Living in a Lucid Dream

I frequently have lucid dreams, in that I'm entirely aware of that fact that I'm dreaming while in the dream.

What I find interesting, however, is that if I have a dream I forgot to study for my test, or I'm naked at school because I left my clothes somewhere else, or the school play starts tonight and I haven't memorized a single line... the fact that I know I'm dreaming doesn't help at all.

Because the problem is that, while lucid dreaming, I have no access to any real-life knowledge or memories. I figure that I'm having the dream because I actually am in school in real life, with an exam I forgot about in the morning. I simply have no access to the fact that I left school many years ago. And if there's a monster behind the door in my dream, it seems entirely plausible in my dream that that's simply because there are monsters in the real world too.

And quite often my dreams are related to real-life situations that happened yesterday or are happening tomorrow or this week -- so it's not like I can try to convince myself of some "rule" that dream anxieties are never anything to worry about.

So my whole anxious lucid dream I'm just thinking, "boy I really hope that I'm not actually in a play that opens tomorrow night..." And then I wake up and it is suddenly crystal-clear that I haven't been in a high school play in decades.

But during my lucid dream, there's absolutely no way of knowing. Curious if this is universal or if other people who lucid dream do always know the details of their actual true reality -- their age, what city and home they live in, current job, etc.

The below is not specific to lucid dreaming but more about experiments regarding consciousness and perceived passage of time:

- Researchers wanted to see how the "time slows down under extreme events" worked

- They created a watch that blinked a message at a time too fast for humans to see under normal circumstances

- They then had people bungee jump and try to read the watch during the jump

Turns out that people could not perceive the message even though they reported the "time slows down" effect during the jump.

This has led researchers to believe that humans are not actually processing events more quickly and/or time is perceived to slow down but rather this is a coping mechanism for dealing with extreme events.

Richard Feynman reports in his biography on his own experiments with lucid dreaming. He found sleep to not be restful enough anymore, found it impossible to switch the lucid part of dreaming off and eventually had a negative experience that caused him to stop.

After I learned to lucid dream real life became much less interesting in comparison. It felt like I came alive at night in my sleep, everything in the dream world was so vivid. I learned I could create any environment I wanted, like when Neo trains in the matrix. I would practice things (like tai chi) but it is a bit boring when the other characters don't have free will, so it was like interacting with robots.

The end game for me was going behind the curtain - into the dream control room. It was a room filled with screens each showing a dream I had experienced, even abstract dreams from the age of 3 or 4. From here I could enter any of the dreams through the screen. In the room was a man, like Morgan Freeman (it was like in the film The Dark Knight where he tracks everyones phone), he was the only person I ever met while lucid dreaming who seemed like a real person.

After some visits to this dream control room, I overcame my addiction to lucid dreaming, I stopped being active in my dreams and watched them like someone would watch a film. I knew it was a dream but I chose not to participate.

At this time I was also experimenting with astral projection. I really wanted to have a shared out-of-body experience which could be validated. I got my flatmate to place things in certain areas around our flat to see if I could find them while meditating, but I couldn't.

Being deeply involved in spirituality really distances you from most people in our society. I gave up meditating to better connect with the kind of people I am surrounded by.

The way I lucid dream is to 'stay awake' through the process of falling asleep.

There are a few tricks I use... but I don't recommend the experience (It can be... uncomfortable {there is a reason you don't remember the point you loose consciousness}).

I don't know if these are universally applicable tricks either. But focusing on a point (visualizing it as actively as you can) seems to be important to staying awake through the process of falling asleep...

When I lucid dream, usually I also have the ability to "fly" and in time I learned one thing. As much as I love to use the "fly" ability to explore, I must not steer too far away from the point I am currently. Otherwise I can examine in quite vivid details the stuff around but if I leap too far it's like my mind says "sorry dude, you've reached end of simulation area, here's where you wake up".

I have been lucid dreaming for many years and about five years ago, I started keeping my tablet on the nightstand and when I wake up, if I remember it, which I generally do, I use speech to text to record it. If I don't do that I often forget them. I have categories, the movie type are like 3rd person and it plays out like I am watching a movie. A ride along dream is like first person, I feel like I am riding along with someone else, but I know it's not me, but I know their thoughts. The me dream is when I am me in the dream. Some of them repeat multiple times over several nights In all cases I know I am dreaming. I started turning some of them into short stories. No idea where some of them come from. Often it seems like I just tuned into someone's story, but the subconscious is a funny thing.

Yeah. You can practice lucid dreaming. I was a (not born, learned) lucid dreamer a few years ago, then I got into college and my sleep schedule got messed up, so I don't do it anymore. Had I learned DILD (dream-induced lucid dreaming) techniques I could continue but those require constant daytime effort no matter how little. I was lazy and went with WILD methods, and they work wonders when you have a consistent sleep schedule.

