I think it's interesting. Tech to create a feedback loop to keep you in a particular state.
When I was a kid I really had this thing for switching a light switch between off and on. Know what I mean? There's a spot you can hold it between off and on where the light flickers, and buzzes, at low power, sort of randomly.
I guess this is like that for wake-sleep. Cool state to be in and to get there without drugs, concentration, or whatever else. Very simple.
Can you lucid dream/OBE? Was it possible to learn?
Lucid dreaming is a skill. There's varying levels of experience and control that can be exerted via different methods. It comes naturally to some people, but is very much also a learnable skill (to varying degrees of difficulty for different people).
I spent about a month practicing methods to lucid dream before being able to achieve a few lucid dreams over a couple weeks. It became difficult for me to keep up some of the exercises in order to do so (such as waking up to write down my dreams in my dream journal in the middle of the night would interrupt my wife's sleep). It can be time-consuming for some people as well, as learners benefit from being able to get 7.5+ hours of sleep each night. I still attempt to lucid dream when convenient, but I don't practice every day like I used to.
Great resources to get started with learning lucid dreaming:
- Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. & Howard Rheingold
If you find yourself semi-lucid within a dream, it's beneficial to immediately try to "anchor" yourself in your surroundings, by slowing turning around in-place, touching yourself, smelling things; activate all of your senses and your grounding to the dream will be much stronger allowing you to stay lucid and control the narrative.
Huh. I should try that next time. I rarely realize I'm in a dream (that I can remember), and whenever I do ... I just try to make out with everyone. It's a lot harder than you'd think! At least for me, even when I realize I'm in a dream, it becomes incredibly difficult to direct anything that's happening.
A good way to realise you’re dreaming is to look for “dream tells”, which vary from person to person but often include: text being hard to read, clocks showing the wrong time, mirrors not working quite right, not being able to remember how you got where you are, things changing appearance when you look away and look back, that sort of thing.
Unless you’re well practiced with lucid dreaming, you probably won’t be able to exert direct control—either your efforts simply won’t work, or you’ll wake yourself up. A useful technique I use is to think something along the lines of “Oh, of course this is what will happen next” and it often does—the structure of the dream is often driven by your expectations and beliefs of how things ought to operate. Poke around and try stuff to see what works for you! :)
The clock/text thing works really well for me. I’ll read a line of text, look away, then read it again. If it seems to have changed, I’m dreaming. Same thing with the clock. If it behaves erratically, I’m probably dreaming.
I've had 2 very lucid dreams (when I was in high school and had a crush on this one girl) and in both I tried to make out with her and stuff but woke up right before anything good happened. Damn excitement. lol
When I was learning how to lucid dream, one of the triggers that I used to tell I was in a dream was flipping a light switch on and off. When I saw nothing happened, I knew it was a dream.
Another big one I use is looking at any words, numbers or clocks to see if they were legit, or random characters / garbage.
I started to "feel" what a lucid dream was because I would get some nightmares that would eventually wake me up. It felt real and I could remember everything about it (for a few minutes). The big ones always involved me falling from a building, and waking up once I hit the pavement.
Over time, I forced myself to try to mostly stay asleep during these nightmares. I remember falling from stuff, hitting the pavement, waking up, but keeping my eyes closed and trying to keep from waking up. It got to the point where I would "half" wake up, but still be in the nightmares. Then with some practice, I could do that to normal dreams too.
I can't really do it on demand, so it's more if I am having a crazy dream, I can usually snap out of it and fully control everything about it.
I once was having dinner with a girl and the topic of conversation drifted to dreams and how one might tell if one is in an "Inception" type scenario. I used the menu as an example-- read a line from the menu, close the booklet, reopen and reread the same line. I told her if the two lines aren't the same line, you're dreaming (the rendering hardware in your brain apparently uses different PRNG seeds for procedural texture generation).
I paused awkwardly as I realized that items in the menu kept changing each time I reread them.
She was very offended when I told her she was a figment of my imagination.
I like your explanation for changing lines of text, but I don't think brain is actively generating any content. I think brain is just trying its best to apply daytime pattern recognition to un-orchestrated neural activity. The most recently learned patterns are the strongest, which is why often you'll dream stuff that happened that day. If you spend a lot of time performing single activity (like gaming), the dream will be intensive and focused; this is called the Tetris effect.
