8 ms·

Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

78 points by sxp 6y ago

thwoawayyowser 6y ago
Does this mean my staff could be asked to get some work done while asleep? In all seriousness I look forward to seeing exactly how much we can do while lucid dreaming. Also, what are the consequences? Does it cost you the nights rest? or could this be a life hack for getting more done in a day?
- lesquivemeau 6y ago
  No you are rested as if it were a normal dream. But it's not easy to keep focused on something while lucid dreaming, you will likely forget that you are in a dream and no longer be lucid.
  - robobro 6y ago
    You mean no longer be dreaming. People who concentrate too much during a lucid dream wake up.
  - vicedvin 6y ago
    I may disagree, as from my own experience and lucid dreamers I spoke to, lucid dream is not a rest state but more of the awake. After lucid dreaming I am as tired as I did not sleep at all, maybe even more.
    - wahern 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure there's distinction between lucid dreaming during REM sleep and something akin to day dreaming while falling in and out of sleep, which some might still call lucid dreaming. I've experienced both. In the latter you won't feel refreshed in the same way (or at all), similar to when stress or alcohol prevents restful sleep. (Stress or alcohol very well may have setup the conditions for the non-REM dreaming.) In the former you feel the same as you normally would.
      - ghusbands 6y ago
        Whether in REM or not, I feel less rested the more I lucid dream.
  - wahern 6y ago
    I've had a productive coding session in a lucid dream at least once. But it was just a small number of lines of code (a few blocks) I was playing around with, and I had been thinking about it all day. The visual and semantic memory was sort of stuck in my mind, consciously and subconsciously. In any event, it was insanely precise (I was editing on a giant terminal screen) and when I woke up I typed in my refactored algorithm verbatim. But reading text coherently in a dream is, AFAIU, quite uncommon as you suggest. I used to lucid dream regularly and deliberately as an adolescent. I would hesitate to say you can't focus in a lucid dream--consciously focusing on elements of the dream, or trying to shape the dream, is kind of the point of lucid dreaming. (Of course, what you have most control over is yourself.) But, yeah, you can't usually control things in such fine detail for the duration necessary to coherently manipulate it. Reading any non-trivial text in a dream isn't very common, lucid or not-lucid, AFAIU. Though, I would imagine it's more common for people with experience lucid dreaming. I'm sure some people can read and write as much as they want, but at a certain point on the curve we're probably dealing with people with abnormal neurology. Sort of like how there's memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques, which anybody can learn, and then there's people with Hyperthymesia.
    - axelsvensson 6y ago
      Lucidity might not be required. I once solved a math problem in a non-lucid dream, and after waking up I could confirm the solution was correct.
      - wahern 6y ago
        Sure. I've also had a couple non-lucid dreams where I've read a longish excerpt of text. (Memorable because of the extraordinary detail, and because it seemed original.) And I've certainly had non-lucid dreams where I've resolved abstract problems in some inarticulable, non-visual manner. And then there's the experience of your subconscious figuring something out and it pops into your conscious mind, which can happen when sleeping or awake. I've had enough lucid dreams when I was kid to know the difference. These days lucid dreaming for me is rare and not deliberate--i.e. if I have the presence of mind to wake up in a dream, it's mostly by chance, not because I orchestrated it through habituation. It came mostly naturally as a kid, after I stumbled upon a reproducible technique. Adults usually have to practice at it, and I'm just too lazy (and too tired). The vast majority of my dreams now are non-lucid, or quasi-lucid (i.e. I'm not in deep sleep) such that I know it's not like a proper lucid dream. The experiences are quite different.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    Speaking from experience, lucid dreaming is not as restful as normal sleep. Furthermore when I was lucid dreaming often, I would get much more regular bouts of sleep paralysis, which only happens to me when my sleep health has severely deteriorated.
  - ghusbands 6y ago
    > No you are rested as if it were a normal dream. Given the sibling comments, this is clearly not a fact. It's best to avoid stating opinion/experience as fact.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ghusbands 6y ago
  There are all sorts of things that are meant to happen during sleep, around learning and similar, that are unlikely to be feasible while you're lucid dreaming, so it might impede learning skills, for example. When I did extensive lucid dreaming I found my brain was making my dreams more and more boring, I'd guess to reduce the chances of me noticing that I was dreaming. Nowadays, I retain an awareness of when I'm dreaming, and I interrupt dreams when I'm especially fascinated by something in them or don't like them, but I otherwise let them run their course and don't take control.
- bemmu 6y ago
  I had a boss who proudly told us that he likes to deal with work-related issues during his lucid dreams. I thought that was a profound waste of a rare moment when you can do almost anything at all. Personally I like to fly.
ve55 6y ago
paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00059-2 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)... "Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep"
throwaway8581 6y ago
>For example, a typical question would be to ask what is 8 minus 6. A 19-year-old American man was able to respond by moving his eyes left-right, left-right — two times — to signal "2." Researchers asked the question again, and he moved his eyes the same way two times again. I’d have to read the paper but color me skeptical. Moving eyes back and forth twice while sleeping is not exactly a clear signal of anything.
- kthejoker2 6y ago
  Instantly thought of Clever Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
lrem 6y ago
