at the edge of capability and stretching yourself.

At the gym, the bodybuilder increases the mass of the weights until a workout generates the correct amount of stress, because thats how they get to the next step.

Or dont, stay where you are and atrophy, whatever :))

FWIW I've had the opposite experience. Whenever I work late the output is absolute garbage. If I work past midnight it takes me 3 hours to get done what would have taken me 30 mins in the morning, and with way less frustration and stress. Your inputs to the LLM are only as good as how fresh your mind is so I've made it a rule to not work past midnight (unless there's an emergency).

In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.

Sounds like polyphasic sleeping might re-emerge as the lifestyle solution. Instead of waiting for agents to complete, you should sleep on the response so when you arise you have the optimized prompt ready to go and a reset on your energy to prevent the burnout.

Amusingly this is an almost-exact description of how I work on my current project, sharc. I'm porting Arc to Common Lisp, and implementing as many HN features as I can. I've been documenting as I go with handoffs: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... (Also thanks partly to dang, who is kind enough to find time to answer an email here and there about their current Arc stack.)

At one point I was working so hard that Claude actually suggested, all on its own, that I should get some sleep.

Feasibly you could do this work while asleep, the lifestyle of the future.

AFAIK this is called sleep consolidation.

I can confirm - I woke up to the resolution to my two hardest problems during PhD. Three, if you count "I should look for this kind of inequality" (which did turn out to exist), but I think that's more of an _idea_ than a solution.

The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.

Can confirm this level of problem solving.

Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).

Interestingly, I observed the same when I was practicing the drums. I would fail multiple times to reproduce a drumming part, sleep on it, and succeed on the first try the day after.

Difficult parts on videogames as well. It could be attributed to slow response times due to being tired or accidentally memorizing a bad pattern, resting also could help with those.

yep, same with guitar. go to sleep fumbling through a riff even though you "know" it, wake up playing it smooth as hell

This would happen to me when I played pool. I would master a skill overnight, somehow, and come back to the table the next day leveled up--far better than I had left off the day before.

That's awesome! I had a somewhat similar experience (shared previously [0]):

> I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.

> Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.

> To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651913

In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it.

I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.

Literally the same in Italian, la notte porta consiglio. It's in the Bible, in nocte consilium from the Book of Proverbs, but it's likely to pre-date even that by centuries.

im english, there's "sleep on it"

In Spanish "consultar con la almohada" (consult with the pillow)

Bulgarian "утрото е по-мъдро от вечерта" (Morning is wiser then evening)

This is exactly how I learned programming.

10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.

I often wake up realizing I wrote a handful of bugs the day before. They’re obvious to me in the morning even before I sit down and open my laptop.

Sleep is a strange and magical thing.

Yes! When I awoke this morning my very first thought was ‘you didn’t connect the ground wire for the heater’.

Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.

In my 40's I could go to bed with a complex software design or implementation problem I was wrestling with. Consciously word a cogent and succinct question that I needed answered, sleep on it, and then in the morning, I would be still and mentally ask, "well?" Not meditating or anything, just be quiet then and listen.

And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.

"Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.

Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.

There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?

> There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?

It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.

Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.

Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.

Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."

I view our existence as something like a fractal.

World history is a scrambled mess of lies and amnesia (from repeated collective concussions, heh) Who knows what is truth and what is the Victor writing the history books?

One's life is untraceable - how did we get here? Literally too much went into that story, majority unseen, and none of us can fully say.

And so at the personal level, are thoughts borne out of a chain (or DAG??) of memories that cannot ever be fully traced?

Was my homunculus voice who gave me detailed clues/answers just returning the highest probable solution gleaned from thousands of simulations in the problem space I presented? Of course I should not be privy to such musings, I wouldn't have the patience for it - so it seems to me to be "out of nowhere".

I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture.

> I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture.

Yes, precisely.

There is a classic initiatory text in the Thelemic tradition, Liber LXV, that personifies these different parts of the self. The "doer in the body" is the scribe that wrote the work, which is a dialogue in the scribe's mind between his egoic awareness (V.V.V.V.V, the namesake of the titular character from V for Vendetta) and the background "thinker," Adonai.

There is a lot of vocabulary in this space used to describe the self at very fine levels of detail.

Fascinating, thank you for wisdom and references!

Can I ask, and this is not judgement but anthropological curiosity, did you recently decide (or were you recently forced) to leave tech?

I interview people about this kind of thing and have noticed a trend.

Shoutout for Jaynes! I used to call it my "buck twenty-five" book because if anyone ever tried to get pretentious with me I'd steer the conversation to an opening to bring up "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and shut them down :-)

Also, I got my copy signed by Jaynes back in the '80s

What about before your 40s?

Nothing I recall from my 30's, but in my 20's I worked in videogames and that was a brutal industry at that time in terms of work-life balance. (Or, at least it sounds better nowadays.)

Bad sleep habits at that time ultimately led me to do a lot of daytime napping.

During those sessions I occasionally experienced sleep paralysis, one out of body waking dream, and disturbing stuff like hearing head-splitting trumpet sounds upon waking up.

One time, I awoke and heard an attenuated trumpet sound, and through the rush I heard two voices nearby. Just as I finished struggling to get control of my body, I distinctly remember hearing one of them say, "I can see it!"

I was living alone at the time, and that was so alarming and made me question my life choices. Looking back now I view that episode as a probable spiritual attack on a vulnerable young man.

Who do you attribute the spiritual attack to?

The voices sounded human, like hushed. I can't say in my case.

In Christianity, Satan and demons are recognized as a reality. God allows them access to humanity. That doesn't make God evil, and in fact God uses evil forces to drive people to Him. And we are given the choice to go with whatever party we choose, so the whole experiment hinges on choice. I know that the prince of Earth, Satan, isn't sporting; of course he preys on the vulnerable and the weak first. That was one of the low points in life for me when I heard the voices and when I had no faith.

It's nice that it gives you comfort but it still boggles my mind how all of this gets rationalized.

I also get that it's a personal relationship, but it troubles me because that mindset allows for an incredible amount of damaging behavior for society as a whole. What's worse is that this relationship becomes part of one's self-identity, so that any critique of that worldview is received as a personal attack rather than a philosophical debate.

