I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access.
I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.
While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.
Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.
ml_basics 4 hours ago [-]
During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems.
For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.
dwoldrich 1 hours ago [-]
In my 40's I could go to bed with a complex software design or implementation problem I was wrestling with. Consciously word a cogent and succinct question that I needed answered, sleep on it, and then in the morning, I would be still and mentally ask, "well?" Not meditating or anything, just be quiet then and listen.
And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.
"Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.
Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.
There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?
rdevilla 57 minutes ago [-]
> There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?
It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.
Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.
Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.
Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."
christophilus 1 hours ago [-]
I often wake up realizing I wrote a handful of bugs the day before. They’re obvious to me in the morning even before I sit down and open my laptop.
Sleep is a strange and magical thing.
jamiek88 58 minutes ago [-]
Yes! When I awoke this morning my very first thought was ‘you didn’t connect the ground wire for the heater’.
Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.
MITSardine 2 hours ago [-]
In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it.
I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.
toyg 1 hours ago [-]
Literally the same in Italian, la notte porta consiglio. It's in the Bible, in nocte consilium from the Book of Proverbs, but it's likely to pre-date even that by centuries.
8note 38 minutes ago [-]
im english, there's "sleep on it"
renegade-otter 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, when you are stuck, put away that red bull and step away from the keyboard, kids.
pants2 4 hours ago [-]
This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...
orky56 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds like polyphasic sleeping might re-emerge as the lifestyle solution. Instead of waiting for agents to complete, you should sleep on the response so when you arise you have the optimized prompt ready to go and a reset on your energy to prevent the burnout.
krashidov 3 hours ago [-]
FWIW I've had the opposite experience. Whenever I work late the output is absolute garbage. If I work past midnight it takes me 3 hours to get done what would have taken me 30 mins in the morning, and with way less frustration and stress. Your inputs to the LLM are only as good as how fresh your mind is so I've made it a rule to not work past midnight (unless there's an emergency).
In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.
malux85 3 hours ago [-]
Then you're not challenging yourself with hard enough problems (those include the set of problems Claude cannot solve)
pants2 3 hours ago [-]
Most software doesn't really have "hard enough problems" unless you're working in deep tech. The majority of SWEs are probably working on some sort of SaaS which isn't super challenging for a model like Opus 4.7. Most of the problems I face are on the product side, which I do need to take time to think through, but it's not as challenging as debugging in the good old days.
Toutouxc 3 hours ago [-]
How do you go from SaaS to “not super challenging”? The part of a SaaS product that I’m working on uses graph algorithms to work with what’s essentially an interactive form. There’s some mildly university-level computer science stuff and it’s mixed with enough domain expertise that Opus 4.7 is still unable to make even small changes without breaking everything or going against the architecture.
So far I’m not that impressed.
vovavili 1 hours ago [-]
Are you guys hiring?
npongratz 2 hours ago [-]
That's awesome! I had a somewhat similar experience (shared previously [0]):
> I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.
> Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.
> To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.
People are so different. When I was in college, if I had an unsolved problem, I could not fall asleep.
usernotused 2 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, I observed the same when I was practicing the drums. I would fail multiple times to reproduce a drumming part, sleep on it, and succeed on the first try the day after.
jwrallie 2 hours ago [-]
Difficult parts on videogames as well. It could be attributed to slow response times due to being tired or accidentally memorizing a bad pattern, resting also could help with those.
nagaiaida 2 hours ago [-]
yep, same with guitar. go to sleep fumbling through a riff even though you "know" it, wake up playing it smooth as hell
GuestFAUniverse 3 hours ago [-]
Can confirm this level of problem solving.
Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).
jvanderbot 3 hours ago [-]
I can confirm - I woke up to the resolution to my two hardest problems during PhD. Three, if you count "I should look for this kind of inequality" (which did turn out to exist), but I think that's more of an _idea_ than a solution.
The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.
2 hours ago [-]
nick_ 3 hours ago [-]
AFAIK this is called sleep consolidation.
hackable_sand 2 hours ago [-]
This is exactly how I learned programming.
