For anyone not familiar, a common class of techniques people used to use (still do? Not mentioned in the article) involve regularly testing yourself to see if you're in a dream. Counting your fingers; in dreams, you may not have 5 per finger. (Sound familiar from a modern take?) Or, look at numbers and words; a digital clock; in dreams they may not make sense, but in real life they do. (OK, this is really sounding familiar...)
The idea is that when you check while awake, you will pass the awake-check, but set up a habit pattern. While dreaming, you will observe weird stuff when this happens, realize it must then you must be dreaming; you then become lucid, and can sort of control the dream, or at least be aware you're dreaming.
It may or may not have worked for me a handful of times. It certainly felt so, but only briefly, and I can't confirm it was the desired effect. Would wake up shortly after each time.
But if a person decided to count fingers to check if he is dreaming then he is already in lucid dreaming right? Because normally you do not know you are in a dream unless you are already in lucid dreaming.
It's not horrifying when dreaming. It's like "yup, 7 fingers, totally normal, let's move on".
In dreams, I've seen people vibrate drastically until they become part of the scenery. Or other insane and horrible to describe things. However, to "myself" in the dream, that was not as surprising as my recollection of it.
A lot of the motional subsystems in your brain are turned off when you dream so you don’t react to things as you normally would. Nightmares, etc happen when those subsystems stay on for some reason (PTSD, for example). See Chap 10 (IIRC) https://amzn.to/3DzSLva
I think you missed that they were pointing out a typo, the original poster said '5 (fingers) per finger' not the intended '5 (fingers) per hand' (and before anyone points out that it should be digits, yes, I know, take that up with the original poster too).
I am not sure what you're referring to but I remember watching an episode of some fictional show on Netflix where this method was used. Where a couple would count their fingers throughout the day so they could dream lucidly together.
If I'd have to guess I think it was "Behind Her Eyes".
The modern take is AI image hallucinations. I didn't realize this at the time, but it's obvious now: The reality checks lucid dreamers suggest match closely with prev-gen AI hallucinations. (fingers, text, numbers etc)
Maybe we are actually LLMs, but we have prompts that prevent us from noticing that. Unless we sleep, probably because our developers decided not to censor that part.
So you’re saying the simulation architects used an older diffusion model for dreams.
> It may or may not have worked for me a handful of times
Exactly my experience. I used the exact strategy you mention (add pinching yourself, as old fashioned as that sounds) and it was almost too easy how quickly it worked, couple days I think. I questioned if it was real or not
>So you’re saying the simulation architects used an older diffusion model for dreams.
I think these concepts are actually related - the things that end up messed up in dreams and diffusion models are things that have high information density. Faces, hands, books, phone screens, ship layouts etc all have a lot of information in them from a human perspective. If we pay attention then we can see the (lack of) this level of detail.
This kind of lucid dreaming advice has worked for me a handful of times. They've been very memorable dreams.
The idea is that when you check while awake, you will pass the awake-check, but set up a habit pattern. While dreaming, you will observe weird stuff when this happens, realize it must then you must be dreaming; you then become lucid, and can sort of control the dream, or at least be aware you're dreaming.
It may or may not have worked for me a handful of times. It certainly felt so, but only briefly, and I can't confirm it was the desired effect. Would wake up shortly after each time.