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Gaming affects your dreams


STiFU

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Have you ever had dreams which were basically pure nightmare but you just kept on dreaming, fighting all monsters opposing you and actually enjoyed it? Do you experience dreams with complex plots that ultimately render you a superhero or stuff like that? If so, you might just be a gamer!

 

I for one have very complex and colorful (sometimes even lucid) dreams and they quite frequently have gaming background. Recently the Aliens of Gears of War actually appeared in my dreams, although I hadn't played any Gears of War in years, and I also had the powers of Crysis. :D The next morning I woke up and thought to myself: "Wow, that was an awesome dream, but should I be worried that so many of my dreams are gaming related?" So I started search the web and on page 1 of google results were already numerous psychology publications about that matter. The following article describes PRECISELY what I am experiencing in my dreams and I am absolutely loving it.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/21/5330636/video-games-effect-on-dreams

 

That consensus of that article is that the effect of gaming on your dreams is actually a very good thing. They argue that nightmares are there for a reason. They are supposed to train you to react to horrible scenarious and while a regular person would wake up in shock, sweating, a gamer would carry on with his dream and try to find a solution, actually training his unconscious to react properly.

 

I found that very interesting and since there were already some discussions about this here a few years back, I wanted to share this with you guys,

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Dreams are fun. A couple years ago I was really into lucid dreaming for a while.

 

 

 

That consensus of that article is that the effect of gaming on your dreams is actually a very good thing. They argue that nightmares are there for a reason. They are supposed to train you to react to horrible scenarious and while a regular person would wake up in shock, sweating, a gamer would carry on with his dream and try to find a solution, actually training his unconscious to react properly.

This is one hypothesis. Competing hypotheses are that dreams are used to process events and memories, or that dreams are just "junk" from the processes that occur during REM sleep.

 

From my experience (~3 years of logging dreams), dreams closely reflect what occupies my mind, ie. what I'm thinking about day-to-day. This is roughly correlated to what happens in day-to-day life, including videogames, and anything else. The people involved in my dreams were the people on my mind, even if I hadn't seen them in a while.

What I'm getting at, is that if you think about videogames a lot, you'll probably dream about 'em.

You can call me Phi, Numbers, Digits, Ratio, 16, 1618, or whatever really, as long as it's not Phil.

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I like my dreams. I am usually in high control of everything and they very often are like exciting movies with interesting plot twists.

 

I never see nightmares or feel scared when I wake up: my dreams are a form of entertainment.

 

I do not know if it is because I'm a gamer. I love inventing plots for our tabletop rpg campaign and TDM missions... I think that hobby is more important for my dreams than simply playing computer games.

 

It is also not clear if my dreams are so well defined because I seem to have a knack inventing plots, or I have a knack inventing plots because of my dreams are so well defined...

Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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One time I had a dream where I was in front of a house. I vividly remember saying to myself, "I know this is a dream, so I'm going to break into this house because I would never get away with doing it in the real world"... and I did... and it was fun.

 

Another time I dreamed I was in a Quake CTF map. It was comprised of a bunch of tunnels, some of which were at crazy angles. I was going through giant pipes, swinging around with a grappling hook and blasting people with rockets.

--- War does not decide who is right, war decides who is left.

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It is amazing when you realize you're asleep and that you're basically neo in the matrix and can do anything and then start doing it. Truly amazing.

 

You ever see that movie, Strange Days, where they had things called "squids" or "squidies" that you put on your head and relived an experience someone had while wearing one? Like robbing a bank or getting killed falling off a building. Freaky trip. Maybe VR will be like that one day, everything created all in your mind so you lose sight of reality...hehe.

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Merry, you're a nice person and all, but that was the largest amount of poppycock I've seen collected in a single post in a long time. I realize that sounds very harsh, so below is a more constructive deconstruction of your post.

 

1. Subconscious/conscious is a false dichotomy. Yes, there are cognitive processes you are aware of and cognitive processes that you are not aware of. But they're still part of the same mind, and sometimes you can become aware of processes that you weren't aware of previously, e.g. stress and what causes it.

