I read a book about lucid dreaming a while back, and it said something like: the easiest way to tell you are in a dream is to look at something mechanical or complicated.
The idea seemed to be: if you could get your dreaming mind to look at your hand and then turn it over to the other side, you didn't have the mental 'bandwidth' to imagine the opposite side correctly, and you'd realize you were dreaming.
Equally, if you were around a bicycle in a dream, and tried to look at the gearing mechanisms etc., it just wasn't possible for your brain to generate that level of detail; it would just change the bicycle into an elephant or what-have-you.
I never got to lucid dreaming, but did notice a similar thing happening. So, I always found it interesting how the mind might switch from internal 'concepts' to external 'reality' in a way that isn't readily available to 'conscious' thought.
Not really going anywhere with this, but if 'AI' can generate better bicycles than our dreaming minds, then…
The method I found to work most consistent in getting to a lucid dream is to wear a wristwatch with a vibrating alarm (noisy alarm clock makes you too awake) and then set it to wake me after I've slept something like 4-5 hours. Then I'll be really tired and fall asleep again almost immediately, but when I'm falling asleep fast it's easier to notice and focus on hypnagogic patterns. Hypnagogic pattern are patterns of light you can see behind your eyelids as you fall asleep and then they become more and more focused until they turn into a dream. It's hard to keep the focus, but doing after waking up just slightly from a vibrating alarm clock and then not moving the body at all, makes it much easier as the patterns then come really fast and quickly turns into a dream and if you manage to keep the focus you basically just go from being awake and straight into a lucid dream. The problem is it fucks up sleep a bit, so should have a few hours extra to sleep in the morning.
This is 100% the most effective way to do it for anybody interested in trying. It doesn't even take all that much practice. I got it on my second attempt.
I'd disagree slightly about how awake you want to get though. Obviously don't turn on any lights or stand up. But force yourself to be awake for enough time to get your bearings or you are going to lose consciousness too early.
Oh man I had that for the first time a few months back when I couldn't sleep for like 50 hours or so and it freaked me out as someone who doesn't visualize
I used to lucid dream regularly (need to get back to it - it's a lot of fun). I used a reality check where I would try to (lightly) blow air through my nose when my hand was closing it off. If I could I was dreaming. I did this randomly during my waking hours every so often when I had some indication that something was different and I needed to test reality.
Whenever I would come semi-aware when I was dreaming I would do this reality check and realize I was lucid and could do what I want. The interesting part to me is that blowing air through my nose and hand twigged me to the fact that I was dreaming, but the technicolor mega-gorilla screaming at the sky and throwing laser bolts did not.
It's amazing how casual the weirdest things are in dreams. For example my wife had a dream where an old women was sitting on stairs, she folded herself, became a hand, which climbed the stairs and disappeared. And it was OK but just weird enough to remember.
I had chronic sleep paralysis for many years. One thing I eventually figured out is that I still had control over my breathing, and I could hyper-ventilate myself awake. Sleep pararalysis then stopped either because I aquired that skill or because I stopped eating gluten.
Huh I actually don't recall ever having control of my breathing actually. Can wiggle wiggle a few fingers/toes and muted scream and some eye control is all I got i think.
Most of the time when I'm dreaming it never even occurs to me that I might be in a dream until I wake up.
I have even had some cases where it did occur to me, and I started lucid dreaming (which was very cool), but then I reverted to my default this-must-be-real dreaming state. That was very weird.
I've only ever lucid dreamed under conditions of extreme stress, nightmares where am being chased by murders etc.
For example I had this dream where I was the guy who got killed in the last bit of The Ring (they think things are OK but Sadako comes for him anyway) and then I was able to lucid dream, control it and beat her up.
I usually become highly aware I’m dreaming when I’m able to kind of float around (not fly, more like low gravity mixed with a near-floor hovering) but the “wow” of it turns into “this is just reality, no big deal” so fast I never get a chance to try to consciously shape the dream.
I can relate heavily. The recurring ability to hover by kicking my legs around is profoundly liberating and a deeply familiar sensation at this point. Dreams feel like living a parallel life :)
The ability to levitate in dreams is very useful, because dreams typically are unable to make your legs actually move. Thus, the feeling of walking is not easily fantasized realistically, and immobility of the main character is not something that many the unpaid screenwriter will refuse to take lying down.
