I wonder what are the benefits from lucid dreaming. I read some claims that it’s possible we could gain access to some ‘hidden registry’ figuratively speaking by using methods such as lucid dreaming. However, I had a few lucid dreams in my life, all without any deliberate effort, they just happened and it’s nice to have them and all, but I don’t see myself getting out of my way to have lucid dreams. Does anyone get any substantial benefit from lucid dreaming out there?
There is a significant recreational benefit. Flying feels amazing, and while I don't lucid dream anymore due to THC supplements for sleeping, I remember being fascinated and endlessly entertained by how _real_ it felt. I also remember quickly waking up upon the exciting realization that I'm dreaming. Rubbing hands together to stabilize the dream as you feel it slipping is a strategy I remember using.
Or skipping inadvertently back into that gullible state where you take the most outlandish stuff at face value and outright forget that you're dreaming.
As other commenters have pointed out, the question itself might be pointless. The article makes the same mistake, trying to frame lucid dreaming around some supposed benefits it provides. But this craving for benefits is just a product of the ego. There’s a deeper layer to it—simply experiencing reality is already profound enough on its own. And being more aware of this beautiful reality during your lifetime, instead of literally being asleep at the wheel, is pretty amazing.
I do experience lucid dreaming ocasionally without any effort of my own and without paying for an application either. I’m trying to understand whether doing more of it benefits me in any way beyond the ocassional episodes that come naturally. Why is this pointless to you?
It is incredibly entertaining. It is the closest thing to full dive VR we can get right now and I doubt we would ever get the "realness" as close as lucid dreaming without some physical hijacking in the brain.
The world is your oyster when you are dreaming and in control. That alone is enough of a draw for many people.
For me: I used to be a tiny bit good at lucid dreaming, just for fun. Now this skill has developed back, but it's still enough to be able to wake up from annoying dreams.
Those include: being with persons you no longer want to be with, writing exams at schools and failing terribly, repeating nonsense calculation/problem solving dreams...
I enjoy it a lot, but this is definitely a downside people should be aware of if they'd like to lucid dream. It's very easy to wake up immediately once you realize you're lucid, or take forever to slip out of lucidity.
My first thought when I saw this study is that now you can seek out lucidity on nights that you know you can afford disrupted sleep.
I first sought out lucid dreaming because it helped with my sleep paralysis. It's still difficult to keep calm, but if I do manage it during an episode, it can become a much less unpleasant experience. I also haven't had nightmares in a long time as a side effect.
> I wonder what are the benefits from lucid dreaming.
Becoming lucid whilst asleep is important within Buddhism.
To my knowledge the Tibetans have developed this further than other schools (non Vajrayana) with a big emphasis on 'dream yoga' [0]. The idea within the religion being that if on your death bead you have learned to become lucid in dream then as you are dying you can fix your mind on higher realms and achieve a more desirable rebirth.
It would seem compatible with Theravada outlooks at least in principle as mentioned in Mahasi Sayadaw's Manual of Insight [1]. As well as supported by discourses such as SN 55.54 Gilāna Sutta [2].
For a slightly more secular approach (but still also from a Buddhist practitioner) you can check out Dreaming Yourself Awake [3].
[1] > "Sleep is a prolonged period of the “life-continuum” or “functional” consciousness. This is the same kind of consciousness that arises during the first and last moments of our lives."
I would think the value of lucid dreams comes from having a better understanding of your unconscious self. Aligning the conscious decisions with the unconscious desires could lead to a more satisfactory life.
I believe feeling fulfilled on one's death bed is a positive experience and feeling unfilled could be hellish.
When I was little I had a reoccurring nightmare, but one night something seemed familiar and jarred me into lucidity. I made a conscious decision to go left instead of right and it ended uneventfully, never to return. A couple times since being somewhat lucid helped end a nightmare, though I had practiced a little using the 'Waking Life' technique of testing light switches
My mind eventually started becoming half lucid during nightmares by itself. Any time I have a nightmare where something is about to hurt me, a slight lucidity kicks in and whatever threat gets nullified. Most clear example was Jurassic Park-like and I was about to be attacked by a raptor when walking into a room. My mind anticipated what it was about to do and turned the threat into a cute dog.
