Consciousness studies 3 - Lucid dreaming

[Ksihkehe]

I used to lucid dream a lot, not so much anymore, I sort of lost interest. At first it's fun and interesting but talking to people is boring once you realize you're just talking to yourself, and things generally lose their magic over time. It turns out dream life is not so interesting when there are no stakes and you're alone. Now, whenever I become lucid during a dream, I just pursue sensory experiences (sex, usually) because at least then you're actually feeling something.

I'm slowly working my way through to reply to things.

This is pretty much the case for most people, at least for those that do experience them spontaneously. That would have been the same pattern over time for me. I lost interest in doing anything to increase the frequency after a short time. As a teen there was always something new to grab my interest. I don't know how common it is or how many would report at least one experience if we were to do a poll on large populations. High frequency experience seems to be at least somewhat rare, but there is also limited opportunity for people to discuss it much. There is also limited interest.

Greater frequency in youth is common, then loss of interest, and eventually less frequent experiences.

I'm interested in lucid dreaming and dreams in general as far as their function and how the brain processes them, but I can't say there's much to do once you get there beyond having experiences. The protocol is fairly easy. For those that have never experienced one it's a low bar. Those that have had limited experience may want more of them to experience something they can't have in day to day life. For others, if they have some type of serious sleep disturbances, they may wish to adapt the protocols in some way to handle them better.

The next level beyond laying the groundwork that was in the OP, for me in my experience and for most of the accounts that I've consumed from those that write about it, requires a lot more time investment. Most people just aren't interested in it. It becomes much like a meditation practice once you try to remain awake during the body transitioning into a sleep state or enter deep meditative states. For the young or the fit, this often will and probably should take a backseat to more physical experiences. When your clock speeds up with age, your focus may shift.

If you're only talking to yourself when you talk to people in dreams, then having sex is really just masturbation. I'm not disagreeing with you, just finishing the thought.

[NobodySpecial268]

The thing about dreams is once one realises that one can navigate conscious as with the Russian Dolls, and that one can have interactive shared dreams, one can begin to understand the UFOs and machine minds out there.

Shared interactive dreams are how they used to build the organic machines.

[Ksihkehe]

Ksihkehe: I don't have a favorable opinion of channeling because it seems most of the people who do it aren't balanced enough to be doing it. It seems to be one of the easiest abilities to abuse and misuse.

I'm not sure if I 'lucid dream' but in most of my dreams I am aware once odd events start happening that I'm dreaming. I've never tried to control the narative, though; I just try to figure out why I'd be having such a strange dream and move on to the next adventure.

I do have flying dreams occasionally, but once I realize I'm flying I float back down. ...probably because I'm not comfortable with  heights OR flying! lol

I've opened Pandora's box because now I have to try to keep up with fresh posts and also work on an update for all the old ones. 

Those are definitely lucid dreams. The noticing of odd events is what the reality checks during the day are trying to cause to happen in the protocols. You're hoping to be doing it so frequently and automatically that this occurs naturally in a dream state. That can then trigger recognition of being in a dream. All of it is small tweaks hoping to cause that spark of recognition. It's very difficult to know which part is working or when, but collectively they have a great deal of success. I would guess that every night there are a significant number of opportunities for this to happen. Even if the protocols only give you a lottery ticket's chance for a lucid dream, you're getting a lot of draws every night.

For you it sounds like it's easy to observe from that lucid state, but I had to train myself not to react to gaining lucidity when it happened spontaneously. I found myself getting almost immediately booted out when I let myself become fully aware too quickly. It was just a minor adjustment for me to stop it, but it didn't come naturally. That wasn't the case when I was younger, but became a problem years later when I was having another go at the protocols. Entering that state from meditation has its challenges. When you overcome those challenges it's less like waking up drugged in The Twilight Zone then it is in when it happens in dreams. I've been able to change entire dreamscapes from within a spontaneous dream, from the ground up, but it was something I had to put into my head before I got there. It wasn't even complicated, but it was hard. I was just pushing my limits, so it had no bigger purpose.

