I thought, given the discussion that came up on the fic Hal and I were working on, some people might be interested in a discussion thread on this that didn't run the risk of overshadowing the narrative. Certainly, I got the impression that Arakara had more he wished to share. I didn't want to stomp on that discussion, so throwing this thread up as a place for it to continue, should folk be interested.
Maybe I'll even relate my own incredibly limited experience in this field later. :)
That would be interesting to hear, since I'm curious as to what made you doubt whether or not the given dream you experienced was lucid.
That said... hmm... I'm not sure what to share at this exact point. Later I might think of something.
The experience I've been sharing so far has been condensed from utterly sporadic dreams scattered over a very long period of time. One obvious reason, to echo something mentioned by sarsaparilla, is that I don't really have a good reason to be stubborn about it (the motivation issue). I think the other reason has to do with my relatively low mindfulness (which is probably the reason why Aunt Rika's throwaway comment about mindfulness in the story struck me as relevant to Kyon's situation). If, so to speak, I'm hardly ever lucid when I'm awake, how do I have a chance of staying lucid when I'm asleep?
But, in the end, the core reason is that I'm extremely stubborn about certain things, and achieving lucid dreaming is not one of them.
The only reliable way for me to enter a lucid dream is merely to sleep in until a ridiculously late hour (11am, anyone?) which, obviously, I hardly ever have the luxury of doing.
Quote from: Arakawa Seijio on November 21, 2011, 04:08:13 PM
The only reliable way for me to enter a lucid dream is merely to sleep in until a ridiculously late hour (11am, anyone?) which, obviously, I hardly ever have the luxury of doing.
That is indeed the easiest way to achieve a lucid state, and you can boost it further by first staying up late, so that you keep drifting between dream and awakened states during the morning hours.
I've been thinking about the issue and realized that nowadays pretty much all my dreams are lucid on a basic level, i.e., I always know when I'm dreaming, and one of the consequences of that is that I'm never having nightmares.
Taking an example from last night, I found myself back at middle school, but instead of acting like the model student I used to be, I had some mischievous fun with my old teacher and messed up his mind by talking about things that hadn't yet happened by that time, and which neither of us should have known (that I still knew because I had access to my real world memories). After the school I went home and found out that my family had been massacred (I was unimpressed as it was just a dream). When I opened the bathroom door I was attacked by five or six armed men and one jaguar (I wonder where
that came from) so I pushed them away (as I cannot be threatened in my own dream) and walked out of the house, where some stranger mocked me for walking with a limp. I noticed that one of the assailants had managed to hit me on the head with an axe, making a hole in my skull, so apparently the limp was caused by brain damage. I was again completely unimpressed, and told the man that it was just a dream and therefore it didn't matter this way or that.
So, while I couldn't bother doing any fancy stuff like picking up the dream I wanted to see, I was still constantly aware that I was dreaming, and behaved accordingly, turning a potential nightmare into a surrealist play.
Fascinating.
I have had a small handful dreams which I believe may have been lucid to varying degrees -- personally.
The first is something that happened to me when I was six or so, and was only partially lucid, but addresses the issue of the sleep-paralysis-scale that Arakawa mentioned. Specifically, I had a dream that 'the giants' (I don't feel this is a parable to Haruhi; when you're small, everyone else is 'giant') took away my voice. I woke up in terrified realization that I could no longer speak, and even though I quickly regained control of the rest of my body, I could not speak except to wheeze/rasp for about ten minutes -- and was too shaken to try and run for help.
Once my voice came back abruptly, I was reassured and able to tell myself it was all a dream, and go back to sleep. Now I somewhat feel able to compare this to the process of waking from a lucid dream unprepared, as I understand it; evidently in my panic I kept myself from properly controlling some muscles until I finished waking later. Since this is only peripherally connected to lucid dreaming, it ties in to later experiences (and possibly my issues with lucid dreaming/my difficulties with it).
I have had one recurring dream every few years. The details I can share are that it involves a closed circle mystery (a concept I didn't really even have when I first had the dream) where I and others are in a mansion/resort, and there is an arbitrary time limit before the world ends. My goal was to solve a mystery (the details of which I could never recall/changed slightly every time). The last time I had that dream, it was lucid, and I was able to 'force back' the 'world ending' effect (in this case, a flood) with the realization that I was in a dream. I managed to hold things together until I could finish hearing the final words from the last figure, which had always been lost in the inevitable flood.
Quite the opposite of Sarsaparilla's experiences, this person told me that they were a dream, and I shouldn't worry about it so much (which woke me up).
I have not had that dream since, and it's been about seven years now.
Another time, I can't recall what happened, but some external factor semi-roused me, and got into the dream, enough to alert my mind that I was dreaming. I had no interest in participating in the part of the dream that was immediately around me, and so disregarded the 'people' on the scene and decided to fly away.
Since this seems a somewhat interesting detail, and I've done this in most of the dreams I considered lucid: Flight in my lucid dreams is always possible, when I think of it. I don't need to put my arms out, just pull my feet up-- In my experience, it's exactly like swimming, except that when I want to go faster than a leisurely pace, I simply think about it, and it happens. Related: When I 'fly' underwater, it works exactly the same way, except that I can breathe just fine underwater (and dark water/instances where the bottom cannot be seen (which I am phobic of) simply don't occur).
A few times (as in, 4-5), when I have had what I consider to be lucid dreams, I have 'pushed too hard' and woken myself up unexpectedly. Usually just by overthinking the logic of me being in a dream and expecting to have abilities even my subconscious mind seems unwilling to accept. Devices and machines always do exactly what I want/expect them to do, regardless of complexity, and I am able to pull characters from video games/books/etc. to use their abilities on my behalf with minimal effort (where doing it myself might break the dream).
Despite all of that, I always get a sense that in lucid dreams there's something critical I am supposed to be accomplishing, and except that one instance of the recurring dream, I've always woken myself up before being able to complete it.
But I suspect we all would view this differently.
Anyway, related to the first bit I related, and Arakawa's mention of sleep-paralysis, the most frequent thing to disrupt me when I am striving for lucidity is perfect awareness of the fact that my body is frozen. Almost always, I experience mild panic, and try to move myself in the waking world just to prove that I can -- which ends my experience right there. I wonder if I inflicted some trauma on myself with that first dream, and that's my main difficulty learning this exercise?
