7 ms·

Induce Lucid Dreaming

43 points by charlieirish 3y ago

jruohonen 3y ago
Even if it is pseudo-science (I seriously cannot make the demarcation), it sounds cool! But as it stands, we now must also return seriously to the concepts of neuro-security and neuro-privacy (for lack of better terms). Ref.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38238813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38238813
cranberryturkey 3y ago
is this thing going to shock my brain or what? how does it work, the site doesn't really say. My main concern is whether or not its harmless.
- SXX 3y ago
  There are already devices that detect REM and provide you with hints that you're in a dream while you asleep. This still require training and practice to use, but make it easier to get into lucid state. Hints as simple as short bright light blinking in front of your eyes or specific sounds playing. But as other comment say there is a good chance this particular device is just pseudo scientific BS.
- noduerme 3y ago
  From what I read about machine-learning-powered devices like this that were in development, in the past year, it basically is reading your brainwaves and sending mild electrical interference patterns that adapt to interfere with them on an ongoing basis without waking you up, based on its training toward (1) not waking you up and (2) patterns that are known to trigger lucid dreams. As opposed to simply shining a light on your eyelid when you enter REM and training yourself to recognize that in your sleep. Supposedly it works pretty well. That said, will it fuck with your brain to have its wave patterns interfered with whenever you go to sleep? I could definitely see legions of people getting addicted and going stark raving mad just from not being able to tell if they were dreaming or awake; let alone long-term ramifications of denying the process of natural sleep. It's still a kind of mystery why every animal on this planet sleeps and dreams, and there's an inherent hubris (not exactly absent from the copy of this website) in trying to improve upon such an essential organic process.
  - cranberryturkey 3y ago
    that's why i returned my quest 2...i was scared i'd become addicted.
pr07ecH70r 3y ago
From my MedTec experience, this thing should be classified and regulated. Otherwise it is just another mumbo jumbo. The Lens org doesn't have any patent applicant by that name. So I would guess it is not what it seems to be.
sieste 3y ago
It looks like they are still in the "we're not sure if this even works" phase of product development.
- xyst 3y ago
  Basically, the Theranos stage of product development.
  - qsort 3y ago
    Judging from the fashionable nonsense in the homepage, this looks more like it's the Juicero stage of product development.
    - barbs 3y ago
      Why would I buy this when I can just squeeze the dreams out with my bare hands?
  - noduerme 3y ago
    I'm not sure even she promised to come down from a mountain with the fire of the gods
3abiton 3y ago
I am curious if anyone knowd "manual" techniques to induce and maintain lucid dreaming?
- rglullis 3y ago
  A higher than usual dose of melatonin does it for me.
  - nefrix 3y ago
    How do you increase your melatonin?
    - trigonated 3y ago
      By taking an higher dosage of whatever they're taking for sleeping. You might be mistaking melatonin for melanin (the skin colour one).
    - NukedOne 3y ago
      Melatonin also comes as a supplement.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    What is your usual dose? Asking for a friend...
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Not really high. I am a natural night owl but I was working at a job that had a more traditional 9-5 schedule, so I was taking them about 1.5mg about once or twice a week, just to help regulate my chaotic sleeping pattern. I used to buy 3mg pills and cut them in half. If I went for a long time without taking it, or if I took a whole pill instead of half it would be almost guaranteed that I would have lucid dreams.
- seletskiy 3y ago
  Yeah. Read "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" book by Stephen LaBerge. It proposes a number of techniques, some of them works better than other for different people. If you are not predisposed to lucid dreaming (some people are), then the main obstacle is will or motivation to keep practicing. One that worked for me is having a mechanical counter of some sort (like lap couter or just miniature code lock so you can use it as a counter), which you reset every morning and increment during the day every time after you ask yourself "Am I dreaming?" and doing some basic "reality check" (e.g. trying to breathe in through your nose when you pinch it, or checking clocks twice in a succession and validating that it makes sense, or just looking at your hands). The goal is to consistently do a number of reality checks during your waking life, which inevitably will increase the chance that you will do it in your dream. That will likely would cause you to wake up immediately for couple of times, but then you'll get used to it. It works simply because "if you don't ask yourself that you are dreaming during your waking life, what is the chance that you'll ask yourself it during sleep?". There are number of other and more advanced techniques that borderline with "magic" to me, like falling asleep without loosing conciousness (and then waking up the same way), but I had this experience only a couple of times I guess.
Idisneb 3y ago
I recently started having lucid dreams every day again (two or three a week). But wearing a halo seems ridiculous, it just seems to be placebo
867-5309 3y ago
title should be prepended with "buy a headband that may help"
feverzsj 3y ago
Frequent lucid dream usually implies poor sleep quality, because it interferes with deep sleep.
- broscillator 3y ago
  Elaborate? Link some research?
- volemo 3y ago
  Could you elaborate or point me somewhere I can read more about that? I'd think lucid dreaming is an altered state of REM sleep. How does it affect deep sleep stage?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bitshiftfaced 3y ago
