New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

https://archive.ph/6wKhx

newyorker.com

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349 points

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XzetaU8

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17 hours ago

213 comments

mr-wendel ・ 11 hours ago

I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access.

I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.

While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.

Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.

  • Unai ・ 9 hours ago

    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.

    • WaltPurvis ・ 7 hours ago

      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.)

      • frereubu ・ 30 minutes ago

        William James reported that a friend of his who was experimenting with nitrous oxide gas kept thinking he'd solved the riddle of the universe when high, but kept forgetting what he'd figured out when he woke up in the morning, so he kept a pen and paper next to him while high and rushed down the following morning to see that he'd written "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout."

      • Intermernet ・ 4 hours ago

        At least you now have a title for your autobiography!

    • qsera ・ 4 hours ago

      Yea, I have composed song (music with lyrics) in my dream. But after waking up, didn't remember most of it.

      I wonder if I did compose them, or did I just have a memory of having composed a great song?

      What is experience, if not our very latest memory, right?

    • murkt ・ 7 hours ago

      A fee years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a very cool sounding riff playing in my head for a song that I was thinking about at that time. I am not a musician and that would be my first, if I would recruit enough help.

      I made noises with my mouth, and it still sounded cool. Instead of recording those noises into any recording on my phone, I went back to sleep and couldn’t remember it the next morning :(

    • smusamashah ・ 2 hours ago

      I have made poetry in some dreams which feels very profound and very rhyming (I have zero poeticness or interest in poetry) but I also remember that a few times when I did wake up with those words still in my head, it was a mish mash of words.

    • ziotom78 ・ 6 hours ago

      Giuseppe Tartini claimed his violin sonata "Il trillo del diavolo" (Devil's trill) was played to him by the devil itself during a dream. However, unlike you, Tartini declared that he had been able to capture only a small part of the music.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Trill_Sonata

    • wahnfrieden ・ 8 hours ago

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

      • pillefitz ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        Selected Ambient Works!

      • y-curious ・ 4 hours ago

        “Richard James” ok dude do you live in his submarine? Just call him Aphex Twin

  • burnerRhodov2 ・ 13 minutes ago

    I think it was franklin who would ponder himself to sleep with metal balls in his hands so it'll wake him up.

  • dietr1ch ・ 8 hours ago

    At uni on an advanced algorithms class we had a take-home exam with 6 problems for 3 days or so.

    On Saturday I already had some ideas for most problems, but there was one that I didn't knew how to approach and stayed a bit late thinking about it.

    On Sunday morning I woke up really exited as I solved the damn problem. I immediately knew that probably like dreams, the memory was fragile, so I rushed to my desk to write the sketch for the idea, which after grabbing coffee turned into my solution to it.

    There's no way I didn't spent my sleep thinking about it and solving it, likely around the last sleep cycle when I woke up.

  • tapland ・ 8 hours ago

    Had a very similar one, I wasn't working frontend but had a dream about a frontend vulnerability that also proved to be true. I dreamed about it, and assume it was because it's the kind of thing that bugs me and while dreaming I had some time to think about things other than the code at hand.

  • ahimthedream ・ 9 hours ago

    Did you try to harness this power again? I.e. seed your dreams to solve problems?

    • mr-wendel ・ 9 hours ago

      Only in my dreams! erm...

      The closest I've come since is involuntary obsessions with playing video games in my dreams. Not something I'd ever want to seed. Quite the opposite, in fact.

      • serf ・ 9 hours ago

        i've had an experience at the cross section of the two where I dreamt factorio optimizations after obsessive play.

        generally they don't work out.

  • rambojohnson ・ 9 hours ago

    so cool. that happens to me with music a lot.

addedGone ・ 6 minutes ago

Happens to me all the time, waking up with a solution (or a new problem :/) to complex software issues.

ml_basics ・ 14 hours ago

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems.

For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.

  • dwoldrich ・ 12 hours ago

    In my 40's I could go to bed with a complex software design or implementation problem I was wrestling with. Consciously word a cogent and succinct question that I needed answered, sleep on it, and then in the morning, I would be still and mentally ask, "well?" Not meditating or anything, just be quiet then and listen.

    And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.

    "Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.

    Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.

    There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?

    • rdevilla ・ 12 hours ago

      > There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?

      It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.

      Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.

      Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.

      Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."

      • dwoldrich ・ 6 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        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 chain (or DAG??) of memories that cannot ever be fully traced?

        Was my homunculus voice who gave me detailed clues/answers just returning the highest probable solution gleaned from thousands of simulations in the problem space I presented? Of course I should not be privy to such musings, I wouldn't have the patience for it - so it seems to me to be "out of nowhere".

        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.

        • rdevilla ・ 4 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          > 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 work, which is a dialogue in the scribe's mind between his egoic awareness (V.V.V.V.V, the namesake of the titular character from V for Vendetta) and the background "thinker," Adonai.

          There is a lot of vocabulary in this space used to describe the self at very fine levels of detail.

    • Supermancho ・ 9 hours ago

      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 isn't always on, but seems to erupt from periods of calm and relaxation. eg Shower solutions or bedtime revelations are common.