Edit: I forgot one critical element to that first dream. I recall now that at that time (at the age of six) I had just that day found and eaten (not knowing what they were) my step-mother's supply of psychedelic mushrooms; the described episode was one of many formative memories I still retain from the incident. So it's entirely possible that my experiences vary much further from the norm than is typically possible, and considering this influence, I'm not entirely positive any of my dreams are truly lucid -- or just very bizarre and strangely memorable on occasion.
The only dream I've ever had approaching lucidity (and I've visited the theme multiple times, although not usually with the same degree of control I can recall from the most vivid example) involves flight - but in a rather bizarre way. The dream I can remember best, I had the ability to fly, and I can distinctly remember the feeling of having control over what I was doing - but with something of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy twist; I don't think I necessarily realized that I was in a dream, but I was at least aware of the fact that what I was doing was impossible on the surface, but that as long as I didn't pay too much attention to that fact it'd be fine.
For the dream itself, the method of flying is what was so odd (and why it sticks with me so much); I basically had to take a seated position on nothing, then just will myself into the air. Movement was entirely controlled by my mind; to move in a particular direction, I'd just think about going in that direction. Beyond that I don't recall a lot of specifics, just that I managed to fly high enough to reach the cloud layer, and some impressions of using it to get to the top of a huge tree for some reason (just big, not unrealistically so).
Since then, I've occasionally had dreams of using the same method of flight, although not with the same sensation of control that I can recall from the one instance. I'm not sure if this would count as a lucid dream (since I don't recall being aware that I was dreaming, just that the things I were doing were impossible but it didn't actually matter.)
Regarding the sleep-paralysis thing: I recall reading somewhere that people generally fall somewhere on a spectrum between tending to sleepwalk and tending to experience sleep paralysis. I definitely fall on the sleep paralysis end of the spectrum. Occasionally I wake up with absolutely no sensation or movement in my left (dominant) arm, and very rarely with an obviously perceptible "phantom limb" which can be moved completely independently from it. (The first time this happened, the perception was realistic enough that I assumed my hand -- which I thought I was holding in front of my face -- had somehow turned invisible... until I found my actual arm lying limp along the bed in an unnatural position.) It generally takes about twenty seconds for sensation to return to my real arm.
The most common failure modes for a lucid dream for me are:
- The dream is insufficiently vivid to hold my attention. This also includes such varying circumstances as being blind in one eye, being (strangely enough) tangled up in my bedsheets during a false awakening, and similar.
- I become lucid, exit the room, and it's like my dream hasn't loaded that portion of reality yet and my brain crashes.
- I am lucid, but somehow there's not enough room in my brain to make a proper decision about the right thing to do. Since I'm completely aware of everything that's happening, such experiences leave me depressed and doubting whether I have free will.
I'm starting to suspect that I'm better at incubating dreams (intentionally or unintentionally) than I am at becoming lucid in them. (Doctor Who monsters I've
intentionally had nightmares about so far: Weeping Angels; The Silence. As you'd expect, the latter in particular was gloriously confusing. If I don't consciously incubate, my dreams are often extremely apropos to what I was doing the previous day. For instance, after posting fanfiction on SR, I nearly always wind up receiving dream C&C for it on my phone; the content of the C&C is mostly too bizarre for words. Not to mention that immediately after lucid dreaming was first brought up on the forum, I had a decidedly non-lucid dream in which I saw a post by sarsaparilla explaining the key to attaining lucidity in two sentences, which is just too ironic for words.)
In fact, since I wasn't taking stock of the fact, incubation may be working against lucidity since I end up incubating the same failure experiences over and over again by worrying about them.
Quote from: Arakawa Seijio on November 21, 2011, 07:37:21 PM
Occasionally I wake up with absolutely no sensation or movement in my left (dominant) arm, and very rarely with an obviously perceptible "phantom limb" which can be moved completely independently from it. (The first time this happened, the perception was realistic enough that I assumed my hand -- which I thought I was holding in front of my face -- had somehow turned invisible... until I found my actual arm lying limp along the bed in an unnatural position.) It generally takes about twenty seconds for sensation to return to my real arm.
I think that the above is a textbook example of body image confusion. It's even worse when you return from a form that is not isomorphic with the human body. The body image is a completely malleable thing; there's an interesting psychological experiment showing how a person can be manipulated into perceiving that arbitrary inanimate objects are part of his/her body.
Quote from: Arakawa Seijio on November 21, 2011, 07:37:21 PMI become lucid, exit the room, and it's like my dream hasn't loaded that portion of reality yet and my brain crashes.
'Walking out of the stage' happens to me as well on occasion, especially in places that I haven't seen before, or when taking an 'unintended' shortcut through a wall. The nothingness on the other side doesn't bother me, though, as I can just turn around and return to the existing set. About the only thing that forces me to wake up is getting disembodied through death, as the resulting total sensory deprivation doesn't leave anything to work on.
Quote from: sarsaparilla on November 22, 2011, 11:17:15 AM
About the only thing that forces me to wake up is getting disembodied through death, as the resulting total sensory deprivation doesn't leave anything to work on.
This just begs an "I don't want to know what you do Saturday nights..." type of joke.
So, after a truly stressful and hectic week, my brain saw fit to grant me with the first lucid dream since I saw the topic discussed on SR, probably as some kind of last-ditch escape mechanism in the absence of ready access to fanfiction. None of my usual above complaints applied. (I became lucid outdoors while in a part of the city I have a good mental model of. Interestingly, lucidity was triggered because I heard the electronic bells sounding on a commuter train:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m041UoWWv9g
It occurred to me that it was an awfully convenient coincidence that the train came at the exact moment that I was thinking about it.)
A major factor in helping to stabilize the dream was remembering that I just recently was participating in a Soulriders discussion on the topic. (It was a much more relevant anchoring point in terms of reminding me that a reality exists outside the dream, than the usual stuff of "it's the middle of the night and I am in bed in such-and-such position and in an hour I have to get up and go to work".)
