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New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

newyorker.com

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

#141

Post by GranPC »

pedalpete wrote: post #98

Interesting comment they have towards the end about "targeted memory reactivation can disrupt sleep". It is important to note the study they are referring to is "targeted memory reactivation with sleep disruption", there are methods of doing targeted memory reactivation without sleep disruption. I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of affectablesleep.com, and though we are mostly focused on slow-wave (deep) s…

Sorry for the off-topic, but I was curious about Affectable so I opened the website. I saw it's very thin and light and comfortable, but I struggled to find out what "it" is and what it does for me. It's kinda buried.

I was interested enough to click through the different links in the footer. And just as I reached the purchase page, I see that it requires "an iPhone running iOS". Unsure why it requires an iPhone; and no info on a timeline for iPhone-less customers. But that immediately rules me out as a customer.

I feel like the landing page would be a lot better if it started out focusing on what it is & how it can help me.

Apologies again for the unsolicited advice. Just wanted to share my impressions in case it's helpful.

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

#142

Post by block_dagger »

When I was beginning to use AI for everything, as most of us had, I would start dreaming that wall of text that had a personality sat between me and reality. For several nights I would dream this way with the wall becoming translucent and displaying text but the "real" actions (other people, scenes) was happening on the other side of the wall. I've dreamed in videogames as well. I'm not sure if I was getting any learning done, but I'm pretty sure my brain was exercising modes of thought that would push knowledge from "system 2" down into "system 1."

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

#143

Post by sillysaurusx »

orky56 wrote: post #97
pants2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...

Sounds like polyphasic sleeping might re-emerge as the lifestyle solution. Instead of waiting for agents to complete, you should sleep on the response so when you arise you have the optimized prompt ready to go and a reset on your energy to prevent the burnout.

Amusingly this is an almost-exact description of how I work on my current project, sharc. I'm porting Arc to Common Lisp, and implementing as many HN features as I can. I've been documenting as I go with handoffs: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... (Also thanks partly to dang, who is kind enough to find time to answer an email here and there about their current Arc stack.)

At one point I was working so hard that Claude actually suggested, all on its own, that I should get some sleep.

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

#144

Post by serf »

mr-wendel wrote: post #132
ahimthedream wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try to harness this power again? I.e. seed your dreams to solve problems?

Only in my dreams! erm... The closest I've come since is involuntary obsessions with playing video games in my dreams. Not something I'd ever want to seed. Quite the opposite, in fact.

i've had an experience at the cross section of the two where I dreamt factorio optimizations after obsessive play.

generally they don't work out.

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

#145

Post by Unai »

mr-wendel wrote: post #111

I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access. I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and…

When I was young, I dreamt that I was playing guitar and made up a cool song. When I woke up I was so excited, that's something you would hear an old rockstar say about their best song, right? "Came to me in a dream". I jumped out of bed, grabbed the guitar, and started playing the song, every note still clear in my memory.

It was a completely random series of notes.

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

#146

Post by rambojohnson »

mr-wendel wrote: post #111

I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access. I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and…

so cool. that happens to me with music a lot.

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

#147

Post by TallGuyShort »

markus_zhang wrote: post #126

Ah, very soon we will need to work in dreams. Can’t leave any stone of productivity unturned, right?

I can honestly say one of my most productive moments ever was when a design came to me in a dream... And who among us hasn't figured out a bug in the shower after taking a break? Getting good sleep is essential to actually being productive in many endeavors for a few reasons.

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

#149

Post by samothrace »

8note wrote: post #127

"communicate" seems like the really interesting part of this, but gets a one-off mention only. like, how does this communication work? how does one sleeping person communicate skills to another sleeping person? have we found the mechanism? was it awake poeple communicating to sleeping people? the reverse?

Stephen LaBerge's book explains, in detail, how they would communicate with lucid dreamers during their research. I don't remember how the researchers signaled the subjects, but if I remember correctly, the subjects would communicate with researchers primarily through eye movements. I can't say if the methods are related at all, but the book is worth a read.

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

#150

Post by coppsilgold »

an0malous wrote: post #139
coppsilgold wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training yourself to remember dreams by writing them down before they fade away is paramount, it's not enough to just think about them - they still somehow fade away along with your thoughts about them. Then read what you wrote before going to sleep again. If you want to achieve lucid dreaming consistently you also have to develop a habit of doing reality checks. The most effective one is to pinch your nose and try t…

Are there any more subtle reality checks so people in the real world don’t think I’m insane trying to breathe through my closed nose all day?

Checking clocks for consistency. Text as well. They are less reliable. Some people swear by rotating a text containing object upside down and see if the text auto-rotates, apparently it does in their dreams. Some people can't read anything in their dreams.
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