      Many people have told stories of voices that nudge them this way or that at just the right time, which I've experienced as well. Whatever part of me dreams is uses memories and fantasy, striving to experiencing new scenarios through thought experiments. The better I sleep, the more I find very recent events are incorporated...so it's some sort of shared space and speaks to how physical state affects mental states, even in sleep. I also feel like the personalities fight for dominance when the body or mind is overly-stressed (puberty, mortal danger, etc) but normally resolve into a sort of basal state.

      I never wanted to be a psychologist. I often think that maybe I'm just crazy. It would explain a lot.

      • gloomyday ・ 5 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        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.

        • krzat ・ 3 hours ago

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

      • godelski ・ 8 hours ago
        ・ 2 more
         

          > I often think that maybe I'm just crazy.
        Everyone is crazy, just most people are afraid to admit it to others. A lot of people are even afraid to admit it to themselves. Some people pretend so long they forget they're pretending. But wouldn't that itself be crazy?
        • dwoldrich ・ 7 hours ago

          I like to think of us as complicated, not crazy. Don't want to ever close myself off to advantages my quirks might bring.

    • gblargg ・ 9 hours ago

      When I wake up from good rest it's like I've been somewhere else for years. I use that time to stay off the Internet and look at things fresh. That would explain plenty of coming up with novel solutions to things, without any solving being done while sleeping. The mental ruts of the day greatly limit problem-solving ability.

      • dwoldrich ・ 7 hours ago

        Sounds like you are a good sleeper!

    • timcobb ・ 9 hours ago

      What about before your 40s?

      • dwoldrich ・ 7 hours ago

        Nothing I recall from my 30's, but in my 20's I worked in videogames and that was a brutal industry at that time in terms of work-life balance. (Or, at least it sounds better nowadays.)

        Bad sleep habits at that time ultimately led me to do a lot of daytime napping.

        During those sessions I occasionally experienced sleep paralysis, one out of body waking dream, and disturbing stuff like hearing head-splitting trumpet sounds upon waking up.

        One time, I awoke and heard an attenuated trumpet sound, and through the rush I heard two voices nearby. Just as I finished struggling to get control of my body, I distinctly remember hearing one of them say, "I can see it!"

        I was living alone at the time, and that was so alarming and made me question my life choices. Looking back now I view that episode as a probable spiritual attack on a vulnerable young man.

  • christophilus ・ 12 hours ago

    I often wake up realizing I wrote a handful of bugs the day before. They’re obvious to me in the morning even before I sit down and open my laptop.

    Sleep is a strange and magical thing.

    • jamiek88 ・ 12 hours ago

      Yes! When I awoke this morning my very first thought was ‘you didn’t connect the ground wire for the heater’.

      Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.

  • renegade-otter ・ 14 hours ago

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

    • pants2 ・ 14 hours ago

      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...

      • orky56 ・ 12 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        Sounds like polyphasic sleeping might re-emerge as the lifestyle solution. Instead of waiting for agents to complete, you should sleep on the response so when you arise you have the optimized prompt ready to go and a reset on your energy to prevent the burnout.

        • sillysaurusx ・ 9 hours ago

          Amusingly this is an almost-exact description of how I work on my current project, sharc. I'm porting Arc to Common Lisp, and implementing as many HN features as I can. I've been documenting as I go with handoffs: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... (Also thanks partly to dang, who is kind enough to find time to answer an email here and there about their current Arc stack.)

          At one point I was working so hard that Claude actually suggested, all on its own, that I should get some sleep.

      • krashidov ・ 14 hours ago

        FWIW I've had the opposite experience. Whenever I work late the output is absolute garbage. If I work past midnight it takes me 3 hours to get done what would have taken me 30 mins in the morning, and with way less frustration and stress. Your inputs to the LLM are only as good as how fresh your mind is so I've made it a rule to not work past midnight (unless there's an emergency).

        In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.

      • card_zero ・ 4 hours ago

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

      • malux85 ・ 14 hours ago
        ・ 4 more

        Then you're not challenging yourself with hard enough problems (those include the set of problems Claude cannot solve)

        • pants2 ・ 14 hours ago
          ・ 3 more

          Most software doesn't really have "hard enough problems" unless you're working in deep tech. The majority of SWEs are probably working on some sort of SaaS which isn't super challenging for a model like Opus 4.7. Most of the problems I face are on the product side, which I do need to take time to think through, but it's not as challenging as debugging in the good old days.

          • Toutouxc ・ 13 hours ago
            ・ 2 more

            How do you go from SaaS to “not super challenging”? The part of a SaaS product that I’m working on uses graph algorithms to work with what’s essentially an interactive form. There’s some mildly university-level computer science stuff and it’s mixed with enough domain expertise that Opus 4.7 is still unable to make even small changes without breaking everything or going against the architecture.

            So far I’m not that impressed.

            • vovavili ・ 12 hours ago

              Are you guys hiring?

  • MITSardine ・ 12 hours ago

    In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it.

    I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.

    • narag ・ an hour ago

      In Spanish "consultar con la almohada" (consult with the pillow)

    • toyg ・ 12 hours ago

      Literally the same in Italian, la notte porta consiglio. It's in the Bible, in nocte consilium from the Book of Proverbs, but it's likely to pre-date even that by centuries.

