Comment by overfeed
3 months ago
> Clock drawing is widely used as a test for assessing dementia
Interestingly, clocks are also an easy tell for when you're dreaming, if you're a lucid dreamer; they never work normally in dreams.
3 months ago
> Clock drawing is widely used as a test for assessing dementia
Interestingly, clocks are also an easy tell for when you're dreaming, if you're a lucid dreamer; they never work normally in dreams.
In lucid dreams there's a whole category of things like this: reading a paragraph of text, looking at a clock (digital or analog), or working any kind of technology more complex than a calculator.
For me personally, even light switches have been a huge tell in the past, so basically almost anything electrical.
I've always held the utterly unscientific position that this is because the brain only has enough GPU cycles to show you an approximation of what the dream world looks like, but to actually run a whole simulation behind the scenes would require more FLOPs than it has available. After all, the brain also needs to run the "player" threads: It's already super busy.
Stretching the analogy past the point of absurdity, this is a bit like modern video game optimizations: the mountains in the distance are just a painting on a surface, and the remote on that couch is just a messy blur of pixels when you look at it up close.
So the dreaming brain is like a very clever video game developer, I guess.
Wait, lucid dreamers need tells to know where they are?!?
Yes, that's how you enter the lucid state. You find ways to tell that you're dreaming and condition yourself to check for those while awake. Eventually you will do it inside a dream and realize that you're dreaming.
Yeah. It’s very common to notice anomalies inside of a dream. But the anomalies weave into the dream and feel normal. You don’t have much agency to enter a lucid state from a pre-lucid dream.
So the idea is to develop habits called “reality checks” when you are awake. You look for the broken clock kind of anomalies that the grandparent comment mentioned. You have to be open to the possibility of dreaming, which is hard to do.
Consider this difficulty. Are you dreaming?
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How much time did it take to think “no”? Or did you even take this question seriously? Maybe because you are reading a hn comment about lucid dreams, that question is interpreted as an example instead of a genuine question worth investigating, right? That’s the difficulty. Try it again.
The key is that the habit you’re developing isn’t just the check itself — it’s the thinking that you have during the check, which should lead you to investigate.
You do these checks frequently enough you end up doing it in a dream. Boom.
There’s also an aspect of identifying recurring patterns during prelucidity. That’s why it helps to keep a dream journal for your non-lucid dreams.
There are other methods too.
Didn't you ever watch Inception? You have to carry around a little spinning top to test which level of VM you're inside of.
The first time it happened to me, it was accidental. I dreamed that I was in a college classroom but I realized that I never went to college. I was not trying to and had never lucid dreamed before, and so it was very surprising.
Plenty of folks out there know when they are dreaming just like they know when they are awake. It varies from person to person.
6 replies →
My brain learned how to maintain legible text in dreams, I cannot use it in lucid dreaming anymore...
For me it’s phones… specifically dialling a number manually. No matter how carefully I dial, the number on the screen is rarely correct.
It seems that I’ve been stuck in a lucid dream for a couple of decades, no matter how carefully write text on a phone keyboard it never comes out as intended.
Tank ypu foe wriiting this
Whenever I dial a number while in a dream, the person I'm trying to call always turns out to be right next to me.
Do they look normal but just not work normally?
Maybe reality is a world of broken clocks, and they only “work” in the simulation.
I feel like the heuristic could just be - do I feel like I’m in a dream? Then I am. I’ve never felt that way when awake.