10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.
rokhayakebe 26 minutes ago [-]
"Sleep on it?"
vanviegen 3 hours ago [-]
I once solved a particularly nasty bug, causing a c++ server to segfault in production about once a week, in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up, and I rushed to my laptop to find the insight was real. I had been trying to comprehend that segfault for several long days. It wasn't the most restful night though.
pedalpete 1 hours ago [-]
I used to do this regularly when I first started coding, I called them "Codemares". They were like nightmares with the shouting of commands I didn't quite understand would invade my dreams.
aeternum 19 minutes ago [-]
It seems to me that this is the purpose of nightmares. I especially noticed this after having kids. They are not by default scared of snakes and such but if they see a nature documentary of a snake biting something or even a cartoon bad guy, it's enough to trigger bad dreams which reinforce the fear and it's far stronger the next day.
IMO this is under-appreciated in current AI models. RL is not very effective in avoiding crocodiles for example, by the time like 5 of your tribe-mates are eaten it's far too late. You need some mechanism that ensures the danger is learned after just a single incident.
consumer451 41 minutes ago [-]
Is this the user friendly name for what is happening?
Kinda related but I used to practice guitar in my dreams. If I had been learning something I’d often dream about playing it over and over again, and even going beyond that and figuring out “solos” and melodies and stuff over the chord. Can’t be sure if it translated into any real life skill, but it felt like I was actually learning or at least strongly reinforcing what I’d been practicing.
pedalpete 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting comment they have towards the end about "targeted memory reactivation can disrupt sleep".
It is important to note the study they are referring to is "targeted memory reactivation with sleep disruption", there are methods of doing targeted memory reactivation without sleep disruption.
I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of affectablesleep.com, and though we are mostly focused on slow-wave (deep) sleep, we have been looking into memory reactivation, lucid dreaming and other stimulations for additions.
dgb23 4 hours ago [-]
Aside, but I struggled a long time with regular sleep. I have been a night owl since I was a kid. I experience late hours as magical, don’t know how to describe it. So I always slept too little, then not at all, then drifting and sleeping in.
But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier.
No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did improve many small things, like getting rid of bad habits, being more content, appreciating sleep more, prioritizing things differently.
I wish everyone good, healthy sleep.
alargemoose 39 minutes ago [-]
My “trick” for this was getting a dog in my early 20s, while living in an apartment, doesn’t matter how much I wanted to sleep in, they needed to go out, so I had to get up. And without thinking I moved my sleep schedule to accommodate this. Worth it.
mahdihabibi 25 minutes ago [-]
This has always been clear as day to me, but I just couldn’t prove it. I used to take naps right after practicing guitar because I believed it would help me learn faster! LOL
Xeoncross 5 hours ago [-]
AI does the work during the day and we learn while sleeping. Society doesn't collapse from ignorance. We have a new movie plot gentlemen.
matthewfcarlson 3 hours ago [-]
I read a short novel about a technology that allowed you to have a VR like experience while dreaming. Of course, there was all the fun/perverted stuff you can think of but also it was immediately put to use as a corporate tool. Over a few years, more and more white collar jobs shifted to night shifts where you worked via dream VR. Then people were available during the day to do whatever, watch their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. In many ways- it was a very promising future.
mlboss 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think this will ever work. Sleep acts as a compression for our daily life. Brains takes in daily new information and compresses it based on what we already know. The stuff dreams are made off are just a variant of what happens in day life.
eichin 2 hours ago [-]
powernapcomic (maritza campos) is a surreal dystopian version of this (with the corporate part turned up to 99). Excellent sci-fi and very weird...
manoDev 20 minutes ago [-]
That’s why we say “let me sleep on it”.
thenthenthen 4 hours ago [-]
Two months ago my partner recorded me speaking in my sleep. I was speaking fluent Mandarin. I always thought sleep time is used for learning (among healing etc), but now I am convinced.
detribaby 4 hours ago [-]
Well you’ll have to give us more. Do you speak Mandarin at all?
tsukurimashou 4 hours ago [-]
spoiler, he is Chinese and only speaks Mandarin
consumer451 4 hours ago [-]
And, what was the partner's ability to benchmark? What is their level of familiarity with the language?
I would love to believe.
jtbayly 4 hours ago [-]
It was a recording. I dare you to ask for it.
consumer451 1 hours ago [-]
I shall not be ensnared by your schoolyard dare. You cannot manipulate me so easily. OP, however...
rcarmo 4 hours ago [-]
So I guess having dreams about recurring meetings is... honing corporate skills?
saltcured 4 hours ago [-]
Is the main theme that you suddenly realize you aren't wearing pants?