    • 8note ・ 11 hours ago

      im english, there's "sleep on it"

  • sqircles ・ 7 hours ago

    My biggest road blocks seem to be knocked down with a nice walk / good nights rest, a la "rubber duck debugging." Essentially, stepping away and being able to put a fresh set of "eyes" on the problem with a different perspective, albeit it's just you resetting your own perspective.

  • npongratz ・ 13 hours ago

    That's awesome! I had a somewhat similar experience (shared previously [0]):

    > I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.

    > Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.

    > To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651913

  • usernotused ・ 13 hours ago

    Interestingly, I observed the same when I was practicing the drums. I would fail multiple times to reproduce a drumming part, sleep on it, and succeed on the first try the day after.

    • jwrallie ・ 13 hours ago

      Difficult parts on videogames as well. It could be attributed to slow response times due to being tired or accidentally memorizing a bad pattern, resting also could help with those.

    • nagaiaida ・ 12 hours ago

      yep, same with guitar. go to sleep fumbling through a riff even though you "know" it, wake up playing it smooth as hell

  • SCLeo ・ 12 hours ago

    People are so different. When I was in college, if I had an unsolved problem, I could not fall asleep.

  • GuestFAUniverse ・ 13 hours ago

    Can confirm this level of problem solving.

    Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).

  • jvanderbot ・ 13 hours ago

    I can confirm - I woke up to the resolution to my two hardest problems during PhD. Three, if you count "I should look for this kind of inequality" (which did turn out to exist), but I think that's more of an _idea_ than a solution.

    The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.

  • nick_ ・ 14 hours ago

    AFAIK this is called sleep consolidation.

  • hackable_sand ・ 12 hours ago

    This is exactly how I learned programming.

    10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.

kshri24 ・ 6 hours ago

Reminds me of Ramanujan learning during sleep from Namagiri.

There are umpteen stories in Hindu scriptures of baby learning in the womb of the mother and how the expecting mother must only be exposed to good thoughts and a good environment for giving birth to an intelligent and well rounded child: stories of Abhimanyu (learning how to break the Chakravyuha formation in his womb while mother was learning it but his learning was incomplete when mother fell asleep during the lecture) and Prahlada (mother learning about Lord Vishnu against the wishes of her demon husband Hiranyakashyapu). Wonder if any studies have been done on this as well.

8note ・ 10 hours ago

"communicate" seems like the really interesting part of this, but gets a one-off mention only.

like, how does this communication work? how does one sleeping person communicate skills to another sleeping person?

have we found the mechanism? was it awake poeple communicating to sleeping people? the reverse?

  • samothrace ・ 8 hours ago

    Stephen LaBerge's book explains, in detail, how they would communicate with lucid dreamers during their research. I don't remember how the researchers signaled the subjects, but if I remember correctly, the subjects would communicate with researchers primarily through eye movements. I can't say if the methods are related at all, but the book is worth a read.

vanviegen ・ 14 hours ago

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.

  • pedalpete ・ 12 hours ago

    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.

    • aeternum ・ 11 hours ago

      It seems to me that this is the purpose of nightmares. I especially noticed this after having kids. They are not by default scared of snakes and such but if they see a nature documentary of a snake biting something or even a cartoon bad guy, it's enough to trigger bad dreams which reinforce the fear and it's far stronger the next day.

      IMO this is under-appreciated in current AI models. RL is not very effective in avoiding crocodiles for example, by the time like 5 of your tribe-mates are eaten it's far too late. You need some mechanism that ensures the danger is learned after just a single incident.

    • delis-thumbs-7e ・ 3 hours ago

      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”.

  • subhobroto ・ 10 hours ago

    > in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up

    YES! I have never told anyone this (because it feels so random) but it's great to know I'm not the only one. I pretty much expect this when I am in depths of an issue I cant somehow consciously resolve, so much that I keep a pen and writing pad next to me, before I sleep, because the code I saw in my dream often gets lost by the time I go to my office and resume the laptop.

    I even figured out a hack - I just force myself to go to sleep if I can't consciously resolve it for more than an hour. It's as if my brain gets an otherwise untapped firepower.

    That said, this absolutely destroys my sleep cycle for the next day or two and spikes my BP for the rest of the day to the point where I feel sick.

    Although in theory I'm sleeping more than the 8h, I feel horribly mentally exhausted. I can work out, physically just fine but my brain is on empty - because of this, I limit this to critical blockers.

markus_zhang ・ 10 hours ago

Ah, very soon we will need to work in dreams. Can’t leave any stone of productivity unturned, right?

  • TallGuyShort ・ 8 hours ago

    I can honestly say one of my most productive moments ever was when a design came to me in a dream... And who among us hasn't figured out a bug in the shower after taking a break? Getting good sleep is essential to actually being productive in many endeavors for a few reasons.

  • malux85 ・ 5 hours ago

    Thats what I thought too, people in this thread are giving anecdotal evidence of "being productive in dreams" and then telltelling stories about one or a small handful of problems their mind voluntarily solved while sleeping, that's a very different thing from the eventual capitalistic dream-learning that is the inevitable ending of this research. They'll claim its a utopian dream of "only learn when you want to", and that its totally optional ... then a few renegade companies adopt it and get ahead, then more adopt it, then its mandatory and performance reviewed.

