deleted by creator
Carry a totem, like, say, a top.
Reality is a dream. Try to enjoy it while you’re here.
Stop wasting time on Lemmy and wake up
If you’re talking about lucid dreaming, try looking at your hands or to read some text.
I can read text in games. But games are dreams. So that’s something.
He means you wouldn’t be able to in a dream. Same for counting your fingers, most people end up having more than five when they are dreaming.
There are things your brain on dreams doesn’t do well and you can take advantage of that fact.
deleted by creator
Entirely a guess, but maybe they’re implying they believe dreaming is a simulation in the same way a game is?
deleted by creator
That’s probably more likely.
Maybe they’re already dreaming.
A game is a guided dream.
I think you and I may have different definitions of the word dream
Not OP but games aren’t real life, they’re often a power fantasy or a simplification of the world.
If the two categories we’re considering are dream or reality, I’d put games into dream.
I dunno, the comment made perfect sense to me.
Our so called reality contains lots of dream stuff. Movies, stories, abstractions… even science. Some dreams are “mere entertainment”. Some are useful (science, abstract description).
And there are links between sensation and dream. Look at a cat and your brain automatically, with no conscious effort on your part, refers to to the term “cat” and a bundle of associated thoughts.
So the line between dream and reality is fuzzier then people think.
Most cultural institutions exist in imaginary space but have incredible power over people. The state, god, heirarchy, status, identity. I definitely think the unreal is way more present in our lives than people normally accept.
I’m in art.
Almost invariably, you show them a piece, they ask “what is it?”, “what does it mean?”.
(Sometimes they even want an explanatory essay pinned to the wall next to the frame)
Because the meaning, the dream-manifestation, is more important to them than the actual experience.
For most of us, dreams are realer than reality.
the meaning, the dream-manifestation, is more important to them than the actual experience.
I’m going to be thinking over that for a while.
Back home I used to go to the annual exhibition of the top high school art students. The explanations were often long-winded, pretentious, not always super coherent. Fair enough I was too in high school. But there was one I loved. It was a very industrial looking metal sculpture of fish skeleton made of rusty engine parts, all teeth and gears. Maybe 3’x3’. The explanation was: “A fish. A big fish. A big scary fish with a motor!”
If you go down that reasoning road then everything is a dream. You are never not dreaming.
Assuming you are talking about lucid dreaming, what you want is a “Dream Check”.
In dreams, large areas of your brain are operating in alternative states. This makes things like reading difficult or impossible. Unfortunately it also makes remembering to try reading just as hard.
What do carry over well are habits. You need to do something, while awake, that won’t do anything when awake, but will in a dream. If you do this habit when awake however, you will also do it in a dream. It working acts as a trigger, you become aware of the dream state.
My personal check is to reach into my back pocket for a bazooka, or other heavy weapon. I obviously never have one, and the action looks innocuous in real life. It also has the added advantage of being excellent for nightmares. Nothing ends a nightmare faster than turning to face whatever is chasing you, while dual wielding AK47s.
At that point, the trick is staying in the dream state. Too excited, and you wake up. Too relaxed, and you fall back into passive dreaming. It’s often best to roll with the dream, and only alter small things. This lets you direct it, but not shatter it.
Happy dreaming.
The “reaching for something” is something I’m gonna do. I’ve had so few lucid dreams, two or three, and they ended after I realized that I was dreaming… After trying to stabilize the dream I don’t know why but I kept doing “random and uncontrolled” stuff.
Do you also say something when reaching out for a weapon?
The trick is not to try and control the dream too strongly. The random and uncontrolled stuff is your brain’s white noise being interpreted. By stabilising it, you are waking yourself up. Instead, be gentle. Accept the dream for what it is, at least initially. With practice, you’ll learn to recognise when a change is about to happen, and inject your preferred interpretation/solution.
As for my dream check, it’s silent. Externally, it’s just me putting my hand in my back pocket for a second or so. A spoken method would work, but would really confuse people around you.
This makes things like reading difficult or impossible. Unfortunately it also makes remembering to try reading just as hard.
I must be weird, but I can read in my dreams (and tell time, etc.)
Do you happen to have a photographic memory?
The main issue, I believe, is that we don’t store memories of text well. We also don’t have a pre-built system to go from text memory to text image. The pipeline is 1 way. Writing uses a different pathway in the brain.
A photographic memory would let your mind bypass this, and pull up real memories to fill the page.
