Bitter lessons about lucid dreaming

Maybe I'm a unique example, but none of this matches my experience at all.

 I was able to have lucid dreams relatively consistently just by dream journaling and doing reality checks. WILD was quite difficult to do, because you kind of have to walk a tight balance, where you keep yourself in a half-asleep state while carrying out instructions that requite a fair bit of metacognitive awareness, but once you get the hang of it, you can do that pretty consistently as well, without much time commitment.

That lucid dreams don't offer much more than traditional entertainment seems also (obviously?) false to me. People use VR to make traditional entertainment more immersive. And LDs are far more immersive than that, and less limited than video games are. 

They're also just a really interesting psychological phenomena. The process is fun. If you find yourself in a lucid dream, its a strange situation. Testing out things, like checking how well your internal physics simulation engine works is really fun. Or just walking around and seeing what your subconscious generates is very fun. And very different from just imagining random stuff. Trying to meditate, and observing how your mind works differently in a dream, compared with waking reality is interesting. Seeing how extreme/vivid sensations you can generate in a dream is fun. Like trying to see if you can get yourself to feel pain. Or how loud sounds you can make.

Galantamine and various supplements all did nothing for me. 

The only thing I agree with is the habituation effect. But like, that's how many things work. You eventually get bored of stuff / feel you've exhausted all the low-hanging fruits.

Man, I just wish I could remember my dreams. I miss it. I assume I do still, but when I wake, I don’t even have a hazy recollection.

I used to have vivid dreams, and even lucid dreaming when I would have a nightmare. Flying was my favorite LD activity. It was always hard though.

Yeah, I suppose, if lucid dreaming is that hard for you, that it requires constant excercises during daytime, you shouldn't strain yourself. 

I learned it intuitively in childhood as a way to deal with rare nightmares and so it is all mostly effortless fun for me since then. I don't get them all the time, but at least half the time I remember dreaming, it's lucid.

Another point is that lucid dreams are usually short. At least in my case its hard to stay in the state without waking up  or forgetting that it's a dream. I don't think I've had more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted experience at a time, though it's hard to tell due to the fact that time perception in a dream is messed up.

Lucid dreams as erotic adventures can be fun but only after you already had enough sexual experience. I think it can be more satisfying than onanism but not significantly. The real advantage is that you are not loosing your daytime on such activity. 

A possible benefit: the regulation of your own emotion that you do to keep a dream stable (even when alarming things are happening in it) may help you keep your emotion stable in the waking state too.

Thanks, that's very useful.

If one decides to use galantamine, is it known if one should take it right before bedtime, or anytime during the preceding day, or in some other fashion?

I’m not sure about (10).

Whenever someone has a theory that it’s impossible to do thing X in a dream, the regular lucid dreamers will provide a counterecamp,e by deliberately doing X in their next dream.

Computers, clocks, and written text can behave weirdly in dreams. Really, it’s the same things that generative AI has diffuculty with, possibly for information-theory reasons.

Based on my limited experience with lucid dreaming, my impression is that, roughly, whatever you expect to happen in a dream will happen. This includes things like the "lessons" in this post. As far as I know, there's no particular reason that lucid dreams have to be easier for women or people ages 20-30, or that you can't transform into someone else in a lucid dream (it's happened to me). But if you convince yourself of these lessons, then they'll be true for you, and you'll be limiting yourself for no reason.

Reading this article, I have just realised that a dream I had last night came from reading one of those test cases where people try to bypass the guardrails on LLMs. Only the dream was taken from the innocuous part of the prompt.

At this rate, I’m going to be having dreams about turning Lemsip(*) into meth.

(*) UK cold remedy. Contains pseudoephedrine.

Given the significance of lucid dreaming in Buddhist practise (Siz Yogas of Naropa, etc.) realising that having a lucid dream just for sexual purposes is kind of pointless may lead to you realising that it’s kind of pointless in waking life too. Many of those guys were monks…

I can lucid dream, and I kind of agree here. Sure, lucid dreaming is possible, but why would you do that?

Re (3), a dream you can completely control tells you nothing you didn’t know already. There is some scope for controlling the dream enough to, in effect, set up a question, and then not control the result.

There a running joke in the lucid dreaming community that the first thing everyone tries is either flying or sex. It’s only when you get to #3 on their list of things they want to do that it becomes at all interesting.

I haven't tried galantamine, but didn't find the drugless techniques all the same. The standard advice of keeping a dream diary and psyching yourself to have a lucid dream and to do reality checks never worked at all for me. Wake-back-to-bed on the other hand got me dozens of lucid dreams and often worked the first time I tried it after a break. It's also annoying to do because it involves messing with your sleep cycle and waking yourself up in the early morning, and it seems to always stop working if I try to do it multiple nights in a row.

Agree with the other parts though, the lucid dreams are generally pretty short, kind of samey. Maybe it takes a longer dream for the narrative to get properly weird, and the WBTB lucids are more often short dreams that start out of nowhere than becoming lucid midway through an involve dream. They're also too sporadic to get any sort of ongoing active imagination practice going since I don't have any routine of trying to WBTB once every week or something. There's Robert Waggoner's lucid dreaming book that talks more about possible ongoing psychological development you could make happen with repeated lucid dreams, as opposed to just the "hey, lucid dreams are a thing" books, but I guess a regular routine and some kind of intentful approach would help a lot here.

One thing I've been thinking is that the stories about shamanic journeys sound a whole lot like lucid dreaming, so maybe you could take a page from there. Try to travel to the underworld or overworld, meet some spirit entities, ask them what's up and maybe have a nice chat about large integer factorization.