Better Rationality Through Lucid Dreaming

I know several people who have done and enjoyed lucid dreaming.

I did it for a while as a student, but stopped. I started with classic techniques for noticing (a word written on the back of my hand worked well for me) and after a month or so got good enough at it that I could tell dreams from reality just by being able to perceive the dream-like quality of my perceptions. The dreams were good fun. It even changed my experience of waking life too, making it more dream-like: more vivid and more fuzzy at the same time.

But eventually I noticed that I was finding it a lot harder to do challenging thinking tasks, like a difficult programming job, or a problem sheet, that I'd previously had no trouble with. Waking life had got less interesting - I'd basically be clockwatching until I could go back to bed and have lucid dreams again. The dream-like quality to waking life was also getting problematic - I'd find myself almost completely zoned out in situations where I really didn't want to be and consequently got in trouble.

When I noticed all this, I was a bit freaked out, so I stopped completely. I trained myself out of the habit of noticing near-constantly whether I was dreaming or not, and developed a new habit of forgetting dreams once I was awake. (Mainly by not thinking about them once I'm awake - the don't think of a white tiger trick is to deliberately think about something else.) Things returned to the previous normal quite quickly, and I haven't done it since.

Looking back, I'm fairly sure I'd become quite seriously sleep-deprived. My guess is my lucid dreaming was making my sleep less restful. Now I have a lot more experience of sleep deprivation, I know that one of the insidious features of chronic sleep deprivation (for me at least) is that it zaps my metacognitive abilities as fast as it zaps my other cognitive functions. Which leads to a Dunning-Kruger death spiral: not only do I get less smart, I get less good at telling how smart I am.

I expect that many people who do lucid dreams won't have that problem: I mention it as something that's worth keeping an eye on. But perhaps wise not to do the experimenting in the run up to e.g. big exams, work deadlines, interviews, long drives, etc.

One of my absolute favourite lucid dreams was flying. I've since done a bit of flying light aircraft as a (very expensive) hobby. The thing about lucid dreams is that you're aware that they are only dreams. In my experience, actually living your favourite dream is harder work, but way better.

To be frank, my main concern about lucid dreaming as a rationality practice is simply that it seems too good to be true.

This post feels like something written during the "honeymoon" phase of the latest trendy technique. I would take it much more seriously after you had stuck with it for several months, had made some sort of measurable improvement in your rationality (maybe count how many times you notice you are confused and it turns out there was something confusing), and had some understanding of its limitations, or alternatively, understood why the intuitive reaction to it being too good to be true was fallacious.

It doesn't seem at all obvious to me that training yourself to become less confused in dreams will translate into training this skill in real life situations. For example, the relevant part of your brain might be normally shut down during dreams for maintenance or rest of some sort, and doing this training might reactivate that part - causing it to function less optimally in real life. I believe Richard Feynman hypothesized something similar to this regarding lucid dreaming.

This isn't to say that I think this sort of training is necessarily a bad idea, or that people shouldn't try it. I have had several lucid dreams and have found them to be enjoyable. But I also don't want its benefits to be overstated.

If you can get yourself to the point where you can consistently induce lucid dreaming by noticing the inconsistencies and absurdities of your dream state,[1] I predict that you will become a much stronger rationalist in the process

I am going with the null hypothesis here and saying that I do not expect any difference in rationalist powers except perhaps through placebo. I've also been a lucid dreamer for 8+ years now and thought some people how to get into it and I've noticed zero improvement on any rationality-related metrics in those people. Of course none of them could do it consistently but would become lucid only once in a while.

Some do get some benefits when I observe in front of them that the fact that your brain makes you believe crazy things while dreaming is a pretty good proof of the fact that you can normally be rational and still succumb to a mental disease / false beliefs, but that's about it.

I really want to like this idea: it's novel and unexpected, fun, possibly utilizing time you otherwise can't. Unfortunately you provide very few reasons to believe it.

If you can get yourself to the point where you can consistently induce lucid dreaming by noticing the inconsistencies and absurdities of your dream state

What kind of time investment are we talking about here?

Thank you katydee, I hadn't thought about lucid dreaming in that way before but now that you mention it what you suggest makes sense. It also matches my experiences with things that I perceive to be similar to lucid dreaming.

Added to my todo list!

I've never managed to get myself to go reliably lucid with a regular sleep cycle. Dream journaling for weeks at a time doesn't work, and then I develop an aversion to writing down my dreams and stop it. Reality check habits don't work, and I develop an aversion to doing them while awake in a couple of days for whatever reason. Recurring dream signs don't seem to show up regularly enough that I could develop a habit of noticing them, though I guess this could be made to work if I had months' worth of dream diaries.

Wake back to bed does work for me, but it mostly gets me wake-induced lucid dreams that last a few minutes and don't get very fun before I zone out into regular sleep. Then it tends to stop working and start messing up my sleep cycle when I can't get back to sleep after waking up early, so I haven't practiced it regularly. The basic trick seems to be that with regular sleep, you go into hours of deep sleep and full unconsciousness, and then when you start dreaming you're so zoned out from that that you don't get your rational faculties online. When you do a properly timed wake back to bed, you deliberately get your mind going after the deep sleep phase, and then go quickly from being fully alert and prepared to lucid dream into an actual dream state, and retain a lot more of the mental alertness.

I also recently noticed that if I go to bed earlier than usual and spend the first 30 minutes lying on my back and meditating (I lie on my side to fall asleep), I seem to consistently have a lot more vivid dreams in the early morning. I'll see if keeping up with this will help with developing some sleep cycle preserving lucid dreaming skills as well.