    • booleandilemma ・ 4 hours ago

      We really strive at making life into a living hell, don't we?

dgb23 ・ 14 hours ago

Aside, but I struggled a long time with regular sleep. I have been a night owl since I was a kid. I experience late hours as magical, don’t know how to describe it. So I always slept too little, then not at all, then drifting and sleeping in.

But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier.

No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did improve many small things, like getting rid of bad habits, being more content, appreciating sleep more, prioritizing things differently.

I wish everyone good, healthy sleep.

  • alargemoose ・ 11 hours ago

    My “trick” for this was getting a dog in my early 20s, while living in an apartment, doesn’t matter how much I wanted to sleep in, they needed to go out, so I had to get up. And without thinking I moved my sleep schedule to accommodate this. Worth it.

  • anal_reactor ・ 7 hours ago

    I just pulled an all-nighter because drugs are fun and now I'm standing here to see the sunrise because why not if I'm already awake.

    Have a good day.

timwis ・ 3 hours ago

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.

tsoukase ・ 2 hours ago

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.

silentkat ・ 11 hours ago

I regularly have abstract dreams I have trouble remembering. I wake up feeling like I understand problems better but I can't articulate why. However, I can indeed tackle problems from the day before more easily.

It's pretty fascinating. What's even more fascinating is often times when I do remember the dream, a lot of it is nonsense. And yet I'm doing better at the things I dreamt about.

willtemperley ・ 7 hours ago

20 years ago I was struggling to build an app that worked in ie6, FF and chrome. While still sleeping I asked my girlfriend what flavour JavaScript she liked. I don’t think it was a good dream.

richstokes ・ 12 hours ago

Kinda related but I used to practice guitar in my dreams. If I had been learning something I’d often dream about playing it over and over again, and even going beyond that and figuring out “solos” and melodies and stuff over the chord. Can’t be sure if it translated into any real life skill, but it felt like I was actually learning or at least strongly reinforcing what I’d been practicing.

Xeoncross ・ 15 hours ago

AI does the work during the day and we learn while sleeping. Society doesn't collapse from ignorance. We have a new movie plot gentlemen.

cobbaut ・ 2 hours ago

Thinking of problems before falling asleep does sometimes help me in finding solutions in a dream. Though I may still be half awake when doing this.

  • EagnaIonat ・ 2 hours ago

    It's a well known technique. I first heard about it from Barbara Oakley, so there is probably some neuroscience research done about it.

  • vasco ・ 2 hours ago

    That may be related or not to the article but Feynman for example wrote a lot about the miracles that the brain can do in the small moments between being awake and being asleep. He thought it unlocked some extra juice and tried to force himself to stay in that moment longer and then to wake up to take notes. You should look into it.

rcarmo ・ 14 hours ago

So I guess having dreams about recurring meetings is... honing corporate skills?

  • saltcured ・ 14 hours ago

    Is the main theme that you suddenly realize you aren't wearing pants?

    And if so, would you say it has improved your pants wearing performance on the job?

  • suprjami ・ 14 hours ago

    It also counts as overtime, right?

    • gblargg ・ 9 hours ago

      If this dream-learning thing caught on, everyone would have to work in their sleep to stay competitive.

throwatdem12311 ・ 13 hours ago

This is why I would smash my head against a wall trying to beat a boss in Dark Souls for an entire evening, then wake up the next day and beat them on my first or second attempt.

Very common phenomena that is discussed frequently in the souls community.

  • hatthew ・ 10 hours ago

    I experience similar, but I'm pretty sure it's just rest and a fresh mind, not overnight learning/thinking. When I'm bashing my head against a wall, I'm stuck in a local optimum, and sleeping lets me reset and try something new that often works better (and I execute it better since I'm not as tired).

  • Root_Denied ・ 8 hours ago

    Sometimes called the "cold controller" effect as well, and not necessarily requiring sleep but rather just a break from the game.

  • t-shaped ・ 12 hours ago

    That’s so on point. One time I was stuck on One Reborn from Bloodborne for a whole evening. While I was sleeping I figured out the optimal path to best the Chime Maidens. I woke up and beat the boss in 5 mins.

    Very real phenomenon. Happened so many times

pedalpete ・ 12 hours ago

Interesting comment they have towards the end about "targeted memory reactivation can disrupt sleep".

It is important to note the study they are referring to is "targeted memory reactivation with sleep disruption", there are methods of doing targeted memory reactivation without sleep disruption.

I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of affectablesleep.com, and though we are mostly focused on slow-wave (deep) sleep, we have been looking into memory reactivation, lucid dreaming and other stimulations for additions.

  • GranPC ・ 9 hours ago

    Sorry for the off-topic, but I was curious about Affectable so I opened the website. I saw it's very thin and light and comfortable, but I struggled to find out what "it" is and what it does for me. It's kinda buried.

    I was interested enough to click through the different links in the footer. And just as I reached the purchase page, I see that it requires "an iPhone running iOS". Unsure why it requires an iPhone; and no info on a timeline for iPhone-less customers. But that immediately rules me out as a customer.

    I feel like the landing page would be a lot better if it started out focusing on what it is & how it can help me.

    Apologies again for the unsolicited advice. Just wanted to share my impressions in case it's helpful.

matthewfcarlson ・ 14 hours ago

I read a short novel about a technology that allowed you to have a VR like experience while dreaming. Of course, there was all the fun/perverted stuff you can think of but also it was immediately put to use as a corporate tool. Over a few years, more and more white collar jobs shifted to night shifts where you worked via dream VR. Then people were available during the day to do whatever, watch their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. In many ways- it was a very promising future.

