Tim Ferris: Beginner's Guide to Lucid Dreaming

Sure, if you're only working 4 hours a week you have plenty of time to Lucid Dream in your Polyphasic zombie sleeps induced by weeks of raw food diet, kegel exercises and cold calling the A-F entries of the phone book to practice the elevator pitch for your <i>personal-growth</i> startup.

I've heard about this before but I do have one question. Isn't it possible that there is some disadvantage to doing this frequently instead of having regular dreams, even if one isn't immediately apparent?

What can't Tim Ferris do, and subsequently blog, film, and self-promote about?<p>The one lucid dream I've had was awesome. I've thought about writing dream-notes upon waking up, but now I think I'll actually try it.

On the topic, see this thread about an individual with total control over his dreams, including time dilation. His longest dream lasted for what felt like four years, which he spent "creating planets and landscapes, and then I just sat back and watched the life/universe I'd created play out in super-fast motion." It's IAmA so he could be a troll, but it seems believable to me.<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9ebol/i_am_in_full_control_of_my_actions_when_i_dream/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9ebol/i_am_in_full_con...</a><p>As far as techniques, I would recommend giving wake-induced lucid dreaming (WILD) a try, as practiced by Richard Feynman. You basically just stay conscious as you fall asleep, watching your body fall asleep and staying aware. A very small amount of caffeine or chocolate an hour before bed can help with this.

Technical question: He states that you should look at a pattern, look away, and then check to see if it changes. Supposedly it will change because your memory can only hold 7 +- 2 bits. Now if your memory is too small to keep this supposed pattern consistent, how the hell are you supposed to memorize this pattern for a consistency check? I.e. you need your memory to assert that your memory failed. Is there a separate memory he is talking about here? Even if that technique worked, couldn't the pattern stay the same just based off the chance that you get horizontal/vertical stripes twice in a row?<p>Sorry if I'm nitpicking, maybe my cs theory courses just ruin these things.

Is there anything useful you can do while lucid dreaming?<p>I've done it once in a fever, and it was admittedly a fantastic experience (I was a multiverse god and made lots of multiverses full of happy people in awesome landscapes having really great sex), but it would be nice to be able to get something out of it that could be shared with other people.<p>I'm wondering if one could use the immense processing power of the human brain in a consciously directed way; for problem-solving, or simulating a complex system, for instance. That would prove that you're not just watching pretty lights while the "this thing that's going on right now is really cool" part of your brain is stimulated.

Great, as Tim usually is. I pretty much know all there is to Lucid dreaming, but I didn't know much about huperzine prior to that post.<p>Also, if you're really interested in lucid dreaming, there's a wonderful community filled with dream-veterans @ <a href="http://www.dreamviews.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dreamviews.com/</a><p>Hands down, the best suggestion of what to do during a dream was, "your finger is an orgasm gun."

Personal experience: I have tried lucid dreaming, and had some moderate success at it (got two lucid dreams that I can remember). It's a lot of fun, and not all that hard. I warmly recommend it to anyone who can be bothered to keep a dream journal by their bedside.

I've had many lucid dreams, though I've never been able to hang on for very long. I'll try the spinning technique next time for sure.<p>If this interests you, you might also be interested in "binaural beats".<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats</a><p>The most famous use of "bb" is probably the audio series produced by The Monroe Institute.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monroe_Institute" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monroe_Institute</a><p>If you can get past the "new age" stigma of TMI, they seem to be surprisingly scientific in their endeavors. They have audio series for LD and other consciousness exercises. The idea is that binaural beats can be used to alter your brainwave frequency and help you enter altered states of consciousness (hack your brain).<p>The first objective is "mind awake, body asleep", which is exactly what it sounds like. It involves relaxation techniques, "resonant tuning" (which is basically chanting like a monk), an affirmation of your goal (to expand your consciousness etc...) and then deeper relaxation.<p>I have achieved this state a few times, but never had the discipline to keep up with the exercises. The few times it happened, the initial feeling was that my body parts had all melded together and I couldn't feel where one part stopped and the other started. Then, I felt a peculiar detachment and a very intense feeling of "energizing" which I can only describe as something similar to holding a 9volt to your tongue, but all over your body. At that point I would always become too excited and "wake up".<p>The main reason I didn't persist with the exercises is because chanting and wearing headphones when you go to bed isn't very pleasant for the person laying next to you. The other roadblock is discipline. If you want to have LDs on purpose, you really do have to stick with the dream journal and make a conscious effort to make it happen and keep up with it.<p>My LDs were natural and not the result of practice, but were definitely very cool. I know what it's like to fly like Superman. :)

This is a great way to keep working even when your body forces you to sleep.

A decade ago I picked up a copy of the La Berge book that Ferris mentions. I highly recommend it as it seems to be the canonical book on the topic since La Berge was credited with being first to medically prove in a lab that lucid dreaming even exists. It takes like 3 months of daily dedicated practice to get the knack, but once you've trained your mind to do it, it gets easier to induce with repetition. Regular lucid dreaming is an incredible experience, and I can't even begin to explain the impact it has had on my own creativity and self of self. If you haven't done it--GO DO IT!!<p>And I agree with what others said about using LD'ing to aid in learning. For me it is hugely useful to get unconstrained "practice" time to quickly go through steps I need to remember when awake. I call it dream kata. I mean both mental steps, like learning math proofs in my case, and steps for physical things, like learning to rock climb(falling off cliffs and flying away is seriously fun). What's weird is after routinely LD'ing such practice scenarios, when I go back to regular dreaming, I will have non-lucid dreams of doing the same kinds of practices. We dream about what we regularly do each day, so it's a way of tricking the mind to watch and mimic itself. Somehow it engages a part of the subconscious to constantly practice and learn.<p>While LD'ing sounds trivial, the time can add up and I think it has huge potential to give those who employ it an edge. Let's say you lucid dream for 2 hours every night for just 3 years--then you've got 2k+ hours of practice time in whatever you do. Take Gladwell's book Outliers and his account that "geniuses" in any field excel simply because they have had so much more raw practice than others. While we don't know how common lucid dreaming is amongst these "geniuses", it might be another explantion of this "practice == genius" phenomenon. The way I see it, if you can get 20% of the way to 10,000 hours just in your sleep, there's no reason to not be doing it.