Controlling your dreams for fun and science

Originally published at: Controlling your dreams for fun and science | Boing Boing

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fun and science

Match made in Math heaven.

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Great! looking forward to when scientists can figure out how to turn dreaming into “productive time” so that the workweek can be extended. In all seriousness though, as far as I know we still don’t really fully understand the biological purpose of dreaming, and I could imagine lucid dreaming being an interruption of some important process that requires a lack of conscious control.

Then again, it could be once we can all do it, it will be like culture-wide psilocybin microdosing and we collectively figure out how to chill the fuck out and stop hoarding wealth and power and destroying each other.

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Cool! I love lucid dreaming. I mostly fly around, pretty basic but extraordinary.
After my covid jabs I had a few nights of super vivid lucid dreams. I read somewhere vivid dreams were a common side effect, the lucidity was a bonus.
Looking forward to my booster shot!

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I can lucid dream quite frequently, although the degree of control varies.
For example, one skill that has grown more effective as I’ve gotten older is If I become conscious I’m dreaming of something unpleasant and/or boring, I can often reset my dreamstate and kind of switch channel by nearing wakefulness.

Never had much luck with the “debauchery” side though, and I suspect that’s a good thing. If I could control when I had naughty dreams and how much control I had in them, I suspect I’d spend a LOT more time asleep.

Even when my dreams get fairly risque, there’s always something weird enough about them to never go fully raunchomatic.

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I have had periods of overwork where I would dream I solved a work problem, and be bummed that I had to do it again in the morning.

But that’s better than the fever dreams where I am constantly debugging code, stepping into an infinitely deep call stack and never finding the issue.

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In the late-1980s/early-1990s my girlfriend bought a book about lucid dreaming. I’ve always been a prolific dreamer and found the techniques in the book to be pretty effective and work quickly. You have to be careful though, because, once you perfect the techniques, you find yourself wanting to sleep all the time in order to induce lucid dreams.

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I’ve managed to realise that I’m dreaming before, but I had no control over the content of my dream at all. I remember thinking “oh cool, I’m lucid dreaming, now I can try flying!” and whatever I tried, I remained stubbornly on the ground.
That was a long time ago tho, maybe I should try again.

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