That's pretty much how my dreams work. For example, I can read in my dreams (like signs, books), but it's almost always one word at a time, and the rest of the text becomes impossible to focus while I'm reading that word, no matter how hard I try. It's like the "permanence module" is disabled and my brain falls back to a primitive generative AI for the next frame. And, I can't reason about the logic of my experience, the lack of causality, or persistence of objects at the time. Everything feels "as they should be" despite how awkward things get. I guess that's why nightmares are so convincing or hard to get out of, because I can't reason about them. The whole article feels like describing a typical dream to me.
> I can read in my dreams (like signs, books), but it's almost always one word at a time, and the rest of the text becomes impossible to focus while I'm reading that word, no matter how hard I try. It's like the "permanence module" is disabled
Techniques for lucid dreaming rely on this fact for you to be able to "detect" that you are in a dream. There is one where you need to look at time, look away and look again. The time will change or be in an impossible format if you're dreaming. Then if you're aware you're dreaming you can start to "control" the dream.
Recently I found myself looking at an old alarm clock with a seven-segment display, but the segments were lit up arbitrarily, making an unreadable pattern instead of a time. But then I remembered, oh yeah, that's right, I do have a broken old alarm clock that does that, it's probably just that, I'm not dreaming. And I fell back into the dream.
The funny thing is, I really do have an old alarm clock that does that. It's the most useless alarm clock ever, because not only can it not tell you the time, it can't even tell you if you're awake.
I've found your brain is extremely quick to jump to conclusions in a dream. It's surreal sometimes where random connections like your alarm clock suddenly come out of nowhere and draw you back in.
What really gets me sometimes is when the dream comes with a 'historical context' that serves as a false memory. For example, dreaming I'm on a ship, and I 'remember' that I've been on it for months.
Funny enough, I never really needed these tricks. Or I guess, I do have one? It's when I realize the events are scripted. I don't know why, but many of my dreams are perfectly sensical and linear, and sometimes I notice and hijack them. What I can do with them tho, depends on how close I am to waking up.
Saddest one was when I realized I was walking my dead dog. She was actually exhibiting behaviors I know she had been used to have, but not ones I had consciously remembered much when thinking about her after her death. I lingered on that one a bit. Still, dreams are dreams, and there was some weirdness, and I knew them for what they were. But that time, I did not fight the script.
That's a good way of putting it. In the past when I realized I was dreaming, I would take advantage of the situation and change things, give myself superpowers, etc. But in recent years my few lucid dreams have had really interesting plots, so I consciously chose to let things be and just see where they go.
I can relate. I saw my dead dog several times in my dream, and in the dream, it felt like she was never dead in the first place, not like I reunited with her, but it was just another of those regular days with her. So, even though I enjoyed the dream, I didn't have that euphoric joy of reuniting with her. I perceive everything as 100% absolute truth and only realize what's wrong after I wake up.
> There is one where you need to look at time, look away and look again. The time will change or be in an impossible format if you're dreaming.
I did a bunch of lucid dreaming when I was younger (seems it was a lot easier then?), and even knowing things like that can end up making sense in the dream, you sometimes end up thinking "Well, it kind of makes sense the time went from 11:00 to 14:00 when I looked away, I did look away for quite a while".
For people who haven't lucid dreamed before, it might sound simple and almost stupid, but a lot harder when you're trying to look at your watch and everything makes sense but also not.
The key to lucid dreaming for me is to question reality regularly, and as a result do things in waking life to test if I'm dreaming. About once a month I will legitimately wonder whether I'm dreaming and press my hand into a solid object expecting my hand to sink into it. This has helped me go lucid in a dream a few times. It's made me seem nutty a few more than that.
The way you described is only one technique, and lucid dreams obtained with this technique have a false positive rate higher than wake-induced (WILD) methods. These false-positives are normal dreams masquerading as lucid. An example is flying like superman “because you know you are in a dream and you can do anything” in order to get the milk from supermarket because your dream-wife told you there is no milk in the kitchen. See the logic error?
>Techniques for lucid dreaming rely on this fact for you to be able to "detect" that you are in a dream.
I wish I could figure out how to do that, anytime I'm dreaming all the weird inconsistencies and people morphing from one person to another and such all just seem to be normal.
Yeah, I can't detect it at all. When dreaming, everything feels 100% real despite how unrealistic it gets: my vision is blurry, it's always in a darker hue even in the daylight, colors are grayish, i can't reason, my long term memory doesn't work, objects don't stay where they are, no logic to anything, sounds are weird. Yet, I can't tell if it's a dream. I can't even think about whether it's a dream or not. My reasoning module doesn't function. If things become so stressful, I wake up, but that's about it.
My experience with nightmares has largely been that a part of my subconscious is trying to conduct the dream in an "exciting" direction, to engender thrill on a par with a carnival ride .. but then it slips or gets out of hand and turns into a spiral of self-fulfilling terror instead.
I feel like ruminating on that process some during waking time has helped my dream producing instincts to instead steer away from unnecessary sources of fear often before I even perceive (during the dream) that things might have been about to get scary (though I'm often able to assess that pattern after the fact).
> It's like the "permanance module" is disabled and my brain falls back to a primitive generative AI for the next frame.
What if there is no such module and whenever you believe you have experienced permanence it is because your brain confabulated it from what it actually observed?
I'd still call that permanence module :) AFAIK, that the way our vision works is that our eyes only see a narrowly focused region in detail and the rest of our periphery is generated by our brain (based on what we saw there before). There are optical illusions based on that.
> AFAIK, that the way our vision works is that our eyes only see a narrowly focused region in detail and the rest of our periphery is generated by our brain (based on what we saw there before).
I know it's a over-simplification, but maybe too much of it? 100% of your periphery isn't "generated" by your brain based only on what you've seen before, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to see stuff "at the corner of your eyes" or "looking while not looking" where you can see stuff without actually focusing straight on on the thing itself.
Except for those times when you're facing off against creatures that can keep track of your saccades, as to move only during the brief moments your brain is ignoring input from your eyes.