Just philosophically speaking, an accidental entropic universe eventually producing Labubus doesn't work either.

History, law, civilization, anti-slavery and the dignity of man all come from judeo-christian teaching, it's not just comfort/assurance. You just gotta be careful who you follow, there's loads of shysters and crummy humans in religion just like everywhere else as you are probably aware.

Church is supposed to be about community, but it never really was for me. I didn't put in enough effort. I still go for the kids.

What hooked me was Bible Study Fellowship[1] where I got a real education in the Bible. That gave me a community where I have a men's group and they know me and we meet weekly and they give good advice and support when things turn sour.

If you want to understand the architecture of the world, check it out. Next year they're doing Romans, holy shit, that one goes deep. Maybe you're searching, and that's a safe place to simply learn.

[1] https://www.bsfinternational.org/

I painfully recognize the value of community offered, as well as a sense of purpose. There's plenty of good things to be had from it. But just as opiates can remove pain and make one "feel good", they have serious risks as well. Marx's comment to this effect is spot on.

We are experiencing a battle of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism that impacts us all. This is why I understand and respect the personal relationship bits, but I fear the fanatics who think their beliefs should be applied to all.

My take on those fanatics is that they are fucking insane and dangerous. The foundation that they rest upon is approved of and validated by the "non crazy, good religious people".

My fear is valid: there are millions of my fellow citizens who would have no concern if I was "terminated" as I am an unbeliever. I wish this was hyperbole and would love to be proven wrong.

The current Secretary of War believes that the actions in Iran are divine and subscribes to the notion of Armageddon as a good thing and is in the position to make that happen. Thus, I find your faith to not be as benign as you do.

edit: I need to emphasize that there's no personal enmity intended in my comment, it's a fear and frustration with the outcome of faith itself.

No offense taken, I see you are wrestling with the idea of faith. The way I look at it, God doesn't just meet you where you are, he pursues. So, if you are meant to surrender, it's a good thing. That just means you were one that didn't get away. Question everything, but don't fight it unnecessarily.

On the other stuff, I will only observe that war is not a human thing. It's too organized, requires inhuman (evil) top down control. Iran is a detestable war just like every other war.

But, there is also the unlimited psychological warfare being waged everywhere now that affects us more directly.

You saw Hegeseth doing a disgusting Deus Vult routine, but I guarantee you the majority of people are tuned out and missed that entirely. (So they get away with it.)

In my opinion, that was another targeted demoralization psyop intended to wound and stun people like us, and for different reasons. It is so far outside the acceptable narrative frame that it cranks everyone up who is paying attention, makes them bewildered and furious and that drowns out other news stories they want everyone to miss.

It is all "fake and ghey", as the kids like to say. How do I know? They're all actors reading scripts, Hegeseth especially. Right out of central casting as Trump says.

What is really happening is a complete toss up. The greatest casualty in war is the truth.

I have no solutions to offer. Just please don't take your frustrations out on normie Christians, even if you think they're misguided, they have no power.

I worry when the rhetoric gets angry and scared. Fear and disgust can lead to atrocities. Who stands to gain when we fight? Who capitalizes every time a lefty shooter pops off? I'd prefer you challenge the rage bait narrative, roll your eyes at how outlandish it all sounds, and become more cynical than scared.

Other insane/outlandish psyops meant to stun and confuse:

* The Charlie Kirk memorial

* Everything that comes out of Stephen Miller's mouth

* Trump coin, Trump nft, Trump Card (immigration)

* The Whitehouse Twitter account, yikers!

I'm actually not wrestling at all with faith -- my point is that I understand the attraction and how in individual contexts it can be benign, but as a whole is the foundation of incredibly dangerous outcomes.

I appreciate your recognition of ugliness that can come out when it is wielded as a weapon, but it's still in the context of "you're holding it wrong".

> war is not a human thing

Au contraire, mon frere. It's been part of humanity the whole time (and we recently learned about chimpanzees doing the same thing. And here you illustrate a facet of my concern: ascribing horrible behavior to some supernatural entities rather than the the reality of human psychology and power dynamics.

This is not just a philosophical exercise -- this is going forward at full tilt and literally represents an existential threat: https://thefulcrum.us/democracy/project-2025-christian-natio...

You must be aware of the fate of heretics and blasphemers in theocracies, right? That is what faith brings when allowed access to power.

Actually, I do remember one episode in my late 30's. My wife had twins. They were born extremely premature and there was a good chance they'd both die as we were at the extreme end of the survivability chart at that time - like by a single day of gestation and with one less day we were in the "recommend do not resuscitate" zone. Most compressed time of anguish I've ever experienced, stunned me for years. Both boys' bodies are growing good now, veeery quirky minds though.

Anyhow, studies had shown that preemies could benefit from just laying with the parents skin to skin, called "kangaroo care". So, I got to experience that with both boys one or two times! Wow, that was really something. I couldn't hold them or touch with my hands, just have them be laid on my bare chest. Very special to just love on them and feel them squirm around there a bit.

I thought, ok, I'm going to give them a little well wishing because the kid I was given was in the worst shape healthwise between the two. I closed my eyes, and concentrated on baby. I said mentally, "heal". "If you can take away anything from me that helps, do it! You have to grow and take food!" And I probed mentally.

Suddenly, I had a visual hallucination. It was a projected 3D scene of reverse images to the color of light coming through my eyelids. I could see some sort of movement of blobs rotating out, coming back. If they got too far outside my field of view they would fade and disappear. There was something like 3 visible blobs, a stationary one and two smaller moving ones. It was like I was seeing autonomic or mental processes in baby, visualized.

So I just loved on him for a bit and sat with that experience. And then I thought, maybe I can see my own processes if this is really happening to me? So, I said in my mind, "Show me what I look like". And the view changed!

What I saw was mostly out of my field of view, so many things were faded, but the blobs I could see were cycling in all different directions including away and back towards me and at different speeds. It was like a factory scene compared to my son's machine shop. I told him to take from that scene whatever would help, and the session ended soon after.

When I kangaroo cared with my other son I tried to repeat this experience and well wish him and communicate mentally, but I could not connect. That made me sad and secretly a little worried about this one's health, but I could not tell anyone my feelings because it was so odd what I had experienced with baby A. And was it just nerves and all my own imagination? Maybe, but it felt real.

