I know I’m not dreaming simply from the fact I can even ask if I am dreaming. When I’m actually dreaming the most random stuff can happen and I don’t even question the fact that it must be real
I think the idea is to form a habit or a tick that is so strong it carries over to your dream. So like, if you commit to wearing a watch everyday, and check it every 5 minutes, eventually you’ll do it in your dreams too. Then, you don’t have to intentionally check whether you’re in a dream, hoprfully you’ll just catch the time being wildly different and be like “holy crap this was a dream??”
Yes, that is correct. It’s one of the strategies you learn when you start diving in to lucid dreaming. Another is to look at some writing (maybe even this sign) and look away and look back, it will say something else if it’s a dream.
I got really into lucid dreaming when I was younger, but I couldn’t fly because I guess I just have no imagination, so I gave up.
I can lucid dream. Not always. And to varying degrees of success. The dream still has some control over me sometimes I and I can only do some things, like fly from danger, or decide to erase something that went wrong and do it again. Or just choose to wake up, that’s quite odd.
But there are times where I have full control and it’s god damn amazing. The ability to control space, time and narrative to my will and know there are no consequences, yet still feel like it’s real, emotions, senses.
Though often the more I have control, the closer I get to waking up, so it can be short lived, plus it has led to sleep paralysis, so tread carefully. However a weird thing that sometimes happens is I know I’m about to wake up, so decide not to and just continue dream, it’s very hard to achieve, but it’s possible.
Strangely I don’t have any techniques to lucid dream though, it’s just an innate sense I developed as a child to combat frequent bad dreams.
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Whenever dreams take a turn for the fucky, I just close my eyes in the dream and just…imagine going back in time for a “redo”. Often, the same thing will happen, so if it’s more stubborn, I’ll close my eyes and imagine something else happening. I don’t know how else to describe it, but…I mean, it’s really just that simple. And it’s not like I’m always lucid dreaming when I do it, either.
I remember one time, I actually experienced sleep paralysis. My eyes were cracked open, I could see the chair I was sleeping in, and the person at the receptionist’s desk (was waiting for some appointment), but I couldn’t move. I didn’t see any freaky demon shit or panic, I just went “Oh, shit, this is sleep paralysis, huh?”
I tried moving my limbs, but the best I could do was a weak finger twitch…until I “imagined” myself lifting my arm. I just thought of the action, the motion of my hand moving from it’s resting place on my leg to a spot in the air, and it worked. But I was still asleep. Wack.
I can get that “wait, this makes no sense, I must be dreaming!” vibe a fair few times a week, but I never know what to do once I reach that state, because then it just feels like…thinking, lol. And I prefer the random bullshit my brain comes up with by itself.
I will often turn to another character in my dream and go “this is a dream” often times they’ll agree.
Plus i can’t punch or harm anyone even when i desperately want to
Exactly why I supported your stance on kumquats, Mr President. Now hurry, the pterodactyls need you for this year’s cotton ball festival. I’ll pack the dental floss, you get on the Komodo dragon and let’s show them how a couple of old school icecreams party.
Ahhh like an old favorite of mine
DON’T PLEASE DON’T JUST COUNT YOUR FINGERS PLEASE
Genuine question, why not?
The problem is mirrors don’t have a certain appearance, they change texture based on what’s in front of them and because of that the brain doesn’t have a static model of it so the brain just mixes everything you’ve ever seen in a mirror together while trying to render it
Some people see just normal things some people see nothing and some see real fucked up shit like their face getting torn apart or something. If you panic while looking at a mirror in a dream, your brain knows what you fear way more than you
Another thing to consider is the human brain being also able to render really high quality images and animations.
Oh that’s interesting, I didn’t consider that, by the way is the brain really capable of reproducing life-like experiences or do we just fool ourselves into believing that our dreams were somehow more organic than they truly are?
I don’t know and we might never know. Brain creates the image and watches the image
But in my experience with lucid dreams objects have really high quality textures. You can even feel the bumpiness when you touch them it’s mind blowing
I hate to say it but I have an IQ of 130 maybe that’s why my dreams are extremely high quality
Only stuff with complex random patterns which you don’t see regularly in real life have sections you can’t remember. Sometimes those sections are filled with other parts of the object, sometimes they are filled with a generated pattern. These “filled” sections are generally blurry or smudgy
Some experiments I made:
- If you try to “load” a lot of these complex objects world just starts shaking and crashes.
- You don’t wake up at morning if the world crashes, you just wake up at the middle of the night. And if you have a smartwatch the sleep graph shows that you jumped from directly REM to Awake, skipping light sleep
- I set up a recording of myself saying “can you hear me inside the dream” to play while I’m in the REM cycle. You can hear the real world inside a dream even when you’re not lucid
- When you tell dream characters “you’re a part of my dream. You’re not real” they panic and scream in fear while running around which “crashes” the dream
- I generally create a “god” which helps me manage the world much easily. One time I asked that “god” to show me a color I’ve never seen. It was beautiful, kind of close to magenta but words can’t describe the beautiful color I saw there (or maybe thats what my brain wants me to think)
- Computers and phones doesn’t work. Icons and text look garbled
- Physics are glitchy. Objects fall in fixed speed unlike the real world. There’s literally no impact response. Collisions either feel like you hit an immovable object or cussions
- Light is not simulated as individual photons. In other words your brain doesn’t have RTX. Reflective objects like mirrors dont work. Turned off screens and cars simply dont reflect anything, they just look either matte or glossy.