An interesting divergence from sarsaparilla's experience, is that once I was lucid the dream characters had no problem with acknowledging the fact that this was a dream, and even pointing out various interpretations of what I was seeing that I
didn't want to consider.
Turns out my dream recall isn't that great (although the dream wound up throwing so many recognizable elements at me that I got the idea it was trying to be deliberately un-journalable). Eventually there was a table with hieroglyphic representations of various states of mind I could attempt to achieve. (There was a person on the other side of the table laying out the tokens, who, when I combed through the table and went towards the state of mind corresponding to vague, generalized genkiness (as a reasonable starting point) stopped me and pointed out I was already in that state.) I'm
pretty sure my lucidity ended when a character picked one of the hieroglyphic representations (something to do with pride and/or humility) off the table and stuffed it into my mouth, like a medication. Hm. After that point I became too engaged with the (unrelated to the above) story that had been constructed to bother remembering that it was a dream.
Just last night I noticed that after we started the discussion on lucid dreaming here I've come across a new trick that is rapidly replacing an attempt to fly as my preferred reality check: turning off gravity. When flying in a dream I must exert conscious effort to stay airborne for extended times, and that becomes tiresome after a while. On the contrary, floating in weightlessness is effortless and relaxing, and there's the added bonus of hilarity that ensues when other people try to cope with the situation. A couple of nights ago I lifted a flight over the Atlantic on the wing of an airplane and when the plane landed at some airport on the east coast of US there was an armed un-welcome committee of security personnel waiting for me; however, once I turned off gravity, making everything float around uncontrollably, they pretty much lost interest in me. ^_^
As with other such tricks, I've tied it to a particular gesture which makes it easier to effectuate the change in the dreamscape. I extend both arms forward, palms up, and then raise the arms like 'lifting off' gravity, and once it gets negated it tends to stay away for the rest of the particular dream sequence. Overall, I've found it most helpful to invent such 'magic' gestures for modifying a lucid dream.
It was only last night when I realized how much I had learned to rely on this new trick to check whether I'm dreaming or not, when I was in some unfamiliar office and recognized a person walking past me as a character from a TV series (the 'office' might have been a hospital, as the character was Dr. Wilson from the series House). I made my 'turn off gravity' gesture, but it didn't work immediately; for a moment I thought that I wasn't dreaming after all (goes to show that 'rational' thoughts cannot be trusted while dreaming, as they can be anything but), but then I saw from the corner of my eye how another person on the other side of the room lost his foothold and tumbled helplessly in the air, spreading the pile of paper he'd been carrying into a cloud of chaff. After that the whole office was thrown into total chaos as the people, pieces of furniture and other office equipment started to float around. I actually tried to tell the people how one should move in zero-G but they wouldn't listen to me, so I just floated serenely in a fetal position and watched the show in amusement. I'm quite the mischievous little imp in my dreams! >_>
Interesting.
Someone recently gave me a tip on how to induce sleep paralysis intentionally to evoke lucid dreaming.
Despite my phobia, I'll give that a try tonight, since I haven't had any success even remembering dreams since the last time I posted.
Quote from: Brian on December 19, 2011, 12:52:10 PM
Someone recently gave me a tip on how to induce sleep paralysis intentionally to evoke lucid dreaming.
Speaking of sleep paralysis and phobias, my oddest experience by far with regards to sleep and dreaming involves my eyes falling asleep while still open. Thus, if I lie down in a dark room with my eyes open and I'm feeling sleepy, more often than not the first thing that happens is that my vision shuts off entirely. (Moving my head is sufficient to restore it.) Theoretically, this means that I'm capable of sleeping with my eyes open, but I make very sure I
close my eyes when going to bed because of this.
*shudder*
I don't know, maybe it's completely safe, and my ability to
temporarily go blind (*shudder*) is actually a workable first step to wake-inducing a lucid dream? Still, phobias seem very reasonable when you're the one who has them.
(Note: logically I experience the exact same thing everyone else experiences when falling asleep, just in a different order. Still, temporarily going blind = not pleasant and causes worry.)
Well, I've run into a different problem in the same area; I don't seem to have the ability to keep from moving my eyes while they're closed. Since that was a dead-end for me, I'm putting all of my focus into just remembering the dreams I should be having.
Closest I got was waking up and immediately realizing I remembered nothing at all. Except that I had to write it down, of course. :\
From my experience with a dream diary, I tend to remember my dreams more reliably if I make an empty note on my smartphone titled "Dream Diary for <tomorrow's date>" before going to bed. Then when I wake up I reach for the smartphone and fill in the note.
I don't always bother doing it, though. Remembering dreams does seem to be a motivation/habit issue more than anything else. (i.e. if I'm motivated to start the note, then perhaps I would be motivated enough to remember the dream anyways even without the note.)
EDIT: dream journaling is then some kind of 'fake it till you make it' strategy? You act like it's important stuff worth remembering for long enough that it becomes important stuff worth remembering? I dunno.
It's more establishing a habit and getting it to happen regularly, I think. Considering I remember around 20 dreams total for my entire life....
Well, hopefully I'll have luck with this in the next three months. Maybe remembering my dreams will be interesting anyway.
And maybe I have lucid dreams all the time, and just never remember them. >_>
Quote from: Brian on January 02, 2012, 03:10:34 PM
Well, hopefully I'll have luck with this in the next three months. Maybe remembering my dreams will be interesting anyway.
I am inordinately fond of having nightmares based on the Silence monsters in Doctor Who (yes, I am indeed referring to the alien in business suit thingies who erase your memory when you look away). Of course, journaling about them is a pain.
... just now I remembered
yet another fragment I dreamt last week, and even with a journal I can't remember what
day of the week it belongs in, let alone how it ties narratively into the other stuff that was happening.
Some minor lucid dream successes over the course of about an hour.
Entering the dream:
- Trigger was deciding to sleep in for an extra hour and dreaming that the alarm clock I'd set for that purpose was ringing, even though it was obviously too early.