I had a similar experience (seeing blobs) where in my sleep I saw my baby boy conceived. A few days later my wife took a pregnancy test and it came back negative, I was majorly let down as I had this vision and strong feeling there was a baby.

A week later my wife misses her period and she is pregnant. It turns out my vision is more accurate than the 99% accurate pregnancy test.

I never had a similar vision since.

Very cool, sweet baby chose you two and you saw it happen, maybe.

> I awoke and heard an attenuated trumpet sound, and through the rush I heard two voices nearby. Just as I finished struggling to get control of my body, I distinctly remember hearing one of them say, "I can see it!"

Sounds like the Geoff Day scene in Infinite Jest ... the sound resonance of a window fan and a violin opens a portal and something Lovecraftian comes through: "a small part of the wing of something far too large to be seen in totality."

When I wake up from good rest it's like I've been somewhere else for years. I use that time to stay off the Internet and look at things fresh. That would explain plenty of coming up with novel solutions to things, without any solving being done while sleeping. The mental ruts of the day greatly limit problem-solving ability.

Sounds like you are a good sleeper!

I subscribe to the Multiplicity of Personality theory (our personalities are a combination of multiple ones). eg My wife and I both have a chaos monkey that emits impulses to do the most destructive and disruptive things, which we sometimes talk about in jest.

My dominant personality is one of control (for order) so I can focus on problem solving. Some sort of raw insight/intelligence comes from a personality that isn't always on, but seems to erupt from periods of calm and relaxation. eg Shower solutions or bedtime revelations are common.

Many people have told stories of voices that nudge them this way or that at just the right time, which I've experienced as well. Whatever part of me dreams is uses memories and fantasy, striving to experiencing new scenarios through thought experiments. The better I sleep, the more I find very recent events are incorporated...so it's some sort of shared space and speaks to how physical state affects mental states, even in sleep. I also feel like the personalities fight for dominance when the body or mind is overly-stressed (puberty, mortal danger, etc) but normally resolve into a sort of basal state.

I never wanted to be a psychologist. I often think that maybe I'm just crazy. It would explain a lot.

  > I often think that maybe I'm just crazy.

Everyone is crazy, just most people are afraid to admit it to others. A lot of people are even afraid to admit it to themselves. Some people pretend so long they forget they're pretending. But wouldn't that itself be crazy?

I like to think of us as complicated, not crazy. Don't want to ever close myself off to advantages my quirks might bring.

I once had a very weird experience on LSD (of course), in which I perceived my brain and thinking as a bunch of separate entities working in synchrony. Only two of them were capable of speech, and some were very simple and reactive. The "me" part was just them agreeing on stuff. I will never forget the experience.

Sounds right. I wonder why it is so hard to notice in regular everyday consciousness.

I think we're experiencing the world like seeing through a pinhole. It's all too much to take in and process, so we've got most of it filtered out just to keep it manageable. But, that mental filter doesn't stop all of reality from interacting with us, and it's possible to remove or tweak the filter, clearly.

> My wife and I both have a chaos monkey that emits impulses to do the most destructive and disruptive things, which we sometimes talk about in jest.

Often called “the imp of the perverse” from the Poe story of the same name.

People are so different. When I was in college, if I had an unsolved problem, I could not fall asleep.

"Sleep on it?"

My biggest road blocks seem to be knocked down with a nice walk / good nights rest, a la "rubber duck debugging." Essentially, stepping away and being able to put a fresh set of "eyes" on the problem with a different perspective, albeit it's just you resetting your own perspective.

That makes me wonder if studying may be more effective right before bed time, despite tiredness from the day, or if it's more effective early in the day, while we're less fatigued.

Yup! All good ideas and solutions to hard problems, after becoming stuck, have come to me after a good night's sleep or after removing myself from the "thinking place" and taking a break. Yes I mean the toilet. Many fantastic ideas come to me on the toilet.

I once solved a particularly nasty bug, causing a c++ server to segfault in production about once a week, in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up, and I rushed to my laptop to find the insight was real. I had been trying to comprehend that segfault for several long days. It wasn't the most restful night though.

I used to do this regularly when I first started coding, I called them "Codemares". They were like nightmares with the shouting of commands I didn't quite understand would invade my dreams.

Is this the user-friendly name for what is happening?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

It seems to me that this is the purpose of nightmares. I especially noticed this after having kids. They are not by default scared of snakes and such but if they see a nature documentary of a snake biting something or even a cartoon bad guy, it's enough to trigger bad dreams which reinforce the fear and it's far stronger the next day.

IMO this is under-appreciated in current AI models. RL is not very effective in avoiding crocodiles for example, by the time like 5 of your tribe-mates are eaten it's far too late. You need some mechanism that ensures the danger is learned after just a single incident.

When I was learning C, I woke screaming. An ominous dark figure had been standing on the foot of my bed. I somehow knew it’s name was ”struct”.

> in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up

YES! I have never told anyone this (because it feels so random) but it's great to know I'm not the only one. I pretty much expect this when I am in depths of an issue I cant somehow consciously resolve, so much that I keep a pen and writing pad next to me, before I sleep, because the code I saw in my dream often gets lost by the time I go to my office and resume the laptop.

I even figured out a hack - I just force myself to go to sleep if I can't consciously resolve it for more than an hour. It's as if my brain gets an otherwise untapped firepower.

That said, this absolutely destroys my sleep cycle for the next day or two and spikes my BP for the rest of the day to the point where I feel sick.

Although in theory I'm sleeping more than the 8h, I feel horribly mentally exhausted. I can work out, physically just fine but my brain is on empty - because of this, I limit this to critical blockers.

I've had some incredible product ideas while asleep, down to very intricate technical detail. The problem has been that when I wake up, reality kicks in, and I realise that, say, even if I built that incredible messenger app for dogs, they still wouldn't be able to communicate with us.

If you’re interested in prototyping something, the buttons Christina Hunger sells are able to send webhooks. I made a Telegram bot for receiving messages “typed” by my golden. (She’s less than one year old, so the sentences she makes are really basic.)