I feel like I’m writing a bug report to god lmao
Those are my personal experiences anyways. Idk if everyone’s dreams work like that
Gold mine of a post thanks for sharing your experiences.
when you tell dream characters they aren’t real they panic and scream in fear
This one is particularly interesting, do you have any further details like what exactly they scream or why this might happen. Are dream characters psudo-sentient consciousnesses like tulpas that literally have an existential crisis when you point out the nature of their reality?
Have you ever tried to render and touch a highly complex mathematical/abstract object like the Mandelbrot set? This may be a good way to test just how much ‘resolution’ your brain can render since fractals contain infinite detail.
Well we don’t know what consciousness is yet but I think if the human brain can handle one “consciousness” it can handle multiple partial ones, especially when in dreams where your brain can run much more efficient. But as I said we need to know what consciousness is before we can answer this question
I also think multiple personality disorders prove that human brain can simulate multiple people
Some characters don’t panic and calmly ask questions like “Will I die if you wake up”, “Is my whole life a lie, am I just an actor to you”. It geniunely makes you feel bad for simulated characters inside your brain. That’s why I don’t do that much
Have you ever tried to render and touch a highly complex mathematical/abstract object like the Mandelbrot set?
Imma try that next time but it will prob just crash or look blurry. But the brain doesn’t work with maths, it’s more similar to an image generation AI
That’s actually really cool, I never experienced lucid dreams so that’s why I was asking.
I feel like I’m writing a bug report to god lmao
Got it, removing dreams altogether in the next patch, enjoy the void suckers ;)
Why doesn’t the brain just enable ray tracing ? Is it stupid ?
edit: bruh I just read your next comment and you have already kinda made the joke
If I was dreaming I would not be able to read that sign. Words would be all blurry and jumbled.
Not always, I find words perfectly legible in dreams but the text will change if I look away and look back again.
I Google stuff in my dreams all the time and it legible. But then when I submit the query it wakes me up because my brain is all like “dude you are the computer simulating this entire dream world you ain’t connected to the internet. Googling is just asking yourself the same question again”. That kind of breaks the immersion
I can never get electronics of any kind to work in dreams.
Same
So would the ⌚
Looked at my watch a minute ago and it was 2:12. Just looked again and it’s a completely different time, 2:13
Welp this day is a stupid dream I guess
I did this but with the number of fingers on my hand. I counted 12 fingers and just said oh that’s nice. Never realized it was a dream until long after I had woken up.
I also think your brain can make you think you read the same time or text etc in a dream. It might be a higher chance to go lucid though.
I pinch my nose and attempt to inhale through it, if successful, I’m dreaming.
Shoutout to my piece of shit brain that figured out that trick and decided to simulate accurate nose pinching physics.
But if you’re in control enough to pinch and inhale, are you asleep enough to be really dreaming? Or is your mind just wandering half-awake?
Personally, if I can get to “I think/hope this is a dream” I’m already starting to wake up.
And it’s usually because I suddenly recognize a familiar dream-trope, like “the reason I’m wandering this disgusting public bathroom looking for a toilet that’s not overflowing with X-crements is because I need to wake up and go pee.”
Or the one where I know I’m drowning and I can only hope it’s a dream because I’m trapped and the only way out is to die and wake up gasping.
But I can’t change my actions in the dream itself unless I’m already coming to the end of the natural sleep cycle, and then it’s basically do I wrap this up or extend it a little?
Or sometimes I haven’t fully fallen asleep and maybe I realize this scenario is at a beach or on a cruise ship or in a dock house or a half-lit indoor pool and I’m like, NOPE!
But pinch my nose, check my watch, look in a mirror? I might as well try to run.
You pinch your nose while awake as well, let’s say whenever I stop at a red light, I pinch my nose, can’t breathe, if I dream and see a red light, I’ll remember to pinch my nose based off the prior habit. The marker you leave to remind you while asleep is a habit built while awake.
Hear is an easy hack, try screaming out of fear, you won’t be able to scream or hear yourself screaming, and you will wake up on the spot.
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perseverance is key. if you keep at it a few will join you , and the rest will follow , that’s just how societies work.
I don’t wanna wake up though
Every sign has a story and I’d love to hear that one.
The guy who hung it printed it out and taped it up just before snapping the photo. Really cool story honestly.
Story: prop for internet memes
Yup. In dreams I cannot achieve anything no matter the effort. And that failure loops.
The fact that I can post this means I’m not dreaming.
Bro that’s when you’re awake
Funnily, the couple of times I do remember my dreams, my mind likes to use the changing time against me to turn them into nightmares
Bro… That’s just life and it’s called ageing.
Oh.
Nobody dreams of being in Sheffield.
I do!
Hey! it’s lovely and green, right next to the Peak District
It’s two hours from London by train and you can take a bus up to the Peak District from the city centre. There’s tons of artists and makers communities. It’s a very cool city.
I don’t wear a clock… I’m living the dream!
Maladaptive daydreaming is the best cope for real life!
I spent the first 12 years of my life or so, needing glasses without knowing, so I got good navigating rooms on instinct not sight. So now the number one way I realise I’m dreaming is when a room layout is off, even a little bit. Yay, lucid dreams.
But somehow, my phone/laptop/tech not functioning the way its supposed to never tips me off… I blame windows and Android. Boo stress nightmares.
Imagine thinking you were in Sheffield and then realizing it was just a dream. Oh the relief.
But how do I learn to start checking if I’m dreaming while I’m dreaming? I have an embarrasing and frustrating reoccurring theme in my dreams and I’d love to know how to stop it when it happens
By doing the above actually. Frequently. The idea is you do that kind of thing (a “reality check”) so often in your waking life that the checks begin to transfer over to your dreams
