To sleep, perchance to control your dreams
in.reuters.com
in.reuters.com
Contrary to what the article suggests, you can't really control the scenario you are in. It is more like being awake. You take conscious control of yourself and the brain makes the world react accordingly, but the actions of others are still beyond your ability to change.
But I also find it to be quite useful in a practical way. I've written some of my best music and developed some of my best business ideas or inventions during lucid dreams. The bonus being that I can remember everything after waking up, so retaining those ideas becomes much easier than it normally is. In fact, if I play or hear a guitar riff while inside a lucid dream, I'm able to pick up the guitar while awake and have retained noticeable "muscle memory" for the chords or progressions or runs, as if I've played them thousands of times.
That aside, the most reliable and intense series of lucid dreams occurred in my teens while experimenting with psylocybin -- unlike the parent comment, sometimes also affecting the dream's setting or the behaviour of people in it.
My favourite (and probably the simplest) experience from that period was repeatedly exhaling steam on a frosty day, marvelling at how the steam and everything else I could sense was a figment of my mind, before waking up giggling and in a wonderful mood.
Does anybody know where the paper is? This is a rare case where I don't give a damn about a pay wall.
Does anyone have any experience with lucid dreaming? It sounds like it would be exhausting.
http://reddit.com/r/luciddreaming has lots of information about this. I think lucid dreaming must be very refreshing...
So it's still stressful but not nearly as much as a full-blown nightmare with no insight whatsoever.
I swear, a subconscious can be surprised at your dream actions. Perhaps someday we'll understand the neuroscience enough to explain that. But I'd swear there was a two to three second massive huh? what now? from my subconscious. Once again, I was faced with the crocodile, almost by some sort of default, and once again, I jumped in. After that, the dream just moved on.
I haven't had many nightmares since. Non-zero, but the incidence rate went way down.
If one is having troubles with "simple" nightmares, which is to say, bad dreams that are just bad for no apparent reason, as opposed to bad dreams which represent real traumas or real problems, lucid dreaming is certainly one good solution. Based on my personal experience I'd be a great deal less sanguine about lucid dreaming being able to deal with personal traumas... dreams are not logical, and if you're having a nightmare based on real things the "dream" may metaphorically laugh off your attempts to change it (i.e., if you lost your buddy because you had forgotten to pack more bullets in a war situation, you can dream that you brought more but the "enemy" may well just soak them up and keep coming), but I guess it can't hurt to try... based on reading around and even in comments on this thread, I've observed it's even more difficult than usual to generalize from personal experience to general "rules" of dreaming because it's probably pretty different for us all.
I remember one dream about being cornered by a bully in a dream, a person that bullied me in real life, but for some reason when he punched me it didn't correspond to what I remembered from reality so I figured I was in a dream. Which meant, guilt free revenge :D i.e. punching him in his face. I soon awoke.
Also the whole thing about not being able to change scenario seems off, I do remember literally saying, you know what dream would be better? The other one. And then switching to that dream.
If you really are in a dream and have nightmares about being in a war zone, just transforming into Iron Man and going ballistic would be the most prudent thing to imagine. After all your dreams, won't kill you and you can change yourself if not the scenario.
I've done that too. But dreams that are just random and dreams that are based on real experiences and "issues" you may have are different, in my personal experience. You may transform into Iron Man and just go ballistic, but in my personal experience, what starts out fun and empowering will likely break down; Iron Man's weapons stop working quite as well, then they just plain stop working, then despite the fact he can fly away it turns out he's always also flying right back to the problem... dreams are not a perfectly-accurate 3D VR simulation of the world, they are heavily influenced by your internal mental and emotional state, deeply symbolic (and I don't mean in the "this tree is your mother" way, I mean, you are not truly visually processing data, you are not navigating in a true 3D space, you are navigating through the highly-processed symbolic representation of the space that is the end result of all your visual processing, which is a very different space than the true 3D world, despite its correspondences) and in fact often quite lacking in true spatial structure, and if you're having problems, you won't be able to escape them by flying away in a dream anymore than you can solve your issues by just "stopping thinking about them"... for indeed, they are the exact same thing, so if the latter sounds foolish, so should the former.
I think a lot of people, lacking control of their dreams, end up reversing cause and effect. With real issues and not just "night terrors" (random nightmares), you're having a bad dream because you have mental or emotional issues... you don't have mental/emotional issues because you have bad dreams. It's a fun metaphor in movies like Inception, but it's not how it actually works... as usual, the reality is a great deal more prosaic, and less full of easy answers.
When I am dreaming I have to check often that I am not actually awake, so I have a trick I use to make sure that I am dreaming. I know, it sounds a lot like Inception.
