Lucid Dream discussion thread

[Jon]

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.

[Brian]

This wasn't a missing segment -- it was a specific retcon.  It felt like it was genuine, to me....

[Jon]

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.)

[Arakawa]

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.

[sarsaparilla]

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.

[Arakawa]

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.

[Arakawa]

Oddest lucidity trigger thus far:

"Wait a minute! I couldn't possibly be guilty of credit card fraud! This must be a dream!"

[Brian]

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>

"$%@#."

* Brian goes back to sleep.

[Jon]

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.)

[Brian]

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.

[Brian]

Success!  I managed briefly to achieve lucidity.

And then Shami pulled my hair and I woke up. :x

[Arakawa]

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.

* Arakawa 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.

[Brian]

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. :\

[Arakawa]

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 -_-

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.

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.

[Arakawa]

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

pqr fast forename mezasmeas

I'm... almost certain that made perfect sense at 2:15am last night.