And if so, would you say it has improved your pants wearing performance on the job?
suprjami 4 hours ago [-]
It also counts as overtime, right?
throwatdem12311 2 hours ago [-]
This is why I would smash my head against a wall trying to beat a boss in Dark Souls for an entire evening, then wake up the next day and beat them on my first or second attempt.
Very common phenomena that is discussed frequently in the souls community.
t-shaped 2 hours ago [-]
That’s so on point. One time I was stuck on One Reborn from Bloodborne for a whole evening. While I was sleeping I figured out the optimal path to best the Chime Maidens. I woke up and beat the boss in 5 mins.
Very real phenomenon. Happened so many times
jesse_dot_id 5 hours ago [-]
Lucid dreaming is a cool concept but I've never been able to pull it off. I still try, though!
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
It sort of just happened to me a few years ago. It’s neat—flying is fun. (As is the opposite, when it just doesn’t work and I wake up sort of laughing at myself for having spent, presumably, hours jumping around in my dream.)
But at least for me, the price was dreams, the moment I go lucid, ceasing to be self directed. I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifies anymore. (If I’m lucid.) I have to kind of create my own magic, which isn’t particularly restful.
karmakurtisaani 4 hours ago [-]
Yep, same. The dream gets incredibly boring after you get control of it.
kbrkbr 3 hours ago [-]
Not if you are an aphantast.
chrz 4 hours ago [-]
but but, you can do whatever you want?
bnreed 3 hours ago [-]
I've had limited experience (n~20) but no... that's not how it worked for me, interested in others' experiences.
"flying" was limited. I didn't have full control and sometimes felt dynamically pinned to the top of a 2D scrolling video game as if there were driver incompatabilities.
drifting off to sleep in a session, it was very disturbing- i felt like i was being dragged by my ankle across the bed before lucid dreaming began, "here it comes..."
Sometimes there would be ominious sounds/visuals that I could not influence that scared me so much I was glad I could wake up because it felt like a nightmare was approaching.
Two big tells I'm lucid dreaming: I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?") or, I look at my hand - as if it were LLM it absolutely does not render well... like a tree trunk with a bunch of branches.
JumpCrisscross 5 minutes ago [-]
> I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?")
Super interesting, because I have the same thing. Also none of my technology works. I usually try to do something on my phone a few times, fail because the UI is putty, and then remember that smartphones don’t work in my dreams.
mynameisash 2 hours ago [-]
My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She lucid dreams very regularly, and she says she spends a lot of that time flying.
I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.
I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.
JumpCrisscross 12 seconds ago [-]
> Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream
There is a Peter Pan tendency, at least to my dreams. You know you can’t fly. But then you remember you have, and believing it’s true makes it happens.
That’s what I was getting at with the film-script effect. I’ll be in a bind and then realize that there “must” be a solution in a particular form, otherwise the dream wouldn’t make sense, and that sort of conjures that thing into existence.
Maybe fortunately, maybe sadly, the one thing I’ve not been able to do is conjure up lost loved ones. I’ll get a bunch of puppies who know my dog, but he just couldn’t show up, or I’ll get strangers or living loved ones who know my grandmother or best friend; they’re just constantly indisposed.
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
Keep a dream journal. There any many methods for achieving it but if you keep a dream journal long enough you'll start getting consistent lucid dreams.
macrolime 2 hours ago [-]
Most consistent way of achieving it I've managed is use a watch with an alarm that vibrates and is trivial to turn off or turns off by itself, then set it to go off after sleeping 5-6 hours. When waking up, don't move and focus on the black behind the eyes, then after a few seconds it may turn into a dream and you go straight from waking into a lucid dream.
stldev 2 hours ago [-]
I was fortunate to be taught by my father when I was younger. It may be an age/luck-of-the-draw thing, but check out "MILD"; it's the name for the simple technique that worked for me.
zeta0134 4 hours ago [-]
My tell is to recognize any room with a piano in it. I naturally want to sit down and play this piano, but the keys are totally wrong. No problem, I'll look around and, lo and behold, dozens more pianos all... with the keys in the wrong places. I can't play anything. "Oh, this again. I must be dreaming. How frustrating."
microtonal 4 hours ago [-]
A very regularly occuring dream is that I'm in a train and realize that I don't have a ticket (never happened IRL), so I want to buy an e-ticket, but the ticketing app does not work. The text changes all the time, the buttons move around, weird errors, and then I realize 'yep I'm in a dream again'.