- This resulted in a series of dreams where I started out in my bed and would either 'eject' myself from the bed and enter the dream by focusing first on the position of my body and then visualizing where I would have landed in the room after ejection; or visualize zooming at high speeds along a landscape similar to the one in (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsUIZ58DVrc - particularly around the 4:00 mark) and then 'touching down' within the landscape. I would correspondingly end up either within my room, or somewhere in the bucolic British (Ontario? British Columbia?) countryside.
- If a dream faded, I would dream I was in bed again, and repeat the procedure.
Dream characters were annoying -- they came along and insisted on following a scripted storyline while I was busy experimenting changing night into day (only half-successful) or making cups refill themselves with water. (In retrospect, it would have been interesting to see what the story was supposed to be.) Regarding trying to get them to go away, it appears that I can plant suggestions in their heads by visualizing a different script for them; depending on the character, the suggestion either takes hold, or they become aware that I'm attempting to rewrite the dream and resist the suggestion. (And then the character stomps off in a huff, so goal accomplished.)
Even more annoying were the trees which would follow me around when I wasn't looking at them, Weeping Angel-style, but otherwise didn't have anything to do with anything. Shoo! Bad trees!
Would like to point out that my experiences mostly consist of one or two nights like this, followed by a month of mostly nothing. (To give an idea of the interval, between the last dream I posted and this sequence I had exactly one lucid dream which was so brief and uninteresting as to not be worth mentioning.)
However, the 'time lapse landscape' method of entering a dream was new and might be easier than what I was trying to do earlier, since it doesn't require any bodily sensation / sleep paralysis nonsense in the initial phase -- it's similar to turning on a YouTube video in the mind's eye, then stepping through the screen into the depicted landscape once the video is sufficiently vivid. Maybe I'll have better success with it in the long term, given the amount of time lapse footage that's been burned into my brain over years of staring at YouTube...
(Since these are methods which involve going to sleep and waking up immediately on both sides of the dream, dream recall wasn't an issue as it usually is.)
That's quite impressive.
After our last discussion in IRC, I've managed to overcome my major barriers to dream recall-- Which is very strange for me, realizing I can actually start to recall bits and pieces of dreams almost every day.
Unfortunately, the tiny pieces that I manage to save are incredibly vague and disconnected.
Almost all of them seem to revolve around being in a ship or some other vessel -- or otherwise allude to a crew/captain relationship. I first attributed it to playing too much Mass Effect, but even after stopping that, the same images tend to crop up in the pieces I can remember. I have a long way to go, I think, but am slowly making progress.
Quote from: Brian on January 12, 2012, 08:03:30 PM
After our last discussion in IRC, I've managed to overcome my major barriers to dream recall-- Which is very strange for me, realizing I can actually start to recall bits and pieces of dreams almost every day.
Unfortunately, the tiny pieces that I manage to save are incredibly vague and disconnected.
In my opinion, moving from
zero recall to recalling
something is probably the tricky part (since it's not at all clear how to improve your dream recall when your brain is convinced that there isn't anything to remember). At this point, it's just a matter of various tricks to continue to pay attention to what it is you do remember.
Anyhow, I'm glad to hear that you've accomplished the part that I'd have no idea how to go about accomplishing had I been in the same situation ^_^
Quote from: Brian on January 12, 2012, 08:03:30 PM
Almost all of them seem to revolve around being in a ship or some other vessel -- or otherwise allude to a crew/captain relationship. I first attributed it to playing too much Mass Effect, but even after stopping that, the same images tend to crop up in the pieces I can remember. I have a long way to go, I think, but am slowly making progress.
The most common recurring element of my dreams is (for whatever reason) riding the subway. Not sure why, and I can't seem to use it as a reliable lucid dreaming trigger in spite of the fact that it crops up in almost every dream I have.
Two points of progress:
- Dream recall exercise. Lie down for five minutes, relaxing until random imagery starts making its way into the mind. With a bit of a nudge the imagery can even be made to form a dreamlike narrative. After five minutes, get up and record the stream of imagery in a dream diary, exactly as though it were a dream. (This requires a large degree of focus to pay attention to a part of the mind that's normally ignored, but takes all of five minutes.) Then fall asleep while trying to maintain the same state of focus on remembering what you see.
- In a lucid dream last night, instead of experimenting on my own, this time I decided to find a dream character who would be willing to give me advice on how to exert greater control over my environment. This was harder than it seemed, most of my struggle had to do with the fact that the first few people who offered to tutor me seemed like people I shouldn't be taking advice from. (Also, given the %0.00000002 percent chance that I'm dealing with random supernatural beings / other dreamers, rather than figments of my own imagination, it probably pays to be picky.) I'll see if I can manage to find my way into a second lesson.
If you're curious, the first lesson involved some explanations about how there
shouldn't be any difficulty with what I'm trying to accomplish, since a dream at the bottom of it is just myself showing myself to myself; followed by a demonstration of how much I still have to learn. (I was instructed to perform an action which should theoretically work, but in practice -- and based on prior experience -- reliably crashes the dream in my case. It crashed my dream, though for a reason
different from the one I was expecting.)
Kind of paradoxical. Still, it was far more thought-provoking than the usual stuff I do when I happen to get a lucid dream.
And for the first time ever my first dream of the night was lucid. (Even if it was not exactly crystal-clear quality.) Normally it was basically a given that I had to have most of the night to sleep for even the vaguest possibility of a lucid dream to occur. It's very odd to see how I can lever my dreams wide open if I can find the right things to concentrate on.
Since it isn't exactly the most restful form of sleep (it feels about half as stressful as pulling a late nighter, the focus needed to get my brain into this unaccustomed state), I'll leave further experimentation to subsequent nights and get some normal sleep now. Again, I'm kind of surprised at my progress.
More details in the morning.
Okay, I kind of had a surreal night last night (well, the first half; the second half I had the ordinary sorts of dreams I normally have). Best summarized as follows (slightly paraphrased, but as far as I can remember exactly as in the dream):
Quote
Welcome to all our new students!
Hikari-chan's Dream Academy guarantees that the learning experience will be irritating but fun. Students are expected to pay attention, exert significant amounts of focus, and generally be on the ball.
The primary problem we begin with solving is that of distraction and disconnection from reality, a problem that is your inevitable lot existing on the mortal plane. (At least eventually.) However, before that happens, we should be able to overcome the issue enough to have plenty of fun!
