I seem to have this aversion to what I find myself calling “full lucidity”; that is, I don’t like breaking an ok dream situation to become god-emperor, and I don’t usually have anything specific in mind that I want to do before falling asleep (sometimes I get something vague, and those work out so rarely that I could paste my notes on those happening in an LW comment).
That aside, I tried to sciencify my dream-plotting starting April 2012 (I did something vaguely similar in 2005 and wrote a terrible paper on it). Some things of note:
Understanding the context of “How did I get here, and does it make sense?” is incredibly difficult. When I managed to force myself to start asking this, I just found myself “remembering” more absurd backstories; for example, wondering why someone from college was at my highschool led me to think “Of course, it all started with an adventure on a pirate ship...”
Trying to force anything to happen in dreams with advanced planning, short of mastering full lucidity, almost never works. I got something somewhat like this to happen once (by trying to imagine how it would work if it was a dream until I wound up in a shallow sleep), and another from the end of August 2013 on which I took very few notes and don’t quite remember how it happened other than it was a slow process with lots of deliberate universe-building in the falling-asleep process.
For a while, I got very good at the “check numbers for consistency” technique. Once, I tried to repeat this experiment several times and remember the details for when I woke up, while attempting to will the numbers to appear a certain way. I only remembered a few of the target-result pairs by the time I started recording them in real life, but the results were pretty clear (It was a serious struggle to get the exact numbers I wanted, but I could consistently get very close, within 1-3 of the target).
Visual details. My vision nosedived in the second half of 2002, and dream vision took much longer to decline, until the present, where it’s rarely any better than real life. I made a conscious attempt to study this and try to improve visual sensation in dreams, and my conclusion is that I can force very crappy visuals to happen when lucid, but it takes a lot of effort and isn’t all that worth it. However, if I’m in a situation where I need visual information, or the information is most obviously obtained visually (especially if there is time pressure), then visuals are much more vivid. Examples include reading numbers on a TV screen, needing to memorize the positioning of different-colored fireworks (that one involved a time-turner and had the clearest colors in quite some time), reading a map and checking my arm for marks that wouldn’t stick out to touch.
Body map! I only remember altering this intentionally for sure once, and that was a situation where I was trying to go full lucid because the original dream was boring and I was feeling sciency (I turned myself into a giant spider, was deliberately vague about individual appendages, and completely failed to pay enough attention to my mouth parts to successfully eat a captured fly). Dreams have screwed with my body without lucidity quite a lot, though; I’ve been physically younger, have mysteriously had certain body parts multiply, etc; these tend to return to present-realistic if I ever go lucid, though (I once attained lucidity in the middle of a dream whose first half had me in second grade, and I’ve tried and failed at changing genders). There are two examples I can think of that might subvert this trend, but how lucid I was in either is not so clear; there was one that I deliberately prolonged by focusing on music when I realized I was about to wake up and the plot was unfinished, and that was a deaged situation. A more recent one felt less lucid, though did involve me calling on Yahweh (by name) a couple times, once to get me to a bridge I couldn’t find, and once to save me and someone else from falling off a ladder (we were both approximately 6 years old). (To make the rationality, or lack there of, weirder in this case, I wound up calling to Yahweh only after my father abandoned me, once by going across the bridge without me, the second time by straight-up vanishing, which I assumed was because he woke up. I mentioned enough of this after waking to confirm that he didn’t have the same dream, so this dream-me was clearly mistaken regarding quite a few things. Also, the deaging in that one came after a lengthy alternate present sequence.).
I kinda feel like I ramble about this too much whenever the topic comes up. Maybe I could just start a “dream experiments” blog so I can keep my LW comments shorter in the future?
I agree. I also find regular dreaming more interesting than lucid dreaming. Regular dream worlds tend to be more vivid and detail rich. Even without exercising the “god powers”, simply breaking character tends to ruin it for me. With increasing lucidity, the dream gradually stops throwing stuff at me that I don’t intentionally create, and the mental effort of creating interesting things on purpose tends to 1) disintegrate portions of the hallucination that I’m not attending to and 2) wake me up.