  • mlboss ・ 13 hours ago

    I don't think this will ever work. Sleep acts as a compression for our daily life. Brains takes in daily new information and compresses it based on what we already know. The stuff dreams are made off are just a variant of what happens in day life.

  • eichin ・ 13 hours ago

    powernapcomic (maritza campos) is a surreal dystopian version of this (with the corporate part turned up to 99). Excellent sci-fi and very weird...

thenthenthen ・ 15 hours ago

Two months ago my partner recorded me speaking in my sleep. I was speaking fluent Mandarin. I always thought sleep time is used for learning (among healing etc), but now I am convinced.

  • detribaby ・ 15 hours ago

    Well you’ll have to give us more. Do you speak Mandarin at all?

    • tsukurimashou ・ 14 hours ago

      spoiler, he is Chinese and only speaks Mandarin

      • lostlogin ・ 9 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        But writes in English. Very rare.

        • BoxedEmpathy ・ 9 hours ago

          I've met a few people who write English but can't speak it. One of them is polish and learned to type English to play online video games.

    • consumer451 ・ 15 hours ago

      And, what was the partner's ability to benchmark? What is their level of familiarity with the language?

      I would love to believe.

      • jtbayly ・ 14 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        It was a recording. I dare you to ask for it.

        • consumer451 ・ 12 hours ago

          I shall not be ensnared by your schoolyard dare. You cannot manipulate me so easily. OP, however...

mbrumlow ・ 6 hours ago

I have been saying this for years.

When I was young I somehow figured out how to control my dreams. By the time I was an adult and working in software all my dreams were always iterating over solutions to problems I had at work. And every day I would come into the office with the ability to move forward on projects with insights in leaned that night while sleeping.

drakonka ・ 3 hours ago

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?

  • satvikpendem ・ 2 hours ago

    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.

ares623 ・ 39 minutes ago

Rich Hickey proven right again. (tongue-in-cheek reference to his Hammock Driven Development talk)

ludicrousdispla ・ 5 hours ago

I've been intensively learning German for a year and once or twice a week in dreams I have brief dialogues with the locals. Very useful as additional speaking practice :)

mahdihabibi ・ 11 hours ago

This has always been clear as day to me, but I just couldn’t prove it. I used to take naps right after practicing guitar because I believed it would help me learn faster! LOL

jesse_dot_id ・ 15 hours ago

Lucid dreaming is a cool concept but I've never been able to pull it off. I still try, though!

  • coppsilgold ・ 9 hours ago

    Training yourself to remember dreams by writing them down before they fade away is paramount, it's not enough to just think about them - they still somehow fade away along with your thoughts about them. Then read what you wrote before going to sleep again.

    If you want to achieve lucid dreaming consistently you also have to develop a habit of doing reality checks. The most effective one is to pinch your nose and try to breath through it, in your dreams it will almost always work and the surprise is major.

    Lucid dreaming even works for people with aphantasia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia>.

    • an0malous ・ 9 hours ago

      Are there any more subtle reality checks so people in the real world don’t think I’m insane trying to breathe through my closed nose all day?

      • satvikpendem ・ 2 hours ago

        Look into all day awareness. It's the phenomenon of noticing the incredible level of detail of the real world and trying to do that all day.

      • ludicrousdispla ・ 5 hours ago

        Read something, and then read it a second time. If you are awake it will be the same text, but if you are dreaming it will have changed.

      • coppsilgold ・ 8 hours ago

        Checking clocks for consistency. Text as well. They are less reliable. Some people swear by rotating a text containing object upside down and see if the text auto-rotates, apparently it does in their dreams. Some people can't read anything in their dreams.

  • JumpCrisscross ・ 15 hours ago

    It sort of just happened to me a few years ago. It’s neat—flying is fun. (As is the opposite, when it just doesn’t work and I wake up sort of laughing at myself for having spent, presumably, hours jumping around in my dream.)

    But at least for me, the price was dreams, the moment I go lucid, ceasing to be self directed. I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifies anymore. (If I’m lucid.) I have to kind of create my own magic, which isn’t particularly restful.

    • eks391 ・ 7 hours ago

      > I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifies anymore.

      I haven't lucid dreamt since a child, but I recall everything about the dream continuing to be autonomous as before becoming lucid, but if I wanted to do something, I could add that element. I definitely could still be surprised, as the dream fulfilled wishes like a genie would, meeting it technically but perhaps not as I meant when I willed the change. The few times I reigned my subconscious so I had full power and there were no longer any surprises, I would wake up.

      • JumpCrisscross ・ 5 hours ago

        > everything about the dream continuing to be autonomous as before becoming lucid, but if I wanted to do something, I could add that element. I definitely could still be surprised

        I may have overstated what I said. The environment continues to be dynamic, and characters enter and exit and cause their usual mayhem (alongside me). But if something unexpected happens, there is–in my mind–a theatrical explanation for it and thus a plot-driven solution. The stuffed animals are upset I'm going to wake up and kill them, so I put them in a zoo where they believe they continue to exist after I stop dreaming, et cetera. (And sure enough, they're there next time I'm in that "place".) If you're trapped somewhere, you know an exit will materialise because you're the main character, and sure enough, it eventually does. If I break something I love, I know something will happen that makes it whole again. When anything that happens can be undone, action is robs of its meaning.