Aside, but I struggled a long time with regular sleep. I have been a night owl since I was a kid. I experience late hours as magical, don’t know how to describe it. So I always slept too little, then not at all, then drifting and sleeping in.

But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier.

No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did improve many small things, like getting rid of bad habits, being more content, appreciating sleep more, prioritizing things differently.

I wish everyone good, healthy sleep.

My “trick” for this was getting a dog in my early 20s, while living in an apartment, doesn’t matter how much I wanted to sleep in, they needed to go out, so I had to get up. And without thinking I moved my sleep schedule to accommodate this. Worth it.

I just pulled an all-nighter because drugs are fun and now I'm standing here to see the sunrise because why not if I'm already awake.

Have a good day.

"communicate" seems like the really interesting part of this, but gets a one-off mention only.

like, how does this communication work? how does one sleeping person communicate skills to another sleeping person?

have we found the mechanism? was it awake poeple communicating to sleeping people? the reverse?

Stephen LaBerge's book explains, in detail, how they would communicate with lucid dreamers during their research. I don't remember how the researchers signaled the subjects, but if I remember correctly, the subjects would communicate with researchers primarily through eye movements. I can't say if the methods are related at all, but the book is worth a read.

My thought too. The title appears to assume there's nothing special about the 'communicating' but there is about the 'practicing'. Should it not be 'New research suggests people can practice skills and even communicate while dreaming'. I would like to know more.

You ever talk with a person who was sleep walking? It's hilarious

It's just a few paragraphs in. The researchers asked yes or no questions and gave some math puzzles to people sleeping. A few remembered. A few were able to answer but didn't remember. It's probably important to remember your entire brain doesn't just stop working and signals still go in and out even though the attentional part we usually think of as ourselves are not aware of it (assuming it's not a lucid dream).

On other hand, I used to have a long-distance girlfriend 25 years ago and we'd talk on the phone before falling asleep and attempt to induce ourselves into having the same dream and seeing each other in it, a la Wheel of Time, which sometimes worked, but of course that kind of communication between two sleepers isn't real, just a testament to the power of suggestion, especially while hypnogogic.

Reminds me of Ramanujan learning during sleep from Namagiri.

There are umpteen stories in Hindu scriptures of baby learning in the womb of the mother and how the expecting mother must only be exposed to good thoughts and a good environment for giving birth to an intelligent and well rounded child: stories of Abhimanyu (learning how to break the Chakravyuha formation in his womb while mother was learning it but his learning was incomplete when mother fell asleep during the lecture) and Prahlada (mother learning about Lord Vishnu against the wishes of her demon husband Hiranyakashyapu). Wonder if any studies have been done on this as well.

Ah, very soon we will need to work in dreams. Can’t leave any stone of productivity unturned, right?

I can honestly say one of my most productive moments ever was when a design came to me in a dream... And who among us hasn't figured out a bug in the shower after taking a break? Getting good sleep is essential to actually being productive in many endeavors for a few reasons.

Thats what I thought too, people in this thread are giving anecdotal evidence of "being productive in dreams" and then telltelling stories about one or a small handful of problems their mind voluntarily solved while sleeping, that's a very different thing from the eventual capitalistic dream-learning that is the inevitable ending of this research. They'll claim its a utopian dream of "only learn when you want to", and that its totally optional ... then a few renegade companies adopt it and get ahead, then more adopt it, then its mandatory and performance reviewed.

We really strive at making life into a living hell, don't we?

I think the Rick and Morty episode mathematically proved the futility in trying such an exercise.

I have started feeling good after waking up from a nightmare after learning that that nightmares may serve to prepare us to tolerate nasty things, helping the brain rehearse threats and build resilience or reduce fear over time. Apparently that is still questionable, I prefer it though , recent findings does not show that nightmares are generally a resilience mechanism. https://sleepeducation.org/survivor-reinterpreting-dreams-wi... at least it helps me to dismiss all superstitions and dodgy stuff.

So I guess having dreams about recurring meetings is... honing corporate skills?

It also counts as overtime, right?

If this dream-learning thing caught on, everyone would have to work in their sleep to stay competitive.

Is the main theme that you suddenly realize you aren't wearing pants?

And if so, would you say it has improved your pants wearing performance on the job?

I regularly have abstract dreams I have trouble remembering. I wake up feeling like I understand problems better but I can't articulate why. However, I can indeed tackle problems from the day before more easily.

It's pretty fascinating. What's even more fascinating is often times when I do remember the dream, a lot of it is nonsense. And yet I'm doing better at the things I dreamt about.

Kinda related but I used to practice guitar in my dreams. If I had been learning something I’d often dream about playing it over and over again, and even going beyond that and figuring out “solos” and melodies and stuff over the chord. Can’t be sure if it translated into any real life skill, but it felt like I was actually learning or at least strongly reinforcing what I’d been practicing.

AI does the work during the day and we learn while sleeping. Society doesn't collapse from ignorance. We have a new movie plot gentlemen.

Two months ago my partner recorded me speaking in my sleep. I was speaking fluent Mandarin. I always thought sleep time is used for learning (among healing etc), but now I am convinced.

Well you’ll have to give us more. Do you speak Mandarin at all?

And, what was the partner's ability to benchmark? What is their level of familiarity with the language?

I would love to believe.

It was a recording. I dare you to ask for it.

I shall not be ensnared by your schoolyard dare. You cannot manipulate me so easily. OP, however...

Native speaker

Well, now I want to learn what you were saying!

spoiler, he is Chinese and only speaks Mandarin

But writes in English. Very rare.

I've met a few people who write English but can't speak it. One of them is polish and learned to type English to play online video games.

I am learning! But in my sleep I seemed way more fluent!

It's not new information that people can learn/practice in their sleep. This is already known and well documented. The interesting question is: what conditions increase the chance practicing in ones sleep? What are the mechanisms?

Where I live the building emits a low rumbling like a spaceship in a sci-fi show. After binge-watching The Expanse then Wheel of Time I had this dream: In order to penetrate the forsaken's magic one must send a sequence of signals, and according to Naomi Nagata on the Rocinante, the sequence of 12 signals resulted in a temporary bypass of the magic, the /count/ was the key. I woke up and wondered what problem this applied to, then tried it with a recent PRNG problem I was having where George Marsaglia's XOR-shift sequences were mostly useless for GLib.get-monotonic-time() as the seed...