I seem to have this aversion to what I find myself calling “full lucidity”; that is, I don’t like breaking an ok dream situation to become god-emperor, and I don’t usually have anything specific in mind that I want to do before falling asleep (sometimes I get something vague, and those work out so rarely that I could paste my notes on those happening in an LW comment).
That aside, I tried to sciencify my dream-plotting starting April 2012 (I did something vaguely similar in 2005 and wrote a terrible paper on it). Some things of note:
Understanding the context of “How did I get here, and does it make sense?” is incredibly difficult. When I managed to force myself to start asking this, I just found myself “remembering” more absurd backstories; for example, wondering why someone from college was at my highschool led me to think “Of course, it all started with an adventure on a pirate ship...”
Trying to force anything to happen in dreams with advanced planning, short of mastering full lucidity, almost never works. I got something somewhat like this to happen once (by trying to imagine how it would work if it was a dream until I wound up in a shallow sleep), and another from the end of August 2013 on which I took very few notes and don’t quite remember how it happened other than it was a slow process with lots of deliberate universe-building in the falling-asleep process.
For a while, I got very good at the “check numbers for consistency” technique. Once, I tried to repeat this experiment several times and remember the details for when I woke up, while attempting to will the numbers to appear a certain way. I only remembered a few of the target-result pairs by the time I started recording them in real life, but the results were pretty clear (It was a serious struggle to get the exact numbers I wanted, but I could consistently get very close, within 1-3 of the target).
Visual details. My vision nosedived in the second half of 2002, and dream vision took much longer to decline, until the present, where it’s rarely any better than real life. I made a conscious attempt to study this and try to improve visual sensation in dreams, and my conclusion is that I can force very crappy visuals to happen when lucid, but it takes a lot of effort and isn’t all that worth it. However, if I’m in a situation where I need visual information, or the information is most obviously obtained visually (especially if there is time pressure), then visuals are much more vivid. Examples include reading numbers on a TV screen, needing to memorize the positioning of different-colored fireworks (that one involved a time-turner and had the clearest colors in quite some time), reading a map and checking my arm for marks that wouldn’t stick out to touch.
Body map! I only remember altering this intentionally for sure once, and that was a situation where I was trying to go full lucid because the original dream was boring and I was feeling sciency (I turned myself into a giant spider, was deliberately vague about individual appendages, and completely failed to pay enough attention to my mouth parts to successfully eat a captured fly). Dreams have screwed with my body without lucidity quite a lot, though; I’ve been physically younger, have mysteriously had certain body parts multiply, etc; these tend to return to present-realistic if I ever go lucid, though (I once attained lucidity in the middle of a dream whose first half had me in second grade, and I’ve tried and failed at changing genders). There are two examples I can think of that might subvert this trend, but how lucid I was in either is not so clear; there was one that I deliberately prolonged by focusing on music when I realized I was about to wake up and the plot was unfinished, and that was a deaged situation. A more recent one felt less lucid, though did involve me calling on Yahweh (by name) a couple times, once to get me to a bridge I couldn’t find, and once to save me and someone else from falling off a ladder (we were both approximately 6 years old). (To make the rationality, or lack there of, weirder in this case, I wound up calling to Yahweh only after my father abandoned me, once by going across the bridge without me, the second time by straight-up vanishing, which I assumed was because he woke up. I mentioned enough of this after waking to confirm that he didn’t have the same dream, so this dream-me was clearly mistaken regarding quite a few things. Also, the deaging in that one came after a lengthy alternate present sequence.).
I kinda feel like I ramble about this too much whenever the topic comes up. Maybe I could just start a “dream experiments” blog so I can keep my LW comments shorter in the future?
I agree. I also find regular dreaming more interesting than lucid dreaming. Regular dream worlds tend to be more vivid and detail rich. Even without exercising the “god powers”, simply breaking character tends to ruin it for me. With increasing lucidity, the dream gradually stops throwing stuff at me that I don’t intentionally create, and the mental effort of creating interesting things on purpose tends to 1) disintegrate portions of the hallucination that I’m not attending to and 2) wake me up.