2. Saying that your "subconscious" is not capable of rational thought is hilarious. An "aha"-erlebnis is a solution to your problem arising from a cognitive process you're not aware of, I'm sure you've had one at some point. How in the world would this cognitive process not be able of logic? It would just serve up random bullshit if it weren't.

3. You are less aware when your sleeping, but that does not mean that sleep necessarily needs you to be unconscious. There exists a technique for inducing lucid dreams which is called WILD, and involves going directly from a waking state into a dream. You fall asleep without ever losing consciousness. It's quite an experience.

4. The process of dreaming is nebulous and there is still a lot of debate as to its function. Saying it's your subconscious dealing with problems too complex for your conscious mind is simply wild speculation.

5. Clearly you've never had a proper lucid dream. Most lucid dreams are vivid, very vivid. And with some practice, the amount of freedom you have and the experiences you can create are limitless. Yes, most beginners have issues with dream control and can't immediately do what they want. But that's akin to dismissing TDM just because blackjacking is a little tough in the beginning.

6. Numerous accounts of problem solving in lucid dreams exist. Also cool to note is that there've been studies on athletes showing improved performance when they practiced in their lucid dreams.

7. The technique you outlined for inducing lucid dreams seems to be the one involving habitual reality checks. This is just one way of inducing lucid dreams. The most popular technique is MILD, which relies on dream signs (a recurring dream thing like a contact lens multiplying) as a mnemonic aid (MILD stands for mnemonic induced lucid dream) to remember to question whether you're dreaming or not. Another technique which does not rely on habit formation at all is WILD (waking induced lucid dream), in which you do a sort of meditative/passive awareness-type-thing to go directly from waking into a dream. The WILD technique has many different forms, typically involving visualisation.

8. What you can or can't do in real life does have a big impact on your dreams. In a lucid dream, if you don't believe you can fly, you can't fly. Waking life gives you certain expectations, and dream control is all about adjusting those expectations when you're in the dream world to do what's impossible in real life.

You can call me Phi, Numbers, Digits, Ratio, 16, 1618, or whatever really, as long as it's not Phil.

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"You're a nice guy, you're a nice guy but that don't fuckin' cut it..."

 

 

It was a vastly simplified explanation to avoid the need for citation and clarification in what was already a wall of text. I completely misused the concept of the subconscious as an umbrella for a ton of separate things, for the sake of simplicity. The subconscious has nothing to do with dreams, for example: it's primarily consisted of instinct and impulse. The preconscious is the recognisably logical and cognitive storage that can be brought to the fore when needed, basically your knowledge. Stress and the like come from here too, depending on its severity and complexity. The unconscious, however, is where things we make ourselves forget go. When we repress something, the unconscious takes it to a place we can't see it work. If a child were abused by men from a young age, they would flinch or try to defend themselves when the postman raised his hand at the door as a hello in later life. The trigger comes from the conscious, the relation to the abuse from the preconscious and the inability to stop having that reaction from the unconscious, which is when you seek psychiatric help: you can't communicate with your unconscious and need someone to diagnose and cure that train of thought in it. We tie stress wave to cause, but can't stop it because of what we've got going on in the subconscious.

 

In that sense, it is an illogical and alien thought process to us, or rather the part of us we consciously think with. You're right: it does think logically when it works, but it's not a logic that we understand. Understanding that alien logic so as to better understand ourselves is the primary goal of the studies into psychology. Nobody does, really, but it's the strongest hypotheses that are taught and therefore the ones I believe. From the get-go we've no way to actually retrieve scientifically sound evidence from dreams before Paprika becomes a reality or we can read more from brain waves. As it's understood, however, the notion of free will while lucid dreaming is still considered to be artificial: you're aware that you're dreaming but neither the dream nor your own mind are of your own creation. You cannot take it into your own hands as your unconscious mind is still in control; people tend to wake up along with their conscious thoughts after a lucid dream, meaning you as you identify yourself were never really there. Were we to realise we're in The Matrix but have no way to get out of the predefined area, what do? It's a very romantic idea and we all want to talk about how we killed a dragon or fucked the neighbor in our lucid dream, but really you're as free as a dog unaware of its long leash.