    • karmakurtisaani ・ 15 hours ago

      Yep, same. The dream gets incredibly boring after you get control of it.

      • JumpCrisscross ・ 11 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        > dream gets incredibly boring after you get control of it

        Wouldn’t go that far. But you have to consciously make it interesting by creating the weirdness.

        • karmakurtisaani ・ 4 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          Maybe it works differently for different people, but I found my creativity incredibly limited once I got the control of the dream. It's like everything just stopped and I could do whatever I wanted, but nothing in the environment reacted to the things I did, just stopped working.

          • JumpCrisscross ・ 4 hours ago

            Are your other characters still sentient? Or do they go ragdoll?

      • kbrkbr ・ 14 hours ago

        Not if you are an aphantast.

      • chrz ・ 14 hours ago
        ・ 4 more

        but but, you can do whatever you want?

        • bnreed ・ 14 hours ago
          ・ 2 more

          I've had limited experience (n~20) but no... that's not how it worked for me, interested in others' experiences.

          "flying" was limited. I didn't have full control and sometimes felt dynamically pinned to the top of a 2D scrolling video game as if there were driver incompatabilities.

          drifting off to sleep in a session, it was very disturbing- i felt like i was being dragged by my ankle across the bed before lucid dreaming began, "here it comes..."

          Sometimes there would be ominious sounds/visuals that I could not influence that scared me so much I was glad I could wake up because it felt like a nightmare was approaching.

          Two big tells I'm lucid dreaming: I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?") or, I look at my hand - as if it were LLM it absolutely does not render well... like a tree trunk with a bunch of branches.

          • JumpCrisscross ・ 11 hours ago

            > I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?")

            Super interesting, because I have the same thing. Also none of my technology works. I usually try to do something on my phone a few times, fail because the UI is putty, and then remember that smartphones don’t work in my dreams.

        • djeastm ・ 9 hours ago

          Well, yeah. But it's what you want in the moment which can be very unpredictable even when you're "guiding" the dream. The subconscious is still in the driver's seat there and can go to some weird, wacky places.

    • mynameisash ・ 13 hours ago

      My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She lucid dreams very regularly, and she says she spends a lot of that time flying.

      I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.

      I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.

      • JumpCrisscross ・ 11 hours ago

        > Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream

        There is a Peter Pan tendency, at least to my dreams. You know you can’t fly. But then you remember you have, and believing it’s true makes it happens.

        That’s what I was getting at with the film-script effect. I’ll be in a bind and then realize that there “must” be a solution in a particular form, otherwise the dream wouldn’t make sense, and that sort of conjures that thing into existence.

        Maybe fortunately, maybe sadly, the one thing I’ve not been able to do is conjure up lost loved ones. I’ll get a bunch of puppies who know my dog, but he just couldn’t show up, or I’ll get strangers or living loved ones who know my grandmother or best friend; they’re just constantly indisposed.

  • satvikpendem ・ 15 hours ago

    Keep a dream journal. There any many methods for achieving it but if you keep a dream journal long enough you'll start getting consistent lucid dreams.

    • jesse_dot_id ・ 4 hours ago

      Yeah, I do that. I've read many books about it. My particular physiology is just stubborn thus far.

  • stldev ・ 12 hours ago

    I was fortunate to be taught by my father when I was younger. It may be an age/luck-of-the-draw thing, but check out "MILD"; it's the name for the simple technique that worked for me.

  • macrolime ・ 13 hours ago

    Most consistent way of achieving it I've managed is use a watch with an alarm that vibrates and is trivial to turn off or turns off by itself, then set it to go off after sleeping 5-6 hours. When waking up, don't move and focus on the black behind the eyes, then after a few seconds it may turn into a dream and you go straight from waking into a lucid dream.

  • zeta0134 ・ 15 hours ago

    My tell is to recognize any room with a piano in it. I naturally want to sit down and play this piano, but the keys are totally wrong. No problem, I'll look around and, lo and behold, dozens more pianos all... with the keys in the wrong places. I can't play anything. "Oh, this again. I must be dreaming. How frustrating."

    • microtonal ・ 14 hours ago

      A very regularly occuring dream is that I'm in a train and realize that I don't have a ticket (never happened IRL), so I want to buy an e-ticket, but the ticketing app does not work. The text changes all the time, the buttons move around, weird errors, and then I realize 'yep I'm in a dream again'.

      The nicer lucid dreams are those were you can fly or make spectacular light and colors, but I find that it's usually a difficult balance to avoid waking up.

  • magiclaw ・ 15 hours ago

    I was really into it in my early 20's. One way to tell if you are mentally in the state to lucid dream is if you no longer feel tired. One night, after a grueling hike, I was completely exhausted when I went to bed. I closed my eyes, and moments later all my exhaustion just vanished, and I began to explore the space.

    • galleywest200 ・ 15 hours ago

      Another way is to try to see what the clock faces say in your dream. Also, see if the light switches behave as you would expect.