This is why I would smash my head against a wall trying to beat a boss in Dark Souls for an entire evening, then wake up the next day and beat them on my first or second attempt.

Very common phenomena that is discussed frequently in the souls community.

That’s so on point. One time I was stuck on One Reborn from Bloodborne for a whole evening. While I was sleeping I figured out the optimal path to best the Chime Maidens. I woke up and beat the boss in 5 mins.

Very real phenomenon. Happened so many times

I experience similar, but I'm pretty sure it's just rest and a fresh mind, not overnight learning/thinking. When I'm bashing my head against a wall, I'm stuck in a local optimum, and sleeping lets me reset and try something new that often works better (and I execute it better since I'm not as tired).

Sometimes called the "cold controller" effect as well, and not necessarily requiring sleep but rather just a break from the game.

20 years ago I was struggling to build an app that worked in ie6, FF and chrome. While still sleeping I asked my girlfriend what flavour JavaScript she liked. I don’t think it was a good dream.

Interesting comment they have towards the end about "targeted memory reactivation can disrupt sleep".

It is important to note the study they are referring to is "targeted memory reactivation with sleep disruption", there are methods of doing targeted memory reactivation without sleep disruption.

I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of affectablesleep.com, and though we are mostly focused on slow-wave (deep) sleep, we have been looking into memory reactivation, lucid dreaming and other stimulations for additions.

Sorry for the off-topic, but I was curious about Affectable so I opened the website. I saw it's very thin and light and comfortable, but I struggled to find out what "it" is and what it does for me. It's kinda buried.

I was interested enough to click through the different links in the footer. And just as I reached the purchase page, I see that it requires "an iPhone running iOS". Unsure why it requires an iPhone; and no info on a timeline for iPhone-less customers. But that immediately rules me out as a customer.

I feel like the landing page would be a lot better if it started out focusing on what it is & how it can help me.

Apologies again for the unsolicited advice. Just wanted to share my impressions in case it's helpful.

I read a short novel about a technology that allowed you to have a VR like experience while dreaming. Of course, there was all the fun/perverted stuff you can think of but also it was immediately put to use as a corporate tool. Over a few years, more and more white collar jobs shifted to night shifts where you worked via dream VR. Then people were available during the day to do whatever, watch their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. In many ways- it was a very promising future.

I don't think this will ever work. Sleep acts as a compression for our daily life. Brains takes in daily new information and compresses it based on what we already know. The stuff dreams are made off are just a variant of what happens in day life.

powernapcomic (maritza campos) is a surreal dystopian version of this (with the corporate part turned up to 99). Excellent sci-fi and very weird...

There is also a game Dreamfall: The Longest Journey where they have devices which fastens to user's face and allow one to have lucid dreams. But they are two-way so the corporation can also control that. Then there also also "unlicensed dreammachines" without tracking and restrictions and "unlicensed dreams". I liked that game (and the original point-and-click adventure too)! https://tlj.fandom.com/wiki/Dreamer_Console

Cats practice skills while dreaming all the time. Watch their little paws go!

My favourite part of coding is going to the park, sit on the bench and dream the problem. After a while, some times it needs several visits I write any code.

Unfortunately most employers see this as slacking. It cannot be done in a noisy open plan office.

At one place few other devs were into this. We would be spending most of the working day in the park. Managers were not happy, but work was delivered always.

Srinivas Ramanujan famously said he did most of his work at night in dreams.

As a total aside, I've had sleep issues my whole life and can sometimes inadvertently induce lucid dreaming, and then I can think for hours while sleeping; it's amazing. Unfortunately a bit inception-y, but whatever.

When I was a kid I wanted to learn how to skateboard. I watched videos on technique a lot, read a bunch of articles, watched Rodney Mullen do some insane foot trickery, and then one night I had a dream of the mechanics of it. Standing on the board as I'd learned online, how to push (not mongo, naturally), and when waking up that day, I asked my friend if I could borrow a skateboard to try.

I remember getting on the board, pushing as I'd dreamed, and voila! Off I went. Something about it did not feel new at all. I'd really visualised the process and it just worked. God I miss skating sometimes, but my self-preservation always far outweighed my desire to eat concrete.

Lucid dreaming is a cool concept but I've never been able to pull it off. I still try, though!

It sort of just happened to me a few years ago. It’s neat—flying is fun. (As is the opposite, when it just doesn’t work and I wake up sort of laughing at myself for having spent, presumably, hours jumping around in my dream.)

But at least for me, the price was dreams, the moment I go lucid, ceasing to be self directed. I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifies anymore. (If I’m lucid.) I have to kind of create my own magic, which isn’t particularly restful.

Yep, same. The dream gets incredibly boring after you get control of it.

but but, you can do whatever you want?

I've had limited experience (n~20) but no... that's not how it worked for me, interested in others' experiences.

"flying" was limited. I didn't have full control and sometimes felt dynamically pinned to the top of a 2D scrolling video game as if there were driver incompatabilities.

drifting off to sleep in a session, it was very disturbing- i felt like i was being dragged by my ankle across the bed before lucid dreaming began, "here it comes..."

Sometimes there would be ominious sounds/visuals that I could not influence that scared me so much I was glad I could wake up because it felt like a nightmare was approaching.

Two big tells I'm lucid dreaming: I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?") or, I look at my hand - as if it were LLM it absolutely does not render well... like a tree trunk with a bunch of branches.

> I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?")

Super interesting, because I have the same thing. Also none of my technology works. I usually try to do something on my phone a few times, fail because the UI is putty, and then remember that smartphones don’t work in my dreams.

Well, yeah. But it's what you want in the moment which can be very unpredictable even when you're "guiding" the dream. The subconscious is still in the driver's seat there and can go to some weird, wacky places.

Not if you are an aphantast.

> dream gets incredibly boring after you get control of it

Wouldn’t go that far. But you have to consciously make it interesting by creating the weirdness.

Maybe it works differently for different people, but I found my creativity incredibly limited once I got the control of the dream. It's like everything just stopped and I could do whatever I wanted, but nothing in the environment reacted to the things I did, just stopped working.