Can attest that lucid dreams are as detailed and real as real life. Can't tell the difference. In one of my first attempts, I had a 30 minutes long lucid dream (I was able to precisely measure.). You know the feeling of wonder and awe? You feel it for at most a few minutes at a time usually. I was in constant amazement all through the whole half an hour. Because against my expectations, everything was as real as the real world. The texture of the ground beneath your feet, the feeling of air when you move fast, the taste when you eat. The weight and texture of stuff when you touch, the feeling of your own weight on your feet when you stand. The sun shining, reflections, brightness. Human eye level perfect quality and detail when you look. This feeling of awe didn't went away for me, I still get it when I LD.

There was a thread about it recently, I wrote there some more: About learning resources too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399548

The original "how can I tell if we're in a simulation" discussion:

https://www.thelucidguide.com/the-butterfly-dream-chuang-tzu...

False awakenings are another aspect of dreams:

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/false-awakening

"They fulfill fantasies of control, seek personal thrills like flying, have sex with Jeremy Allen White."

I really hope someone called Jeremy Allen White reads this.

Surprised to see that a lot of people experience lucid dreams. Are there any solid techniques to trigger them?

I've been thinking about the flip side of this, the incomprehensible waking life.

For me, daily life is an unending series of setbacks, negative reinforcement loops and disappointments. I know going into nearly all endeavors that they will end in some kind of failure, but decide to be brave and enter them anyway. I understand that this is the opposite of manifestation, and that I am creating self-fulfilling prophecies. But feel that a neural net would create a model of reality that matches my lived experience of suffering, so there's a basis in fact here. That this is truly all there is unless something changes.

A small example: I decided to go on the Bacon app to see what walk-on gigs are available in my city to raise some quick cash. There are 2: garbage man and warehouse worker.

Now, I knew going in that the odds were grim, and that the gigs would be things that nobody wants to do. Had I gone in with a positive mindset, and imagined fun afternoons helping people set up for events or something, is that what I would have received? I just don't know. I've experienced both, but an overwhelming percentage of the time, the negative outcome matches the prediction of my negative mindset.

Another small example: the other day I helped an acquaintance with handyman work for $100 for an afternoon, but got a traffic ticket on the way home that skimmed away 2/3 of what I had earned.

It was an uncanny reflection of my experience of hustling, similar to movies like The Pursuit of Happyness. Two steps forward and one step back. Another day older and deeper in debt. No win until the end - but the epiphany never comes.

Where i'm going with this is that what we think of as "the real world" is the dream. Or in my case, the nightmare, or at the very least the night terror.

Whereas in our dreams, we can be anything and do anything. Not only that, our subconscious provides rich plot lines far more creative than what our ego comes up with as it co-creates this 3D realm. I often wonder if the point of daily suffering is actually to dream in the spirit world where source consciousness originated.

Except in my case, my dreams are mostly night terrors as well, spilled over from the suffering of my lived experience. I know why, it has to do with sleep apnea, and living a sober life after decades of self-medicating, and finally doing shadow work in middle age. But I just wish that the sun would rise on this long night of the soul, because my basic beliefs in hope for a better tomorrow are growing more tattered with every news cycle and seeing the very worst in humanity expressed in the most powerful and influential people, who are unwittingly bringing about hell on Earth.

I broke my ankle and the pain from that and the related surgeries has messed up my sleep in some interesting ways:

When the pain was at its worst, I basically wasn't getting any sleep at all and after a few days, I was practically delirious. I had a few times where in the middle of the day, while awake, I would start dreaming. Not like a daydream, but not exactly falling asleep either. Hard to explain but it's like the boundary between "this is what I'm perceiving about the real world" and "this is what I'm imagining" got very thin and permeable. My mind would wander off into dreamspace and I'd think it was real until I would realize "No, that's some crazy dream shit."

I also ended up with several days of nerve pain. I would be fine sometimes for hours and then completely out of the blue I'd get an intense (like 9/10 on a pain scale) stabbing pain in my ankle. Like someone snuck up and nailed me with an electric cattle prod.

When this happened while I was asleep, I would be jolted awake. But, also, my dreaming brain would try to incorporate the pain into the dream somehow. And since those two things were happening simultaneously, I would be yanked awake with a head still full of some crazy dream involving nerve pain that I was actually feeling. Sometimes, it would take a good ten minutes of sitting there to sort out what the hell was going on versus what was just dream nonsense.

Overall, would not recommend.

I usually fall asleep fast, sleep through the night and wake up without any recollection of dreaming. I guess it’s usually a good thing, but it feels like im missing this whole thing a lot of other people experience.

One of the biggest modern day spiritual gurus says that dreaming is just a fluctuation of mind activity during sleep, we can enjoy it but it has no significance in terms of spiritual development.

Every time I realise I'm dreaming I wake up immediately. Would love to lucid dream at least once to know what's it all about.

The article links to the study about bi-directional communication with lucid dreamers: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

“Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reckons we might see AI-generated games in less than 10 years”

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-...

With some way to measure the players enjoyment/desire maybe in 50 years we’ll see ‘lucid gaming’