 

The unconscious is derived entirely from the most profound, repressed emotions you have on you, and it's those that are the focus of your dreams. They're the focus because they're the most interesting and profound: it's entirely possible to have a dream about going to the shop for eggs but you'll most likely neither remember nor get anything from it. The 'unconscious constructs your dreams to work you through your problems' was an analogy. It is what happens, but it's not intentional, nor is it consistent: your dreams are essentially the only way to get into proper contact with the unconscious, as psychiatrists simply tell you what it's thinking and you either believe it and it sticks or you don't and you stay troubled, which is where exercises come in. Elements of the unconscious crop up in dreams, and the world therein is constructed from your preconscious, albeit with the flawed/alien logic of the deeper layers of your mind. You can recognise locations but the things your preconscious comes up blank with are filled in, and what it does remember is usually just replicated as an artist's impression. You still believe it though: it's as real as your waking world because you're not yourself, and you're told what to think and how to act so that the dream can run its course.

 

You seem to have a fair few misconceptions of lucid dreaming yourself. It isn't natural VR, nor is it in your hands to manipulate. When it takes place, you aren't in control: you cannot create your own world or do what you want in it. Most people wake up very shortly after realising they're dreaming, and conscious thought that deviates from the predetermined path of your dream will wake you up in very short order. The you you're thinking with isn't the architect of your own dreams: you can do whatever you want within the stage that was already built for you and can follow a string of related entities (such as "I'm in my childhood house as my childhood self: if I go across the road I can bang my childhood crush) if you're very practiced and don't immediately wake up, but lording over your own world? Uh-uh. "MILD" as it's called now, apparently (?) is the act of realising you're in a dream because, say, you're aware that throwing punches in dreams feels really, really weak, and you've told yourself that fact enough that when you dream you recognise it and realise you're dreaming. If you succeed, you're still in the crappy diorama that is your sleeping world. "WILD" (really? with the acronyms?) is a fancy term for sleep paralysis, and holy shit do you want to stay away from that. As a narcoleptic, I've gone through a lot of sleep paralysis, and it is NOT lucid dreaming as you know it. It is you beginning to dream while paralysed on your bed. Your motor functions have shut down and you're dreaming, but your eyes are open and you're processing the world around you while the dreams come to you in the real world as hallucinations. Don't romanticise it: it's nightmarish.

 

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So what you're saying is that you've never had a lucid dream, Merry? You should practice meditating upon something you intend to do you in your dream as you fall asleep. You'll be shocked if you achieve it because IMO at least, you can create/do/make happen, anything you want. You're totally in control and although that may be just an illusion...it is after all a dream and you're aware that it is an illusion.

 

WILD is not a fancy term for sleep paralysis and whoever stated that doesn't know what they're talking about, my opinion based on personal experience.

 

Also, how is it that some of the most practiced yogis can slow their heart rate to imperceptable levels? Controlling subconscious processes consciously? You probably don't believe that either, yeah?

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Aside: could somebody please tell me how to turn off this f**king WYSIWYG post-editing shit off? Trying to edit quotes in this "new and improved" garbage is just infuriating.

 


It was a vastly simplified explanation to avoid the need for citation and clarification in what was already a wall of text.

 

Sorry, but <numbers> is right. Your wall of text is pretty much all speculation and discredited Freudian "repressed memory" bollocks presented as fact. The true function of dreams is still largely a mystery, so claiming that you have an "explanation" is somewhere between delusion and arrogance.

 

You seem to have a fair few misconceptions of lucid dreaming yourself. It isn't natural VR, nor is it in your hands to manipulate. When it takes place, you aren't in control: you cannot create your own world or do what you want in it.

 

Actually for many people (sadly I am not one of them) this is exactly what lucid dreaming is. I'm not sure why you believe you have the authority to declare that all of them are either lying or too stupid to understand their own experiences.

 

"WILD" (really? with the acronyms?) is a fancy term for sleep paralysis, and holy shit do you want to stay away from that.

