Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 140 posts

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#111

Post by heywire »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #85
djsumdog wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I should try that next time. I rarely realize I'm in a dream (that I can remember), and whenever I do ... I just try to make out with everyone. It's a lot harder than you'd think! At least for me, even when I realize I'm in a dream, it becomes incredibly difficult to direct anything that's happening.

A good way to realise you’re dreaming is to look for “dream tells”, which vary from person to person but often include: text being hard to read, clocks showing the wrong time, mirrors not working quite right, not being able to remember how you got where you are, things changing appearance when you look away and look back, that sort of thing. Unless you’re well practiced with lucid dreaming, you probably won’t be able…

The clock/text thing works really well for me. I’ll read a line of text, look away, then read it again. If it seems to have changed, I’m dreaming. Same thing with the clock. If it behaves erratically, I’m probably dreaming.

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#112

Post by thisiszilff »

mjburgess wrote: post #50
goodroot wrote: post #47

Fascinating. I have a keen interest in Shamanism and more patience for "woo-woo" here than most. Navigating your dream state is a mighty Shamanic concept. It is one of two Shamanic practices that people here will entertain. The other is the idea of the memory castle. New technological approaches like this will help us peel back the veil of the tangible, 'ordinary' realities of which we are comfortable. The world will…

I think the converse is true, no? That the shamanic practices will be pealed back, to reveal the familiar reality of scientific investigation. I've had many lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, etc. "Navigating your dream state" seems really just like a lucid dream. You're pretty much able to create a life-like world at whim in a lucid dream. The ability of the mind to hallucinate sensation in great depth is tremendous, an…

I don't think science will be able to say as much on the subject as one would like. "Navigating your own dream state" is a person making decisions about a world they themselves have created. There isn't much room for an objective observer there. In general, I don't think science is ever going to get a grip on consciousness. The whole "self observing the self" business makes it way too slippery a concept to get a grasp on in any satisfactory manor.

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#113

Post by Nition »

DavidSJ wrote: post #100
tauntz wrote: post #98

> Ideas were not coming from me, they were just passing through my head This might sound like I'm crazy but this brings back memories of a strange experience from some years ago that I can't really explain other than "coincidence".. but in the light of this article I started to think.. is it? Me and my gf were really tired and both exactly in this "almost sleeping but not quite" state. We were lying down with our hea…

Consider an alternative hypothesis? In your hypnagogic state, your brain actually produced an image based on what she described to you, then reordered the chronology of events so that it seemed to you like you imagined the image before she described it. Not too dissimilar from deja vu. It's well known that brains can sometimes reorder the chronology of events, especially if they occur within a short time window.

I was thinking even simpler: Maybe she started talking about the orange ball earlier, but he was asleep (or mostly asleep) at that point, and so started dreaming about it. Then he woke up at the last bit of the story.

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#114

Post by orodley »

komali2 wrote: post #55

>“Ideas were not coming from me, they were just passing through my head,” one subject reported. Is consciousness even real, man? Great books if you wanna chew on basically (for now) unanswerable questions: Peter Watts' "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia." Neal Stephenson's "Anathem."

Lots of Greg Egan's work deals with consciousness. For example, "Permutation City" is great.

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#115

Post by tedeh »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #87
chipuni wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article isn't about lucid dreaming. It's about the liminal state. It can take months of active practice to have lucid dreaming. The liminal state takes about five minutes to learn. The article has a story about Thomas Edison dropping balls on the floor; this works well.

Yeah, I’m quite experienced with lucid dreaming, but this particular hypnogogic state is something I actually try to avoid lingering around in, because it’s very uncomfortable for me. The process of falling asleep feels like having my mind squeezed through a narrow gap, surrounded by random proto-thoughts like fragments of words and images. I wonder if that’s just my perception of the lower frontal lobe activity they…

Not to mention feeling the conscious control of your breathing slipping away. That was always a slightly freakish experience for me when I used to do lucid dreaming in my teens.

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#117

Post by dvtv75 »

jl2718 wrote: post #94
donttrack wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypnagogia.. Didn't hear that word before. I get that a lot and tried to explain it to other people, but nobody seem to understand what I am talking about. It feels like I am dreaming while I am still awake in some kind of transitional state, where I am not conscious and also not asleep. It is not the same as lucid dreaming, which I had a couple of times also.

That moment when your brain falls asleep in class and tells you it unveiled the deep connection between carnival blister peanut texture and the quantum variational bound. And then you wake up suddenly and get scared because you think you might have yelled out something stupid. Or maybe I’m just the only one.

My brain fell asleep in class once, and my head slipped off my hand. The noise of it hitting the desk woke me up again.

Everyone heard that one for sure!

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#118

Post by spraak »

moj wrote: post #110
be_jenk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love some reading recommendations on these topics if you would be willing to recommend anything.

"The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep" by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is excellent. The terminology can feel alien or intimidating, but if you're receptive you can see results quickly. Bonus: The author & his organization give many workshops, in the US and abroad, even online.

Awesome to see someone else familiar with Rinpoche. I came in this thread to mention it. Also worth noting is that they have two Youtube channels [1] [2] that they regularly share guided meditations from.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvtLfdR8gIVmdVVYsDcon_A [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/ligmincha

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#119

Post by rangibaby »

veli_joza wrote: post #2

I was introduced to this phenomenon through Kurzweil's book "How to create a mind". He claims that the brain is massively parallelized pattern recognition machine, with consciousness being a censor that filters results. While in hypnagogia, this censoring function is suppressed and you are able to make "unthinkable" connections between ideas you normally think are unrelated. Of course, you should just take notes of t…

My favorite use of Hypnagogia is to find things that I have lost around the house. It's able to pull memories out of your brain that you can't usually access (analogous to backup tapes in your garage I guess).

When I was younger I was able to make music by counting beats in my head with a hi-hat just before I hit a hypnagogia state. I knew I was there when the hi hat would keep counting even after I stopped consciously doing counting, then an entire analog and digital orchestra in my brain would start playing wonderful tunes. Of course I could never remember them after, but it doesn't matter.

Re: MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

#120

Post by cecilpl2 »

jl2718 wrote: post #94
donttrack wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypnagogia.. Didn't hear that word before. I get that a lot and tried to explain it to other people, but nobody seem to understand what I am talking about. It feels like I am dreaming while I am still awake in some kind of transitional state, where I am not conscious and also not asleep. It is not the same as lucid dreaming, which I had a couple of times also.

That moment when your brain falls asleep in class and tells you it unveiled the deep connection between carnival blister peanut texture and the quantum variational bound. And then you wake up suddenly and get scared because you think you might have yelled out something stupid. Or maybe I’m just the only one.

I have this too. Suddenly I realise that each line of code I am writing is a doorway to a different parallel universe.

Or maybe that the numbers on the clock indicate the distance I have to run in the track meet.

My girlfriend has told me that sometimes when we drift off to sleep talking, I'll start making less and less sense. She occasionally interviews me and can keep me going in this free-association state for a couple of minutes. I'll have to get to her take notes. :)

Post reply on HN