A little more - I had night terrors up until I was 12. I would walk though my house in a frantic dream state, sometimes seeing things that weren't there on top of things that were. Maybe the lucid dreaming and early night terrors were connected.
My mom had once told me that she had a bad dream where someone grabbed her, and she bit the person's hand and it was like biting through dough. One night, during a dream, I remembered this and bit the area between my thumb and my index finger and there was no feeling.
Also, food has no taste when I am dreaming. It doesn't even really have texture.
The worst part about sleep paralysis is that things happen to you while you are in bed in your room (or where ever you fell asleep) and things seem too real-- ghosts trying to choke you, a monster slowly crawling towards you, or just some person in the mask breaking into your house and you can't move or scream to ask for help.
Sometimes it happens at night and you can move around (but that's a dream), then you wake up and can't move (and that's either sleep paralysis or yet another dream). Then you wake up for real but you don't know if that's still a dream.
Sometimes it happens during the day when you nap. You can hear people around you talking but no one seems to see/feel that building is about to be destroyed or hear you screaming because you can't move your lips.
Luckily, I learned to control it. All you need to do is calm down and say that it is a dream. Personally, there are clues that give up the fact that I am in sleep paralysis-- I can't see faces clearly, regardless of the thing being alive or inanimate (like stuffed toys). So I just calm down, admit that it is a dream, and fall asleep again.
PS: I also wouldn't call it "suffering sleep paralysis". It happened frequently (several times per month) when I was young but after I turned 22 it might have happened 3 or 4 times only.
The main use-case for lucid dreaming is fun. Being in a dream and being able to control it and fly about in your own dream world is a pretty amazing experience.
The latter never really worked, but I once got very scared because I couldn't control myself anymore, I felt like a spirit locked into a body. With hindsight I attribute this to unintentional self-hypnosis.
The former was quite easy to achieve. The trick that did it for me was to remind myself often, while going to sleep, that I wanted to lucid dream. I repeatedly thought "When dreaming, ask myself if I'm dreaming" when laying in bed. The first night was uneventful but the second one I was able to "wake up" from my dream, but control it. By controlling, I mean move freely around in the scene I was in, not generate scenes.
I happened to be running towards a lake with my brother (recurrent dream for me) and I realised I was dreaming just next to shore. I spontaneously began to fly over the water, and I could control where I went. Still, the surroundings were a bit fuzzy, like in usual dreams, I just could move around freely.
It happens to me once in a while now, but never lasts more than what seems like a good 15 seconds. It's as if my subconscious knows it lost control, and then I wake up. It always happens in the morning.
Last night I became aware I was in a dream in which I was in a Dunkin Donuts in a southern city with cobblestone streets and a large red brick church. Prairie Home Companion was on the radio in the Dunkies. They were having a tasting for a new line of estate coffees. Garrison Keillor was singing and monologueing about a substitute preacher from Netherlands. I rode around the center of the city on a green bicycle. The cobbles were unusually smooth. Traffic was light to moderate. I was able to turn around across several lanes of traffic to circle the central square of the city. While I was riding around I was thinking that the city was an invention, and I was certain I had never been in a city that looked like this. I thought, while dreaming, it was an imagined Charleston, although I have no idea if Charleston looked like my dream. I have never been to Charleston.
My lucid dreams are usually pleasant and refreshing.
Additionally, you can learn how to do 'supernatural' things when you are lucid such as flying, which I almost always use to change the scenery upon becoming lucid.
Yet...
Thinking it over, I've never been able to conceive of an obvious benefit to it, other than as a means to avoid bad dreams. But beyond that, why bother? What kind of absurd escapism is this? And then, just to wake up to a piss-poor reality, where I'd rather be asleep? Feh!
In the long run, I found that my diet had a strong relationship with the bad dreams I was having, and after I got out of college, and started buying food with my own money, when I purchased the foods I actually felt hungry for, instead of just raiding the refidgerator for whatever my parents had stocked with (or otherwise resorting to fast food), that bad dreams disappeared, and now I rarely have memorable dreams.
Sleep is restful and uneventful, when I get enough of it, and I'm thankful for that.
(Although the game backstory goes further with its machine being able to not only trigger but also shape and even download the contents of the dream, posing copyright and mind-control issues, but that's another thing :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamfall%3A_The_Longest_Journ...
Maybe just people aren't generally aware of lucid dreaming to know what the market size is.
I have had personal experience of lucid dreams, when I was very young I would stare at my bedroom wall until I fell asleep, the concentration must have kept me awake to some degree.
You'd think accessing the decision making functions of the brain would give you a worse rest overall.