I would look at my hands in lucid dreams and they would appear in extreme detail, as if I could comprehend both its general form as well as every single grove in my fingerprints. I’m pretty sure I tried to turn them over and was able to see all around them.
One thing I find fascinating about dreaming is that it seems that the dream wants to prevent you from staying lucid. When I become aware that I am dreaming I “wake up” and start going about my day, only to realise I am still dreaming, at which point I “wake up” again, and this cycle continues. This is a perceptual barrier that can be broken through, at which point you instantly gain hyper awareness awareness and control over you dream.
> the dream wants to prevent you from staying lucid
What we consider waking life, reality, etc. is the same. The mechanism of the hypnosis is the constant identification with phenomena, which creates the sense of being a person, which is nothing more than a conceptual abstraction.
Recently I switched from taking a lions mane supplement in capsule form to mixing some powder into my morning tea, since I can get the powder for far less $$ and it's usda organic on top of it.
For some reason this has resulted in persistent lucid dreaming before waking up, daily, for over a month now. The capsules rarely caused this, but something about the tea seems to be affecting the bio-availability, or maybe the powder is just different.
Whatever the root cause, it's been quite fun. But a bit distracting as it makes completely waking up difficult, now that there's this incredible interactive mind-movie I'd rather continue playing vs. start my day...
It does seem like a state of mind worth exploring with some potentially huge utility if mastered. I can't produce such immersive and vivid visuals to navigate mental models in my regular conscious thinking. I'd much rather do the equivalent of lucid dreaming to navigate things like interplaying algorithms and data structures for example.
Have you noticed any differences in your ability to form internal imagery while awake? There’s a post on Reddit where the subject appears to have had that ability affected by Lions Mane.
I read a guide that suggested looking at your hands - that night I dreamt and recalled that and it worked. I guess most people do not see their own hands accurately while dreaming and it acts as a cue.
My thinking is not coherent enough while asleep to run all those experiments. A few times I've asked "am I dreaming?" in dreams, but following any step-by-step process after that thought is just not in the cards. My thought patters are just as disjointed as the scenery and events "inside".
Look at the time or look at letters. They are all fractal gibberish if you look at them closely during dreaming.
But that might just be part of the dream.
I’ve more than once floated into letters that would reveal more and more shapes just like zooming animations of fractals. But it hasn’t caused me to realize it was a dream, let alone take control of it.
Lots of crazy and spacey things happens in dreams, that you just accept.
Light switches and steering wheels never work properly in my dreams. I have to concentrate really hard to get things to follow the rules. Then I wake up.
Nope, nope, nope. Light switches never work properly in my own dreams either, but I find that testing the lights or just even noticing they aren't working is a guaranteed one-way trip to night terror land, even in adulthood. Not even realizing I'm dreaming is enough to stop it at that point.
The technique a few people mentioned of looking at words or writing and then looking away and looking back is pretty effective for me. You would have to have some reason to suspect you were dreaming first.
I can do it, I first figured it out when I was 6 or 7, but why? Might be better to just get some sleep.
Just a few nights I had such happen during a dream in which I was playing cards with three or for opponents. I was counting the cards played, and I realized that I had played a card that I had not been dealt. Refusing to believe that I was cheating, I deduced that I were dreaming and awoke at once. But I cannot explain the stack of chips that I found on my night table.
Another way to tell is to try to read things or look at a clock/numbers in your dream. Often time the information will not make sense, and will change if you look away and back.
I've done this myself once or twice in a dream and I actually was able to tell I was dreaming but the shock of my realization woke me up.
> Often time the information will not make sense, and will change if you look away and back.
Yeah, I've done that a few times and it's been reliable for me.
One time I remember, I was absolutely sure I was awake, so I did the "reading text" test, I read something, looked at something else, then read the thing again, they went "Wait, those aren't the same words. Ah, crap."
I've had dreams where I found myself traveling and was presented with maps (in one my car had a HUD where I saw the map on the windshield as I was driving) that seemed to be quite accurate when I recalled them after waking. Even freeway signs with names of towns, roads and freeway numbers that matched reality.