    To my knowledge it's physiologically not an altered state of REM as it is just regular REM sleep. Hypothetically, you can have a lucid dream just as you would a regular dream, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's no real difference from your body's point of view. Maybe parts of your brain is more active, since you have conscious awareness. I can't speak for the parent poster, but maybe they meant that you tend to have more lucid dreams (and also remember your dreams altogether) whenever your sleep is broken up more during the night. In other words, lucid dreams don't necessarily interrupt sleep, but interrupted sleep tends to make them more likely (at least in my experience).
throwaway290 3y ago
> Dreaming of a Theory of Consciousness > Everything that exists was once either a dream of man or a dream of God. What a dumpster fire of hype! On a serious note though did anyone try using sleep tracking smart watch for lucid dreaming? Allegedly it knows when you REM or deep sleep, seems like hooking up into that and sending some specific vibration pattern should do the trick?
bedane 3y ago
I'll stick to nonfrequent mushroom use, thanks. My sleep and dreams are fine.
noduerme 3y ago
Apropos of nothing, non-lucid (i.e. regular) dreaming has become a great aid to my songwriting and story-writing over the past few years. I have really long and vivid dreams where I'm other people in other parts of the world - sometimes other worlds altogether. I've been gay, straight, woman, man. I've been an otter and a pelican. I've spent weeks holding off an army of zombies. I've fought in post-nuclear wars. Each dream can last days or weeks of dream-time. The high level of detail of the situations - and their total lack of relation to my quotidian life - makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe. But wherever they come from, I find they tell me things about my own life and help me answer questions, sometimes really practical questions about code, other times emotional questions about what I want to do. And they're a great source of novel creative material. I've never tried to lucid dream, but I'm afraid that if I could control them my dreams would lose the thing that makes them so valuable to me, which is that from their strangeness and randomness, I get to interpret what my other selves are trying to tell me. If my conscious mind controlled them, I think I would lose insight into that; I even wonder whether losing those voices and other lives in my sleep would be a step toward going insane in waking life.
- NukedOne 3y ago
  What do you think makes you have these vivid dreams?
  - meindnoch 3y ago
    Typically medications. E.g. SSRIs, antiretroviral drugs, and a lot of others.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    My gut answer is that they're real, and that when we're sleeping or when we die our consciousness slips seamlessly into parallel universes. But it may just be that my brain has really long-form ways of trying to solve puzzles by turning them into audio-visual experiences. [edit] I'm not on any meds, never taken antidepressants, and I've never done psychedelics. I do smoke pot occasionally, but oddly it tamps down the intensity of the dreams; the most vivid or memorable ones occur when I'm completely sober.
Zetobal 3y ago
If I really need to induce lucid dreaming I just use the proofen method of taking a nap ingest a high dose of caffeine and going back to sleep again. Depending on your fav way of consuming caffeine it runs from 1-3 dollars.
Ferret7446 3y ago
I don't think I've ever had lucid dreams, but I do fly in my dreams a lot, and the "skill" of flying specifically gets carried over kind of like continuation dreams, except the dreams themselves are different (e.g., sometimes the dream world has magic and sometimes not). My dream flying is odd; my ability to control my altitude fluctuates depending on whether I'm "concentrating" too little or too much. I suspect I'm balancing some kind of "partial lucidity" where I know I'm dreaming/I can fly but I can't think too hard about it. Another analogy would be like thinking about the game, or thinking too hard about a skill that has already become second nature. Dream mental states are intriguing because you can be "in between". I don't think I'm the only person who has had "in between" dream states when you're trying to sleep in a stressful/uncomfortable situation and you drift in and out of consciousness (or maybe I am?).
- thelastparadise 3y ago
  > or maybe I am? I've never heard of this.
Euphorbium 3y ago
If you go to sleep like 90-120 min later than usual, then wake up as usual and go to sleep again about 60-90 min later, entering lucid sleep is very easy. You can even leave music going on, or some video playing. No need for any devices.
- Idisneb 3y ago
  It's true, the technique of being aware of the physical state while we literally fall asleep also helps me. I know it sounds strange, but this is what the transition from being awake to being asleep feels like, it's like losing gravity and falling into a dark stage as if it were a loading stage, then a few seconds later you sink into a dream. any.
lazyweb 3y ago
Straight out of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21942866/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21942866/ Which is a fun watch btw
indigo0086 3y ago
My dad had similar bs for lucid dreaming from the 80s.
jkmcf 3y ago
I'm not sure lucid dreaming is all it's cracked up to be. I've experienced it every night for most of my life. It's all quite entertaining -- I have some really awesome dreams -- but the dreams are also very visceral and a negative[1] dream can leave me emotional throughout the day. Unsure if related, but I rarely wake feeling refreshed. Need to get a referral for sleep study... [1] Sadly, none of the dreams are positive.
indigo0086 3y ago
The psychobabel on the front page makes me wary of touching it.

