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Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

npr.org

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Re: Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

#2
Does this mean my staff could be asked to get some work done while asleep?

In all seriousness I look forward to seeing exactly how much we can do while lucid dreaming. Also, what are the consequences? Does it cost you the nights rest? or could this be a life hack for getting more done in a day?

Re: Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

#4
>For example, a typical question would be to ask what is 8 minus 6. A 19-year-old American man was able to respond by moving his eyes left-right, left-right — two times — to signal "2." Researchers asked the question again, and he moved his eyes the same way two times again.

I’d have to read the paper but color me skeptical. Moving eyes back and forth twice while sleeping is not exactly a clear signal of anything.

Re: Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

#5
This is amazing, underwhelming and not very surprising, all at the same time.

Unsurprising, as it was already known that lucid dreamers can move their eyes... And I think everyone has experienced external stimuli, say an alarm clock, being seamlessly integrated into a dream.

Underwhelming, as this requires people with rare skills and special requirement to achieve just 18% success rate. For a basic task.

Amazing, because obviously the first time something is achieved with rigor, it's opening some hard to predict room to grow. Hopefully this will bring more research and any decade now we'll see practical applications, say dream manipulation to said psychotherapy.

Re: Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

#6

Does this mean my staff could be asked to get some work done while asleep? In all seriousness I look forward to seeing exactly how much we can do while lucid dreaming. Also, what are the consequences? Does it cost you the nights rest? or could this be a life hack for getting more done in a day?

No you are rested as if it were a normal dream. But it's not easy to keep focused on something while lucid dreaming, you will likely forget that you are in a dream and no longer be lucid.

Re: Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

#7

Does this mean my staff could be asked to get some work done while asleep? In all seriousness I look forward to seeing exactly how much we can do while lucid dreaming. Also, what are the consequences? Does it cost you the nights rest? or could this be a life hack for getting more done in a day?

No you are rested as if it were a normal dream. But it's not easy to keep focused on something while lucid dreaming, you will likely forget that you are in a dream and no longer be lucid.

You mean no longer be dreaming. People who concentrate too much during a lucid dream wake up.

Re: Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

#8

Does this mean my staff could be asked to get some work done while asleep? In all seriousness I look forward to seeing exactly how much we can do while lucid dreaming. Also, what are the consequences? Does it cost you the nights rest? or could this be a life hack for getting more done in a day?

No you are rested as if it were a normal dream. But it's not easy to keep focused on something while lucid dreaming, you will likely forget that you are in a dream and no longer be lucid.

I may disagree, as from my own experience and lucid dreamers I spoke to, lucid dream is not a rest state but more of the awake. After lucid dreaming I am as tired as I did not sleep at all, maybe even more.

Re: Scientists talked to people in their lucid dreams

#10

Does this mean my staff could be asked to get some work done while asleep? In all seriousness I look forward to seeing exactly how much we can do while lucid dreaming. Also, what are the consequences? Does it cost you the nights rest? or could this be a life hack for getting more done in a day?

No you are rested as if it were a normal dream. But it's not easy to keep focused on something while lucid dreaming, you will likely forget that you are in a dream and no longer be lucid.

I've had a productive coding session in a lucid dream at least once. But it was just a small number of lines of code (a few blocks) I was playing around with, and I had been thinking about it all day. The visual and semantic memory was sort of stuck in my mind, consciously and subconsciously. In any event, it was insanely precise (I was editing on a giant terminal screen) and when I woke up I typed in my refactored algorithm verbatim.

But reading text coherently in a dream is, AFAIU, quite uncommon as you suggest. I used to lucid dream regularly and deliberately as an adolescent. I would hesitate to say you can't focus in a lucid dream--consciously focusing on elements of the dream, or trying to shape the dream, is kind of the point of lucid dreaming. (Of course, what you have most control over is yourself.) But, yeah, you can't usually control things in such fine detail for the duration necessary to coherently manipulate it. Reading any non-trivial text in a dream isn't very common, lucid or not-lucid, AFAIU. Though, I would imagine it's more common for people with experience lucid dreaming.

I'm sure some people can read and write as much as they want, but at a certain point on the curve we're probably dealing with people with abnormal neurology. Sort of like how there's memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques, which anybody can learn, and then there's people with Hyperthymesia.

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