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MIT Researchers Have Developed a ‘System for Dream Control’

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

#131

Post by personlurking »

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.

Interesting. I've had several strange experiences in the last year which could be explained this way (as I have no other way to explain me "seeing the future"). In one example, my brain told me there was a 5 euro note under a chair at a cafe, and then I looked, saw it and picked it up. In another example, I saw a fruit had fallen from a tree and imagined an older man come and pick it up and then look up at the tree. This exact thing occurred 10 seconds later.

Other weird experiences include living in a new country and having at least 20 instances of deja vu there within a short time (not of having been there, but just random moments I had seen before in my head).

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

#132

Post by OnACoffeeBreak »

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…

Like another poster said, your brain may have re-ordered the order of events. I remember something similar happening to me, but it wasn't another person talking, which allowed me to figure out that re-ordering happened.

I was dosing off while my family was still up. It was a short dream in which I was playing tennis. It was only 2 or 3 strokes, but I woke up with a start just as the ball hit the court surface. Turns out that someone dropped something nearby. I assume my brain heard it, played out the tennis match dream synchronizing the tennis ball hitting the court with something being dropped.

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

#134

Post by okmokmz »

donttrack wrote: post #67
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…

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.

>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

I've had this start happening to me in the past year. When I was a kid I would have horrible, recurring nightmares for months on end that were difficult to remember. At some point in middle/highschool I stopped having dreams altogether (or at least stopped remembering them entirely). It was great as I would no longer wake up in a panic or stay up incredibly late in order to get to sleep. Recently however, I've started having dreams like you describe. My sleep schedule has changed as well. I get up at 5AM, but recently I've found that I'll naturally wake up between 2-4AM at which point I'll drift in and out of consciousness having negative, vivid dreams that I partially remember in the morning.

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

#136

Post by sfink »

Bizarrely timely for me. Just yesterday I experienced something much like this. I was working through a personal problem in my head but was pretty tired, and kept almost dropping off to sleep before realizing my chain of thought made no sense whatsoever and awakening myself. It happened a few dozen times (I was determined to get through the problem, though I wasn't having much success.)

But at some point, I was amused by where my mind was going to, so I started writing the dream fragments down. They were dreamlike, too -- they would sort of take over my brain, it was very difficult for me to recognize that they weren't rational or at all related to what I had been thinking about, and after I fully awoke they'd slip away entirely. But like I said, there was a point before falling asleep where I would become aware enough to realize what was happening, then grab onto some fragment of the dream, and wake up enough to write it down. So here's the list (these are all snapshots, as that was all I could hang onto):

    * my son saying he's going to jump up to the sky and then him soaring upward

    * someone being trained in the Israeli army

    * getting kicked out of a band

    * cutting an Adam's apple out of a chicken neck

    * stomping on something that looks like a painting lying on the floor, and shattering it

    * holding and tilting up a spatula, onion, and lemon

    * shooting missiles at the butt of an enormous cow

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

#137

Post by optimalsolver »

fnordsensei wrote: post #127
optimalsolver wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do when your arm falls back on the bed? Do you put it up again? And how many times do you do this before getting into the desired mental state?

Yeah, exactly. Sorry, the description was a bit rough. Essentially; lie down on your back. Raise your arm from the elbow as if you were about to point to the ceiling, while keeping the elbow resting on the bed. When you are about to fall asleep, the arm falls down, waking you up (hopefully). The point is to give you the opportunity to sort of traverse back and forth over the line separating waking and sleeping consci…

Thanks. Very interesting.

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

#138

Post by evincarofautumn »

tedeh wrote: post #115
evincarofautumn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, not my favourite, hah. I usually notice the lack of conscious control over breathing at the other end, when waking up in sleep paralysis—which unfortunately is triggered by lucid dreaming for me. Thankfully since I’ve had SP my whole life, I’m used to it by now and can just try to relax and wait for it to pass.

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

#139

Post by sangnoir »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #130
sangnoir wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or maybe I’m just the only one not just you - I didn't have a name for it, but my brain pretty much does free-association in that phase. On more than one occasion I've jolted awake because I've had a earth-shattering revelation, only to realise my idea was already invented (hot air balloon) or pretty ridiculous (like having your toaster burn the day's agenda on your toast). I can't help but wonder: how many multi-m…

> pretty ridiculous (like having your toaster burn the day's agenda on your toast). https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/258723592/toasteroid-fi...

Hmmm, you're onto something. If I could lower my morals just a bit, I could parlay these crazy ideas into fanciful crowd-funded cash-grabs. I'll be the visionary - I'll need a technical "co-founder" (to handle the photoshops and cheery promo videos)

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

#140

Post by animal531 »

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.

The worst instance of this for me was when I was younger and would get a high fever. My brain would just constantly go over the same concepts, try to reconcile them, fail, retry etc.

Usually it would attempt something similar to yours, like reconciling the concept of orange with a physical shape, which just immediately fails.

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