43 points by charlieirish 3y ago

Even if it is pseudo-science (I seriously cannot make the demarcation), it sounds cool! But as it stands, we now must also return seriously to the concepts of neuro-security and neuro-privacy (for lack of better terms). Ref.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38238813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38238813

cranberryturkey 3y ago

is this thing going to shock my brain or what? how does it work, the site doesn't really say. My main concern is whether or not its harmless.

SXX 3y ago
There are already devices that detect REM and provide you with hints that you're in a dream while you asleep. This still require training and practice to use, but make it easier to get into lucid state. Hints as simple as short bright light blinking in front of your eyes or specific sounds playing. But as other comment say there is a good chance this particular device is just pseudo scientific BS.
noduerme 3y ago
From what I read about machine-learning-powered devices like this that were in development, in the past year, it basically is reading your brainwaves and sending mild electrical interference patterns that adapt to interfere with them on an ongoing basis without waking you up, based on its training toward (1) not waking you up and (2) patterns that are known to trigger lucid dreams. As opposed to simply shining a light on your eyelid when you enter REM and training yourself to recognize that in your sleep. Supposedly it works pretty well. That said, will it fuck with your brain to have its wave patterns interfered with whenever you go to sleep? I could definitely see legions of people getting addicted and going stark raving mad just from not being able to tell if they were dreaming or awake; let alone long-term ramifications of denying the process of natural sleep. It's still a kind of mystery why every animal on this planet sleeps and dreams, and there's an inherent hubris (not exactly absent from the copy of this website) in trying to improve upon such an essential organic process.
- cranberryturkey 3y ago
  that's why i returned my quest 2...i was scared i'd become addicted.

pr07ecH70r 3y ago

From my MedTec experience, this thing should be classified and regulated. Otherwise it is just another mumbo jumbo. The Lens org doesn't have any patent applicant by that name. So I would guess it is not what it seems to be.