This is amazing, underwhelming and not very surprising, all at the same time. Unsurprising, as it was already known that lucid dreamers can move their eyes... And I think everyone has experienced external stimuli, say an alarm clock, being seamlessly integrated into a dream. Underwhelming, as this requires people with rare skills and special requirement to achieve just 18% success rate. For a basic task. Amazing, because obviously the first time something is achieved with rigor, it's opening some hard to predict room to grow. Hopefully this will bring more research and any decade now we'll see practical applications, say dream manipulation to said psychotherapy.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  On integrating outside stimuli, what I’ve always wondered is how wall clock time relates to time in the dream world. I have a vivid memory of a dream as a kid where I was a fighter pilot, went through a bunch of dream time as a kid’s idea of what fighter pilots did, was eventually shot down/ejected over water and condemned to drown in the dream. I woke up with my mouth stuffed full of my own blanket to the point which was making mouth breathing almost impossible. Did I start ingesting the blanket and concoct and experience a long dreamtime dream in 3 minutes? Or did the dream take 45+ minutes and I started ingesting the blanket midway through? This was probably 40 years ago and I can remember it like it was last week.
  - ianai 6y ago
    I don’t know for your memory of course. But I definitely know my brain morphs an ongoing dream to the outside world.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Agree: mine as well. Maybe I should simplify my question. If my alarm starts ringing at 7:00:00 and this is an instance where that stimulus will be incorporated into a dream which started slightly earlier, can the dream be 4 hours long in dream time, ending with the alarm stimulus, if the dream started at 6:58? Or is there a much smaller (or larger) time dilation possible? Does the brain speed up to quickly get to a scenario where that alarm sound is plausibly part of the dream world? If I started dreaming 1 second before the alarm, what’s the most complex dream I could experience that ended with an alarm sound? The brain and dreams are fascinating to me, which is pleasingly meta.
jerrygoyal 6y ago
on a side note, people who do lucid dreams, how do you do it?
- bobbyi_settv 6y ago
  Keep a dream journal. Meaning, when you wake up each morning, immediately write down everything from your dreams. Everyone says they can't do this because they don't remember their dreams, but if you start trying to do it, you will probably find that when you have just woken up, you remember a little, and as you start writing, more comes back to you. Over days of doing this, you will get better at it. After doing this for a while, try to recognize patterns, particularly specific things that show up with some frequency in your dreams that are indications you are dreaming. For example, there is someone you went to high school with that you encounter semi-often in your dreams, but never see anymore in real life. If you are talking to that person it means you are dreaming. Try to brainwash yourself, really drill into your head over and over, that when you see this person, you are in a dream, and you should start trying to activate your mind and be conscious of what is going on. Also, really drill into your mind the idea that if you every find yourself vaguely wondering "am I dreaming right now?" the answer is ALWAYS yes. With luck, the next time you encounter this situation in your dream, there will be a nagging feeling that there was something you were supposed to remember, and then you'll realize what it is and start to wake up your mind within the dream. After a few times, your mind will start to recognize when it is in a dream and become lucid sometimes without the specific trigger. This is the technique I read in a book decades ago in my early teens and didn't expect it to actually work, but it did. I don't get there regularly (and never did), but I still get to full on lucid maybe once every month or two and it is amazing. It's so incredible to be able to look at the world around you and realize that everything you are seeing is created by your mind. It gives a deep appreciation for how powerful your mind is and how much more there is to it than just what you are conscious of, since in the dream your conscious mind feels the same as when you are awake, but you know that all of the seemingly external stuff around you and even people that you speak to are also "you". If your conscious mind and everything that seems external to it are really part of the same connected whole when you are dreaming, could the same be true when you're awake? Even if this approach doesn't work for you, keeping a dream journal for a while can be super interesting anyway. FWIW, this was the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805025006/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805025006/ I haven't seen it in decades, so can't really vouch for it too much. From what I remember, it explained the approach I've outlined above in not much more detail than I just did and most of the rest was filler talking about what dreams are.
thepostman0 6y ago
Great, now companies will expect us to reply to messages when we sleep.
fsflover 6y ago
Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234614
bongoman37 6y ago
It is interesting to me that this is the first time someone has done this in a lab setting. I have lucid dreams and I talk in my sleep a fair amount as well. I used to be a somnambulist as a kid as well, though haven't done that in a long time though I will still kick out occasionally in my dreams. I have had reasonably long conversations in my sleep. When I was living in the dorms once my roommates were solving a physics problem and I answered several parts correctly leading them to the solution though on waking up I knew I had some conversation but no recollection of the actual problem they were solving. My wife often says I am funny to talk to when I am talking in sleep as in the answers can be wildly creative but getting information out is usually impossible, as in if she asks me a password or something I will deflect rather than give an answer.
- frongpik 6y ago
  Let them ask you "who are you?" and "what's your name?"
  - emteycz 6y ago
    I know the answers, but can't really drive my attention. So I might say that I am a train occasionally... But then I'm able to correct myself sometimes! (All of this is absolutely out of my memory, you have to trust my girlfriend)
- jbotz 6y ago
  My wife is a lucid dreamer, and once there was smoke in her dream and while dreaming she was worried that maybe there was a fire in "the real world", so she called me out loud asked if I smelled smoke... her voice came out strangely muffled, and her closed eyes were doing the REM thing, so I knew that she was dreaming. I told her that there was no smoke and she relaxed and continued dreaming. So yes, we've had first hand experience that communication between a lucid dreamer and a waking person is possible.
afkqs 6y ago
Here's a 8-Step Guide to Lucid Dream for Beginners https://luciddreamsociety.com/beginners-lucid-dream-guide/ https://luciddreamsociety.com/beginners-lucid-dream-guide/