I seem to have this aversion to what I find myself calling "full lucidity"; that is, I don't like breaking an ok dream situation to become god-emperor, and I don't usually have anything specific in mind that I want to do before falling asleep (sometimes I get something vague, and those work out so rarely that I could paste my notes on those happening in an LW comment).

That aside, I tried to sciencify my dream-plotting starting April 2012 (I did something vaguely similar in 2005 and wrote a terrible paper on it). Some things of note:

• Understanding the context of "How did I get here, and does it make sense?" is incredibly difficult. When I managed to force myself to start asking this, I just found myself "remembering" more absurd backstories; for example, wondering why someone from college was at my highschool led me to think "Of course, it all started with an adventure on a pirate ship..."
• Trying to force anything to happen in dreams with advanced planning, short of mastering full lucidity, almost never works. I got something somewhat like this to happen once (by trying to imagine how it would work if it was a dream until I wound up in a shallow sleep), and another from the end of August 2013 on which I took very few notes and don't quite remember how it happened other than it was a slow process with lots of deliberate universe-building in the falling-asleep process.
• For a while, I got very good at the "check numbers for consistency" technique. Once, I tried to repeat this experiment several times and remember the details for when I woke up, while attempting to will the numbers to appear a certain way. I only remembered a few of the target-result pairs by the time I started recording them in real life, but the results were pretty clear (It was a serious struggle to get the exact numbers I wanted, but I could consistently get very close, within 1-3 of the target).
• Visual details. My vision nosedived in the second half of 2002, and dream vision took much longer to decline, until the present, where it's rarely any better than real life. I made a conscious attempt to study this and try to improve visual sensation in dreams, and my conclusion is that I can force very crappy visuals to happen when lucid, but it takes a lot of effort and isn't all that worth it. However, if I'm in a situation where I need visual information, or the information is most obviously obtained visually (especially if there is time pressure), then visuals are much more vivid. Examples include reading numbers on a TV screen, needing to memorize the positioning of different-colored fireworks (that one involved a time-turner and had the clearest colors in quite some time), reading a map and checking my arm for marks that wouldn't stick out to touch.
• Body map! I only remember altering this intentionally for sure once, and that was a situation where I was trying to go full lucid because the original dream was boring and I was feeling sciency (I turned myself into a giant spider, was deliberately vague about individual appendages, and completely failed to pay enough attention to my mouth parts to successfully eat a captured fly). Dreams have screwed with my body without lucidity quite a lot, though; I've been physically younger, have mysteriously had certain body parts multiply, etc; these tend to return to present-realistic if I ever go lucid, though (I once attained lucidity in the middle of a dream whose first half had me in second grade, and I've tried and failed at changing genders). There are two examples I can think of that might subvert this trend, but how lucid I was in either is not so clear; there was one that I deliberately prolonged by focusing on music when I realized I was about to wake up and the plot was unfinished, and that was a deaged situation. A more recent one felt less lucid, though did involve me calling on Yahweh (by name) a couple times, once to get me to a bridge I couldn't find, and once to save me and someone else from falling off a ladder (we were both approximately 6 years old). (To make the rationality, or lack there of, weirder in this case, I wound up calling to Yahweh only after my father abandoned me, once by going across the bridge without me, the second time by straight-up vanishing, which I assumed was because he woke up. I mentioned enough of this after waking to confirm that he didn't have the same dream, so this dream-me was clearly mistaken regarding quite a few things. Also, the deaging in that one came after a lengthy alternate present sequence.).

I kinda feel like I ramble about this too much whenever the topic comes up. Maybe I could just start a "dream experiments" blog so I can keep my LW comments shorter in the future?

You notice absurdity in dreams with your "mind", which is already corrupted. E.g: you are conjunction-fallacy-man, see something in your dream, which works according to the math, find it absurd, wake up. Sure, active LD practice can increase your awareness, but I cannot see non-neglible result if you are already rising your sanity waterline with some CFAR-ish technics. If previous statement is false, then lucid dreamers are already more rational than general population. I haven't seen evidences for this hypotesis

I've never lucid dreamt, but it seems utterly amazing. If you could do almost anything you could imagine, wouldn't you prefer that to real life? Does anyone find themselves, or know of anyone who can lucid dream and wants to spend their time lucid dreaming instead of being awake?

I've had some success of my own with lucid dreaming. Relatively speaking.

The problem I have is that I dream so rarely that it is almost impossible to develop habits. I still manage to go lucid about half the time I do dream, and manage to go lucid without inadvertently waking myself up about half again of those times.

I don't know if lucid dreaming has improved my rationality, but I do think that my rationality helps with the "oh, this is silly and must be a dream" reflex. There is correlation, but it is not obvious in which direction there is causation, if there is at all.

The hardest part in my experience is actually staying asleep once I go lucid. I have to very deliberately pay attention to the physicality of myself and my immediate surroundings in the dream, while ignoring any signals from my real body, or the dream will evaporate in seconds.

For me, the key to manipulating a dream was figuring out that dreams, even lucid dreams, don't seem to run on willpower. I can will something to happen with all my might, and nothing will happen. Rather than wielding willpower, I have to wield expectation. If I expect to see something, I will. There is an exception to this that I don't have an explanation for, though: I'm telekinetic in my dreams. All my dreams, no matter what they're about, whether they're lucid or not. You'd think this would make it easy to check if I'm dreaming, but I'm just so used to it that half the time it doesn't register as strange.

Does anyone know possible causes for rarely-dreaming-at-all?

¿That every nonsensical dream I've allowed myself to blithely stagger through is historical evidence that I could be much better at noticing inconsistencies in my model of reality?