You may feel surprised to know this, but essentially the same attachment that lets you reject the distractions of irreality and stay grounded in reality and that enables things like skillful driving, piano playing, or just generally managing the relentless flow of everyday things, is the attachment that will help you succeed in the task of lucid dreaming!
If you're feeling enthusiastic and want something to do before the next official lesson, we suggest you try the following exercises:
- Do {{ten rotations en toast}}. Most of the challenge is deciding what that's even supposed to mean!
- Generally stay in a sunny and happy mood :-)
- Find a dream or daydream location where you can review and remember the contents of this email. Fair note of warning: different people may see completely different messages, since they almost certainly have different ways of seeing.
Looking forward to our next meeting and wishing sweet dreams :-)
-- Hikari-chan
After thinking about it for some time, I'm... kind of dubious on this. But beyond the dubiousness is the basic reaction of "okay... what just happened?"
You subconscious assembled something based largely on your expectations?
More or less. I'm trying to figure out if this process is useful or just a waste of energy.
And in last night's session... training montage!
(I blame my last IRC conversation with Brian.)
EDIT: the reason I'm not going into details is that I'm on my first ever several-nights-consecutive streak, so I've decided it makes sense to wait until that streak is broken and post edited highlights, rather than spamming this thread on a daily basis. Going to quiet down for now.
To vaguely summarize the gist of my recent (highly personal) experiences, and keep my issues out of the 'In Your Dreams' thread:
My unconscious mind seems to be deeply dissatisfied with who I am (far more than my conscious mind is). Many of my dream characters betray this attitude either explicitly or through unspoken demeanor. The dream tutor is the most encouraging, being an attempt to communicate this message in a friendly and nonthreatening manner. But in general, I can lucid dream when, and only when, I make a serious effort to push my psyche in a more tractable direction.
But on the bright side:
It's not like constantly pushing my psyche in a more tractable direction, and getting rewarded for it, is a problem or anything. As for having to constantly stare at my own apparent negative attitude toward myself, it's not like I'm not going to fix that by ignoring it -_-;; so that doesn't change much in terms of the cost/benefit calculation.
I've made no headway on further lucid dreaming, but have managed to recall more dreams.
I recently come to realize that almost all of my dreams are very depressing. I also had a dream where I _knew_ I was dreaming, but it wasn't lucid. Irritatingly, I was only bitter about it because it was the one 'pleasant' dream I could recall, and I couldn't enjoy it because I knew it wasn't real.
It sounds like an attitude that can (and should) change as you progress. It's sort of similar to watching a good movie but being unable to enjoy it properly because it's not real. >_>
More encouragingly, it's nice to discover that (with sufficient effort) you can push your mind to work differently. (Or at least, I've found the discovery encouraging. Figuring out what overall direction to push is worth the effort has been more tricky.)
Had an in-dream training session, but I've let my dream recall slip to the point that I didn't remember any details when I woke up. Time to work on dream recall again...
(Conclusion: unless you've had perfect recall for several months or something, this is something you need to keep grinding at to maintain.)
Remembering some details now. It continued the recent theme of learning to split off and re-absorb parts of my psyche in the form of dream characters, without losing control of the dream, and I was finally starting to have success with it! Kind of annoyed that in all the excitement about being able to have this new experience, I've let myself neglect maintenance of the basics that enabled it in the first place.
Had a dream today where I discovered something that probably says terrible things about me.
I was dreaming I was one of a duo of characters in what appeared to be a buddy/action movie. At one point, the plot required me to make amends with someone who had caused me substantial grief in the waking world. Instead of going along with it or waking up, I managed to somehow change the dream to no longer require him as a character, and remove my PoV to be external to the two main characters -- just finishing the rest of the dream as an observer.
It ended with a buggy jumping over a ramp and an improbable landing with no damage to anyone (the buggy was naturally in pieces), and then Shami woke me up.
I have no idea what the whole, 'change things you don't like without becoming lucid' aspect means.
The other strange thing I've discovered is that I will remember my dreams upon waking, write some details down, and then (typically while I'm in the shower) I will remember other parts of the dream. My ... guess is that I'm not nearly as unified when I dream, so it takes something that aligns all of me to achieve lucidity. Most of me will remember some parts of the dream, and if I work at it, the rest trickles in later. For this dream, I remembered the 'buddy/action' movie parts, but the 'retcon that guy I don't like out' part didn't come to me until later.
Not sure what that means, but suspect it translates into me being a terrible person.
Keep in mind that the act of recall is not a passive thing like a computer retrieving data from a storage device. It's more like how Dom in Inception describes dreaming; you recreate and re-perceive the memory.
There have been plenty of times when I've woken up and remembered a dream with loose ends or missing parts. As I thought about it, I could remember bridge sections, but I have no reason to believe those were actually in the dream. They're just confabulation.
This wasn't a missing segment -- it was a specific retcon. It felt like it was genuine, to me....
That's what confabulation feels like, at least to me. (I only know it's not genuine because it doesn't operate on dream logic.)
Took a while to organize my thoughts on the confabulation issue. Brian's the only one who knows the inside of his own head well enough to say whether it's confabulation or not. Either one is plausible to me.
e.g. I've had dreams where time seemed to be nonlinear, in the sense that I could remember two different versions of the same event within the same narrative. I've also had non-lucid dreams where I could squeeze my eyes shut and wish for anything to happen and when I opened them it would happen. It seems inherently plausible to me that you could have a dream combining those things.
Contrariwise, there are dreams where I have to, what you call, confabulate a bit in order to obtain something sufficiently coherent to put in a dream diary. In that case, however, I don't have much trouble distinguishing the confabulation from the original (indescribable) content of the dream.
(There's also the thorny question of whether developing dream recall just lets you remember what was going on in your head all along, or it modifies your state of mind during dreaming to make you more likely to have easily-rembered dreams.)
Regarding dream recall, it's fairly common at a certain stage (i.e. whenever you don't have perfect recall of everything right off the bat) to have memories of a dream come back long after the fact. I don't think the majority of people are particularly "unified" when they dream.