Been hoping I can turn that into full lucidity at some point, but that type of nightmare where it happens is rare.
That's how lucidity started for me. I was having recurrent nightmares, and gradually built up my confidence at repelling the threat with telekinesis and fire. Those "skills" evolved into having lucid dreams about once a month, for a while.
I remember in one dream, it started off on a nice beach, when awareness hit me. I looked around and marvelled at how real it all looked. I was near a wooden railing and touched it, wondering how could I ever tell the difference between a dream and reality, since it all looked and felt so solid and vibrant. Then I noticed a truck parked nearby, levitated it with my mind, and hurled it hundreds of meters down the beach.
The frequency of lucidity subsided after a while. I don't know why my brain only switched on lucid dreaming for just one phase of my life. I did have another lucid dream a week ago, the first in about four years. I was flying over a landscape and entered a surreal city, and once again marvelled at how real everything all looked.
I'm with a couple of the other commenters in this thread. It's nice to have experienced lucid dreaming at some point, and it's fun when it happens again. However, it's also kind of pointless. A healthy attitude is to appreciate restful sleep instead of craving for some useless thrill.
Every lucid dream I have becomes a nightmare. When I suddenly gain consciousness in a dream I begin to panic and the atmosphere turns sinister.
The last time this happened it turned into some kind of sleep paralysis where I became aware of my physical body but was unable to move as I crossfaded between dream and reality.
Mine have never turned into nightmares, but once I become aware that I'm dreaming and try to take control, the dream seems to fall apart and I wake up.
I've had the sleep paralysis and crossfade that you describe. But it's never psychologically unpleasant.
I've also had lucid dreams where it seems like I get stuck in a time loop and keep dreaming that I'm waking up. It feels like hours have elapsed and I've even gotten bored.
This might sound weird but what works for me is once I realize I’m lucid and the dream starts falling apart as you describe it - I quickly start spinning my (dream) body counter clockwise. In most cases this stops the awakening and I can continue lucid dreaming.
Waking up in the ”time loop” is also recurring to me, but a reality check often gets me back on track even when I’m pretty certain that I’m awake (I’m not). I usually just look at my hand. If my fingers look spooky, I’m still sleeping and can induce lucid again.
Personally every time I lucid dream I wake up a few seconds later. As soon as I realize I'm conscious, I directly remember the existence of my physical self, the feeling of my arms, my legs in my bed which directly wakes me up
Interestingly enough I've had the opposite experience. If I'm having a nightmare, usually at some point I realize it's a dream, and from there I can almost always force myself to wake up immediately. It rarely happens for me in a regular dream but when it does I can start to control the scenario to some degree.
While I believe this can just happen to some people, in my case it was a result of sleep apnea. Getting diagnosed for it and taking remedial steps has been a life changer for me.
I've had both lucid dreams (which was enjoyable) and sleep paralysis before. The paralysis was not a fun experience at all, and sounds a lot like what you describe.
I've only had the sleep paralysis a couple times thankfully, and anecdotally the last time I had woken up in the middle of the night beforehand, remembered something I needed to do on my computer, took care of it in a dark room real quick, then went back to sleep. I suspect the sudden bright light and a bit of stress probably contributed to it happening.
I we have our own folklore about it too. I believe a good percentage of alien abduction experiences are in fact attributable to sleep paralysis phenomena. Alien abductions are as real to us as night hags we're to our predecessors.
My experiences in lucid dreaming and "astral travels" are a bit like Lovecraft's Hypnos story, since in this altered state of lucid dreaming I could turn to have an experience of spiritual search, looking for those dark places that nobody wants to visit, like feeling invisible barriers that I would not dare to do again. In short, when this becomes a habit, you can control the experiences emotionally to force yourself to have a more hyper-realistic experience sensorially speaking, but the side effects are to feel a strong neural connection, so it is common if something goes wrong to have dream paralysis and experiences totally full of glich, but once you wake up you know that this is fantasy, although in the dream state it is impossible not to believe it.