Poke one finger of one hand into the palm of the other. If you are dreaming, the flesh will yield like putty, and your finger will go through. This also works most of the time with windows, and sometimes with walls.
Pinch your nose, close your mouth, and try to breathe. If you are dreaming, you will be able to inhale and exhale without any conceivable path for the air to flow. Also works if you are underwater.
Light switches always do something in my dreams. It might not be turning the lights on and off, but a thing happens when I flip the switch. (One time, it made some rabbits explode. That was fascinating, and I blew them all up one by one, and then felt guilty about it after I woke up.) Although most of the time, my dreams don't even have light switches, and I don't notice when they are absent from places where they should be, according to building codes.
I almost always have hands and a face, and the ability to move, so the two tricks above usually work.
"Pinch your nose, close your mouth, and try to breathe. If you are dreaming, you will be able to inhale and exhale without any conceivable path for the air to flow. Also works if you are underwater."
That has happened to me before! It was more an accident of experimenting around in a lucid dream. I didn't think anything further of it. You're right, though, that it should be a default technique since you can close your mouth and attempt to breath in about any dream situation. Thanks a lot!
> When I was a kid I really had this thing for switching a light switch between off and on. Know what I mean? There's a spot you can hold it between off and on where the light flickers, and buzzes, at low power, sort of randomly.
I relate to this on a spiritual level. When I was a child, I would go around the house and set all the switchs to that "in-between" state.
Its funny you say that one twchnique for lucid dreaming is focusing on mundane things that you do in everyday life and within a dream the behavior is different. A friend actually used light switches as anchors so whenever there was one in a dream he would realize he was dreaming. Im not a practitioner so im not 100% sure how this works in practice but I remember him talking about light switches specifically
A great way to become conscious in your dreams is to notice something that isn't supposed to happen while you're awake. For reasons I'm not sure why, many people share a lot of experiences that happen in dreams that work well as anchors; your hair falls out, you look in a mirror and have missing teeth, technology doesn't work the way it's expected to, light switches don't work, clocks don't display a proper time or you can't read them, and more.
There are more ways to purposefully check if you're dreaming, such as by trying to push your finger through your hand, or breathing through your nose while you pinch it with your fingers. But some of the examples above just passively happen while you're dreaming and you can train yourself to notice them.
Yes. You start by having a dream journal. Before going to sleep, tell yourself with focus and mental expectation you will have dreams that you remember. Prep your mind. Each time you wake up, try to remember anything you might have dreamed jotting it down. This will increase awareness and number of dreams you have. Many also find taking naps during the day increases number of dreams. Most of mine came with them. You're also wanting to maximize REM sleep at least per previous research. That's where you get more dreaming and dream recall. There were devices built that supposedly detected when you were in REM vs NREM that could wake you up in REM. You could then journal stuff. I worried it might condition the brain to interrupt dreams, though. Never tried them.
So, now you're dreaming a lot. You now have to wake up in the dream. Techniques to do that are called "reality checks" since they tell you what's real and isn't. You do them all throughout the day of waking life to make a habit out of them. The habit kicks in during the dream either on autopilot (script) or when you remember to do it. You spot a discrepency between what's expected from reality and what you're seeing. You're therefore dreaming. You will probably wake up immediately with a mental rush. Lucid dreaming websites or books will give you techniques for "anchoring" from there like spinning around that hold the dream together. You can also do it with mental focus. You can also prime your subconscious to do it for you for a while but we're in tricky territory there with a lot to debate. Here's some reality checks I use to get your started:
First, ask yourself if you're awake. When you're awake, you know you're awake. If you're not sure, assume you're dreaming unless you prove otherwise. There's apparently some sense we have for that.
Second, there's often something to write with in dreams from a pen to your fingers on a surface. Write something down. Look at it to take in the words themselves plus their visual details. Hold it in your head while looking at other stuff in the room in similar detail. Then, look back at original writing to see if it changes. For some reason, the words will be different or start doing weird things like moving. You can do this with configuration of objects you find in room around you, too, but I find semi-cursive handwriting to be best. I speculate the difficulty is that the simulator has trouble telling what you're focusing on. That they're different components of the brain is already predicted by research on intuition vs reason.