Unlike most I can see things in great detail, including text in my dreams. Consistency in time is absolute mess, for sure, but then again, I don't find this odd to begin with. In fact I kind of expect this. As in I realize I'm dreaming, and yet I don't.
The method that works most reliably that no one talks about is to pinch your nose closed and try to inhale through it. If you’re dreaming, you can still inhale through a pinched nose. Always a useful check to perform before hurling yourself off a cliff to see what it feels like.
I've tried that but am always foiled; the bike falls over or I'm distracted at the last minute by something else within the dream. Its like the mind is creating excuses not to wake up.
This also reminds me of some theories I've seen that sleep (e.g. mostly sessile behavior) is the biological default for Earth life, and being "awake" and highly mobile is itself a specialized adaptation.
I see a few problems with that. For example that we can freely act and think in reality but cannot in (non-lucid) dreams. Things like meditation seem more convincing.
Though it is an interesting thought experiment, which implies that we evolved much farther than necessary for dreaming simply because the environment outside dreams as an energy source is so competitive, to a point we're now able to create different kinds of alternate realities as well. Which as so often leads to questions like the purpose of our existence.
To me the idea that dreams exist in order to let the brain filter out unimportant experiences from the day before - or highlight important ones - seems more plausible, especially considering sleep deprivation can lead to hallucinations and more, I don't think this can be explained purely with other processes like the self-cleaning mechanisms of the brain during sleep.
I think it's an interesting potential answer to the ongoing question of "why do we have dreams, what evolutionary purpose do they serve?" Maybe the answer is that they do not need to serve any purpose because dreaming is actually the default mode - "normal" consciousness is the adaptation. From that perspective the evolutionary purpose (of normal rational consciousness) is obvious.
Just musing here but I wonder if that line of thought could shed light on how non-sapient animals experience consciousness as well.
My (uninformed!) theory is that dreams are just what brains/neurons appear to do when the driving signal (thought) is mostly disconnected, but the filter (interpretation) is still active.
I.e. just neural noise, following pathway patterns by biological necessity, but shaped into conceptual patterns by our overactive pattern matchers which do a ton of work to arrange input into a limited set of "observations".
If that's true, nothing we ever dream is truly novel, but just assembled or permuted from the giant set of our own known or imagined pieces.
Which seems pretty consistent with my dreams, at least. And it explains the phenomenon be being unable to recognize the dream state without altering it. Heisendreams!
I can tell you from firsthand experience that dogs dream. Some dogs "talk" in their sleep, move their legs as if walking or running -- the sequence from Cinderella (1950) when Bruno is dreaming of chasing Lucifer is only a slight to moderate exaggeration. A dreaming dog is definitely in a place far removed from waking life -- perhaps one where steaks grow on trees and blood-soaked frisbees fly through the air for no reason.
I have a pet theory that holds that primarily attentive ADHD (ADHD-PI) is actually a facet of the type of autism that used to be called Asperger's.
And that ADHD, generally, is an extension just outside of the autism spectrum: possibly bridging into it with ADHD-PI if not the other ADHD classifications.
One of ADHD-PI's most noticeable traits is virtually uncontrollable daydreaming. When auditory / cognitive fatigue or fast-arriving boredom sets in, for example.
Asperger's theory is plagued by glut. Which makes the condition challenging to accurately comprehend, but at the same time doesn't necessarily imply that a lot of the theory is incorrect. Instead, it may imply complexity. Which makes sense given that this condition isn't acquired but instead is characterized by divergent brain architecture and talent / cognitive resource re-parsing from "normal". Similar in concept to an RPG game.
One facet of this glut of Asperger's theory is the school of thought that hypothesizes that Asperger's is some kind of evolutionary forward expression of a type of intelligence. Which is both generous and an unusually positive take within the glut of theory, ignoring for a moment any negatives.
My hypothesis adjusts this a bit, and proposes that Asperger's may be a type of genetically de-selected (low reproduction chance) contribution of a specific intelligence type. Which may have existed in human populations from the beginning. Implying that Aspergian intelligence, which may be associated with an increase rate in daydreaming, isn't so much a forward evolution but a population mainstay that may serve some type of function in the sense of low-rate genetic contribution.