 

No it isn't. Please inform yourself of basic facts before holding forth on the meaning of terms and drawing equivalences between totally different things. Lucid dreaming has nothing to do with sleep paralysis (although it's plausible that someone who experiences one might also experience the other, perhaps even in the same night).

 

I can confirm from direct personal experience that a wake-induced lucid dream is possible, although I can only recall having one in my entire life.

 

As a narcoleptic, I've gone through a lot of sleep paralysis, and it is NOT lucid dreaming as you know it. It is you beginning to dream while paralysed on your bed. Your motor functions have shut down and you're dreaming, but your eyes are open and you're processing the world around you while the dreams come to you in the real world as hallucinations.

 

I'm sorry you've had such unpleasant experiences, but this doesn't mean that all of the people who have had positive ones are ignorant or lying.

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The problem with debating sleep psychology is that barely anything is proven. Like I said, until we have empirical evidence feeding back from dreams, it's all up in the air. You needn't assume I have ulterior motives in simplifying what I was saying to avoid jargon: it wasn't arrogance or delusion at all. Nobody has the authority to declare anything with regards to this without their own widely ranging study to back them up, which none of us have. All I can do is say what I know and what I learned through the years of studying it in uni, and that's what I did. I bunched together the things we control and the things we don't into conscious and subconscious and used them in an analogy to illustrate what appears in our dreams. It's not all there is to it but it facilitates discussion with people who haven't studied the subject. It's also the way we were taught to see it in a class that assumed we all wanted to become therapists. Granted, I could have surrounded it with [anecdote] tags, probably should have. It's incredibly cynical to see arrogance in that. Stupidity, maybe, but I'm on an insomnia bender. Sue me.

 

With regards to WILD, I've only ever heard bad things. Every experience I've heard or read about is people ending up paralysed in a waking nightmare because they got carried away, which is sleep paralysis. People talk about out of body experiences and the whole world becoming their lucid oyster which is amazing, but again there's no proof. If you succeeded, great, but having experienced the worst-case scenario of it I can't warn people away from it enough: the gain doesn't outweigh the risk in my eyes. I'm skeptical of the extent people say they've taken it to as well, but again it's just he-said-she-said. All it is to me is a nifty way to get yourself hallucinating.

 

I can't get inside people's dreams, but what I know about their nature dictates that truly conscious thought within them is a paradox. I've never seen proof to the contrary, but I'd love to know I can be the architect of my own world without waking up immediately. Don't get me wrong: I don't consider anything in this realm to be fact, but you can't rebuke me for going off the commonly accepted rather than the fanciful and the ideal. I've not once heard of somebody being able to achieve real, proper sandbox mode in their dreams that I trusted as far as I could throw them. I don't pretend for a second that that means they definitely didn't happen, I just don't believe they did. Everything I know about the nature of dreams goes against that being a possibility, so sure I'm skeptical when I hear it. Since Paprika has yet to become a reality, it's a moot point to debate on anyway.

 

@Lux I've had plenty of lucid dreams. My BA thesis was based partly on research I conducted myself with regards to the effectiveness of various reality checks. Over the course of the year I made myself develop several nervous habits that were common reality checks: pinching myself, clearing my throat in a certain way, drumming my lap and so on. The dreams were consistently washed away after maybe 30 seconds of being self-aware. Pinching was the most effective method, and I got what must have been nearly 20 lucid dreams over a couple of months. I would always realise I was dreaming, start trashing the place or going exploring or whatever, and the more I did against the status quo of the dream, the faster I woke up. Like I said, you can't do much with your freedom: you're in a pre-determined context and the more you reject that context the faster you wake up. I'm willing to believe that there's a trick that would allow someone to extend that further than I could, or that it just requires immense control or practice or whatever. All the same, the dream world is the dream world, and what I know doesn't support the presence of 100% conscious thought within it.

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Like I said, you can't do much with your freedom: you're in a pre-determined context and the more you reject that context the faster you wake up. I'm willing to believe that there's a trick that would allow someone to extend that further than I could, or that it just requires immense control or practice or whatever. All the same, the dream world is the dream world, and what I know doesn't support the presence of 100% conscious thought within it.