78 points by sxp 6y ago

Does this mean my staff could be asked to get some work done while asleep? In all seriousness I look forward to seeing exactly how much we can do while lucid dreaming. Also, what are the consequences? Does it cost you the nights rest? or could this be a life hack for getting more done in a day?

lesquivemeau 6y ago
No you are rested as if it were a normal dream. But it's not easy to keep focused on something while lucid dreaming, you will likely forget that you are in a dream and no longer be lucid.
- robobro 6y ago
  You mean no longer be dreaming. People who concentrate too much during a lucid dream wake up.
- vicedvin 6y ago
  I may disagree, as from my own experience and lucid dreamers I spoke to, lucid dream is not a rest state but more of the awake. After lucid dreaming I am as tired as I did not sleep at all, maybe even more.
  - wahern 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure there's distinction between lucid dreaming during REM sleep and something akin to day dreaming while falling in and out of sleep, which some might still call lucid dreaming. I've experienced both. In the latter you won't feel refreshed in the same way (or at all), similar to when stress or alcohol prevents restful sleep. (Stress or alcohol very well may have setup the conditions for the non-REM dreaming.) In the former you feel the same as you normally would.
    - ghusbands 6y ago
      Whether in REM or not, I feel less rested the more I lucid dream.
- wahern 6y ago
  I've had a productive coding session in a lucid dream at least once. But it was just a small number of lines of code (a few blocks) I was playing around with, and I had been thinking about it all day. The visual and semantic memory was sort of stuck in my mind, consciously and subconsciously. In any event, it was insanely precise (I was editing on a giant terminal screen) and when I woke up I typed in my refactored algorithm verbatim. But reading text coherently in a dream is, AFAIU, quite uncommon as you suggest. I used to lucid dream regularly and deliberately as an adolescent. I would hesitate to say you can't focus in a lucid dream--consciously focusing on elements of the dream, or trying to shape the dream, is kind of the point of lucid dreaming. (Of course, what you have most control over is yourself.) But, yeah, you can't usually control things in such fine detail for the duration necessary to coherently manipulate it. Reading any non-trivial text in a dream isn't very common, lucid or not-lucid, AFAIU. Though, I would imagine it's more common for people with experience lucid dreaming. I'm sure some people can read and write as much as they want, but at a certain point on the curve we're probably dealing with people with abnormal neurology. Sort of like how there's memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques, which anybody can learn, and then there's people with Hyperthymesia.
  - axelsvensson 6y ago
    Lucidity might not be required. I once solved a math problem in a non-lucid dream, and after waking up I could confirm the solution was correct.
    - wahern 6y ago
      Sure. I've also had a couple non-lucid dreams where I've read a longish excerpt of text. (Memorable because of the extraordinary detail, and because it seemed original.) And I've certainly had non-lucid dreams where I've resolved abstract problems in some inarticulable, non-visual manner. And then there's the experience of your subconscious figuring something out and it pops into your conscious mind, which can happen when sleeping or awake. I've had enough lucid dreams when I was kid to know the difference. These days lucid dreaming for me is rare and not deliberate--i.e. if I have the presence of mind to wake up in a dream, it's mostly by chance, not because I orchestrated it through habituation. It came mostly naturally as a kid, after I stumbled upon a reproducible technique. Adults usually have to practice at it, and I'm just too lazy (and too tired). The vast majority of my dreams now are non-lucid, or quasi-lucid (i.e. I'm not in deep sleep) such that I know it's not like a proper lucid dream. The experiences are quite different.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  Speaking from experience, lucid dreaming is not as restful as normal sleep. Furthermore when I was lucid dreaming often, I would get much more regular bouts of sleep paralysis, which only happens to me when my sleep health has severely deteriorated.