The nicer lucid dreams are those were you can fly or make spectacular light and colors, but I find that it's usually a difficult balance to avoid waking up.
magiclaw 4 hours ago [-]
I was really into it in my early 20's. One way to tell if you are mentally in the state to lucid dream is if you no longer feel tired. One night, after a grueling hike, I was completely exhausted when I went to bed. I closed my eyes, and moments later all my exhaustion just vanished, and I began to explore the space.
galleywest200 4 hours ago [-]
Another way is to try to see what the clock faces say in your dream. Also, see if the light switches behave as you would expect.
there's a wearable dropping this year that's supposed to make it easier to lucid dream: https://www.prophetic.com/
andai 4 hours ago [-]
> In perhaps the most striking example of learning during sleep, Konkoly, Paller, and several collaborators witnessed what amounted to conversations with people who were in the midst of dreams. Independent lab groups in the U.S., France, Germany, and the Netherlands asked lucid dreamers to answer yes-or-no questions and solve simple math problems. Electrodes measuring body and brain activity verified that the participants were not awake. Martin Dresler, a sleep researcher at the Donders Institute, who ran the Dutch experiments, said that they were able to verbally deliver new information to the sleeping mind—and to receive responses. Some people could remember the questions they had been asked when they woke up. “This is a form of very complex learning,” he told me.
Buddy of mine tried lucid dreaming for years. One night, he finally had it.
Immediately, a police man shows up. "No, you're not allowed to be lucid." My friend hung his head and said "okay", and was never lucid again.
Even stranger, I later heard reports from others along similar lines.
nikolay 2 hours ago [-]
This is nothing new as there's even a term for it - "hypnopedia." People used this widely to learn new languages in the past, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence about its effectiveness.
brisket_bronson 3 hours ago [-]
Omelette du fromage
nomel 4 hours ago [-]
Edison, famously, solved problems in a light dream state [1].
Me: "I'm gonna plan the workshop tomorrow, more than enough time."
7,5 h Later
Brain: "Hey, here is everything, worked the whole night, no need to thank me!!!"
Me: "I need coffee..."
praveen4463 3 hours ago [-]
I feel walking outside and thinking is a better way to practice skills and solve problems. A tired mind just sleeps and usually doesn't remember current events.
Interestingly this is not something native to Tibetan Buddhists. Neoplatonists had something similar, and even Orthodox Christian monks speak about literally "praying ceaselessly" which inludes prayer during sleep, it's definitely all lucid dreaming
irishcoffee 31 minutes ago [-]
This happens to me both sleeping and awake. When I’m stuck on a problem and decide to walk away from it for a while, I subconsciously spin off a thread in my mind and move on to something else. The number of times I’ve had a eureka moment 3-5 hours later (not realizing I was even percolating on it) has to be in the hundreds.
Happens probably twice a week when I sleep on the problem as well.
To parlay this back to the current LLM craze, if we just export all our problems to some fuzzy non deterministic solver without ever trying to understand the problem, our collective brains will atrophy severely.
I use the LLM my work pays for, sparingly, because I refuse to let that atrophy occur.
chaqchase 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like mental rehearsal more than magic. Interesting, but I'm not sure what to do differently day to day.
petra 4 hours ago [-]
Have anybody managed to use sleep to learn language? How ?
neom 4 hours ago [-]
I have dyslexia and in high school learning my lines for plays was really hard but I loved doing plays, so I recorded myself saying my lines on tape (yah, I'm old) and used double cassette to fill 2 tapes with them, then run them over night while I was sleeping. I've never used this in my adult life but it worked pretty well for my lines and I suppose maybe you could use it to learn a language?
Edit: Claude tells me I was a head of my time, apparently it works but not net new, you have to also be working on it awake, it's called 'targeted memory reactivation (TMR)": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12592824/
spudlyo 4 hours ago [-]
While I think it's a compelling idea that playing speech in your target language while you sleep can help, I don't think it's ever been demonstrated to work.
Having said that, that sleep is incredibly important for learning anything! I practice my language learning during the day, a little bit every day, and I prioritize getting good sleep. This is mostly just trying to go to bed at the same time every night, avoiding alcohol, and giving myself an hour before bed with low lights to read and calm my mind. When you sleep, memories are consolidated, organized, and tagged for long-term storage. I will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and bouncing around in my mind are echos of phrases and words from my target language. I figure it's working.