In my view, this should be rephrased: "Like I said, I can't do much with my freedom: I'm in a pre-determined context and the more I reject that context the faster I wake up."

 

Other wise it reads like, "Like I said, One can't do much with their freedom: You're in a pre-determined context and the more one rejects that context the faster they wake up.", which is a generalization based off of one's individual personal experience which as you are aware, certainly doesn't account for others and their experiences.

 

In either case, obviously its your opinion and relates to your personal experience with lucid dreaming.

 

It is not however, anything like the experiences that I've had where after I woke by decision, thinking...I wonder what time it is, I can't do this all night, and woke then laying in bed reflecting on the experience I'd just had and recalling all of it. This was years and years ago (probably more than 10yrs) and I can still recall over half of the experience it was so incredible.

 

I stumbled on all of this by meditation and breathing/visulization exercises at bedtime. Once in the lucid state, I was making conscious decisions about shaping the world and even got myself in to some fights with bad guys where I conjured weapons in to my hands from nothing. Lept up in to the air and hovered laughing to myself and then flew about as I pleased, across the US all the way over to the west coast over the Hollywood Hills where I observed a party on a large deck off the back of a house on the side of a hill. I landed perched in a tree and observed from some 50' or so away not wanting to "intrude" or give away my position. I flew home and back to my home and right in to bed and woke up. Deliberately.

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I was always taught that it's the context that denotes whether someone's speaking for everyone or themselves rather than the pronouns they use. I wouldn't assume for a second that somebody talking about something as wobbly as this considered themselves the voice of fact on the matter. I wouldn't take all the anecdotes in the thread as people giving their insight into the concrete nature of lucid dreaming, but that's not because of the person they refer to. Still, I'll jump out of this thread. The anecdotes are ridiculous when stood against what I've experienced and read. Similar to a religious debate, for as long as it's about lucid dreaming I've really nothing to offer that isn't skepticism.

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Anyhoo, the theory of dreaming that I always found most credible was the physiological theory, which IIRC states that that dreams are a product of the brain maintaining and building Hebbian links (which depend on trigger frequency) on concepts it's expected it may deal with in the near future, due to recent use. I don't recall the empirical case, but I thought that level of description was the right one at least , not too high level psychbabble, not too low level psychophysics babble, but right at the level of the actual kind of mechanism doing the work, Hebbian dynamics of visual cns areas.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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It's the kind of babble I was trying to avoid because I've been told off for derailing threads with jargon before, but yeah, it was one that stuck with me. It was already very much grounded in the observation of LTP resulting in the strengthening of synapses between two neurons being fired regularly and in tandem, and any foothold like that was welcome after being told "don't believe anything we tell you because we know nothing". It was also supported by the hypothesis that Hebbian potentiation is evident when awake and the pre-existing knowledge that global downscaling occurs in sleep. A point against it was that the period of 'recent use' typically didn't stretch as far as Hebbian links were observed as enduring, so while there was some correlation it obviously wasn't anywhere near approaching conclusive, as always. I always hoped that we'd get to the bottom of it in my lifetime thanks to the ridiculous progress we've been making in all fields, but now I have real doubts. Makes me wanna actually take the degree somewhere rather than parroting lecturers over the internet.

 

I'm still not here by the way. I just got baited with science.

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@STFIU: awesome, thanks. BBCode mode is back after all.

 

The problem with debating sleep psychology is that barely anything is proven. Like I said, until we have empirical evidence feeding back from dreams, it's all up in the air. You needn't assume I have ulterior motives in simplifying what I was saying to avoid jargon: it wasn't arrogance or delusion at all.

Maybe arrogance or delusion is an uncharitable interpretation, but you seem to be under the impression that there is some objective reality (even if we don't know what it is) that unites everybody's experience of dreaming, everywhere. Maybe there is, but this is itself a proposition that requires proof. It seems far more likely to me that even we discover what the true biological purpose of dreaming is, the nature of the experience for each individual is still going to vary greatly.

