I have practiced lucid dreaming for literally years, and imho anyone who says they get super detailed dreams is full of **. Your mind doesn't have enough processing power to render realistic scenes. It's all a blurry mess and you wake up if you exert too much control.
FYI, I used to have similar experiences. Until I started deliberately lucid dreaming and learned some "dream stabilization" techniques.
The first time I had a proper, photo-realistic dream with complete awareness that it was a dream it blew my fucking mind in a way that was almost religious. I could feel the sun on my face, and the texture of the sidewalk I was walking on. I couldn't stop looking at plants! It was incredible to see every leaf and twig with the realization that they were being entirely rendered by my brain in real time. TRUST ME, those experiences are completely possible, and the detail a brain can create is nothing short of ASTOUNDING.
Upon reflection, it makes perfect sense. EVERYTHING you conceive of or percieve in your waking life is a lie, essentially a hallucination of sorts. It is a mostly high-level construction and summary made by some part of your brain based on sensory input. It turns out, your brain is perfectly capable of synthesizing the high level construction without the fine-grained sensory input.
How did you get to that point? I've been working towards trying for consistent lucid dreams. I'm most successful when I wake up early and go back to sleep for ~1 hour.
1. It's most likely a lie. I am not saying that to start a flame war, I just have actual experience with this. As in years of dedicated experience.
2. Keep a dream journal.
3. Do reality checking throughout the day.
4. Meditate before sleep. Do a relaxation exercise. There's 100s of them.
"Lucid Dreaming: A Concise Guide to Awakening in Your Dreams and in Your Life" is the definitive book on the topic that everyone copies. No one has additional information.
What about it is most likely a lie? I've had dreams go lucid. I mainly want to use them to practice physical skills in the dream world and have them transfer to real life. I remember ready a study about it.
Not sure why he said that it's a lie. I have had lucid and vivid dreams that felt very real. The most significant one was when I "woke up" but in a dream. I then woke up again but this time for real. It was so surreal and at first I wasn't sure whether I was actually awake or still in a dream...
It haunted me for some time after because I never expected something like in the movie inception to be possible in real life.
A study to test this would be simple - test skills level at something (e.g. chess), and then have the study participant study "in their sleep" for a month. Test again. It has never been done. Not even close. As it has never been done, I strongly believe you are misinterpreting / over-stating your results.
These really intense dreams, are you in control of the imagery, or is it something you are experiencing beyond your control? When I have intense dreams and try to control them the fidelity breaks down and I usually wake up.
Didn’t practice too much, maybe you can get better at control, my own actions I could control including things like walking through wall or flying off from balcony, but not so much environment around me, a bit but not much. For waking up (very common when you realise you are in a dream) for me spinning around always worked very well. For me visual and sensual details were absolutely impressive, it’s at the level you can easily believe there exists another world, but it’s always nonsense threaded from your own memory with logic errors everywhere, however when inside the feel of truthness of reality is absolutely overwhelming.
By spin around I mean keep turning around in your dream when you feel you're loosing it/waking up, don't close eyes in the dream but in reality you're lying down with closed eyes (without spinning)! :)
Yeah, I don't have much control yet. I can choose where to go, and I can look around and stuff, but I can't really change the scenery. I think you can do it with practice though.
I have managed to fly a few times, but the first couple of times I tried, I jumped and fell flat on my face! I don't really experience pain in my dreams though.
Back when I dabbled in extreme sleep deprivation I'd be forced into a sort of wakeful sleep where what I can only describe as "eye movies" would forcibly take over my vision center. They were entirely fabricated, and indistinguishable from normal vision. My eyes would still be open, in some cases I'd still be engaged in a demanding activity like riding a motorcycle (this was insane), but my mind was completely out to lunch and I'd be observing a completely different world than the one reflected on my retinas.
My conventional sleep dreams never had that amount of consciously-accessible fidelity, but I presume some people can access their dreams as well as my sleep deprivation experiences proved for me.
Some people can't access their dreams at all, why wouldn't variety in the other direction occur as well? I think we should assume it's a spectrum across the whole gamut.
That’s not quite true; you have far more neurons going to the retina than you have coming from it. The retina supplies a surprisingly small amount of bits per second to the brain. Neuroscientists believe that at least half of our conscious experience of reality is effectively “hallucinated” by the brain based on internal models it has built from past experiences. So it’s highly plausible that that same perception-generating system which creates your conscious perception of reality could also function while asleep.
Sure, it's possible, by in my experience, most people exaggerate everything - especially things that can't be verified.
The other reason I have a hard time believing this is that I know normal people can't visualize anything. Artists, really good artists, are able to visualize a face with some detail. Most can't visualize a circle and toggle its color, let alone anything complex.
To me, that is a strong argument to believe the mind can't generate clear worlds, as people claim.
