A lucid dream is when you are aware that you are dreaming and then, you can control your dream.<p>Read more:<p>http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream
I did as a teen. I found the inconsistencies in the resulting dream structure too annoying. I stopped trying deliberately.<p>Eg, last night I had a dream conversation with Mal of the Serenity on reactor core dynamics. I became aware of the dream when he couldn't explain how part of the ship he was fixing worked. It fell apart when I wanted to figure out how ship cooled itself. My dream state couldn't support that level of control.<p>I then woke up and realized that thermophotovoltaic or other sort of nuclear electric system would make more sense than a light water reactor, assuming they figured out how to make that be efficient. There's still a bunch of heat to dissipate.<p>I should have just left the dream a dream.
A trick someone taught me to get into a lucid dream state is to 'touch your nose' while in a dream. The action itself is symbolic, so basically any simple command you can remember to do will open up your ability to consciously control your dream.<p>If you get into the habit of keeping track of your dreams by doing something like keeping a dream journal, sooner or later you'll be able to remember to 'touch your nose' and lucid-dream at will.<p>I enjoyed experimenting with it for a while several years ago; it can be pretty exhilarating. But ultimately I found I wasn't feeling rested after a night of living a dream life (oddly enough) so I discontinued the practice.
I wrote total Artificial Intellicence. Very short but evolved by itself in super recursive selfmodifying way. I totally understood how it worked, but I knew already I do not when I wake up. So I tried to construct simple images to give me some clue. The image was a tree which branched when stimulated various ways. Sometimes branches joined together -- this was the key property, but sadly do not understand what it means. :-(
I did it a lot as a child but everytime I forced too much to generate things or whatever, I would wake up, ruining my sleep.
It was also a good way to remember some things I could not remember awake. Nowadays I can't sleep much so I stopped.
I've had then sporadically but never had an idea what got me into them.<p>My friend Jeff, a designer, had a great blog post about this.<p><a href="https://www.makermistaker.com/my-first-out-of-body-experience/" rel="nofollow">https://www.makermistaker.com/my-first-out-of-body-experienc...</a>