Are your other characters still sentient? Or do they go ragdoll?

They just go ragdoll. The whole world just stops generating anything new. It's really weird and I stopped trying to "wake up" within the dream because it just gets damn boring instantly.

My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She lucid dreams very regularly, and she says she spends a lot of that time flying.

I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.

I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.

> Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream

There is a Peter Pan tendency, at least to my dreams. You know you can’t fly. But then you remember you have, and believing it’s true makes it happens.

That’s what I was getting at with the film-script effect. I’ll be in a bind and then realize that there “must” be a solution in a particular form, otherwise the dream wouldn’t make sense, and that sort of conjures that thing into existence.

Maybe fortunately, maybe sadly, the one thing I’ve not been able to do is conjure up lost loved ones. I’ll get a bunch of puppies who know my dog, but he just couldn’t show up, or I’ll get strangers or living loved ones who know my grandmother or best friend; they’re just constantly indisposed.

> I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifies anymore.

I haven't lucid dreamt since a child, but I recall everything about the dream continuing to be autonomous as before becoming lucid, but if I wanted to do something, I could add that element. I definitely could still be surprised, as the dream fulfilled wishes like a genie would, meeting it technically but perhaps not as I meant when I willed the change. The few times I reigned my subconscious so I had full power and there were no longer any surprises, I would wake up.

> everything about the dream continuing to be autonomous as before becoming lucid, but if I wanted to do something, I could add that element. I definitely could still be surprised

I may have overstated what I said. The environment continues to be dynamic, and characters enter and exit and cause their usual mayhem (alongside me). But if something unexpected happens, there is–in my mind–a theatrical explanation for it and thus a plot-driven solution. The stuffed animals are upset I'm going to wake up and kill them, so I put them in a zoo where they believe they continue to exist after I stop dreaming, et cetera. (And sure enough, they're there next time I'm in that "place".) If you're trapped somewhere, you know an exit will materialise because you're the main character, and sure enough, it eventually does. If I break something I love, I know something will happen that makes it whole again. When anything that happens can be undone, action is robs of its meaning.

maybe you just got to get scared enough! https://medium.com/luminasticity/beating-up-sadako-82c5fb3f0...

Keep a dream journal. There any many methods for achieving it but if you keep a dream journal long enough you'll start getting consistent lucid dreams.

Yeah, I do that. I've read many books about it. My particular physiology is just stubborn thus far.

I was really into it in my early 20's. One way to tell if you are mentally in the state to lucid dream is if you no longer feel tired. One night, after a grueling hike, I was completely exhausted when I went to bed. I closed my eyes, and moments later all my exhaustion just vanished, and I began to explore the space.

Another way is to try to see what the clock faces say in your dream. Also, see if the light switches behave as you would expect.

My tell is to recognize any room with a piano in it. I naturally want to sit down and play this piano, but the keys are totally wrong. No problem, I'll look around and, lo and behold, dozens more pianos all... with the keys in the wrong places. I can't play anything. "Oh, this again. I must be dreaming. How frustrating."

A very regularly occuring dream is that I'm in a train and realize that I don't have a ticket (never happened IRL), so I want to buy an e-ticket, but the ticketing app does not work. The text changes all the time, the buttons move around, weird errors, and then I realize 'yep I'm in a dream again'.

The nicer lucid dreams are those were you can fly or make spectacular light and colors, but I find that it's usually a difficult balance to avoid waking up.

> [..] app does not work [..] text changes all the time, the buttons move around, weird errors, and then I realize 'yep I'm in a dream again'.

Unfortunately, this is becoming less and less of a "tell"! You're going to have to find a new one.

Haha, fair :D.

there's a wearable dropping this year that's supposed to make it easier to lucid dream: https://www.prophetic.com/

Is there any research that would support that such a device actually works? This just looks like vaporware, and what I was able to find on the /r/luciddreaming subreddit also seems to echo that sentiment.

I'm not sure about that device but there's research about lucid dream induction through flashing lights during sleep in a consistent pattern and there are a few head devices that do that.

Most consistent way of achieving it I've managed is use a watch with an alarm that vibrates and is trivial to turn off or turns off by itself, then set it to go off after sleeping 5-6 hours. When waking up, don't move and focus on the black behind the eyes, then after a few seconds it may turn into a dream and you go straight from waking into a lucid dream.

I was fortunate to be taught by my father when I was younger. It may be an age/luck-of-the-draw thing, but check out "MILD"; it's the name for the simple technique that worked for me.

Training yourself to remember dreams by writing them down before they fade away is paramount, it's not enough to just think about them - they still somehow fade away along with your thoughts about them. Then read what you wrote before going to sleep again.

If you want to achieve lucid dreaming consistently you also have to develop a habit of doing reality checks. The most effective one is to pinch your nose and try to breath through it, in your dreams it will almost always work and the surprise is major.

Lucid dreaming even works for people with aphantasia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia>.

Are there any more subtle reality checks so people in the real world don’t think I’m insane trying to breathe through my closed nose all day?

Checking clocks for consistency. Text as well. They are less reliable. Some people swear by rotating a text containing object upside down and see if the text auto-rotates, apparently it does in their dreams. Some people can't read anything in their dreams.

Read something, and then read it a second time. If you are awake it will be the same text, but if you are dreaming it will have changed.

Look into all day awareness. It's the phenomenon of noticing the incredible level of detail of the real world and trying to do that all day.

This happens to me both sleeping and awake. When I’m stuck on a problem and decide to walk away from it for a while, I subconsciously spin off a thread in my mind and move on to something else. The number of times I’ve had a eureka moment 3-5 hours later (not realizing I was even percolating on it) has to be in the hundreds.

Happens probably twice a week when I sleep on the problem as well.

To parlay this back to the current LLM craze, if we just export all our problems to some fuzzy non deterministic solver without ever trying to understand the problem, our collective brains will atrophy severely.

I use the LLM my work pays for, sparingly, because I refuse to let that atrophy occur.

Once upon a time, I had a Game Boy with Tetris. Now, I wasn’t particularly good or anything; I was an average player. I was at the end of high school so I’d have been in my late teens.