Say having to do with visual processing that implies advanced talent in pattern processing specifically.
Some human intelligence academics, who are not involved in Asperger's research, place emphasis on pattern processing as the possible heart of it.
I can think of obvious reasons as to why whatever group genetic "intelligence" governs genetic evolution, as well as the roughly equal reproduction ratio of men and women as another example, would "want" to bias human evolution as much as possible away from a high rate of human-specific-intelligence gain. Possibly smoothing it out away from purely Aspergian expression and blending it, over time, with our other natures and talents.
They state that generally females are diagnosed adhd-pi higher, but there may be other factors. However, Females are generally diagnosed less with autism:
(From wikipedia) "Several theories exist to explain the sex-based discrepancy, such as a genetic protective effect,[7][8][9] the extreme male brain theory[10][11] and phenotypic differences in the presentation between sexes,[9][12][13][14] which may all be intertwined. Researchers have also debated whether a diagnostic gender bias has played a role in females being underdiagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.[15] Researchers have also speculated a gender bias in parental reporting due to the expectations and socialization of gender roles in society.[16]"
Thought I would indulge your theory, and give more food for thought.
It’s not just the visual processing aspect but also the ability to assemble completely novel mental imageries. There’s a link between those with ADHD and having hyperphantasia, or having extremely vivid imaginations. Can someone daydream if they can’t imagine objects?
Yes. I have ADHD, chronically daydream and have aphantasia.
You don't need to see things with your inner eye to be able to conjure them in your fantasies. Daydreaming is just being preoccupied on something that only exists in their mind. It's not a strictly visual phenomenon.
>When I am dreaming, I am receiving images/stories that are produced for me, not really by me
This can really only be partially true for lucid dreaming, though, right?
Maybe all dreaming is really just lucid dreaming. We're all usually just in some kind of split-brain patient situation where around half our brain is "lucidly" controlling a dream and the other half just goes along for the ride.
A lot of dreams are just kinda nonsense, but some I've had are pretty clearly well-thought-out metaphors for things that are happening in my life. Somebody or something pretty smart that knows a lot about me had to have come up with it.
> This can really only be partially true for lucid dreaming, though, right?
I've had a lot of lucid dreams over the years (starting when I first was prescribed medication to help me sleep when I was a kid, where I'd have them several times a week, and gradually becoming less common over the years to maybe once a month). At least in my experience, being aware that I'm dreaming gives me the ability to choose how to act, the ability to force myself to wake up, and occasionally the ability to break minor "physics" rules (I pretty commonly find in lucid dreams that I can hover a few inches above ground and float around that way instead of walking), but I've never experienced the ability to change my environment, and the "people" in my dreams I interact with continue to act independently.
Obviously my dreams are entirely a creation of my own mind, so some part of my brain is in control of it, but being aware of that isn't sufficient to let me control it arbitrarily any more than I can stop myself from feeling physical pain or disliking the taste of some food in real life. Ultimately, we're not really in "full" control of how our mind and body react to real-life stimulus either; if we were, things like depression and phobias wouldn't exist.
Dreaming is the condition where the parts of your brain required to form memories, and to have consciousness are active enough to participate and take part in what the other awake parts of your brain are doing while the sleeping parts like sensory input and motor control are shut down. We already know the brain creates an active predictive model of the world that is what we experience, so it makes sense the brain can continue creating that model when asleep and untethered from sense input.
I once trained myself to recognise if I was dreaming by looking at something in my dream, looking away and looking back again. If the thing I was looking at had changed in any way, I was dreaming. This allowed me to partly shape my dreams, so I can’t totally buy the conjecture that senses are what’s taking the dream machine. Another thing supporting this is the fact that I could let my body fall asleep while keeping my consciousness awake. Even though the senses are technically shut off (sleep paralysis), I was not dreaming. I think the fact that dreaming is similar to generative models has more to do with how we learn shapes, and that is by learning sub shapes and categories of shapes. My theory is that that’s also how long term memory works. Instead of storing the full senses senses at that moment, parts of those senses are replaced by concepts/sub shapes.