sieste 3y ago

It looks like they are still in the "we're not sure if this even works" phase of product development.

xyst 3y ago
Basically, the Theranos stage of product development.
- qsort 3y ago
  Judging from the fashionable nonsense in the homepage, this looks more like it's the Juicero stage of product development.
  - barbs 3y ago
    Why would I buy this when I can just squeeze the dreams out with my bare hands?
- noduerme 3y ago
  I'm not sure even she promised to come down from a mountain with the fire of the gods

3abiton 3y ago

I am curious if anyone knowd "manual" techniques to induce and maintain lucid dreaming?

rglullis 3y ago
A higher than usual dose of melatonin does it for me.
- nefrix 3y ago
  How do you increase your melatonin?
  - trigonated 3y ago
    By taking an higher dosage of whatever they're taking for sleeping. You might be mistaking melatonin for melanin (the skin colour one).
  - NukedOne 3y ago
    Melatonin also comes as a supplement.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  What is your usual dose? Asking for a friend...
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Not really high. I am a natural night owl but I was working at a job that had a more traditional 9-5 schedule, so I was taking them about 1.5mg about once or twice a week, just to help regulate my chaotic sleeping pattern. I used to buy 3mg pills and cut them in half. If I went for a long time without taking it, or if I took a whole pill instead of half it would be almost guaranteed that I would have lucid dreams.
seletskiy 3y ago
Yeah. Read "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" book by Stephen LaBerge. It proposes a number of techniques, some of them works better than other for different people. If you are not predisposed to lucid dreaming (some people are), then the main obstacle is will or motivation to keep practicing. One that worked for me is having a mechanical counter of some sort (like lap couter or just miniature code lock so you can use it as a counter), which you reset every morning and increment during the day every time after you ask yourself "Am I dreaming?" and doing some basic "reality check" (e.g. trying to breathe in through your nose when you pinch it, or checking clocks twice in a succession and validating that it makes sense, or just looking at your hands). The goal is to consistently do a number of reality checks during your waking life, which inevitably will increase the chance that you will do it in your dream. That will likely would cause you to wake up immediately for couple of times, but then you'll get used to it. It works simply because "if you don't ask yourself that you are dreaming during your waking life, what is the chance that you'll ask yourself it during sleep?". There are number of other and more advanced techniques that borderline with "magic" to me, like falling asleep without loosing conciousness (and then waking up the same way), but I had this experience only a couple of times I guess.

Idisneb 3y ago

I recently started having lucid dreams every day again (two or three a week). But wearing a halo seems ridiculous, it just seems to be placebo

867-5309 3y ago

title should be prepended with "buy a headband that may help"

feverzsj 3y ago

Frequent lucid dream usually implies poor sleep quality, because it interferes with deep sleep.

broscillator 3y ago
Elaborate? Link some research?
volemo 3y ago
Could you elaborate or point me somewhere I can read more about that? I'd think lucid dreaming is an altered state of REM sleep. How does it affect deep sleep stage?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bitshiftfaced 3y ago
  To my knowledge it's physiologically not an altered state of REM as it is just regular REM sleep. Hypothetically, you can have a lucid dream just as you would a regular dream, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's no real difference from your body's point of view. Maybe parts of your brain is more active, since you have conscious awareness. I can't speak for the parent poster, but maybe they meant that you tend to have more lucid dreams (and also remember your dreams altogether) whenever your sleep is broken up more during the night. In other words, lucid dreams don't necessarily interrupt sleep, but interrupted sleep tends to make them more likely (at least in my experience).

throwaway290 3y ago

> Dreaming of a Theory of Consciousness > Everything that exists was once either a dream of man or a dream of God. What a dumpster fire of hype! On a serious note though did anyone try using sleep tracking smart watch for lucid dreaming? Allegedly it knows when you REM or deep sleep, seems like hooking up into that and sending some specific vibration pattern should do the trick?

bedane 3y ago

I'll stick to nonfrequent mushroom use, thanks. My sleep and dreams are fine.

