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New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

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Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#101

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems. For me this a big eye opener about the impor…

In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it. I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.

Literally the same in Italian, la notte porta consiglio. It's in the Bible, in nocte consilium from the Book of Proverbs, but it's likely to pre-date even that by centuries.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#103
Kinda related but I used to practice guitar in my dreams. If I had been learning something I’d often dream about playing it over and over again, and even going beyond that and figuring out “solos” and melodies and stuff over the chord. Can’t be sure if it translated into any real life skill, but it felt like I was actually learning or at least strongly reinforcing what I’d been practicing.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#104

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems. For me this a big eye opener about the impor…

In my 40's I could go to bed with a complex software design or implementation problem I was wrestling with. Consciously word a cogent and succinct question that I needed answered, sleep on it, and then in the morning, I would be still and mentally ask, "well?" Not meditating or anything, just be quiet then and listen.

And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.

"Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.

Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.

There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#105

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems. For me this a big eye opener about the impor…

People are so different. When I was in college, if I had an unsolved problem, I could not fall asleep.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#106
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, what was the partner's ability to benchmark? What is their level of familiarity with the language? I would love to believe.

It was a recording. I dare you to ask for it.

I shall not be ensnared by your schoolyard dare. You cannot manipulate me so easily. OP, however...

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#107

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems. For me this a big eye opener about the impor…

I often wake up realizing I wrote a handful of bugs the day before. They’re obvious to me in the morning even before I sit down and open my laptop. Sleep is a strange and magical thing.

Yes! When I awoke this morning my very first thought was ‘you didn’t connect the ground wire for the heater’.

Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#108

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems. For me this a big eye opener about the impor…

In my 40's I could go to bed with a complex software design or implementation problem I was wrestling with. Consciously word a cogent and succinct question that I needed answered, sleep on it, and then in the morning, I would be still and mentally ask, "well?" Not meditating or anything, just be quiet then and listen. And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer…

> There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?

It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.

Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.

Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.

Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#109

I once solved a particularly nasty bug, causing a c++ server to segfault in production about once a week, in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up, and I rushed to my laptop to find the insight was real. I had been trying to comprehend that segfault for several long days. It wasn't the most restful night though.

I used to do this regularly when I first started coding, I called them "Codemares". They were like nightmares with the shouting of commands I didn't quite understand would invade my dreams.

Is this the user-friendly name for what is happening?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#110
post #47

Aside, but I struggled a long time with regular sleep. I have been a night owl since I was a kid. I experience late hours as magical, don’t know how to describe it. So I always slept too little, then not at all, then drifting and sleeping in. But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier. No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did…

My “trick” for this was getting a dog in my early 20s, while living in an apartment, doesn’t matter how much I wanted to sleep in, they needed to go out, so I had to get up. And without thinking I moved my sleep schedule to accommodate this. Worth it.
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