This is just my experience though. I haven't been doing anything to increase the frequency of these for a while, but if I had one I'd probably just let it flow.

Regarding falling like a feather, I thought about that and my experiences. I can't think of any time I fell from flying at the speed of gravity that I would expect to. The only time I've felt like I was under the full influence of gravity and falling was when falling sleep. Those little jump starts at the edge of sleep when you feel like your bed just disappeared from under you. I never thought about it before. Have you ever fallen like a rock when flying fails?

[FCD]

FTR, I can in fact read in these dreams.  In fact, it was the being able to read text and writing which I feel was the turning point in these dreams.  I can distinctly remember when I was unable to read things like signs and handwriting in my dreams, and I remember wondering why I was not able to read something no matter how hard I tried.  I even made some posts about it on ATS.  There were some who stated the reason I couldn't read something is because it was a dream so there was nothing there to read in reality.  I couldn't accept that, especially when I knew what the words should say.  For example, a "STOP" sign; the shape of the sign and the color gave away what the word should say, but I couldn't make it out in my dream.  I focused on this, and then after a while I could read what the sign said.  Progressively, over time, I could read more and more things.  That was many years ago.  Now, I can read something like instructions on how to do something which I don't necessarily know how to do, for example.  I find that very interesting, but I have yet to try it out.  Meaning...if I found instructions on how to hold my breath for 15 minutes (in my dream), I haven't tried to do it in real life.  So, I don't know if I could actually learn something that I don't know how to do through just pure organic dreaming and nothing else.

[Nugget]

Have you ever fallen like a rock when flying fails?

No, I just lose altitude and 'float' and slowly come down to the ground. I like the feeling of being that light, so when I get close enough to the ground I 'kick off' and manage to get to tree level height, which is all the higher I want to go. lol

I have found myself in the clouds on many occasions, but I'm always afraid to look down. 

My father used to say the greatest fear is the fear of the unknown, and that holds very true for me. No 'warior spirit' here!

[Ksihkehe]

FTR, I can in fact read in these dreams.  In fact, it was the being able to read text and writing which I feel was the turning point in these dreams.  I can distinctly remember when I was unable to read things like signs and handwriting in my dreams, and I remember wondering why I was not able to read something no matter how hard I tried.  I even made some posts about it on ATS.  There were some who stated the reason I couldn't read something is because it was a dream so there was nothing there to read in reality.  I couldn't accept that, especially when I knew what the words should say.  For example, a "STOP" sign; the shape of the sign and the color gave away what the word should say, but I couldn't make it out in my dream.  I focused on this, and then after a while I could read what the sign said.  Progressively, over time, I could read more and more things.  That was many years ago.  Now, I can read something like instructions on how to do something which I don't necessarily know how to do, for example.  I find that very interesting, but I have yet to try it out.  Meaning...if I found instructions on how to hold my breath for 15 minutes (in my dream), I haven't tried to do it in real life.  So, I don't know if I could actually learn something that I don't know how to do through just pure organic dreaming and nothing else.

I would say that it's without a doubt that you can learn something you don't know in a dream, lucid or vanilla. Information already exists, the linear causation to arrive at you having the information in the format you need it is the only thing missing. In theory this is true even for novel science concepts, which are merely reconfiguring information one already has nearly 100% of the time. The information already exists, but there is no chain of events (existing knowledge, cognitive reasoning, intuition, an apple falling from a tree) to arrange that information in a meaningful way for you.

Is this is what could be considered exclusively an accident, with just elements of chance influencing what pops from your subconscious into a dream state? Alternatively, might some discoveries of novel information be your subconscious making connections that the conscious mind hasn't? I think it's probably a lot of the former and a bit of the latter.

How much useful novel information is generated? How often? Not much and not very, I'd guess. Once you start to have these dreams more frequently though, and then start seeding ideas that you hope to grow in those states, might it be possible to increase the odds of getting useful information? I think you probably can. Everything feeds the process with small nudges. You keep nudging things in a direction you want and you start stacking the odds in your favor. First the increased dreaming recall, then the lucidity, then the seeding of ideas, then whatever you discover to add a few more tenths of a percent to the odds.