My wife used to think that I had terrible sleep apnea because I'd repeatedly quit breathing for a minute or two at a time and then gasp for air, but it turned out I was just dreaming about freediving for lobsters.
lazyasciiart 3 hours ago [-]
Uh, do you freedive while awake?
hughw 4 hours ago [-]
While you're sleeping I'm practicing my skills. Enjoy being poor, suckers!
matthewfcarlson 3 hours ago [-]
While you were sleeping, I was practicing the art of the blade
orthecreedence 3 hours ago [-]
While you were studying the blade, I was drooling on my physical self while trying to get two girls to kiss in a lucid dream.
Yes, "new research" is a misnomer here. The correct version is "people in lab coats have finally noticed ..."
Reminds me of the studies that say lobsters can feel pain. Like, no fucking shit. What multi-cellular (and even single-celled) organisms do not feel pain? Glad we're giving the western stamp of approval on these highly contested ideas.
azan_ 2 hours ago [-]
I suggest you should drop the patronizing tone. People believe lots of things and a lot of them is completely bogus. That's why we need people in lab coats to evaluate them in systematic way.
orthecreedence 2 hours ago [-]
> I suggest you should drop the patronizing tone.
Wow, that is SUUUUCH a great idea. Thank you soooo much for the incredible advice!!1
azan_ 16 minutes ago [-]
No problem, hit me up for an advice any other time you will be tempted to post stupid bullshit, glad I could help!
whatever120 2 hours ago [-]
I’m an academic and you have insulted my ego. I will now cry in a corner.
davidw 1 hours ago [-]
I remember when I first started dreaming in Italian... it was pretty cool though.
Svoka 1 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of Echopraxia (Peter Watts book)
2 hours ago [-]
squibonpig 4 hours ago [-]
It's gonna be really sad in 10-15 years when all the sc bros are hustling and grindsetting their dreams away.
notahacker 4 hours ago [-]
Can't wait for the LinkedIn posts about their day to start even earlier than the 4am workout and 5am meditation with strategic dreaming between 1am and 3am.
Top performers manufacture 33% more hours in the day thanks to this one weird trick!
zombot 4 hours ago [-]
Now there is no excuse anymore to be working less than 24 hours a day.
bethekidyouwant 2 hours ago [-]
Where is the control group of regular dreamers exposed to the same sounds when in REM?
Lucid dreaming is just an unusually awake form of dreaming. Not surprising that they can hear things especially the ones that can move their eyes left and right when prompted…
The study should have simply been find people that can move their eyes left and right when prompted that still have REM brain waves tell them some random thing and see if they can remember it when you wake them up. I don’t know why that’s not completely obvious maybe it is and these guys are just grifters
nothinkjustai 3 hours ago [-]
Hah and people still make the argument LLMs and brains work the same lol
There is no such thing as "should".
The thing is possible, therefore humans will do it. The only question is, who is we?
azan_ 5 hours ago [-]
Well, you shouldn't smoke yet people do it. I think the article posits question whether we should in similar spirit.
econ 5 hours ago [-]
After two weeks I woke up and didn't notice it was German tv. Eventually after 5 minutes an unknown word came along. I still can't speak it.
When 13 i use to code till 1-2 am. In school I slept with my eyes open till 11. The information was stored and organized but I was unaware of it. I remember tests where all of the questions talked about topics I never spend a conscious thought on. But I knew all the answers. Quite the surreal experience.
Teachers sometimes wondered if I was still in the room or they just asked questions. My mind would grep the most recent chunk of speech, parse it and respond as if nothing unusual was going on. The mind raced but I talked slowly to portray the slight delay more natural.
I learned you don't want other people's bullshit in your head. It needs to be questioned first.
Rendered at 00:22:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.
While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.
Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.
For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.
And, in very deadpan style, after a few seconds (as if to choose one's words carefully), some answer would come to me audibly in my voice in my mind.
"Have you tried X?" No, I hadn't tried X, and holy smokes that was a workable approach! Sometimes, it would tell me to go back to some bit of code or configuration I had moved on from and tell me to go back and focus on that, it was almost always right that there was where I had goofed up. I experimented with posing multiple questions and follow up questions. I even asked it how it was that these answers were derived.
Strange to reread the above and refer to my own thoughts as 'it'. They were bidden ideas that came from me for sure. But, I disassociate from them because I have no memory of the chain of thought that led to the responses.
There's a lot going on upstairs, higher mind stuff. I am older now, and I no longer experience this phenomena. Have I lost it to age, or have I integrated it somehow into my conscious mind?
