There was an effort by some Less Wrong folks to experimentally prove the safety of lucid dreaming. Did this end with any conclusive results? Can I get in touch with you guys?
Unfortunately, a bunch of reading up on the topic of tACS indicates that there aren’t any really tACS devices available which are both safe & cheap. (Which is too bad, because with an effect size like that it should both be easy to verify the effect and very useful if it pans out.)
Out of curiosity, do you suspect (let’s say with p >= .05) that lucid dreaming is unsafe? Or do you know of someone on this site who does? I’d like to know why, because I lucid dream somewhat frequently. But I don’t personally see any reason to think it would be less safe than regular dreaming, especially as I see awareness while dreaming as something on a sliding scale, not a binary “yes” or “no” question.
Learning to lucid dream, from everything I’ve read on the subject, involves progressively defeating whatever mechanism usually provides amnesia on waking.
Having too much access to memories of nonexistent events seems an epistemically unsafe thing. I have one or two memories from a lifetime of dreaming, and I cannot distinguish them from life memories by any individual texture or quality; only by the fact that they don’t cohere with my other memories. This scared me greatly.
Improving dream recall isn’t necessarily important for lucid dreaming—I practiced lucid dreaming for some years without any explicit attention to it. I can imagine ways it would be helpful: analyzing your dreams will help you recognize when you are dreaming, plus there’s not much point to a lucid dream if you don’t remember it.
My fears are more on the opposite side of things; some people advocate lucid dreaming methods where you slip directly from wake to lucid dream, but this requires passing through some rather terrifying states of consciousness I can’t bring myself to intentionally experience.
There was an effort by some Less Wrong folks to experimentally prove the safety of lucid dreaming. Did this end with any conclusive results? Can I get in touch with you guys?
Speaking of lucid dreaming, the other day I ran into some very interesting research about tACS (the dual of tDCS) being used during REM sleep to induce lucid dreaming in naive subjects with something like a 50% success rate: “Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity”, Voss et al 2014.
Unfortunately, a bunch of reading up on the topic of tACS indicates that there aren’t any really tACS devices available which are both safe & cheap. (Which is too bad, because with an effect size like that it should both be easy to verify the effect and very useful if it pans out.)
Out of curiosity, do you suspect (let’s say with p >= .05) that lucid dreaming is unsafe? Or do you know of someone on this site who does? I’d like to know why, because I lucid dream somewhat frequently. But I don’t personally see any reason to think it would be less safe than regular dreaming, especially as I see awareness while dreaming as something on a sliding scale, not a binary “yes” or “no” question.
Learning to lucid dream, from everything I’ve read on the subject, involves progressively defeating whatever mechanism usually provides amnesia on waking. Having too much access to memories of nonexistent events seems an epistemically unsafe thing. I have one or two memories from a lifetime of dreaming, and I cannot distinguish them from life memories by any individual texture or quality; only by the fact that they don’t cohere with my other memories. This scared me greatly.
Improving dream recall isn’t necessarily important for lucid dreaming—I practiced lucid dreaming for some years without any explicit attention to it. I can imagine ways it would be helpful: analyzing your dreams will help you recognize when you are dreaming, plus there’s not much point to a lucid dream if you don’t remember it.
My fears are more on the opposite side of things; some people advocate lucid dreaming methods where you slip directly from wake to lucid dream, but this requires passing through some rather terrifying states of consciousness I can’t bring myself to intentionally experience.