After just a few days of obsessively playing Tetris it was all I could dream about! I heard the music, saw the pieces falling, rotating, getting faster. It was play play play all through the night! I did get better at the game pretty quickly but I have to admit: the dreams freaked me out a bit! They’re why I stopped playing entirely — I didn’t like the idea something could put itself in my head that way!

Is this dream yoga?

https://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/Tenzin-Wangyal-Rinpoche-T...

Interestingly this is not something native to Tibetan Buddhists. Neoplatonists had something similar, and even Orthodox Christian monks speak about literally "praying ceaselessly" which inludes prayer during sleep, it's definitely all lucid dreaming

I've been intensively learning German for a year and once or twice a week in dreams I have brief dialogues with the locals. Very useful as additional speaking practice :)

> In perhaps the most striking example of learning during sleep, Konkoly, Paller, and several collaborators witnessed what amounted to conversations with people who were in the midst of dreams. Independent lab groups in the U.S., France, Germany, and the Netherlands asked lucid dreamers to answer yes-or-no questions and solve simple math problems. Electrodes measuring body and brain activity verified that the participants were not awake. Martin Dresler, a sleep researcher at the Donders Institute, who ran the Dutch experiments, said that they were able to verbally deliver new information to the sleeping mind—and to receive responses. Some people could remember the questions they had been asked when they woke up. “This is a form of very complex learning,” he told me.

https://xkcd.com/269/

Also, https://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/summer-dream-job/

Buddy of mine tried lucid dreaming for years. One night, he finally had it.

Immediately, a police man shows up. "No, you're not allowed to be lucid." My friend hung his head and said "okay", and was never lucid again.

Even stranger, I later heard reports from others along similar lines.

I wonder if this is related to getting banned from the DMT realm.

>getting banned from the DMT realm

Never heard of this before. Is it a real thing? I mean, in the context of psychedelics experiencies. I've tried DMT a few times expecting the legendary all-healing trip everyone talks about but never worked.

There are lots of people who say that they've been banned from the DMT realm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCDntV81Q8A&t=522s

When you get the message, hang up the phone. —Alan Watts

This has always been clear as day to me, but I just couldn’t prove it. I used to take naps right after practicing guitar because I believed it would help me learn faster! LOL

Referenced Paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf067

I was once able to prove a MAC scheme was insecure by allowing ciphertext to be rearranged while in a dream; this was a cryptography exercise.

Not about sleep learning but lucid dreaming in general: I have long been puzzled and disappointed that we are not pouring more research, interest, and funding into controlling the induction of lucid dreams. There are ways to learn to do it now, but they are slow and unreliable. Gadgets exist but they're fringe - there is no great lucid dreaming movement like there is with longevity, for example.

I would have thought in a society where we want a gadget or magic pill for anything and everything, our interest in this would be through the roof. You can live a whole other lifetime in a dream, either your own or of some other character or world you step into. You can replay the past see the future, countless times. Controlled lucid dreaming seems like the closest we will likely ever get to immortality. Why aren't we more bullish about facilitating it?

Same here, I don't understand it either. It's a powerful phenomenon and is essentially the end state of virtual reality, as you are now the god of your own universe.

I think the issue is, you can't take photos or bring friends with you into your lucid dream, so you have nothing to share with others.

It's kinda a solo activity.

Omelette du fromage

I rarely remember my dreams in the morning, only a handful times in my life. At one I was a Chinese citizen and experienced a dense feeling of being a little ant in the greatest Empire the universe and time had ever seen (China). A nothing in the whole. There are no words. Another one was an insane, out of the world sex experience. Dreams are wild.

I have been saying this for years.

When I was young I somehow figured out how to control my dreams. By the time I was an adult and working in software all my dreams were always iterating over solutions to problems I had at work. And every day I would come into the office with the ability to move forward on projects with insights in leaned that night while sleeping.

My wife used to think that I had terrible sleep apnea because I'd repeatedly quit breathing for a minute or two at a time and then gasp for air, but it turned out I was just dreaming about freediving for lobsters.

Uh, do you freedive while awake?

Yes of course, I was in a mountain lake looking for walleye yesterday!

Happens to me all the time, waking up with a solution (or a new problem :/) to complex software issues.

last couple years i really started branching away from data engineering to software engineering. i am constantly dreaming about software sometimes it just feels like im thinking while sleeping. sometimes its mumbo jumbo but a lot of times it's legitimate cohesive architecting or coding.

honestly it's driving me crazy. i really miss just having nonsensical dreams it was refreshing.

Edison, famously, solved problems in a light dream state [1].

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-na...

I thought this was already known! Why else would we be out of touch with reality for several hours per day?? Any non-trivial task that requires focus will improve via sleep: Speaking a new language, playing the guitar, pickleball, flying a helicopter, coding, etc.

While you're sleeping I'm practicing my skills. Enjoy being poor, suckers!

While you were sleeping, I was practicing the art of the blade

While you were studying the blade, I was drooling on my physical self while trying to get two girls to kiss in a lucid dream.

There's a long history of doing yogic practice in the dream state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga

Yes, "new research" is a misnomer here. The correct version is "people in lab coats have finally noticed ..."

Reminds me of the studies that say lobsters can feel pain. Like, no fucking shit. What multi-cellular (and even single-celled) organisms do not feel pain? Glad we're giving the western stamp of approval on these highly contested ideas.

I suggest you should drop the patronizing tone. People believe lots of things and a lot of them is completely bogus. That's why we need people in lab coats to evaluate them in systematic way.

This is nothing new as there's even a term for it - "hypnopedia." People used this widely to learn new languages in the past, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence about its effectiveness.

yeah i hate it when i work while sleeping

Me: "I'm gonna plan the workshop tomorrow, more than enough time."

7,5 h Later

Brain: "Hey, here is everything, worked the whole night, no need to thank me!!!"

Me: "I need coffee..."

When I was beginning to use AI for everything, as most of us had, I would start dreaming that wall of text that had a personality sat between me and reality. For several nights I would dream this way with the wall becoming translucent and displaying text but the "real" actions (other people, scenes) was happening on the other side of the wall. I've dreamed in videogames as well. I'm not sure if I was getting any learning done, but I'm pretty sure my brain was exercising modes of thought that would push knowledge from "system 2" down into "system 1."