Regarding dreams reflecting on someone being "terrible" or not as a person... well, it's just a dream, in the end. You tend to act out anxieties in dreams, even when you have complete control over how you respond to them in real life.
My personal experience is that confabulation is not an issue with lucid dreams as the experience is focused enough to be comparable to the awakened state, in continuity, categorization and mode of thought. A more delicate issue is the potential recurrence of dream events -- even in an unfamiliar situation I may have a deja vu-like sense of my surroundings, knowing what lies beyond the area that I can currently see, or knowing what is going to happen, or even knowing what I myself am supposed to do. Either I have had the same dream before (there are some genuinely recurrent dreams) or I can somehow sense the 'script' that my subconsciousness is using to maintain the dream world, or possibly it's just an illusion and things are the way they are because that's what I expected and they got modified accordingly.
For non-lucid dreams confabulation may be an issue, as the mind tries to make sense of what it has experienced. At one side there are dreams that have a clear narrative context and require the least amount of interpretation or creative patching to make sense; on the other side there are chaotic dreams that may be completely inconceivable immediately after experiencing them because the contained associations are incompatible with the awakened, analytic mind. I tend to have those kind of nonsensical dreams early on during the sleep cycle, with events becoming more organized and coherent toward the end of the sleep state, but if I wake up prematurely I may get a very short glimpse into those weirder dreams. Just to give an example, "the experience of being an umbrella that is penetrated by purple rays of pain" might be the closest possible description of a dream that I was having immediately before waking up because of a headache.
And about wondering whether your dreams are revealing something negative about yourself ... dreams don't provide an objective point of view. They are much more likely to grossly exaggerate issues than give an unbiased account, and more readily show things the way you fear them to be instead of they way they actually are. I use dreams to connect with my creative part of the mind but I don't expect to find any hidden wisdom from there.
Just last night I realized / had the tutor point out to me something very odd: in a lucid dream, I have an easier time modifying an object by visualizing it reflecting in a mirror and focusing on changing the reflection. It wasn't even registering for me previously that that was what I'd been doing.
Maybe it was because if I was looking at the reflection rather than the actual object, my brain wasn't as convinced that it was real?
Apparently, no. The rule was amended to "just holding a compact mirror and vaguely pointing it in the direction of the object like a searchlight, makes the object easier to influence".
The term "dream logic" is basically an oxymoron.
Oddest lucidity trigger thus far:
"Wait a minute! I couldn't possibly be guilty of credit card fraud! This must be a dream!"
Huh. Remembered a dream in enough detail I got it confused with reality.
"Warg. Must wake up and read e-mail I have been hoping for."
empty inbox, <foreveralone.jpg>
"$%@#."
/me goes back to sleep.
That happens to me a lot. Meanwhile, it wasn't lucid, but I dreamt an entire anime, which I don't believe exists. However, in the dream, it had the name "Higurashi." (It had nothing to do with Higurashi.)
I ... dreamed the plot of an action movie, basically. Weird number and level of details.
I was able to identify which things I encountered this week that prompted various details appearing in my dream, but some things still mystify me -- like the wizard who showed up in the prologue.
At least I'm getting myself back into the habit of working on recall, but man, that was just strange.
Success! I managed briefly to achieve lucidity.
And then Shami pulled my hair and I woke up. :x
I fell out of the sky last night (long story) and into Touhou Project. Given my extremely cursory knowledge of Touhou, it was very disorienting.
/me extinguishes imaginary singed bangs.
EDIT: It's interesting due to the whole confabulation issue. The dream was extremely vague due to a lack of knowledge about Touhou and had a bunch of things which were probably educated guesses at the details that could be reinterpreted to fit any later information I find out. Remaining lucid while it happened (it was a struggle) was interesting. It makes me think that some dreams are more open to confabulation than others, as though you can explicitly leave blanks at the time of the dream to fill in later.
Also, the midst of a danmaku battle is not the smartest place to try the spinning thing that Brian recommended.
Posting this here by Arakawa's request (since we were discussing this in IRC).
For whatever reason, when I achieve lucidity, I suffer a pretty severe perspective shift, or at least, have the last time I managed it. I'm starting to suspect the earlier experiences I took as lucid dreams were not, or have just been rewritten by my subconscious for whatever reason to fill out the empty/blank details. This ties in somewhat to the 'going off the map' idea that was mentioned earlier in the thread, where there are areas that are poorly defined -- or completely undefined.
I think, looking back, my lucid dreams are organized in terms of narrative, so 'unimportant' things before achieving lucidity are somewhat abstract. This means there are blurry spots unless I focus on them, while my recall of dreams themselves seem much more vivid.
Then again, I guess we all seem to experience things very differently. For example, Sars mentioned that closing her eyes accomplished nothing, but I don't seem to have a problem with that. Weirdly, when I reduce my focus to only myself in dreams, everything else vanishes, and which elements are critical to the 'narrative' can seemingly change. A chair or desk will still be a chair or desk, but could look entirely different; function is more important than form.
I haven't paid any real attention to how things sound as much as how they look and feel. One of my discoveries was that flight is easier because physical sensation (touching things) doesn't 'feel' right. Touch is indistinct, and my mind tells me, "This is not what x feels like in the waking world," so floating over the ground instead of stepping on it is actually easier than walking.
Maybe it's just me ... I'm not really sure what to make of it. Maybe I'm just really bad at it. Hopefully time will change things, and it won't always feel like I'm getting only pieces of dreams when I'm lucid ... though, that could entirely be the case, too. :\
Quote from: Brian on June 04, 2012, 07:02:15 PM
Posting this here by Arakawa's request (since we were discussing this in IRC).
For whatever reason, when I achieve lucidity, I suffer a pretty severe perspective shift, or at least, have the last time I managed it. I'm starting to suspect the earlier experiences I took as lucid dreams were not, or have just been rewritten by my subconscious for whatever reason to fill out the empty/blank details. This ties in somewhat to the 'going off the map' idea that was mentioned earlier in the thread, where there are areas that are poorly defined -- or completely undefined.