That doesn't mean that knowledge and what you're trying to learn don't matter. For me, when I last did work specifically on these spontaneous lucid dreams, I was looking for information and insight into lucid dreaming and consciousness. That made it really easy to find proof of novel discoveries in dreams for me. It's going to be a bit harder to get more detailed information, but some innovators have claimed this sort of discovery. Most of them already have expert level knowledge, but they get a spark from somewhere in one of these states that puts things together in a new way.

A hypothetical scenario for you, with your experience with electrical engineering and aviation, for example. You have a complex wiring problem on a newly designed aircraft. I'm taking this from a real person and real wiring problem they had, but I only know the basics. Somewhere in the miles of wiring there's something causing a problem. If I was an electrical engineer I could give a better scenario, but you'll know one. You've checked everything you can think of, you moved and reconfigured things that might be an issue, and the problem persists. If you're like me, you'll be gnawing on the problem off and on putting it through all the paces you can think of. It gets frustrating fast.

Imagine on day one of this problem at bedtime that night, already frequently lucid dreaming, you doze off with this plane and its wiring as your target. If successful, you have given yourself a cognitive sandbox to mess around with this plane and the wiring in. Will it be right? Hard to say. What you have working in your favor is decades of information, experience, and the intuition that feeds. Just because you don't know the problem doesn't mean that you don't already have all the information you need to fix whatever the problem is. It's almost certainly just the opposite, you almost certainly know the solution and it will be apparent to you once you see the problem. Your brain, working underneath the lucidity, still knows a hell of a lot. It can even be that messing around in this sandbox just provides a burst of creative energy, then you make a breakthrough the next day.

Is it worthwhile? I think it's probably not worth it for a lot of people and a lot of the tasks they have to deal with. It's a sound concept in my opinion, but it's meeting that bar at the same sort of barely there level of proof as you get from psi studies. That's for this kind of lucid dream, which is ephemeral for most people even when they do everything they can to facilitate them. A guy like Tesla, you give him some lucid dreams (or he has learned how to enter similar states), the results could start to get more interesting pretty fast. I don't expect to discover any really important science theory or generate an important equation. If I was closer to the bleeding edge on something like that, I'd be doing what I could to be playing with it in that space. It's not quite lucid dreaming for me now anymore, but there's more freedom as far as planning when it happens and guiding what will happen there when coming at it from meditation.

For me, even if I get little information, it's a few hours here and there that I'm keeping my brain really active. I do seed ideas when I have a problem I'm trying to solve though. I sometimes get answers, but I don't count on it. I consider it to be just part of a holistic approach to solving problems. I think on it, let it stew, forget about it, see what comes up. If it doesn't seem to be working, then I'll freshen my mind up on it again and get into an altered state of some kind to see where it leads. Sometimes the answer pops up a few days later. Sometimes the information will end up taking me to answers I didn't even know I should have been asking questions about.

If you have a lucid dream in the near future I'd be curious to know how persistent the writing is for you. Maybe these are all already answered and I'll see it when I do another read through from the start. If you look at it closely and try to keep it memorized, can you look at it again and have it be entirely unchanged? Can you do it with longer gaps? Can you carry it with you like on a note and read it again in a different spot? Can you bring it to another dream, like when you wake up and then end up returning? They may seem like silly details, but there aren't many good details to get into the nitty gritty of it and I have no timeline for being able to answer even one of them myself. The last time I tried it I got just a cyclone of letters and things on the page. The individual letters were reminiscent of the letters in older AI images, just sort of letter-like shapes. I have come to the conclusion that whatever I need to figure out to crack this probably requires I just keep working on refining my control and duration. Even then, if I start being able to read, I still need to set up conditions to test all those little questions.

It's actually likely you'll have one soon. If not, somebody that's following along is likely to even if they aren't doing the protocols. I haven't kept track of how often it happens relative to how often I've had in-depth discussions on it, but often enough to have noticed even with a pretty small sample size. Every little nudge counts, even the ones that come from the environment. Those that are already having them are now getting subliminal priming from this exposure to the topic. The more exposure, the harder the nudge.