  • typeish ・ 14 hours ago

    there's a wearable dropping this year that's supposed to make it easier to lucid dream: https://www.prophetic.com/

    • hobofan ・ 4 hours ago

      Is there any research that would support that such a device actually works? This just looks like vaporware, and what I was able to find on the /r/luciddreaming subreddit also seems to echo that sentiment.

      • satvikpendem ・ 2 hours ago

        I'm not sure about that device but there's research about lucid dream induction through flashing lights during sleep in a consistent pattern and there are a few head devices that do that.

andai ・ 15 hours ago

> In perhaps the most striking example of learning during sleep, Konkoly, Paller, and several collaborators witnessed what amounted to conversations with people who were in the midst of dreams. Independent lab groups in the U.S., France, Germany, and the Netherlands asked lucid dreamers to answer yes-or-no questions and solve simple math problems. Electrodes measuring body and brain activity verified that the participants were not awake. Martin Dresler, a sleep researcher at the Donders Institute, who ran the Dutch experiments, said that they were able to verbally deliver new information to the sleeping mind—and to receive responses. Some people could remember the questions they had been asked when they woke up. “This is a form of very complex learning,” he told me.

https://xkcd.com/269/

  • Tossrock ・ 13 hours ago

    Also, https://dresdencodak.com/2006/10/07/summer-dream-job/

    • andai ・ 12 hours ago

      Buddy of mine tried lucid dreaming for years. One night, he finally had it.

      Immediately, a police man shows up. "No, you're not allowed to be lucid." My friend hung his head and said "okay", and was never lucid again.

      Even stranger, I later heard reports from others along similar lines.

deferredgrant ・ 8 hours ago

This is fascinating, but it feels like exactly the kind of topic where the effect size and reproducibility matter more than the headline. Dream research is very easy to oversell.

block_dagger ・ 9 hours ago

When I was beginning to use AI for everything, as most of us had, I would start dreaming that wall of text that had a personality sat between me and reality. For several nights I would dream this way with the wall becoming translucent and displaying text but the "real" actions (other people, scenes) was happening on the other side of the wall. I've dreamed in videogames as well. I'm not sure if I was getting any learning done, but I'm pretty sure my brain was exercising modes of thought that would push knowledge from "system 2" down into "system 1."

jboggan ・ 15 hours ago

My wife used to think that I had terrible sleep apnea because I'd repeatedly quit breathing for a minute or two at a time and then gasp for air, but it turned out I was just dreaming about freediving for lobsters.

  • lazyasciiart ・ 14 hours ago

    Uh, do you freedive while awake?

nikolay ・ 13 hours ago

This is nothing new as there's even a term for it - "hypnopedia." People used this widely to learn new languages in the past, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence about its effectiveness.

throwforfeds ・ 14 hours ago

There's a long history of doing yogic practice in the dream state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga

  • orthecreedence ・ 13 hours ago

    Yes, "new research" is a misnomer here. The correct version is "people in lab coats have finally noticed ..."

    Reminds me of the studies that say lobsters can feel pain. Like, no fucking shit. What multi-cellular (and even single-celled) organisms do not feel pain? Glad we're giving the western stamp of approval on these highly contested ideas.

    • azan_ ・ 13 hours ago

      I suggest you should drop the patronizing tone. People believe lots of things and a lot of them is completely bogus. That's why we need people in lab coats to evaluate them in systematic way.

      • orthecreedence ・ 13 hours ago
        ・ 3 more

        [flagged]

        • whatever120 ・ 12 hours ago

          I’m an academic and you have insulted my ego. I will now cry in a corner.

        • azan_ ・ 11 hours ago

          No problem, hit me up for an advice any other time you will be tempted to post stupid bullshit, glad I could help!

hughw ・ 14 hours ago

While you're sleeping I'm practicing my skills. Enjoy being poor, suckers!

  • matthewfcarlson ・ 14 hours ago

    While you were sleeping, I was practicing the art of the blade

    • orthecreedence ・ 13 hours ago

      While you were studying the blade, I was drooling on my physical self while trying to get two girls to kiss in a lucid dream.

franze ・ 14 hours ago

yeah i hate it when i work while sleeping

Me: "I'm gonna plan the workshop tomorrow, more than enough time."

7,5 h Later

Brain: "Hey, here is everything, worked the whole night, no need to thank me!!!"

Me: "I need coffee..."

praveen4463 ・ 14 hours ago

I feel walking outside and thinking is a better way to practice skills and solve problems. A tired mind just sleeps and usually doesn't remember current events.

petra ・ 15 hours ago

Have anybody managed to use sleep to learn language? How ?

  • neom ・ 14 hours ago

    I have dyslexia and in high school learning my lines for plays was really hard but I loved doing plays, so I recorded myself saying my lines on tape (yah, I'm old) and used double cassette to fill 2 tapes with them, then run them over night while I was sleeping. I've never used this in my adult life but it worked pretty well for my lines and I suppose maybe you could use it to learn a language?

    Edit: Claude tells me I was a head of my time, apparently it works but not net new, you have to also be working on it awake, it's called 'targeted memory reactivation (TMR)": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12592824/

  • spudlyo ・ 14 hours ago

    While I think it's a compelling idea that playing speech in your target language while you sleep can help, I don't think it's ever been demonstrated to work.