 

Nobody has the authority to declare anything with regards to this without their own widely ranging study to back them up, which none of us have.

In general I take the view that people's reporting of their own first-person experiences is authoritative as to the nature of the experience itself (although conclusions about objective reality derived from first-person experiences can of course be totally wrong).

 

Sure, you can take an ultra-skeptical view that "you don't really know what you are experiencing", but this is pretty useless in practice, as it rules out all study of conscious experiences that aren't empirically measurable (which is most of them), and tends towards the solipsistic position that nobody in the world except yourself actually has any subjective experiences at all.

 

I could just as well argue that since I don't like avocados I should be "skeptical" of anyone else who claims that they do like them, since my study of the nature of human taste preferences doesn't support the idea of avocados being a desirable food.

 

With regards to WILD, I've only ever heard bad things. Every experience I've heard or read about is people ending up paralysed in a waking nightmare because they got carried away, which is sleep paralysis.

Well, perhaps if you poll a group of narcoleptics who suffer from sleep paralysis you will find overlap between the two experiences, but they are really quite separate things. Sleep paralysis is (from what I've read) a half-waking state in which you are aware of the world around you and your inability to move; WILD is a full dream state in which you have no awareness of the world around you but are aware that you are dreaming.

 

Maybe there is an increased risk that you could transition from one to the other, but I don't see why this should be any greater for lucid dreaming than any other kind of REM sleep, or that somebody who has never suffered from sleep paralysis would suddenly start to experience it as a result of trying to induce lucid dreaming.

 

Similar to a religious debate, for as long as it's about lucid dreaming I've really nothing to offer that isn't skepticism.

I don't see much connection really. Religious debates are about the nature of objective reality, not just what happens inside someone's head. Of course people sometimes claim to have had religious experiences, but the source of conflict is the conclusions about the universe they draw as a result (i.e. "God exists"), not about the quality of the experience itself.

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Maybe arrogance or delusion is an uncharitable interpretation, but you seem to be under the impression that there is some objective reality (even if we don't know what it is) that unites everybody's experience of dreaming, everywhere.
No, I just fucked up in formatting it and ended up essentially saying I believed Freud was a psychic. The one thing I came away from modules on sleep and dreams with was that we really need to be funding it more because all I'd really learned was a bunch of conflicting theories with cherry-picked proof.

 

 

In general I take the view that people's reporting of their own first-person experiences is authoritative as to the nature of the experience itself [...] you can take an ultra-skeptical view that "you don't really know what you are experiencing", but this is pretty useless in practice, as it rules out all study of conscious experiences that aren't empirically measurable
I think what is empirically measurable is the recounting of experiences and the trends between them. Since the majority of information is from simple word of mouth, the accounts earn their credibility from sheer quantitative surveying. I'll readily believe the commonly reoccurring experiences because of how consistent they are, but I'll never put everything on red if an isolated or contained group of people told me I was going to win. Open-mindedness is essential with something so subjective, but too much benefit of the doubt is definitely destructive to the process in my eyes. The lack of empirical proof doesn't mean rejecting people on their lack of evidence, but the crazier and more contradictory to the norm an account is, the more skeptical I become. Maybe that way of thinking isn't appropriate here, but I think the moment we start taking down everyone's claims as both true and accurate is the moment records become as useful as a televangelist's word.

 

 

I could just as well argue that since I don't like avocados I should be "skeptical" of anyone else who claims that they do like them, since my study of the nature of human taste preferences doesn't support the idea of avocados being a desirable food.
More like "there's an isolated island out in the Pacific where nobody equipped to carry out a conclusive study can make land. The avocados there are made of solid gold but turn to sand when you leave. I saw it though, with my own eyes, and so did others on the internet." Not only does it sound too wonderful to be true, but there's also no way to verify it with the technology we have.

 

Well, perhaps if you poll a group of narcoleptics who suffer from sleep paralysis you will find overlap between the two experiences, but they are really quite separate things.
I'm not convinced: whenever I read about it while studying it was said to be simply a case of RNG as to whether you end up flying from coast to coast or having a panic attack in your bed. Yes they're referred to as something different and they're categorically not the same thing, and you'll have to forgive my strong response, but if sleep paralysis is as common a result as it seems then it's genuinely dangerous to pursue it.