Going to riff on the 'going off the map' by recapping the end outcome of my 'summon dream tutor experiment'. In the end, Hikari-chan's primary concern seemed to be fixing the whole 'crashing problem' through a variety of methods. I mentioned on IRC that the first thing she did (as a sort of initial assessment) was to use a catapult to fling me high into the air, such that the detailed view below would be what I consider too much to process and cause me to 'crash' the dream. A number of increasingly involved methods were devised to get me to retain control of the dream, most of them involving anime cliches.
(I blame an offhand IRC comment by Brian for the anime cliche part.)
The greatest success was setting up a training montage, where the pacing of the montage produced a rhythm where after crashing the dream I would be snapped back into an earlier point in time and allowed to try again.
Anyhow, I learned that I could head off any lack of definition in the dream by methodically picturing the portion of the dream that got lost and then splicing it back into the dreamscape. As a side effect, because keeping the dream together involves a constant background exertion of concentration, the usual 'spinning' trick doesn't affect the vividness of the dream as much as it seems to do for most people.
(Yes, I tried to do it
outside of a danmaku context since my last post.)
Hikari-chan stopped showing up after I got the 'crashing' thing mastered, presumably to give me time to play around with the expanded capabilities. I assume she'll next show up when I'm feeling ready to deal with the other issue of just eventually losing lucidity and slipping back into a regular dream.
In general, there's a very counterintuitive link between picturing something in your head and what happens in the dream -- since at all times the dream *is* one of the things you're picturing in your head. It is likely something that I will still be trying to master for a long time -_-
QuoteI think, looking back, my lucid dreams are organized in terms of narrative, so 'unimportant' things before achieving lucidity are somewhat abstract. This means there are blurry spots unless I focus on them, while my recall of dreams themselves seem much more vivid.
Anyhow, my end interpretation of the whole 'crashing' thing is that lucidity tends to push one away from the fully immersive dream state towards something more like 'daydream you have while paralyzed and experiencing sensory deprivation so it feels somewhat realistic but not as much as a dream'. It's necessary to develop... or relax...
something to counteract that to get a fully immersive dream without losing lucidity.
That's my best explanation so far for the lack of vividness issue.
The downside of writing a dream diary at the moment you wake up is that sometimes it's just not enough to retain the dream. For instance
Quote from: dream diary
pqr fast forename mezasmeas
I'm... almost certain that made perfect sense at 2:15am last night.
I had an interesting bit of lucidity the other day in a dream. I don't remember what was going on in the dream, but I looked down in it and realized I was wearing a white t-shirt with cream-coloured shorts. For some reason, I freaked out about it in the dream, then said "Oh, it's all right. It's not real; I can change!" And then I was wearing jeans and proceeded to dream a little while longer before I woke up.
Amused me at the time.
I am getting better at dream recall. I think I had multiple dreams last night, but evidently my mind puts them in a framing device, so it feels a bit like one dream with constant changes in focus.
Without going into too much detail, last night's dream(s?) had me as a technician, then I went to watch a presentation, which turned into the next dream before I went back to the original role, and overheard some people discussing a movie they had seen, which became another dream.
Strange.
I had a lucid dream last night (which was especially awesome, because I had decided that I was going to go from dream recall to attempting lucidity). I think you can experience different levels of lucid dreaming, or else just retain particular awareness as you enter the dreaming state.
Basically.... I was dreaming I was trying to get to sleep, but having trouble actually falling asleep (fairly common for me as an insomniac), and then it feels like I transitioned straight from trying to doze off into a dream ... maybe just a daydream? However, my landlord had been replaced by Wendy Oldbag (from the Phoenix Wright games), which was really lousy, and she came in my room to badger me about something.
That managed to totally overshoot my 'this isn't real' radar for a bit. I can't remember what the trigger was, as I've been particularly bad about practicing my reality checks, but I realized I was asleep and tried my chosen reality check (trying to breathe in through my mouth while it's closed). Interestingly, in the dream nothing happened, but I was aware of (and could feel) my actual body and the one in the dream simultaneously. I guess this ties in with what Arakawa mentioned about sleep paralysis?
I didn't manage to stay in the dream much longer, but, hey, progress!
Also, I'm running a fever. I'm not sure how that impacts things.
Quote from: Brian on July 01, 2012, 10:22:59 PM
Interestingly, in the dream nothing happened, but I was aware of (and could feel) my actual body and the one in the dream simultaneously. I guess this ties in with what Arakawa mentioned about sleep paralysis?
I didn't manage to stay in the dream much longer, but, hey, progress!
Right... the correct thing to do to stay in the dream is ignore the waking body and focus on the dream one. This is something that takes a bit of practice.
I assume that once you manage to stay in the dream for an extended period of time, you'll actually be more or less at my current level. Modulo some minor variations in level of recall and ease of entering the dream (which fluctuates for me wildly anyway), not to mention that handy anti-crashing training I got from my unconscious.
But the point is that about 80% of my lucid dreams happen near the morning under very similar circumstances to what you describe, when e.g. I'm waiting for the imminent alarm clock or somehow otherwise brooding about my current location in a bed / stuff on my smartphone beside the bed. This generates a dream where I happen to be lying in bed or checking the smartphone, and it's fairly easy to spot inconsistencies. I even developed a reality check specifically for that situation: if I can spin around 360 degrees in the bed (in blatant violation of conservation of momentum, and without bumping my head against the wall) just by thinking about it, then I'm asleep.
Sleep paralysis is more when part of my body shuts off for sleep, but there is no dream corresponding to it. Like when I used to try (in retrospect horrendously difficult) wake-induction techniques and snapping by body out of them took an effort. Or once in a blue moon I wake up and my left arm (and only my left arm) is actually physically paralyzed and lacks sensation for a minute, and hangs down from my left side while I can feel a phantom limb that's held out somewhere in front of my eyes. Or the trick I already mentioned of shutting off my vision without closing my eyes.
/me is driven by all the talk of sleep paralysis to wonder how much bloodymindedness it really takes to get a wake-induction technique running
(Short explanation: wake-induction involves any number of tricks for wrenching the state of one's consciousness directly from waking consciousness to REM sleep with a lucid dream. Unlike with ordinary lucid dreaming, there is no evidence that anyone can learn to do this, or that the same tricks work for different people. Haven't seriously tried it in over two years.)