- ghusbands 6y ago
  > No you are rested as if it were a normal dream. Given the sibling comments, this is clearly not a fact. It's best to avoid stating opinion/experience as fact.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ghusbands 6y ago
There are all sorts of things that are meant to happen during sleep, around learning and similar, that are unlikely to be feasible while you're lucid dreaming, so it might impede learning skills, for example. When I did extensive lucid dreaming I found my brain was making my dreams more and more boring, I'd guess to reduce the chances of me noticing that I was dreaming. Nowadays, I retain an awareness of when I'm dreaming, and I interrupt dreams when I'm especially fascinated by something in them or don't like them, but I otherwise let them run their course and don't take control.
bemmu 6y ago
I had a boss who proudly told us that he likes to deal with work-related issues during his lucid dreams. I thought that was a profound waste of a rare moment when you can do almost anything at all. Personally I like to fly.

ve55 6y ago

paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00059-2 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)... "Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep"

throwaway8581 6y ago

>For example, a typical question would be to ask what is 8 minus 6. A 19-year-old American man was able to respond by moving his eyes left-right, left-right — two times — to signal "2." Researchers asked the question again, and he moved his eyes the same way two times again. I’d have to read the paper but color me skeptical. Moving eyes back and forth twice while sleeping is not exactly a clear signal of anything.

kthejoker2 6y ago
Instantly thought of Clever Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

lrem 6y ago

This is amazing, underwhelming and not very surprising, all at the same time. Unsurprising, as it was already known that lucid dreamers can move their eyes... And I think everyone has experienced external stimuli, say an alarm clock, being seamlessly integrated into a dream. Underwhelming, as this requires people with rare skills and special requirement to achieve just 18% success rate. For a basic task. Amazing, because obviously the first time something is achieved with rigor, it's opening some hard to predict room to grow. Hopefully this will bring more research and any decade now we'll see practical applications, say dream manipulation to said psychotherapy.

sokoloff 6y ago
On integrating outside stimuli, what I’ve always wondered is how wall clock time relates to time in the dream world. I have a vivid memory of a dream as a kid where I was a fighter pilot, went through a bunch of dream time as a kid’s idea of what fighter pilots did, was eventually shot down/ejected over water and condemned to drown in the dream. I woke up with my mouth stuffed full of my own blanket to the point which was making mouth breathing almost impossible. Did I start ingesting the blanket and concoct and experience a long dreamtime dream in 3 minutes? Or did the dream take 45+ minutes and I started ingesting the blanket midway through? This was probably 40 years ago and I can remember it like it was last week.
- ianai 6y ago
  I don’t know for your memory of course. But I definitely know my brain morphs an ongoing dream to the outside world.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Agree: mine as well. Maybe I should simplify my question. If my alarm starts ringing at 7:00:00 and this is an instance where that stimulus will be incorporated into a dream which started slightly earlier, can the dream be 4 hours long in dream time, ending with the alarm stimulus, if the dream started at 6:58? Or is there a much smaller (or larger) time dilation possible? Does the brain speed up to quickly get to a scenario where that alarm sound is plausibly part of the dream world? If I started dreaming 1 second before the alarm, what’s the most complex dream I could experience that ended with an alarm sound? The brain and dreams are fascinating to me, which is pleasingly meta.