All of the suggestions here for conducting certain "physical" or mental tests to know if you're dreaming or not presuppose that you're capable of enough self awareness to realize you might be dreaming, and act on your suspicions. For most of us, being inside a dream, no matter how surreal, feels like being in another concrete reality in which it doesn't even occur to you to test its falsehood, because you take its realness as a given.
And what probably gives us awareness or consciousness is the multiple GPT like structures running in parallel. It really does make me wonder if we are really close to true AGI. It does feel like it.
Very exciting times! Just hope we don't end up doing a Terminator.
Oddly enough, we've been saying that since... The Terminator. NN's and LLM's are cool but not even close to the power of the human brain (maybe quantum llm's?). I'm keen to see how we can tap into our own minds as CPU's or at least drivers thereof. Consciousness is awareness and perception so one could say we are close to a rudimentary consciousness but we have a long way to go before it's aware.
Still, even though we've been saying it for 30 years, exciting times indeed! #skynet
> LLM's are cool but not even close to the power of the human brain
There are only 20 Billion Neurons in the Neocortex. GPT-3 has 175 Billion. GPT-4 scores 130 on IQ tests. They are absolutely in the realm of the power of human brains. They're just exposed to different stimuli and have very narrow input/output.
> There are only 20 Billion Neurons in the Neocortex. GPT-3 has 175 Billion.
No, parameters are loosely analogous to synapses (they are weights on the connections between neurons) not neurons, and the neocortex is not the whole of the brain. There are about 140 trillion synapses in the neocortex, 600 trillion in the brain. And neural connections may not explain the brain's capacity, as mutual interaction with other body systems is involved.
> GPT-4 scores 130 on IQ tests.
Methodological issues (or simply methodological unclarity) with the reports of GPT-4 test results aside, IQ tests do not directly test general intelligence, even under the assumption that g is the same thing as general intelligence. They are a proxy which works for testing that in humans, because in humans the capacities directly tested by them correlate with g. We have no idea what IQ testing results of LLMs, even conducted appropriately, mean, if anything.
> They are absolutely in the realm of the power of human brains.
No, to steal from Pulp Fiction, an LLM and a human brain “ain’t even the same f###ing thing. […] Ain’t no f###ing ballpark neither. […] It ain’t the same league. It ain’t even the same f###ing sport.”
I hope this isn’t true. I’m in my 50s and I have never dreamed. By that I mean, I have never woken up from sleeping and remembered anything happening between the time I fell asleep and I awoke. It’s a complete blank. Maybe I do dream, but I have no proof or indication that I do. I never have.
As a side note, it really bothers me when dreaming is used as a plot device in books. I can’t relate at all to the concept of dreaming and remembering the dream.
People who go under anesthesia routinely have significant amounts of time where they are conscious and interacting with doctors, that are completely lost to memory. Everyone is configured uniquely, and you could just be someone whose memory is more shut off during sleep and still be "dreaming", if we just define dreaming as the brain continuing to operate on its model of the world in some capacity while sleeping.
There are devices made to detect and disturb you (with light, vibrations, etc) during REM sleep, to help with lucid dreaming. If you want to experience a dream, something like that might help, with the fairly safe assumption that you do enter REM sleep.
I didn't realize this until I had kids and my sleep became constantly disturbed, but the only times I'm consciously aware of my dreams are when I'm awoken during the dream. If I am given the chance to have a peaceful night, then it's just an instantaneous time shift from falling asleep to awake with nothing in-between.
So I could see how one of these types of devices could be handy to gently bring the consciousness out of deep sleep.
Interestingly enough, I could be considered the opposite. Having aphantasia, I've never had a mental image, but I have very vivid dreams. Talking to my dad, he only dreams in black and white. It's just awesome the variability we humans have.
> Childhood exposure to black-and-white television seems to be the common denominator. A study published this year, for example, found that people 25 and younger say they almost never dream in black and white. But people over 55 who grew up with little access to color television reported dreaming in black and white about a quarter of the time. Over all, 12 percent of people dream entirely in black and white.