That’s way more deep than my lucid dreams which are exactly like my regular dreams, except I can control what happens in them, like being in a movie I’m also directing and writing.
Usually it’s just something like I’m at a restaurant but I can just eat whatever I want because I know it’s just a dream and I can make it a different kind of restaurant instead if I want. I certainly never had anything spiritual about it.
I think a good way to describe my lucid dreaming is it’s just like day-dreaming, but immersive because it feels like I’m actually there experiencing it instead of just thinking about myself experiencing it.
It seems very likely that it's possible to force people into lucid dreaming. However, it seems that any external methods rely on external cues during REM sleep and I'd worry that in doing so you might be subtly reducing quality of REM sleep.
I've wanted to make my own 'app' for a wearable device that i can trigger to vibrate for X seconds at Y intensity every Z minutes... to find the sweet spot for lucid dreaming. I only dig a quick look but didn't see any easy mode APIs for the wearables, for the vibrating feature
I once met a guy whom I told I some times had lucid dreams. He replied matter factly - lucid dreams don't exist, with the same of contempt you'd tell a creationist that God doesn't exist. I said they do exist because I've had them before. At this point from his look he must believe I'm perhaps trolling him, like I'm claiming that I can fly or become invisible. After a lot of back and forth and a lot of condescension from him, he eventually admits he doesn't know what a "lucid dream" is. So he just thought it meant something like "I have visions in my dreams and they predict the future", and assumed that's what I meant without even bothering to check.
You wouldn't believe the kind of stupid people you meet at physics conferences.
i want to do a data dump here. did you ever wonder how its possible that you can experience vivid, real-time non-scripted (so to speak) events that are totally lifelike? how is it possible to do that without sensory input generating the images and sounds? i thought about this a lot and there is only one answer that fits: the human mind generates a model of the world and everything in it, your experience of the world is actually happening inside of this model. when you are awake, your mind looks at the world thru sensory organs and updates the model accordingly which gives the illusion that you are directly experiencing the world. but in reality there is a middle man. this is why so many aspects of the dream world kind of half-work. like clock hands changing position. your mind isnt designed to operate without having information fed to it, so it can only predict so much and you get a kind of semi-logical state of world within this internal model. most of what you experience is not as real as you think, although the minds model is designed to track and predict reality as well as possible.
but theres more to the story. there were reports of people using a drug called ISRIB, russians mostly, a few years ago. its a drug that impacts the latency of cells, turning on cells that have gone latent due to injury... or for any other reason, reasons we may not be aware of. this drug is basically used in labs in cultures and is very new. people arent supposed to take it. but some people had it synthesized and they tried it anyway of course. most of them reported extremely life-like dreams. one person reported having waking dreams that were so real that even while totally and completely lucid, she was not able to tell that she was dreaming. she was pretty shaken up by it based on the chats. i think she described it as experiencing total insanity. but this tracks. when you are asleep, your model is not firing on all cylinders. part of the reason why the world is "unrealistic" is because your brain is not working as hard as it could to fill in the model in a coherent way. think about the experiences that schizophrenics have, seeing in full fidelity people and things that are totally non existent. all of these considerations together point to the fact that we inhabit models of the world rather than experiencing sensory stimuli directly.
I wonder what are the benefits from lucid dreaming. I read some claims that it’s possible we could gain access to some ‘hidden registry’ figuratively speaking by using methods such as lucid dreaming. However, I had a few lucid dreams in my life, all without any deliberate effort, they just happened and it’s nice to have them and all, but I don’t see myself getting out of my way to have lucid dreams. Does anyone get any substantial benefit from lucid dreaming out there?
There is a significant recreational benefit. Flying feels amazing, and while I don't lucid dream anymore due to THC supplements for sleeping, I remember being fascinated and endlessly entertained by how _real_ it felt. I also remember quickly waking up upon the exciting realization that I'm dreaming. Rubbing hands together to stabilize the dream as you feel it slipping is a strategy I remember using. Or skipping inadvertently back into that gullible state where you take the most outlandish stuff at face value and outright forget that you're dreaming.