jerrygoyal 6y ago

on a side note, people who do lucid dreams, how do you do it?

bobbyi_settv 6y ago
Keep a dream journal. Meaning, when you wake up each morning, immediately write down everything from your dreams. Everyone says they can't do this because they don't remember their dreams, but if you start trying to do it, you will probably find that when you have just woken up, you remember a little, and as you start writing, more comes back to you. Over days of doing this, you will get better at it. After doing this for a while, try to recognize patterns, particularly specific things that show up with some frequency in your dreams that are indications you are dreaming. For example, there is someone you went to high school with that you encounter semi-often in your dreams, but never see anymore in real life. If you are talking to that person it means you are dreaming. Try to brainwash yourself, really drill into your head over and over, that when you see this person, you are in a dream, and you should start trying to activate your mind and be conscious of what is going on. Also, really drill into your mind the idea that if you every find yourself vaguely wondering "am I dreaming right now?" the answer is ALWAYS yes. With luck, the next time you encounter this situation in your dream, there will be a nagging feeling that there was something you were supposed to remember, and then you'll realize what it is and start to wake up your mind within the dream. After a few times, your mind will start to recognize when it is in a dream and become lucid sometimes without the specific trigger. This is the technique I read in a book decades ago in my early teens and didn't expect it to actually work, but it did. I don't get there regularly (and never did), but I still get to full on lucid maybe once every month or two and it is amazing. It's so incredible to be able to look at the world around you and realize that everything you are seeing is created by your mind. It gives a deep appreciation for how powerful your mind is and how much more there is to it than just what you are conscious of, since in the dream your conscious mind feels the same as when you are awake, but you know that all of the seemingly external stuff around you and even people that you speak to are also "you". If your conscious mind and everything that seems external to it are really part of the same connected whole when you are dreaming, could the same be true when you're awake? Even if this approach doesn't work for you, keeping a dream journal for a while can be super interesting anyway. FWIW, this was the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805025006/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805025006/ I haven't seen it in decades, so can't really vouch for it too much. From what I remember, it explained the approach I've outlined above in not much more detail than I just did and most of the rest was filler talking about what dreams are.

thepostman0 6y ago

Great, now companies will expect us to reply to messages when we sleep.

fsflover 6y ago

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234614

bongoman37 6y ago

It is interesting to me that this is the first time someone has done this in a lab setting. I have lucid dreams and I talk in my sleep a fair amount as well. I used to be a somnambulist as a kid as well, though haven't done that in a long time though I will still kick out occasionally in my dreams. I have had reasonably long conversations in my sleep. When I was living in the dorms once my roommates were solving a physics problem and I answered several parts correctly leading them to the solution though on waking up I knew I had some conversation but no recollection of the actual problem they were solving. My wife often says I am funny to talk to when I am talking in sleep as in the answers can be wildly creative but getting information out is usually impossible, as in if she asks me a password or something I will deflect rather than give an answer.

frongpik 6y ago
Let them ask you "who are you?" and "what's your name?"
- emteycz 6y ago
  I know the answers, but can't really drive my attention. So I might say that I am a train occasionally... But then I'm able to correct myself sometimes! (All of this is absolutely out of my memory, you have to trust my girlfriend)
jbotz 6y ago
My wife is a lucid dreamer, and once there was smoke in her dream and while dreaming she was worried that maybe there was a fire in "the real world", so she called me out loud asked if I smelled smoke... her voice came out strangely muffled, and her closed eyes were doing the REM thing, so I knew that she was dreaming. I told her that there was no smoke and she relaxed and continued dreaming. So yes, we've had first hand experience that communication between a lucid dreamer and a waking person is possible.

afkqs 6y ago

Here's a 8-Step Guide to Lucid Dream for Beginners https://luciddreamsociety.com/beginners-lucid-dream-guide/ https://luciddreamsociety.com/beginners-lucid-dream-guide/