    Having said that, that sleep is incredibly important for learning anything! I practice my language learning during the day, a little bit every day, and I prioritize getting good sleep. This is mostly just trying to go to bed at the same time every night, avoiding alcohol, and giving myself an hour before bed with low lights to read and calm my mind. When you sleep, memories are consolidated, organized, and tagged for long-term storage. I will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and bouncing around in my mind are echos of phrases and words from my target language. I figure it's working.

  • Cthulhu_ ・ 14 hours ago

    Dexter, from Dexter's Lab, learned French.

chaqchase ・ 14 hours ago

Sounds like mental rehearsal more than magic. Interesting, but I'm not sure what to do differently day to day.

smurda ・ 6 hours ago

In “Why We Sleep” by Harvard sleep researcher Matthew Walker, he says that during REM sleep your brain revisits emotional experiences but in a chemically safe environment. Stress-related chemicals like noradrenaline are greatly reduced so you can replay difficult or painful memories but without the full emotional intensity you felt at the time. The brain can process and “defuse” those emotions.

TLDR, sleeping on it works.

manoDev ・ 11 hours ago

That’s why we say “let me sleep on it”.

shevy-java ・ 5 hours ago

I quite effectively use this technique at work.

varispeed ・ 11 hours ago

My favourite part of coding is going to the park, sit on the bench and dream the problem. After a while, some times it needs several visits I write any code.

Unfortunately most employers see this as slacking. It cannot be done in a noisy open plan office.

At one place few other devs were into this. We would be spending most of the working day in the park. Managers were not happy, but work was delivered always.

squibonpig ・ 15 hours ago

It's gonna be really sad in 10-15 years when all the sc bros are hustling and grindsetting their dreams away.

  • magiclaw ・ 15 hours ago

    Now that's dystopian!

    • fizzbar ・ 15 hours ago

      Top performers manufacture 33% more hours in the day thanks to this one weird trick!

anon291 ・ 9 hours ago

Srinivas Ramanujan famously said he did most of his work at night in dreams.

As a total aside, I've had sleep issues my whole life and can sometimes inadvertently induce lucid dreaming, and then I can think for hours while sleeping; it's amazing. Unfortunately a bit inception-y, but whatever.

irishcoffee ・ 11 hours ago

This happens to me both sleeping and awake. When I’m stuck on a problem and decide to walk away from it for a while, I subconsciously spin off a thread in my mind and move on to something else. The number of times I’ve had a eureka moment 3-5 hours later (not realizing I was even percolating on it) has to be in the hundreds.

Happens probably twice a week when I sleep on the problem as well.

To parlay this back to the current LLM craze, if we just export all our problems to some fuzzy non deterministic solver without ever trying to understand the problem, our collective brains will atrophy severely.

I use the LLM my work pays for, sparingly, because I refuse to let that atrophy occur.

davidw ・ 12 hours ago

I remember when I first started dreaming in Italian... it was pretty cool though.

Svoka ・ 12 hours ago

Reminds me of Echopraxia (Peter Watts book)

zombot ・ 14 hours ago

Now there is no excuse anymore to be working less than 24 hours a day.

ALittleLight ・ 7 hours ago

Now that there is proof of communication while dreaming, it is only a matter of time before someone manages to vibe code while sleeping.

bethekidyouwant ・ 13 hours ago

Where is the control group of regular dreamers exposed to the same sounds when in REM?

Lucid dreaming is just an unusually awake form of dreaming. Not surprising that they can hear things especially the ones that can move their eyes left and right when prompted…

The study should have simply been find people that can move their eyes left and right when prompted that still have REM brain waves tell them some random thing and see if they can remember it when you wake them up. I don’t know why that’s not completely obvious maybe it is and these guys are just grifters

nothinkjustai ・ 13 hours ago

Hah and people still make the argument LLMs and brains work the same lol

metalman ・ 16 hours ago

There is no such thing as "should". The thing is possible, therefore humans will do it. The only question is, who is we?

  • azan_ ・ 16 hours ago

    Well, you shouldn't smoke yet people do it. I think the article posits question whether we should in similar spirit.

econ ・ 16 hours ago

After two weeks I woke up and didn't notice it was German tv. Eventually after 5 minutes an unknown word came along. I still can't speak it.

When 13 i use to code till 1-2 am. In school I slept with my eyes open till 11. The information was stored and organized but I was unaware of it. I remember tests where all of the questions talked about topics I never spend a conscious thought on. But I knew all the answers. Quite the surreal experience.

Teachers sometimes wondered if I was still in the room or they just asked questions. My mind would grep the most recent chunk of speech, parse it and respond as if nothing unusual was going on. The mind raced but I talked slowly to portray the slight delay more natural.

I learned you don't want other people's bullshit in your head. It needs to be questioned first.

lucidityspirits ・ 6 hours ago

I built a mobile app called Lucidity (luciditydreams.com) aimed at helping people have their first lucid dream:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lucidity-lucid-dream-journal/i...

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.b3nz.lucidi...

Started building it 14 years ago after reading an article about lucid dreaming in my favorite science magazine, and no other apps out there existed to assist you with reality checks and the different induction methods. Recently added a 7-day lucid dreaming journey to guide you to your first lucid dream. I worked with lucid dreaming researchers for the program's content.

Feedback welcome!