AlephNeil comments on Dissolving the Question - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 March 2008 03:17AM

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Comment author: AlephNeil 20 May 2010 08:24:07AM *  9 points [-]

My favourite method is holding my nose and seeing if I can still breathe through it.

That's awesome.

I never devised anything as cool as that, but I did discover a pretty reliable heuristic: If I ever find myself with any genuine doubt about whether this is a dream, then it definitely is a dream.

Or in other words not feeling like you "just know" you're awake is very strong evidence that you're not.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 20 May 2010 09:58:23AM 15 points [-]

It's funny that the working reality tests for dreaming are pretty stupid and decidedly non-philosophical. For instance, the virtual reality the brain sets up for dreams apparently isn't good enough to do text or numbers properly, so when you are dreaming you're unable to read the same text twice and see it saying the same thing, and digital clocks never work right. (There's an interesting parallel here to the fact that written language is a pretty new thing in evolutionary scale and people probably don't have that much evolved cognitive capacity to deal with it.)

There's a whole bunch of these: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Induction_Techniques#Reality_checks

Comment author: Raw_Power 11 September 2010 01:48:55AM 11 points [-]

This reminds me of a horrible nightmare I had back in High School. It was the purest dream I had ever had: the world consisted of me, a sheet of paper, and a mathematical problem. Every time I got to the bottom of the problem, before starting to solve it, I went back up to make sure I had gotten it right... only to find it had CHANGED. That again, and again, and again, until I woke up, a knot in my stomach and covered in sweat.

To realize that this dream has an explanation based on neural architecture rather than on some fear of exams is giving me a weird, tingly satisfaction...

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 29 March 2012 07:40:07PM 1 point [-]

Isn't fear of exams also due to neural architecture?

Comment author: Raw_Power 30 March 2012 01:13:24PM 0 points [-]

How does that work out?

Comment author: ata 20 May 2010 10:02:22AM *  3 points [-]

That's awesome.

It is indeed. I can't take credit for it, though; don't remember where I learned it, but it was from some preexisting lucid dreaming literature. I think it's an underappreciated technique. They usually recommend things like seeing if light switches work normally, or looking at text and seeing if it changes as you're looking at it, but this is something that you can do immediately, with no external props, and it seems to be quite reliable.

I never devised anything as cool as that, but I did discover a pretty reliable heuristic: If I ever find myself with any genuine doubt about whether this is a dream, then it definitely is a dream.

Or in other words not feeling like you "just know" you're awake is very strong evidence that you're not.

That's similar to what I originally did, but it doesn't always work — false awakenings (when you dream that you're waking up in bed and everything's normal) are especially challenging to it. In those cases I usually feel pretty confident I'm awake. Still, that heuristic probably works well for most dreams that are actually dreamlike.

Comment author: hannahelisabeth 17 November 2012 10:39:43PM 0 points [-]

They usually recommend things like seeing if light switches work normally

Do other people have the same problem I do, then? When I'm dreaming, I often find that it's dark and that light switches don't work. I'm always thinking that the light bulbs are burnt out. It's so frustrating, 'cause I just want to turn on the light and it's like I never can in a dream.

Comment author: hannahelisabeth 17 November 2012 10:31:57PM 0 points [-]

That's exactly my method too.