> Go back a half-century, and television’s impact on our closed-eye experiences becomes even clearer. In the 1940s, studies showed that three-quarters of Americans, including college students, reported “rarely” or “never” seeing any color in their dreams. Now, those numbers are reversed.
If you're really curious you could use the Salvador Dali method: hold cutlery in your hand. When you sleep, you drop the cutlery and wake up from the noise. Repeat until hallucination.
Don't worry about it. There are no such things as dreams; they're the brain bullshitting itself when you wake up in an inconsistent state. If you have a very complicated or imaginative life, your brain has to do a lot of work at night doing a very lossy compress of everything interesting that happened that day. If your sleep is restless or interrupted, you're more likely to still be in this process when you awake. Your mind can then attempt to rationalize how it reached this state [edit: filled with malformed images, associations and features that lack wholes.]
If you have some combination of a life of habit and adequate rest, you'll less often fool yourself into thinking you dreamed. If you immediately start writing when you wake up, you'll fool yourself into thinking you have the most elaborate and profound dreams ever, although you'll code this as remembering.
Dreams are so insubstantial that we very recently believed that everybody dreamed in black and white, and that dreaming in color was a sign of mental illness. This is a belief that faded completely and quickly alongside the rise of color tv and film. The implications of this are pretty devastating. People themselves believed they only dreamed in black and white, and later largely forgot that this was their experience.
edit: so I disagree with the OP. There are no dreams, only recollections of dreams. When you look at the "dreamlike" imagery of generative AI, you're looking at something similar to what awake people construct dreams from, not dreams themselves.
Very interesting, but how do lucid dreaming could exist if there's nothing more than remembering? Are we, in fact, just remembering we've been lucid ? (and, thus, haven't really been?)
I find this notion hard to reconcile with the occasional phenomenon of recalling the contents of an earlier dream only after several hours of having been awake.
That’s exactly what I’ce been exploring with this dream journal that is generating images in order to match your brain visualisation during sleep https://driary.com/
Given that this might be so, wouldn’t it be even more apt to adopt Geoffery Hintons Forward Forward Algo which emphasises teaching the neural network the difference between dream data and real data at the neurological level.
I liked it (unusually enough for some random blog) so I'll volunteer my take on it.
Remember how Stable Diffusion works? It's essentially noise reduction cranked up to eleven. You train a neural network to clean up slightly noisy images. When it gets good at it you turn up the noise a notch and repeat. You keep doing that until the network will look at pure noise and "repair" it into an image of whatever.
Animal brains have to do something similar, because our senses suck. Take our eyes; the part of your field of view which is actually in focus is tiny [1], so you are constantly updating an internal 3D model of the world, one small patch at a time [2], interpolating between patches and editing out things like your nose to replace it with a hallucination of whatever it happens to be occluding (except right now, because I reminded you of it).
In this sense, what you "see" is not so much the real world as a hallucination guided by your sensory input.
What happens when you reduce the information content of that sensory input, either by making it "unstructured" [3] or by removing it altogether [4]? Same thing that happens to Stable Diffusion when you present it with pure noise: it hallucinates freely.
So it makes sense that lying down on a comfortable bed in a dark, quiet room and shutting your eyes - all steps toward sensory deprivation - should have a similar effect.
Is intelligence even intelligent? Only thinking creature and you use your brain for murder machines. Sounds so intelligent. Everything here for everyone, yet some greedy pigs feel more deserving. Intelligence, more like a waste of human life. Intellectuals and computers have been a giant circle jerk. You couldn't support your own weight.
The idea seemed to be: if you could get your dreaming mind to look at your hand and then turn it over to the other side, you didn't have the mental 'bandwidth' to imagine the opposite side correctly, and you'd realize you were dreaming.
Equally, if you were around a bicycle in a dream, and tried to look at the gearing mechanisms etc., it just wasn't possible for your brain to generate that level of detail; it would just change the bicycle into an elephant or what-have-you.
I never got to lucid dreaming, but did notice a similar thing happening. So, I always found it interesting how the mind might switch from internal 'concepts' to external 'reality' in a way that isn't readily available to 'conscious' thought.
Not really going anywhere with this, but if 'AI' can generate better bicycles than our dreaming minds, then…