Pretty amazing when is works, though
As other commenters have pointed out, the question itself might be pointless. The article makes the same mistake, trying to frame lucid dreaming around some supposed benefits it provides. But this craving for benefits is just a product of the ego. There’s a deeper layer to it—simply experiencing reality is already profound enough on its own. And being more aware of this beautiful reality during your lifetime, instead of literally being asleep at the wheel, is pretty amazing.
I do experience lucid dreaming ocasionally without any effort of my own and without paying for an application either. I’m trying to understand whether doing more of it benefits me in any way beyond the ocassional episodes that come naturally. Why is this pointless to you?
It is incredibly entertaining. It is the closest thing to full dive VR we can get right now and I doubt we would ever get the "realness" as close as lucid dreaming without some physical hijacking in the brain.
The world is your oyster when you are dreaming and in control. That alone is enough of a draw for many people.
MXE/k holing is slightly closer to feeling like reality, and much higher resolution if you get good at controlling it.
For me: I used to be a tiny bit good at lucid dreaming, just for fun. Now this skill has developed back, but it's still enough to be able to wake up from annoying dreams.
Those include: being with persons you no longer want to be with, writing exams at schools and failing terribly, repeating nonsense calculation/problem solving dreams...
I actually dislike lucid dreaming; it's not as restful and it's often difficult to return to restful sleep once you're aware.
I enjoy it a lot, but this is definitely a downside people should be aware of if they'd like to lucid dream. It's very easy to wake up immediately once you realize you're lucid, or take forever to slip out of lucidity.
My first thought when I saw this study is that now you can seek out lucidity on nights that you know you can afford disrupted sleep.
I first sought out lucid dreaming because it helped with my sleep paralysis. It's still difficult to keep calm, but if I do manage it during an episode, it can become a much less unpleasant experience. I also haven't had nightmares in a long time as a side effect.
When it happens nearly every time you go to sleep, it gets rather tiresome (I’ll show myself out)
Seriously though, I wish I could turn it off. Almost every single night. No thanks.
Edit: When it gets to be that common, it really starts to mess with your memory of things.
> I wonder what are the benefits from lucid dreaming.
Becoming lucid whilst asleep is important within Buddhism.
To my knowledge the Tibetans have developed this further than other schools (non Vajrayana) with a big emphasis on 'dream yoga' [0]. The idea within the religion being that if on your death bead you have learned to become lucid in dream then as you are dying you can fix your mind on higher realms and achieve a more desirable rebirth.
It would seem compatible with Theravada outlooks at least in principle as mentioned in Mahasi Sayadaw's Manual of Insight [1]. As well as supported by discourses such as SN 55.54 Gilāna Sutta [2].
For a slightly more secular approach (but still also from a Buddhist practitioner) you can check out Dreaming Yourself Awake [3].
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62191734-the-tibetan-yog...
[1] > "Sleep is a prolonged period of the “life-continuum” or “functional” consciousness. This is the same kind of consciousness that arises during the first and last moments of our lives."
[2] https://suttacentral.net/sn55.54/en/sujato?lang=en
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13151218-dreaming-yourse...
I would think the value of lucid dreams comes from having a better understanding of your unconscious self. Aligning the conscious decisions with the unconscious desires could lead to a more satisfactory life.
I believe feeling fulfilled on one's death bed is a positive experience and feeling unfilled could be hellish.
When I was little I had a reoccurring nightmare, but one night something seemed familiar and jarred me into lucidity. I made a conscious decision to go left instead of right and it ended uneventfully, never to return. A couple times since being somewhat lucid helped end a nightmare, though I had practiced a little using the 'Waking Life' technique of testing light switches
My mind eventually started becoming half lucid during nightmares by itself. Any time I have a nightmare where something is about to hurt me, a slight lucidity kicks in and whatever threat gets nullified. Most clear example was Jurassic Park-like and I was about to be attacked by a raptor when walking into a room. My mind anticipated what it was about to do and turned the threat into a cute dog.