I think it will be Nugget. She's got almost all of nudge right in her name. She's going to become Nudgget.

[FCD]

If you have a lucid dream in the near future I'd be curious to know how persistent the writing is for you. Maybe these are all already answered and I'll see it when I do another read through from the start. If you look at it closely and try to keep it memorized, can you look at it again and have it be entirely unchanged? Can you do it with longer gaps? Can you carry it with you like on a note and read it again in a different spot? Can you bring it to another dream, like when you wake up and then end up returning? They may seem like silly details, but there aren't many good details to get into the nitty gritty of it and I have no timeline for being able to answer even one of them myself. The last time I tried it I got just a cyclone of letters and things on the page. ...

Interesting questions.  I think, for the most part, yes, they are memorized or baked in.  Now, that said; it depends on what kind of writing it is.  For example, if it's a road sign, and if I see the same physical sign multiple times (in my dream) it will say the exact same thing.  And, the writing is very clear (in the past, before I could read the text, or in the early stages, it would be blurry and vague, but now it is crystal clear).  On the other hand, if it's something like a hand written note on a piece of paper which was just given to me (in my dream), I'm going to have to think about that a little more.  I want to say the visibility of something like this is a little more sketchy.  I would put it in the category of seeing something in a dim light where I get the gist of what it says, but I can't see it fully...and I feel like if I just had a brighter light I could see it better.  That's my first reaction to your question, but I want to think about this some more.  Very interesting question.

As far as 'portability' between dreams, about the only thing I can say for sure is...some obvious things are 'portable'.  "STOP signs, for example, are an obvious.  I have had instances of the 'memory' of a note someone wrote to me in another dream, but I can't recall ever being able to call up that note to read again.  I...I...

I...I...just had to step out to eat Easter dinner with my lovely bride, so I lost my train of thought...because I am now stuffed with ham, mashed taters, green beans and wine.  Perhaps I'll regain my senses later.

All for now.

edit - I'm pretty sure the dinner was not a dream! LOL!

[NobodySpecial268]

I stopped in and a chat with the LD'er girl and her mother.

Ksihkehe. In response to the question of reading in her lucid dreams, The young lady says that she hasn't been in the position of having to. Though she says there are other people who sit at tables with pamphlets. The setting is a shopping mall.

FCD, the young lady reports there is a similar thing for her as your 'stop signs'. She saw a sign for a shop that was the 'GG' symbol which she recognised as Gucci.

For the young lady, that seems to be symbolic recognition rather than reading per se.

[TokenLiberal]

If you're only talking to yourself when you talk to people in dreams, then having sex is really just masturbation. I'm not disagreeing with you, just finishing the thought.

Of course. I have no illusions about actual intimacy in dreams. It's purely the sensory experience I'm after. Since it's impossible to do anything intellectually stimulating, what else is there to do but pursue sensory experiences? (other than the sort of "dream research" the rest of you are discussing).

[NobodySpecial268]

Of course. I have no illusions about actual intimacy in dreams. It's purely the sensory experience I'm after. Since it's impossible to do anything intellectually stimulating, what else is there to do but pursue sensory experiences? (other than the sort of "dream research" the rest of you are discussing).

Researching new fields can be intellectually stimulating, figuring out the way these things work and how to work with them is very challenging. Conventional psychology isn't always helpful and can become an impediment to progress. Even more challenging is to translate findings into plain language without the mystic jargon.

One can learn to think outside the box.

But what is 'the box' that one must learn to think outside?

Well that would be conventional thought.

In many ways dreams are five dimensional. That is to say Length X Width X Height X Inside X Outside. The dream itself is contained within the dimension of inside, and to have an inside one needs an outside. - The container and the contained. That means we can have a two-dimensional object without length width nor height.

Working these things out can be quite trippy in what it does to conventional intellectual thinking. More so to put it into practice.

Any armchair explorer can do this sort of research if they are inclined to try.