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Scientists Achieve Real-Time Communication with Lucid Dreamers in Breakthrough
- bloqs 6y ago>Roughly 18 percent of the trials resulted in this level of clear and accurate communication from the dreamer; 17 percent produced indecipherable answers, 3 percent ended with incorrect responses, and 60 percent did not provoke any response at all.
- eurasiantiger 6y agoThis is essentially random chance.
- nelsonmandela 6y agoIf anyone is interested in using dreams as a part of spiritual practice I recommend reading 'The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep' by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Carrying awareness from wakefulness to sleep is one of those things in your life you'll never forget. Kinda sad that only 18% of participants could respond. Who knows, maybe you could have whole groups of people entering one anothers dreams.. Would be great for interrogations, setting up archetypal areas like airport checkpoints to gain access to the identification part of someones subconscious. Might be less tinfoil than you think.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoThere is another great book on the subject, The Yoga of Dream and Natural Light my Namkhai Norbu and Michael Katz. It's kinda fascinating that a thousand years ago Tibetans were exploring this fascinating subject in depth - with precise methods, scriptures and so on - while at the same time in Europe theologians were debating how many devils could be fit on the tip of a needle.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoIt's as though even the European theologians were embarrassed and were simply trolling with thought experiments like that.
- lurquer 6y agoYour comment is akin to saying “it’s so embarrassing that Plato was having thought experiments about spelunking.” Your comment — and the one to which it responds — is cringeworthy.
- wittyreference 6y agoThe latter was a debate about materialism, and whether the divine had any physical component (in which case there was a finite number of angels on a pin), or did not (and therefore infinite), with consequences for the debates about whether divinity is a falsifiable hypothesis. Intelligent people were having intelligent debates.
- kcartlidge 6y agoMany years ago I was stopped in a UK high street by a saffron-robed mendicant who offered me a free book (in return for a donation, which I found an amusing definition of free). I refused it, but for some reason the title stuck with me: "Easy Journey to Other Planets". Even in later years when I researched lucid dreaming and remote viewing, I never actually got around to getting and reading it - anyone else able to save me the trouble and let me know if it is worth the time?
- smusamashah 6y agoIt doesn't make logical sense. How people can enter one anothers dreams? We can not see whats going in another person's head.
- kasperni 6y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26185603
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y agoAn interesting video about this work: https://youtu.be/7M06fJxiayo https://youtu.be/7M06fJxiayo
- ACAVJW4H 6y agoStarting development on Dream Adblocker
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoFrankly, I can imagine a full-page ad in New Yor Times arguing that the forthcoming legislation against ads in dreams is hurting small businesses.
- INTPenis 6y agoSo that's why I suddenly want to buy Lightspeed Briefs.
- op03 6y agoWhats happening with hypnosis? Is it similar? Recently read about David Eaglemans theory that dreams are just the visual cortex defending its territory when all its inputs are off for the night (ie staying active to prevent neighboring regions from poaching neurons) - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.24.219089v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.24.219089v1 Here too they seem to be dealing with the visual parts.
- jessriedel 6y agoI just read the abstract. Does he address the objection that nocturnal animals sleep in the day, and length of sleep doesn't change as much as the length of day over the seasons?
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoIf your eyes are closed, does it matter if it’s daytime?
- jessriedel 6y agoOh maybe I misinterpreted. I thought the author was arguing that the purpose of sleep was this protection of the visual cortex, but maybe the idea is that sleep has another purpose (with varying timing thoughout the day depending on the animal) and the purpose of dreams is to protect the visual cortex while this is going on.
- frongpik 6y agoI've read a bit about the scientology cult and their hypnosis technique seems similar. This article mentions that the sleeping person hears the command or question as a megaphone type of sound definitely coming from outside the dream. Perhaps an average person perceives such a "megaphone narrator" as trustworthy and remembers the heard commands as important.
- wittyreference 6y ago> 36 participants > 18% > “many” people reported Let’s not overstate the findings here.
- mashpoe 6y agohow do you even get 18% from 36 participants? 7/36 = 19.4% and 6/36 = 16.6%. I know they said "roughly" but I don't see why how you could round to that number.
- hervature 6y agoPossibly a combination of rounding all the numbers and having the constraint it must sum to 100%
- cryptofistMonk 6y agoCould be that each dreamer participated in multiple trials
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y agoThe finding is that it is possible. Not everybody is able to perform it, though. It's difficult to stay focused and aware when lucid dreaming - it takes practice.
- cpncrunch 6y agoNot a breakthrough. This was first done by Laberge over 25 years ago.
- dangom 6y agoNo. La Berge showed that lucid dreamers can reach out to their external environment (dreamer->experimenter), he did not show that they can react to external inputs (experimenter->dreamer).
- tasty_freeze 6y agoI read the book when it came out so perhaps my memory is faulty, but I was pretty sure they tried different mechanisms for prompting the lucid dream. One of them was embedding LEDs in a sleep mask. When their waves showed they were in REM sleep, the experimenters would flash the LEDs as a prompt to the dreamer to interact. They would respond either with a prepared eye left/right pattern or by clenching their fist. I don't recall asking them to do higher level thinking, such as simple subtraction problems, though.
- dangom 6y agoRight, in some of these attempts cues are learned before the participants fall asleep, so that they react to it while dreaming. One could argue that the distinction is subtle, and La Berge could've found the results these groups are showing today, had he ran the experiment. Nonetheless, experimenter->dreamer communication during sleep as suggested in this paper is AFAIK indeed new.