Third, reflective surfaces like mirrors. They'll often have no reflection or reflect something unexpected. I'm probably the only person my friends meet who doesn't care about appearance much but always looks at mirrors. Get interesting reactions when I tell them I was just making sure the world was real instead of a dream. "No, I'm not worried or confused: just a good habit of mine." Another interesting reaction as that doesn't make it better haha. I take it as an opportunity to tell them about lucid dreaming or start a "how do you know what's real?" philosophy discussion. Or ensure they've seen The Matrix.
These three techniques have woken me in every dream I've ever had where I at least was aware enough to check them. Two of them are instances of a general pattern of simply observing the world in detail with a questioning mind. In my dreams, I similarly observe and question what I'm seeing with the WTF's going through the roof at some point. There's actually a compound effect where more simulation failures happen as I start noticing them. Confusion is how it starts. Then, my barely-functional, scripted mind starts wondering off script noticing things "aren't right." The second I'm partly independent of the dream's control I attempt a reality check out of habit. Then, I either wake up or have lucid control of the dream. My sneaky imagination sometimes counters, though, by switching to a new script to block my awareness. It adapts. The worst adaptation was, after seeing Inception, it incorporating the dream in a dream concept where I had to wake up 10+ times on occasion before I was awake. The dreams became inescapable.
That leads to the last point about practicing lucid dreams that people should know about: we can also get lucid nightmares. They're like all the creativity of your brain channeled in to writing your own personal, horror movie staring you as the perp, victim, or both. All depends on what you've seen/read previously and luck given dreams are semi-random connections between a vast array of thoughts/memories. ;) Most people can just wake yourself up to escape or at least nullify it knowing it's not real. That even feels empowering when you do it as you awaken to take on life's petty challenges after conquering something much worse. Some of us can't escape or make it go away, though. Nobody is sure how to determine that ahead of time either. One subset that was obvious was that any mental condition that brings anything from anxiety to paranoia can cause this since the same brain components are used in dream creation/control far as anyone can tell. My PTSD from head injury, aka "always-on worrying," turned some of lucid dreams from beautiful vacations I was used to into Freddy Krueger shit I couldn't escape from. Started happening a lot. Now, I just wake up the second I can since good ones aren't worth the bad ones to me.
Again, doens't happen to most people either anxious or not. I'm just giving the warning since anyone in that category will wish they knew ahead of time to make an informed decision about taking the risk. Everyone else, get a dream journal, start doing the reality checks, start taking naps, and prepare to have a blast just when you thought your day was "over." Also, you'll be the most experienced person in any conversation about what's real and isn't since you're ability to assess that will have been tested many times. ;)
I don't think your adaptations were caused by the movie. Fake wake-ups are common when lucid dreaming and some practitioners counter this by training themselves to preform reality checks each time they wake up.
That's true and good advise. I second that for anyone reading. You're never guaranteed to be out just because you seem to wake up. Double true if lying on bed when "awake." ;)
Regarding my case, I rarely had them over many years of lucid dreaming. They were 2-3 layers deep if each wake-up is a layer. After the movie, I had more in next months than I had in years with 3+ layers common with some around 10. I also increased lucidity after a few layers with changes to the dream script that tricked me into thinking I was more awake. The reality checks even failed on some of them. The simulation was that realistic. Except No 1 because I always know when I'm finally awake. I just couldn't apply No 1 in those dreams for some reason. I just eventually got out after massive, prolonged effort with many false positives until I was truly awake where I could apply No 1.
Freaky stuff. I'm not necessarily blaming the movie itself so much as saying it gave my mind an idea that unconscious creativity ruthlessly exploited from there. I can't prove causality but it's quite a huge correlation to be accidental. Fortunately, I managed to reduce the problem a bit using the reverse of learning lucid dreaming. Hit and miss. I haven't had one of those mega-layered dreams in a while.
When I was a kid I really had this thing for switching a light switch between off and on. Know what I mean? There's a spot you can hold it between off and on where the light flickers, and buzzes, at low power, sort of randomly.
I guess this is like that for wake-sleep. Cool state to be in and to get there without drugs, concentration, or whatever else. Very simple.
Can you lucid dream/OBE? Was it possible to learn?