A surface-level summary of my work from the past 5-10 years in one sentence: Trigger-action planning is better when supported by prospective memory training.
I think I became at least a little wiser reading this sentence. I know you’re mostly focused on other stuff but I think I’d benefit from some words connecting more of the dots.
i’m not exactly up for “connecting the dots” as i conceptualize that, but i’m happy to say whatever words happen to come to me after i finish typing this sentence.
[eta: the following paragraph is superfluous. feel free to skip it.]
i was kinda trying to write a novel, and over the years i’ve read a buncha books on how to do that, but i realized i’d been reading books with an extremely intellectual/design-based/outlining perspective on novel writing, so i thought i should read at least one book that was not like that. i read /from where you dream/ by Robert Butler. his thesis is that good writing comes “from the same place as dreams”, as in the hallucination things you have when you’re asleep. and he goes on about this for the length of a quite excellent book. i liked what he said enough that i thought i’d try his approach for a week, and i liked that enough that i decided to devote myself to it for a month. during the course of that month, i found myself taking Robert Butler a lot more literally than i think he intended; i decided that if i was really going to write “from where i dream”, then why on earth was i trying to do all the work while i was awake? if the idea is to let dreaminess into waking life or something, then perhaps consciousness should try collaborating with dreaminess while i’m actually asleep. so i started to learn lucid dreaming.
it turns out that Stephen LaBerge, the head honcho of contemporary western lucid dreaming research, prescribes a curriculum that looks a hell of a lot like my naturalism curriculum, and it starts with prospective memory training—or what you probably think of as “noticing”. on the first day, notice whenever you see an animal. on the second day, notice whenever you write anything down. etc. and each time you notice your target, that’s your cue to perform a “state check”—a test of whether you’re awake or dreaming. there’s an important psychological component to state checks, but my favorite physical action for state checks is to pinch my nose and try to breathe. (in dreams, i can breathe just fine with my nose and mouth closed off.) once you’re pretty good at choosing to learn to notice an arbitrary target experience category like “flowers” or whatever, then you can look through your dream journal for common dream signs (for me these include flying, or having long hair, or tornados), and then when you set the intention to state check in response to encountering a dream sign, you stand a chance of actually doing it.
there are a whole buncha other techniques and strategies that can help with lucid dreaming, but this seems to be far and away the most popular and effective. (the second most popular and effective is probably “imagining in great detail what it is like to become lucid in a dream”, which also sounds like my naturalism stuff.)
why do our curricula have this in common? i think it’s because in lucid dreaming, it’s pretty obvious that you can’t count on your intellect/system 2/deliberate reasoning/etc. to be online while you’re asleep, so whatever method of “planning” or “intending” you rely on is going to have to operate by some other route. in LeBerge’s field, the reason for this is transparent: you’re asleep when the critical moments arise. you have to be so good at state checks that you can literally do them in your sleep.
although my naturalism stuff targets (mostly cognitive) behaviors in waking life rather than in dreams, it sort of says “look, if you really want to know something, don’t try to know it with your waking mind. learn it with your sleeping mind, and then it’ll be in you for real. it’ll be part of you, you won’t just be holding abstract concepts at a distance and thinking about them. if you wanna change how you see the world you’ll have to go way deeper than the intellect. you’ll have to be able to notice the critical moment while you’re asleep and then in that moment wake yourself up enough to do something about it.”
so i, too, tell people that if they can perform a simple action each time they smell something, they’re already most of the way done.
A surface-level summary of my work from the past 5-10 years in one sentence: Trigger-action planning is better when supported by prospective memory training.
I think I became at least a little wiser reading this sentence. I know you’re mostly focused on other stuff but I think I’d benefit from some words connecting more of the dots.
i’m not exactly up for “connecting the dots” as i conceptualize that, but i’m happy to say whatever words happen to come to me after i finish typing this sentence.
[eta: the following paragraph is superfluous. feel free to skip it.]
i was kinda trying to write a novel, and over the years i’ve read a buncha books on how to do that, but i realized i’d been reading books with an extremely intellectual/design-based/outlining perspective on novel writing, so i thought i should read at least one book that was not like that. i read /from where you dream/ by Robert Butler. his thesis is that good writing comes “from the same place as dreams”, as in the hallucination things you have when you’re asleep. and he goes on about this for the length of a quite excellent book. i liked what he said enough that i thought i’d try his approach for a week, and i liked that enough that i decided to devote myself to it for a month. during the course of that month, i found myself taking Robert Butler a lot more literally than i think he intended; i decided that if i was really going to write “from where i dream”, then why on earth was i trying to do all the work while i was awake? if the idea is to let dreaminess into waking life or something, then perhaps consciousness should try collaborating with dreaminess while i’m actually asleep. so i started to learn lucid dreaming.
it turns out that Stephen LaBerge, the head honcho of contemporary western lucid dreaming research, prescribes a curriculum that looks a hell of a lot like my naturalism curriculum, and it starts with prospective memory training—or what you probably think of as “noticing”. on the first day, notice whenever you see an animal. on the second day, notice whenever you write anything down. etc. and each time you notice your target, that’s your cue to perform a “state check”—a test of whether you’re awake or dreaming. there’s an important psychological component to state checks, but my favorite physical action for state checks is to pinch my nose and try to breathe. (in dreams, i can breathe just fine with my nose and mouth closed off.) once you’re pretty good at choosing to learn to notice an arbitrary target experience category like “flowers” or whatever, then you can look through your dream journal for common dream signs (for me these include flying, or having long hair, or tornados), and then when you set the intention to state check in response to encountering a dream sign, you stand a chance of actually doing it.
there are a whole buncha other techniques and strategies that can help with lucid dreaming, but this seems to be far and away the most popular and effective. (the second most popular and effective is probably “imagining in great detail what it is like to become lucid in a dream”, which also sounds like my naturalism stuff.)
why do our curricula have this in common? i think it’s because in lucid dreaming, it’s pretty obvious that you can’t count on your intellect/system 2/deliberate reasoning/etc. to be online while you’re asleep, so whatever method of “planning” or “intending” you rely on is going to have to operate by some other route. in LeBerge’s field, the reason for this is transparent: you’re asleep when the critical moments arise. you have to be so good at state checks that you can literally do them in your sleep.
although my naturalism stuff targets (mostly cognitive) behaviors in waking life rather than in dreams, it sort of says “look, if you really want to know something, don’t try to know it with your waking mind. learn it with your sleeping mind, and then it’ll be in you for real. it’ll be part of you, you won’t just be holding abstract concepts at a distance and thinking about them. if you wanna change how you see the world you’ll have to go way deeper than the intellect. you’ll have to be able to notice the critical moment while you’re asleep and then in that moment wake yourself up enough to do something about it.”
so i, too, tell people that if they can perform a simple action each time they smell something, they’re already most of the way done.
What is prospective memory training?
This says “remembering to do things in the future.”