Been hoping I can turn that into full lucidity at some point, but that type of nightmare where it happens is rare.
That's how lucidity started for me. I was having recurrent nightmares, and gradually built up my confidence at repelling the threat with telekinesis and fire. Those "skills" evolved into having lucid dreams about once a month, for a while.
I remember in one dream, it started off on a nice beach, when awareness hit me. I looked around and marvelled at how real it all looked. I was near a wooden railing and touched it, wondering how could I ever tell the difference between a dream and reality, since it all looked and felt so solid and vibrant. Then I noticed a truck parked nearby, levitated it with my mind, and hurled it hundreds of meters down the beach.
The frequency of lucidity subsided after a while. I don't know why my brain only switched on lucid dreaming for just one phase of my life. I did have another lucid dream a week ago, the first in about four years. I was flying over a landscape and entered a surreal city, and once again marvelled at how real everything all looked.
I'm with a couple of the other commenters in this thread. It's nice to have experienced lucid dreaming at some point, and it's fun when it happens again. However, it's also kind of pointless. A healthy attitude is to appreciate restful sleep instead of craving for some useless thrill.
I don't know. It just feels nice to fly, for once.
Supposedly it is easy to go from lucid dreaming to astral travel.
unless its one and the same
Every lucid dream I have becomes a nightmare. When I suddenly gain consciousness in a dream I begin to panic and the atmosphere turns sinister.
The last time this happened it turned into some kind of sleep paralysis where I became aware of my physical body but was unable to move as I crossfaded between dream and reality.
Mine have never turned into nightmares, but once I become aware that I'm dreaming and try to take control, the dream seems to fall apart and I wake up.
I've had the sleep paralysis and crossfade that you describe. But it's never psychologically unpleasant.
I've also had lucid dreams where it seems like I get stuck in a time loop and keep dreaming that I'm waking up. It feels like hours have elapsed and I've even gotten bored.
This used to happen to me as well.
This might sound weird but what works for me is once I realize I’m lucid and the dream starts falling apart as you describe it - I quickly start spinning my (dream) body counter clockwise. In most cases this stops the awakening and I can continue lucid dreaming.
Waking up in the ”time loop” is also recurring to me, but a reality check often gets me back on track even when I’m pretty certain that I’m awake (I’m not). I usually just look at my hand. If my fingers look spooky, I’m still sleeping and can induce lucid again.
Personally every time I lucid dream I wake up a few seconds later. As soon as I realize I'm conscious, I directly remember the existence of my physical self, the feeling of my arms, my legs in my bed which directly wakes me up
Interestingly enough I've had the opposite experience. If I'm having a nightmare, usually at some point I realize it's a dream, and from there I can almost always force myself to wake up immediately. It rarely happens for me in a regular dream but when it does I can start to control the scenario to some degree.
I would suggest doing a sleep test.
While I believe this can just happen to some people, in my case it was a result of sleep apnea. Getting diagnosed for it and taking remedial steps has been a life changer for me.
When the Apple Watches start monitoring for it, you’re going to see sleep apnea diagnosis skyrocket.
I've had both lucid dreams (which was enjoyable) and sleep paralysis before. The paralysis was not a fun experience at all, and sounds a lot like what you describe.
It's apparently common enough that there's folklore around it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_hag
I've only had the sleep paralysis a couple times thankfully, and anecdotally the last time I had woken up in the middle of the night beforehand, remembered something I needed to do on my computer, took care of it in a dark room real quick, then went back to sleep. I suspect the sudden bright light and a bit of stress probably contributed to it happening.
I we have our own folklore about it too. I believe a good percentage of alien abduction experiences are in fact attributable to sleep paralysis phenomena. Alien abductions are as real to us as night hags we're to our predecessors.