- chasd00 6y agoIt would be nice to get my workday done in a dream. Then I could wake up and do whatever I wanted in actual reality. However, if communication can be worked out, I guess the opposite would be true as well.
- bitwize 6y agoI think this would be detrimental. Dreaming is, more or less, your brain's GC cycle, so it's not a path you want to put arbitrary "computation" on.
- Jeff_Brown 6y agoBased only on my own experience I feel very strongly that an important element of sleep is testing. Seeing how I would react in various situations, with a particular focus on situations in which in real life I've performed below expectation, until I seem to get it consistently right in the dream. Also testing how much I would enjoy a result I work toward or consider working toward when awake.
- amelius 6y agoYou'd wake up exhausted.
- eloff 6y agoHave you ever thought that's what you're doing? When you wake up and go about your day, you've plugged into the Earth simulation after a day's work. Then you go to sleep and wake up in the base reality and go to work. I don't really believe that mind you, but it's fun to think about.
- mellavora 6y agoYou must have very pleasant nightmares.
- kowlo 6y agoInvest in a mouth guard first...
- bezout 6y agoCould the eye signals be random, couldn’t they?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gremlinsinc 6y agoGreat, now my employees can work while they sleep. Twice the productivity. - Elon Musk probably.
- dualvectorfoil 6y agoPerhaps this is common knowledge, but I was surprised to learn that lucid dreaming is a skill that can be practiced, rather than a random occurrence. Here’s a previous HN thread on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047370, and the main subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming https://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tluyben2 6y agoYep, I practiced it for a year over 25 years ago and I can do it all the time. I am usually lucid multiple times a nice. Would not want to miss it for the world.
- JeremyNT 6y agoI kept a journal and practiced for a while, and eventually could lucid dream somewhat consistently with a few simple techniques plus melatonin. Here is my question: do you find that you're actually rested when you lucid dream? I always found myself exhausted, so I stopped trying, and in my case the skill has atrophied. But I'm not sure if that was only due to my technique and if it would have improved in time.
- Bakary 6y agoCan you control whether you are lucid or not? I would be annoyed at the prospect of being "locked in" to having lucid dreams every night instead of the typical unconsciousness
- ddmma 6y agoBrain waves in REM are similar to the awakening stage, from a daytime perspective tries to sort out what was during the day and maybe offer solutions by morning. Have a good read from ‘When Brains Dream’ (Zadra & Stickgold 2021)
- dorkwood 6y ago> “We’ve thought of so many experiments we could do with this,” Konkoly said. “I think one predicate that we're working on now is: how can we optimize the procedure? How can we have this happen more? How can we have people have more lucid dreams? How can we communicate more reliably?” Do we want people to have more lucid dreams? I personally think it's an experience everyone should have at least once, as it gives you an appreciation for the brain's ability to construct reality out of nothing, but I also think it's an addictive activity that disrupts sleep without many other benefits.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y agodoes it disrupt sleep?
- tluyben2 6y agoI have them almost every night (I trained for it when I was 19 and it stuck); when I don't have at least one, I feel far fitter and slept-out than if I did not have one. So I would say it helps sleep. Devices like the Apple Watch or other sleep measuring devices do note that 50-60% of my nights are spent in deep sleep, which, apparently, is a lot.
- 74d-fe6-2c6 6y agoso, what you're saying is that from your experience lucid dreaming does not impact sleep quality negatively - correct? if I'm understanding you correctly you'd even say it impacts sleep quality positively (?)
- tluyben2 6y agoThat is my experience yes.
- isaac21259 6y agoSome techniques require you wake up in the middle of the night before going back to sleep. Personally I've always had far higher success with these methods than others.
- thatguy0900 6y agoImagine having a interactive choose your own adventure story read to you while you lucid dream. That would be insane.
- soulofmischief 6y agoBreakthrough? I've successfully done this in my own lucid dreaming sessions. Solving math problems, composing poetry and music, conversing with people while in between. Maybe I should reach out...
- tluyben2 6y agoWith people outside your dreams? I talk with people in my dreams a lot, but not with people outside them while I am dreaming.
- soulofmischief 6y agoYes. Very basic stuff. Groans, twitches. I want to find the time to train myself on a keyboard, that coveted holy grail. I've practiced lucid dreaming for over a decade and I've developed a few tricks over the years. I need to get serious about developing things further and finding studies to participate in.
- rozab 6y agoDoes anyone else find this research kind of creepy? It sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ-vBhGk9F4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ-vBhGk9F4
- rafaelvasco 6y agoYeah I can see why some people find it creepy. I find it fascinating. Once you have your first "out of normal" experience, then you start looking into more.
- gdubs 6y agoI don’t know why — and forgive the potentially low value comment — but the headline alone made me recall the movie “Flatliners” from the 90s, which I saw way too young, and which thoroughly terrified me.
- rkagerer 6y agoMy dog is the most prolific dreamer I've ever met. I'd love to know what's going on in there.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 6y agoI can't be the only one who has tried to get a sleep-talking sibling to reveal their secrets.
- cush 6y agoBut how many levels do we need to go down to perform an inception?
- rafaelvasco 6y agoI know it's possible, but this puts communication with patients in a coma into the realm of possible, scientifically.