noduerme 3y ago

Apropos of nothing, non-lucid (i.e. regular) dreaming has become a great aid to my songwriting and story-writing over the past few years. I have really long and vivid dreams where I'm other people in other parts of the world - sometimes other worlds altogether. I've been gay, straight, woman, man. I've been an otter and a pelican. I've spent weeks holding off an army of zombies. I've fought in post-nuclear wars. Each dream can last days or weeks of dream-time. The high level of detail of the situations - and their total lack of relation to my quotidian life - makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe. But wherever they come from, I find they tell me things about my own life and help me answer questions, sometimes really practical questions about code, other times emotional questions about what I want to do. And they're a great source of novel creative material. I've never tried to lucid dream, but I'm afraid that if I could control them my dreams would lose the thing that makes them so valuable to me, which is that from their strangeness and randomness, I get to interpret what my other selves are trying to tell me. If my conscious mind controlled them, I think I would lose insight into that; I even wonder whether losing those voices and other lives in my sleep would be a step toward going insane in waking life.

NukedOne 3y ago
What do you think makes you have these vivid dreams?
- meindnoch 3y ago
  Typically medications. E.g. SSRIs, antiretroviral drugs, and a lot of others.
- noduerme 3y ago
  My gut answer is that they're real, and that when we're sleeping or when we die our consciousness slips seamlessly into parallel universes. But it may just be that my brain has really long-form ways of trying to solve puzzles by turning them into audio-visual experiences. [edit] I'm not on any meds, never taken antidepressants, and I've never done psychedelics. I do smoke pot occasionally, but oddly it tamps down the intensity of the dreams; the most vivid or memorable ones occur when I'm completely sober.

Zetobal 3y ago

If I really need to induce lucid dreaming I just use the proofen method of taking a nap ingest a high dose of caffeine and going back to sleep again. Depending on your fav way of consuming caffeine it runs from 1-3 dollars.

Ferret7446 3y ago

I don't think I've ever had lucid dreams, but I do fly in my dreams a lot, and the "skill" of flying specifically gets carried over kind of like continuation dreams, except the dreams themselves are different (e.g., sometimes the dream world has magic and sometimes not). My dream flying is odd; my ability to control my altitude fluctuates depending on whether I'm "concentrating" too little or too much. I suspect I'm balancing some kind of "partial lucidity" where I know I'm dreaming/I can fly but I can't think too hard about it. Another analogy would be like thinking about the game, or thinking too hard about a skill that has already become second nature. Dream mental states are intriguing because you can be "in between". I don't think I'm the only person who has had "in between" dream states when you're trying to sleep in a stressful/uncomfortable situation and you drift in and out of consciousness (or maybe I am?).

thelastparadise 3y ago
> or maybe I am? I've never heard of this.

Euphorbium 3y ago

If you go to sleep like 90-120 min later than usual, then wake up as usual and go to sleep again about 60-90 min later, entering lucid sleep is very easy. You can even leave music going on, or some video playing. No need for any devices.

Idisneb 3y ago
It's true, the technique of being aware of the physical state while we literally fall asleep also helps me. I know it sounds strange, but this is what the transition from being awake to being asleep feels like, it's like losing gravity and falling into a dark stage as if it were a loading stage, then a few seconds later you sink into a dream. any.

lazyweb 3y ago

Straight out of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21942866/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21942866/ Which is a fun watch btw

indigo0086 3y ago

My dad had similar bs for lucid dreaming from the 80s.

jkmcf 3y ago

I'm not sure lucid dreaming is all it's cracked up to be. I've experienced it every night for most of my life. It's all quite entertaining -- I have some really awesome dreams -- but the dreams are also very visceral and a negative[1] dream can leave me emotional throughout the day. Unsure if related, but I rarely wake feeling refreshed. Need to get a referral for sleep study... [1] Sadly, none of the dreams are positive.

indigo0086 3y ago

The psychobabel on the front page makes me wary of touching it.