No. I do have aphantasia, but that’s the only thing that jumps out to me as weird (in this situation; I’m plenty weird in other ways).
Maybe because I don’t “see” images or have a mind’s eye in the same way other people describe it, things work a bit differently. I still do dream vividly and visually, at least so far as I can tell.
Well, according to Waking Life, if you flip a light switch and nothing changes, you might be dreaming.
I heard that reading text is another method. If you can read text then you probably aren’t dreaming. Because if you are dreaming the text gets all weird and unreadable.
Waking Life - 2001 Film is an amazing film about lucid dreaming, reality, and the consequences of such. It really is a must watch til the end, it has one of those endings that everyone draws their own conclusions about.
On a similar note, one technique I use while lucid dreaming is to try to pass my right hands index finger through my left hands palm. If I feel and see the resistance to my skin, I know I’m awake.
I mean if I basically even touch water while I’m dreaming, I start to drown until I remember that I can breathe water because I’m dreaming. It was literally just rain, once.
That being said, I don’t go around trying to see if I drown to test if I’m dreaming.
Check your cell phone. If it works normally, that’s reality. If it’s fuzzy or does crazy things then you’re in Dreamland baby!
Or it’s time to get a new phone
Hah. Whenever I am aware that I am dreaming, I try to look in a mirror. It always does something weird. Like one time my reflection’s eyes were shut. Another time the mirror was like a window to the real world where I could see myself sleeping in bed. That was trippy.
I’ll have to try looking at my phone.
Last time I looked at my phone in a dream, the screen turned red and it started blaring the Amber alert tone, but like… in G-Major. Scared me awake, and then like 2 minutes later my alarm went off and re-scared me.
I can always tell that i’m not dreaming, i’m never really sure when i am dreaming.
- pinch your nose and try to breathe through it
- Count your fingers
- Check a clock
- Read text
- Ask how you got here.
- Ask where/what/why.
- Try to observe stillness.
- Stare at one item for way too long and watch it gain detail.
- Ask strangers impossible questions about your self.
- Close your eyes and see if you remember opening them.
- Check if text and numbers change or fail to stay tell a coherent idea.
- Do not disturb the second ones as it just wakes you up.
- Just confidently Harry Potter your ass though a wall, it will work if you convince yourself.
- Stare at your hand for too long, 5 is hard to keep track of.
- Look in a mirror and watch your brain short out a bit.
- Hit a light switch a few times, see if lights break reality.
Adding to this:
- Phones/computers never work correctly
Gosh, I have that recurring theme that I want/need to call 112 (European 911) but mistype every time… Three digits. But I will fail every time.
Trust me, you won’t fuck up if you ever need to.
How do I know? Have called multiple times.
That first one is the only one that almost never fails me.
There’s only been 3 or 4 times out of hundreds where I was like, yep, that’s normal, and didn’t become lucid.
AI image generators seem to have trouble with fingers too. I wonder if there’s a connection.
Reading text works really well for me.
When you realise that you can choose the text before you read it, you’re on the road to lucid dreaming!
if it looks ai generated, its probably a dream.
If you are reading this you aren’t dreaming. It’s hard to read text in dreams because the part of your brain that handles text processing isn’t turned on.
Hard but not impossible. I’ve read reddit posts in my dreams back when I used to doomscroll. I remember the text being hard to read but readable sometimes, especially headlines.
I think what happens in those cases is that your brain is inventing the meaning of the text and making you think you are reading it. If you actually pay close attention to the text itself it should begin to fall apart.
Yeah that’s what it seems like. Almost gets pixelated and obscured, like using the pixelate tool in a photo editor.
Yeah, my brain pulled a fuck you on me. I tried to read something in a dream (as technique to attempt lucid dreaming). My brain constructed the dream to have that text written in non-Latin alphabet.
If Kylie Minogue is in my bed it’s definitely a dream.
I hardly dream so I guess I would say “it’s a dream when I wake up afterwards”
There’s something called the “doorway effect”. Passing through doorways can break your memory. It’s a common phenomenon.
Now why did I come in here?..
The passage from dream to wake may be such a door, and the forgetfulness such an effect.
A very big door, very big effect.
I only remember them if I wake up in the middle. I bet I’m missing out on some good stories.
Meh, don’t worry about it… whatever environment you find yourself in, navigate it the best you can. Reality might be real to someone experiencing it, but it’s irrelevant to someone who isn’t.