Anyhow, that's my infodump for today.
Also, for some reason if I manage to successfully lucid dream while sick, that tends to have a therapeutic effect. Not really sure why. Forcing a lucid dream exercises the same part of the brain responsible for the placebo effect?
I've had minimal luck with lucid dreaming, and my dream recall isn't holding up as well as I'd like. Still sticking with it.
I'm noticing more and more consistent behaviors/effects between dreams. I think that everyone must have their own largely consistent internal ruleset for how dreams work. I'm contemplating the differences between what I'm figuring out for mine vs. Sars'. It seems quite a bit of what she finds impossible is trivial for me, and vice-versa. On the other hand, I never manage to remember Arakawa's tricks to transmute/create things, so I've got no idea if those will work for me....
Bleah. Hopefully will manage to achieve lucidity again sometime soon. At least the dream recall is going at all....
Hmm, I foolishly blurted out some things on IRC regarding the results of my experiment of 'summon dream character representations of real-life people and talk things over with them to resolve lingering issues'.
So, yeah. That particular experiment is not for the faint of heart. It drew attention to a fault I've ignored that's been screwing me up significantly for the past few years, but it was very horrible to get it out in the open and then belatedly wonder how people were going to react. I hope I haven't offended anyone by so doing...
I was actually mildly amused. For what it's worth, when I dreamed about you and Sars (which I think mention of prompted the discussion), it didn't even occur to me that you'd be offended.
Possibly short-sighted on my part, but -- they're dreams. I expect it'd say a lot more about me than you, and vice-versa. Though I guess you realized that as well....
I had a messed up dream that spanned two nights. In the first night, I was talking with this woman who said her husband just died, then I took a cab, and the cab driver was scared shitless. I thought something was wrong, but ignored it, and went home. Then I woke up. The next night I went back and talked to the woman again, and she said that her husband always took a cab home, so she paid the cab driver extra one time so that he could get home, even though he was gone. Then I figured out that the ghost of her husband was in the cab. Then I got a chill down my spine. That chill down my spine woke me up at 4:30 in the morning. Geez.
Had an absurd dream. I haven't watched CSI in any form in years.
But last night I dreamed a full episode of it, and it was badly written, and incredibly stupid. I remembered being annoyed and thinking it was possibly one of the worst episodes I'd ever seen.
I really wonder what prompts my dreams, sometimes.
arg
Had that most generic of dreams, being at work/school without any clothes. I remember it being irritating and involving our office moving for some reason. blearg
I had a very brief interlude where I woke from that dream and then went back to sleep and started dreaming again -- and was lucid enough to ignore my surroundings and fly ... but I messed things up and woke myself up again almost immediately afterward.
I am so bad at this. =_=
I'm also trying to learn how to lucid dream, with mixed results.
Often I will have a single night where I can vividly recall my dream, then spend several weeks trying (or forgetting to try >.<) with no luck.
I have been able to turn dreams recently lucid, but not with good reliability.
In every case, as soon as I turn it lucid, the first thing I can think to do is fly, but it's almost always followed by me waking up.
Quote from: Brian on June 22, 2013, 03:08:00 PM
In every case, as soon as I turn it lucid, the first thing I can think to do is fly, but it's almost always followed by me waking up.
In my experience, sudden termination of a lucid dream is most often induced by breaking the willing suspension of disbelief, i.e., trying to do something that you don't actually, deep down believe you can do. Because of that, despite being almost always lucid, I don't usually make drastic changes to the dreamscape that I am experiencing. I
can fly naturally and effortlessly in my dreams because of long practice, but even then there are separate degrees of difficulty in the feat. By far the easiest way to fly is to hover just above the ground -- as an experience it is almost like walking around but without moving the legs. Slightly more effort is needed to fly in the space between the ground and the tallest objects around, usually rooftops or treetops. It may be beneficial to conceptualize it to oneself as swimming in the air. True freeform flying is the hardest trick, and should probably not be attempted before the other two modes have been mastered. The inherent problem would appear to be that without hobbies like parachuting most people lack natural experiences of the kind. Even when I am able to break the 'treetop barrier' by imagining an updraft that lifts me up on the sky, the state is less controllable and more volatile than most lucid experiences.
Maybe. I wanted to fly because it would be a faster way to accomplish the objective (which I can't even recall). I actually get a sense that I 'broke' the dream by violating the narrative pacing, more than anything else.
I have noticed that my dreams frequently take the form of non-interactive media (like a movie or a play), to the point that I frequently become a disembodied observer watching a character. I may have been that character at one point, but stopped at some point, transitioning to the observer and leaving an actor behind. It's strange.... It seems that these dreams are about not participating, but observing something my subconscious mind is trying to tell me; it's strangely more tolerant when I'm not actually 'present'; a few times I was able to look at it like a video game where I was remote controlling the 'self' I left behind. In those instances I can make sweeping changes that seem to not drastically alter the narrative, and things will still continue.
I'm not sure ... just that my mind works against me sometimes. :p
Oh, well! From a year ago, I've made considerable progress! Hopefully by this time next year, I'll have gotten even further! ;)
I had a lucid dream this morning. I had my normal terrible Shami-interrupted rest, and then went back to sleep. I thought about trying to lucid dream, and the fact that most of my lucid dreams consist of flying around briefly before waking up, so thought I'd try to do more -- like actually alter the setting -- if I managed another lucid dream.
And then it happened. So I altered the setting, and was flying around somewhere different ... and then I convinced myself in my lucid dream, that I'd pushed things too far, broken out of it, and was awake. And then the body horror segment of the dream began....
I think my mind hates me.
False awakenings are a sufficiently common thing for me that I've gotten used to them :(.
Hm. 5 lucid dreams in the past 7 days. That's a record for me, but it depends on the explicit 'wake-back-to-bed' experience of getting up at 5am, working with intense concentration until 6:30, then going back to bed.
One random observation: for some reason (as far as I can tell), alcohol consumption totally destroys my ability to attain lucidity (which is why it's 5 in 7 and not 7 in 7). And I don't mean serious alcohol, even apple cider that has started to ferment a bit is suspect.