If you can get yourself to the point where you can consistently induce lucid dreaming by noticing the inconsistencies and absurdities of your dream state,[1] I predict that you will become a much stronger rationalist in the process
I am going with the null hypothesis here and saying that I do not expect any difference in rationalist powers except perhaps through placebo. I’ve also been a lucid dreamer for 8+ years now and thought some people how to get into it and I’ve noticed zero improvement on any rationality-related metrics in those people. Of course none of them could do it consistently but would become lucid only once in a while.
Some do get some benefits when I observe in front of them that the fact that your brain makes you believe crazy things while dreaming is a pretty good proof of the fact that you can normally be rational and still succumb to a mental disease / false beliefs, but that’s about it.
I generally recommend to people to start keeping a dream journal (and to be consistent with it—writing every day and immediately upon waking up), to do reality checks automatically and additionally upon feeling that something could be amiss (my favorite is holding your nose and trying to breathe) and to really watch out for False Awakenings. I also often go through things that happen often in dreams (teeth falling out, being back in school, reading being weird, running being weird, etc.) and briefly mention other ways to have a lucid dream (WILDs for example). This is a short version of my usual ‘intro to lucid dreaming’ but the slightly unpacked version is enough in my opinion to start someone off (and most of what they need to know).
What I myself do is reality checks and a dream journal (although I don’t currently and my dream recall has degraded) but have tried most techniques I’ve seen on the relevant forums (mainly dreamviews.com) that have been posted before 2009-2010 back then.
I assume your methods are much more centered on rationality?
I am going with the null hypothesis here and saying that I do not expect any difference in rationalist powers except perhaps through placebo. I’ve also been a lucid dreamer for 8+ years now and thought some people how to get into it and I’ve noticed zero improvement on any rationality-related metrics in those people. Of course none of them could do it consistently but would become lucid only once in a while.
Some do get some benefits when I observe in front of them that the fact that your brain makes you believe crazy things while dreaming is a pretty good proof of the fact that you can normally be rational and still succumb to a mental disease / false beliefs, but that’s about it.
What methods did you use?
I generally recommend to people to start keeping a dream journal (and to be consistent with it—writing every day and immediately upon waking up), to do reality checks automatically and additionally upon feeling that something could be amiss (my favorite is holding your nose and trying to breathe) and to really watch out for False Awakenings. I also often go through things that happen often in dreams (teeth falling out, being back in school, reading being weird, running being weird, etc.) and briefly mention other ways to have a lucid dream (WILDs for example). This is a short version of my usual ‘intro to lucid dreaming’ but the slightly unpacked version is enough in my opinion to start someone off (and most of what they need to know).
What I myself do is reality checks and a dream journal (although I don’t currently and my dream recall has degraded) but have tried most techniques I’ve seen on the relevant forums (mainly dreamviews.com) that have been posted before 2009-2010 back then.
I assume your methods are much more centered on rationality?