 

I don't see much connection really. Religious debates are about the nature of objective reality, not just what happens inside someone's head.
They're obviously about different topics of differing natures, but they're tackled in a similarly unproductive manner. One person will stick to their guns and produce anecdotes and faith while the other can't possibly produce anything that will disprove it.
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More like "there's an isolated island out in the Pacific where nobody equipped to carry out a conclusive study can make land. The avocados there are made of solid gold but turn to sand when you leave. I saw it though, with my own eyes, and so did others on the internet." Not only does it sound too wonderful to be true, but there's also no way to verify it with the technology we have.

Yes, we do. The method by which lucid dreams have been scientifically verified (look up LaBerge's research) involves communicating from the dream to the real world via eye movements. We also have data indicating that exposing the eyes to light flashes, even through close eyelids, incorporates those flashes in the dreamworld. There's technology like the REM Dreamer to help induce lucid dreams based on this.

This, effectively, gives us a system to communicate between the researcher in the sleep lab and the dreamer. This means we can give the dreamer a certain task to execute (likely from a list of several). If lucid dreams are as you experienced them, then likely (s)he won't be able to execute the task we give him.

 

I'm not aware of any studies done on the subject though. None probably exist because most people seriously into lucid dreaming have experienced dream control.

You can call me Phi, Numbers, Digits, Ratio, 16, 1618, or whatever really, as long as it's not Phil.

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I always got the same impression from LaBerge as I did anyone talking about lucid dreaming: I'm with them up to a certain point and then it really breaks with what I'm willing to believe. Granted, he's done a lot of research to reinforce what we take for granted as fact today, but at the same time the empirical output is still very lacking the further you read. You can follow it as far as what we now know and it all rings true: the outside world feeds into dreams, you can communicate with and influence sleeping people and so on. After a point, though, it once again falls to anecdote, which is the point at which they also begin to sound properly fantastical. Writing on lucid dreaming always shows a negative correlation between progress and scholarliness: the more new ground it breaks the thinner the research becomes. I don't imagine we'll ever find a way to verify those kinds of accounts through eye movements so, until technology progresses, the extent of our abilities when lucid compared to the original nature of the dream remains a grey area.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I don't call the dreams about gaming as something lucid, but goddamnit it's horrible to try and run a badly built Dwarf Fortress in plain ASCII in a dream. There were walls of ASCII all around me and no matter how good I played, them dorfs kept dying like they always do and it was like they were all my pets and had names and I cared for them and I just kept losing them to goblins, dragons, carps whatever. I could squish a goblin char here and there but they were too many too fast...

 

I had a headache the next morning and decided it was time to ditch DF for a good, long while.

 

Funny that I usually can't remember my dreams but DF on ASCII dream is vividly still there.

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  • 5 weeks later...

Please keep your dreams private to yourselfs, thank you.

 

Because a dream is a mirror of your current mental feelings.

 

You can analyze your dreams by recalling moments of your dreams and translating the symbols, on sites such as dreambible.com.

For an example: in one of my "game" dreams, i was a pirate and saw Pirates.

Edited by freyk

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Please keep your dreams private to yourselfs, thank you.

 

Because a dream is a mirror of your current mental feelings.

 

You can analyze your dreams by recalling moments of your dreams and translating the symbols, on sites such as dreambible.com.

For an example: in one of my "game" dreams, i was a pirate and saw Pirates.

I don't disagree with the second sentence of your post, but I find the idea of universal dream interpretation to be laughable. Everyone is different and has his or her own particular "language". For instance, for some lifting weights might bring up the image of a stupid meathead on a roid rampage, but for me lifting weights is something to make you better. All strong guys I know are super nice people. If we dream about a weightroom with some dude lifting heavy weights, that might mean a different thing for you than it does for me.

You can call me Phi, Numbers, Digits, Ratio, 16, 1618, or whatever really, as long as it's not Phil.

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