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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

#191
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many years ago I had such a profound insight in one of my dreams that I woke up and wrote it down on an index card so I wouldn't forget. Here's the pearl of wisdom I captured for posterity: "Emotions — it's emotions that invented and fricasseed the invisible ravioli." (I still have the card.)

At least you now have a title for your autobiography!

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

#192
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, when you are stuck, put away that red bull and step away from the keyboard, kids.

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...

Feasibly you could do this work while asleep, the lifestyle of the future.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view our existence as something like a fractal. World history is a scrambled mess of lies and amnesia (from repeated collective concussions, heh) Who knows what is truth and what is the Victor writing the history books? One's life is untraceable - how did we get here? Literally too much went into that story, majority unseen, and none of us can fully say. And so at the personal level, are thoughts borne out of a cha…

> I do sometimes wonder though with all my weird experiences if I am merely the "doer in the body" whereas I have a higher self who is the real "thinker" running things in the background and who has access to the big picture. Yes, precisely. There is a classic initiatory text in the Thelemic tradition, Liber LXV, that personifies these different parts of the self. The "doer in the body" is the scribe that wrote the w…

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richard James did an album of these using synthesizers to record from memory and lucid dreaming to compose.

Selected Ambient Works!

the 2nd one only

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

#195
Not about sleep learning but lucid dreaming in general: I have long been puzzled and disappointed that we are not pouring more research, interest, and funding into controlling the induction of lucid dreams. There are ways to learn to do it now, but they are slow and unreliable. Gadgets exist but they're fringe - there is no great lucid dreaming movement like there is with longevity, for example.

I would have thought in a society where we want a gadget or magic pill for anything and everything, our interest in this would be through the roof. You can live a whole other lifetime in a dream, either your own or of some other character or world you step into. You can replay the past see the future, countless times. Controlled lucid dreaming seems like the closest we will likely ever get to immortality. Why aren't we more bullish about facilitating it?

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I subscribe to the Multiplicity of Personality theory (our personalities are a combination of multiple ones). eg My wife and I both have a chaos monkey that emits impulses to do the most destructive and disruptive things, which we sometimes talk about in jest. My dominant personality is one of control (for order) so I can focus on problem solving. Some sort of raw insight/intelligence comes from a personality that is…

I once had a very weird experience on LSD (of course), in which I perceived my brain and thinking as a bunch of separate entities working in synchrony. Only two of them were capable of speech, and some were very simple and reactive. The "me" part was just them agreeing on stuff. I will never forget the experience.

Sounds right. I wonder why it is so hard to notice in regular everyday consciousness.

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

#197

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.

When I was learning C, I woke screaming. An ominous dark figure had been standing on the foot of my bed. I somehow knew it’s name was ”struct”.

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

#198
I've had some incredible product ideas while asleep, down to very intricate technical detail. The problem has been that when I wake up, reality kicks in, and I realise that, say, even if I built that incredible messenger app for dogs, they still wouldn't be able to communicate with us.

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

#199
I rarely remember my dreams in the morning, only a handful times in my life. At one I was a Chinese citizen and experienced a dense feeling of being a little ant in the greatest Empire the universe and time had ever seen (China). A nothing in the whole. There are no words. Another one was an insane, out of the world sex experience. Dreams are wild.

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

#200

Not about sleep learning but lucid dreaming in general: I have long been puzzled and disappointed that we are not pouring more research, interest, and funding into controlling the induction of lucid dreams. There are ways to learn to do it now, but they are slow and unreliable. Gadgets exist but they're fringe - there is no great lucid dreaming movement like there is with longevity, for example. I would have thought…

Same here, I don't understand it either. It's a powerful phenomenon and is essentially the end state of virtual reality, as you are now the god of your own universe.
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