I feel walking outside and thinking is a better way to practice skills and solve problems. A tired mind just sleeps and usually doesn't remember current events.

Why not both? (Sleepwalking)

So... If your latest nap was comprised of nightmares and solving a job issue, can you charge your boss for overtime and harmful working conditions?

Thinking of problems before falling asleep does sometimes help me in finding solutions in a dream. Though I may still be half awake when doing this.

That may be related or not to the article but Feynman for example wrote a lot about the miracles that the brain can do in the small moments between being awake and being asleep. He thought it unlocked some extra juice and tried to force himself to stay in that moment longer and then to wake up to take notes. You should look into it.

It's a well known technique. I first heard about it from Barbara Oakley, so there is probably some neuroscience research done about it.

Have anybody managed to use sleep to learn language? How ?

While I think it's a compelling idea that playing speech in your target language while you sleep can help, I don't think it's ever been demonstrated to work.

Having said that, that sleep is incredibly important for learning anything! I practice my language learning during the day, a little bit every day, and I prioritize getting good sleep. This is mostly just trying to go to bed at the same time every night, avoiding alcohol, and giving myself an hour before bed with low lights to read and calm my mind. When you sleep, memories are consolidated, organized, and tagged for long-term storage. I will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and bouncing around in my mind are echos of phrases and words from my target language. I figure it's working.

I have dyslexia and in high school learning my lines for plays was really hard but I loved doing plays, so I recorded myself saying my lines on tape (yah, I'm old) and used double cassette to fill 2 tapes with them, then run them over night while I was sleeping. I've never used this in my adult life but it worked pretty well for my lines and I suppose maybe you could use it to learn a language?

Edit: Claude tells me I was a head of my time, apparently it works but not net new, you have to also be working on it awake, it's called 'targeted memory reactivation (TMR)": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12592824/

I attempted to do this with Japanese but did not make much headway.

Dexter, from Dexter's Lab, learned French.

The bigger problem is, most of people's brain do not work while sleeping, since there are less and less hard problems to think about.

Sounds like mental rehearsal more than magic. Interesting, but I'm not sure what to do differently day to day.

This "research" has no controls, no blinding, no quantitative data. The historic work mentioned all come from a time when there was no reliable way to confirm that someone was actually asleep. The recent research is full of weasel words like suggests, seems like, appears to, with no actual hard facts to measure and review.

So called Sleep Learning systems have been around for over 100 years but to date there is no rigorous suggesting that any of them work for acquisition of new information and/or skills.

I'll never understand HN's fascination with obvious pseudo science.

I remember when I first started dreaming in Italian... it was pretty cool though.

The newyorker has fascinating and well written medical stories. For example, Dhruv Khullar always writes amazing columns https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dhruv-khullar

Synthetic training data

Now there is no excuse anymore to be working less than 24 hours a day.

But the problem is we forget as soon as we wake up

Not so much if you note it down immediately.

I quite effectively use this technique at work.

Reminds me of Echopraxia (Peter Watts book)

That’s why we say “let me sleep on it”.

Where is the control group of regular dreamers exposed to the same sounds when in REM?

Lucid dreaming is just an unusually awake form of dreaming. Not surprising that they can hear things especially the ones that can move their eyes left and right when prompted…

The study should have simply been find people that can move their eyes left and right when prompted that still have REM brain waves tell them some random thing and see if they can remember it when you wake them up. I don’t know why that’s not completely obvious maybe it is and these guys are just grifters

In “Why We Sleep” by Harvard sleep researcher Matthew Walker, he says that during REM sleep your brain revisits emotional experiences but in a chemically safe environment. Stress-related chemicals like noradrenaline are greatly reduced so you can replay difficult or painful memories but without the full emotional intensity you felt at the time. The brain can process and “defuse” those emotions.

TLDR, sleeping on it works.

It's gonna be really sad in 10-15 years when all the sc bros are hustling and grindsetting their dreams away.

Now that's dystopian!

Top performers manufacture 33% more hours in the day thanks to this one weird trick!

Can't wait for the LinkedIn posts about their day to start even earlier than the 4am workout and 5am meditation with strategic dreaming between 1am and 3am.

Type LUCID in the comments for a how to guide...

Already done https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andyeung_i-just-met-a-founder...

I hate evopsych speculation, but this might be involved in PTSD-related nightmares.

Your brain is exploring the trauma-space while asleep to learn to deal with similar experiences.

Hypnospace

Now that there is proof of communication while dreaming, it is only a matter of time before someone manages to vibe code while sleeping.

Hah and people still make the argument LLMs and brains work the same lol

Sure, another Rupert Sheldrake

tl:dr "Andrillon warned against trying to harness the sleeping mind in the service of the waking world." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00276-0

Proper sleep definitely isn't optional.

There is no such thing as "should". The thing is possible, therefore humans will do it. The only question is, who is we?

Well, you shouldn't smoke yet people do it. I think the article posits question whether we should in similar spirit.

After two weeks I woke up and didn't notice it was German tv. Eventually after 5 minutes an unknown word came along. I still can't speak it.

When 13 i use to code till 1-2 am. In school I slept with my eyes open till 11. The information was stored and organized but I was unaware of it. I remember tests where all of the questions talked about topics I never spend a conscious thought on. But I knew all the answers. Quite the surreal experience.

Teachers sometimes wondered if I was still in the room or they just asked questions. My mind would grep the most recent chunk of speech, parse it and respond as if nothing unusual was going on. The mind raced but I talked slowly to portray the slight delay more natural.

I learned you don't want other people's bullshit in your head. It needs to be questioned first.

I built a mobile app called Lucidity (luciditydreams.com) aimed at helping people have their first lucid dream:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lucidity-lucid-dream-journal/i...

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.b3nz.lucidi...

Started building it 14 years ago after reading an article about lucid dreaming in my favorite science magazine, and no other apps out there existed to assist you with reality checks and the different induction methods. Recently added a 7-day lucid dreaming journey to guide you to your first lucid dream. I worked with lucid dreaming researchers for the program's content.

Feedback welcome!

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