My experiences in lucid dreaming and "astral travels" are a bit like Lovecraft's Hypnos story, since in this altered state of lucid dreaming I could turn to have an experience of spiritual search, looking for those dark places that nobody wants to visit, like feeling invisible barriers that I would not dare to do again. In short, when this becomes a habit, you can control the experiences emotionally to force yourself to have a more hyper-realistic experience sensorially speaking, but the side effects are to feel a strong neural connection, so it is common if something goes wrong to have dream paralysis and experiences totally full of glich, but once you wake up you know that this is fantasy, although in the dream state it is impossible not to believe it.
That’s way more deep than my lucid dreams which are exactly like my regular dreams, except I can control what happens in them, like being in a movie I’m also directing and writing.
Usually it’s just something like I’m at a restaurant but I can just eat whatever I want because I know it’s just a dream and I can make it a different kind of restaurant instead if I want. I certainly never had anything spiritual about it.
I think a good way to describe my lucid dreaming is it’s just like day-dreaming, but immersive because it feels like I’m actually there experiencing it instead of just thinking about myself experiencing it.
App the article is about: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neurelectr... Doesn't install on recent android versions though
Another argument for every public funded thing should be open source.
Developed for an older android version, so I cannot use it.
It seems very likely that it's possible to force people into lucid dreaming. However, it seems that any external methods rely on external cues during REM sleep and I'd worry that in doing so you might be subtly reducing quality of REM sleep.
I've wanted to make my own 'app' for a wearable device that i can trigger to vibrate for X seconds at Y intensity every Z minutes... to find the sweet spot for lucid dreaming. I only dig a quick look but didn't see any easy mode APIs for the wearables, for the vibrating feature
If you do this, please sell it as an intensive sleep retraining device, a la the Thim.io device except not garbage.
I once met a guy whom I told I some times had lucid dreams. He replied matter factly - lucid dreams don't exist, with the same of contempt you'd tell a creationist that God doesn't exist. I said they do exist because I've had them before. At this point from his look he must believe I'm perhaps trolling him, like I'm claiming that I can fly or become invisible. After a lot of back and forth and a lot of condescension from him, he eventually admits he doesn't know what a "lucid dream" is. So he just thought it meant something like "I have visions in my dreams and they predict the future", and assumed that's what I meant without even bothering to check.
You wouldn't believe the kind of stupid people you meet at physics conferences.
i want to do a data dump here. did you ever wonder how its possible that you can experience vivid, real-time non-scripted (so to speak) events that are totally lifelike? how is it possible to do that without sensory input generating the images and sounds? i thought about this a lot and there is only one answer that fits: the human mind generates a model of the world and everything in it, your experience of the world is actually happening inside of this model. when you are awake, your mind looks at the world thru sensory organs and updates the model accordingly which gives the illusion that you are directly experiencing the world. but in reality there is a middle man. this is why so many aspects of the dream world kind of half-work. like clock hands changing position. your mind isnt designed to operate without having information fed to it, so it can only predict so much and you get a kind of semi-logical state of world within this internal model. most of what you experience is not as real as you think, although the minds model is designed to track and predict reality as well as possible.
but theres more to the story. there were reports of people using a drug called ISRIB, russians mostly, a few years ago. its a drug that impacts the latency of cells, turning on cells that have gone latent due to injury... or for any other reason, reasons we may not be aware of. this drug is basically used in labs in cultures and is very new. people arent supposed to take it. but some people had it synthesized and they tried it anyway of course. most of them reported extremely life-like dreams. one person reported having waking dreams that were so real that even while totally and completely lucid, she was not able to tell that she was dreaming. she was pretty shaken up by it based on the chats. i think she described it as experiencing total insanity. but this tracks. when you are asleep, your model is not firing on all cylinders. part of the reason why the world is "unrealistic" is because your brain is not working as hard as it could to fill in the model in a coherent way. think about the experiences that schizophrenics have, seeing in full fidelity people and things that are totally non existent. all of these considerations together point to the fact that we inhabit models of the world rather than experiencing sensory stimuli directly.
I just want some good rest, not to experience a different reality doing bs work in my head