'One of the creators of the Firefox internet browser, Blake Ross, realised his experience of visual imagery was vastly different from most people when he read about a man who lost his ability to imagine after surgery. In a Facebook post, Ross said:
What do you mean ‘lost’ his ability? […] Shouldn’t we be amazed he ever had that ability?
We’ve heard from many people who have experienced a similar epiphany to Ross. They too were astonished to discover that their complete lack of ability to picture visual imagery was different from the norm.'
Every aspect about the way people think is on a spectrum. There is also the split between those who have an inner monologue in their heads the those who don't. There's also studies showing these two populations astonished that the other exists.
> So for myself personally, I see the words a person is speaking as they would appear being typed on the page of a computer screen and never once will hear the person’s voice speaking them, nor my own.
This sounds like a perversion of synesthesia to me. This is like LSD.
Do these people have strange accents like people born deaf?
I have aphantasia, and I have specifically invoked lucid dreams. I use the SSILD method (which stands for senses induced lucid dream). I have no ability to visualize during the waking state at all, but I do obviously remember what I see during the day. When I have lucid dreams, they are visual, and detailed. They can be blurry, but there are techniques to increase their clarity. I specifically examine closely what around me when I realize that I am dreaming, and that tends to make things more detailed. In fact, my dreams are visually more detailed and clear than in my waking life, because of my failing eyesight. There are other techniques people use, such as spinning around quickly or simply asking loudly for clarity.
Aphantasia seems to be a defect in (or a difference in, I don't know) one portion of the brain whereas dreaming seems to use a separate portion of the brain. I can also see images when I'm between being awake and asleep, which seems to be related to dreaming. I've had a couple of dreams where I've successfully used the WILD technique (wake induced lucid dreaming) where you use hypnagogic imagery to create an environment and (if you're successful at it) go directly from being awake to being in a lucid dream. It's an experience that will lead you to believe that you do actually visually experience your dreams, since there was no apparent break between lying on your bed and entering a dream. I've also watched a dream fade before, and woke up immediately afterwards with no apparent loss in consciousness.
You don't have to believe me, of course, that's up to you. I'm as surprised as anyone that I can visualize while dreaming but not at all when I'm awake.
No, I am not. Or I wouldn't be able to draw from imagination. Most people get a brief, vague glimpse and act like they can hold an image in their mind.
You aren't holding it if you can't draw from it. End of story.
In my personal case, I can maintain a clear image but be unable to translate it accurately to paper or to another medium (electronic or not) since it involves skill. The fidelity I am able to attain has improved as my skill has improved, and I can clearly see the frustrating differences between the image in my mind and what I then drew without yet being able to remedy it. If the proposition were correct neither of these things would be possible.
I can tell you that I have had dreams that I have mistaken for reality. In fact some of those dreams became normal memories that I have to filter because they never actually happened.
I've been able to read magazines, have full conversations with multiple people, stare at a brick wall and notice all the little pits. It does not happen every day, but maybe a couple times a month. I used to have severe sleep apnea and those were the most intense dreams. So I don't think it's possible to extrapolate your own experience to others. The mind already constructs a model of reality, so why wouldn't it be able to in a dream state?
My god, the gall of you to claim that since you can't do something, nobody else can. Quite a preposterous and absurd claim. I'm sure you have seen this[1] image that tests for a phenomenon known as aphantasia. While I myself can only briefly hold the fourth image in my head, I know several who can hold the fifth or sixth in their head continuously with ease. Likewise, I practice lucid dreaming on the regular, and yes, photorealistic scenes frequently do happen, if you have the memory for it. I am also one of those people who remember entire conversations and snippets from years past. During sprint planning, often nobody could remember why something was done the way it was, but I pipe up and can give detailed reasonings and the history as to why even if I had very little to no involvement in implementing it.
There is no "gall" involved here - it's called experience. When you have lifted weights for the past 15 years and someone tells you they deadlifted 500 lbs the first time they tried it, you have enough experience to know they are lying. Simple as.
As far as your image - I still maintain that if you can "hold it", you can draw it, especially for simple geometric shapes like a star.
There is some vague, hand wavy evidence suggesting that enough of the right nutrients can help. I want to say people who live by or visit the coast (thus exposed to salt and minerals from the sea) seem to have more vivid mental stuff and interest in boldly colorful art/decor. B vitamins are also known to be important to the brain.
Yeah I know what you mean, I have been trying physical excercise for literally years now, and everybody who says they enjoy it is literally full of **.
Everything I do makes me sweaty and winded, even walking.
I am not sure if this is sarcasm, but there is a huge trend of ascribing absolutely magical benefits to working out, eating clean, and taking cold showers.
It's a direct result of influencers selling a lifestyle. I work out, and have my entire life, but it definitely doesn't feel amazing - it's just a grind and you feel a bit better afterward.
You can always try and simplify too. Some days I can visualise anything I want, other times my mind seems too busy or not focussed. On those days I visualise being in an empty cloudy pool, or walking in a snowy field as there’s less for me to render. Works quite well.