It's similar to what Jaynes described in his "bicameral mind." Man of antiquity "heard" disembodied wisdom dispensed to him, seemingly at random, from an incorporeal source: "gods." Today we simply regard such pseudo-auditory phenomena as "thought," which may throw light on Cartesian-style equation of "the soul" with "the mind," and enduring mathematical truths with divinity.
Following the Bronze Age collapse and the "breakdown of the bicameral mind," human culture is replete with examples of people trying to hear the voices of gods, who were now being crowded out by the conscious, egoic, individualistic mental chatter of the newly developed default mode network - the crying out of the Psalms, elaborate rituals and procedures for invoking divine inspiration in the oracles, various forms of divination, augury, etc.
Tarot, properly understood, is not a means for divining the future, but a debugger or reverse engineering tool for probing the internal psychological state of the querent, and hopefully coaxing out these moments of unconscious, unbidden inspiration.
Much of modern esotericism is about trying to steer the brain into states of mind where these vestigial, intuitive, subconscious, nonlinear, pattern matching, Kahneman System 1 facilities of thinking, become once again accessible to conscious prompting and dialogue. Jaynes calls this "the induction," the Romans called it "the genius," Thelemites know it as "the knowledge & conversation," and it may be most broadly described as "union with God."
Sleep is a strange and magical thing.
Amazing how our brains work. Went back and sure enough I’d omitted that final connection.
I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.
In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.
So far I’m not that impressed.
> I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.
> Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.
> To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651913
Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).
The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.
10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.
IMO this is under-appreciated in current AI models. RL is not very effective in avoiding crocodiles for example, by the time like 5 of your tribe-mates are eaten it's far too late. You need some mechanism that ensures the danger is learned after just a single incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
It is important to note the study they are referring to is "targeted memory reactivation with sleep disruption", there are methods of doing targeted memory reactivation without sleep disruption.
I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of affectablesleep.com, and though we are mostly focused on slow-wave (deep) sleep, we have been looking into memory reactivation, lucid dreaming and other stimulations for additions.
But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier.
No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did improve many small things, like getting rid of bad habits, being more content, appreciating sleep more, prioritizing things differently.
I wish everyone good, healthy sleep.
I would love to believe.
And if so, would you say it has improved your pants wearing performance on the job?
Very common phenomena that is discussed frequently in the souls community.
Very real phenomenon. Happened so many times
But at least for me, the price was dreams, the moment I go lucid, ceasing to be self directed. I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifies anymore. (If I’m lucid.) I have to kind of create my own magic, which isn’t particularly restful.
"flying" was limited. I didn't have full control and sometimes felt dynamically pinned to the top of a 2D scrolling video game as if there were driver incompatabilities.
drifting off to sleep in a session, it was very disturbing- i felt like i was being dragged by my ankle across the bed before lucid dreaming began, "here it comes..."
Sometimes there would be ominious sounds/visuals that I could not influence that scared me so much I was glad I could wake up because it felt like a nightmare was approaching.
Two big tells I'm lucid dreaming: I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?") or, I look at my hand - as if it were LLM it absolutely does not render well... like a tree trunk with a bunch of branches.
Super interesting, because I have the same thing. Also none of my technology works. I usually try to do something on my phone a few times, fail because the UI is putty, and then remember that smartphones don’t work in my dreams.
I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.
I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.
There is a Peter Pan tendency, at least to my dreams. You know you can’t fly. But then you remember you have, and believing it’s true makes it happens.
That’s what I was getting at with the film-script effect. I’ll be in a bind and then realize that there “must” be a solution in a particular form, otherwise the dream wouldn’t make sense, and that sort of conjures that thing into existence.
Maybe fortunately, maybe sadly, the one thing I’ve not been able to do is conjure up lost loved ones. I’ll get a bunch of puppies who know my dog, but he just couldn’t show up, or I’ll get strangers or living loved ones who know my grandmother or best friend; they’re just constantly indisposed.
The nicer lucid dreams are those were you can fly or make spectacular light and colors, but I find that it's usually a difficult balance to avoid waking up.
https://xkcd.com/269/
Immediately, a police man shows up. "No, you're not allowed to be lucid." My friend hung his head and said "okay", and was never lucid again.
Even stranger, I later heard reports from others along similar lines.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-na...
Me: "I'm gonna plan the workshop tomorrow, more than enough time."
7,5 h Later
Brain: "Hey, here is everything, worked the whole night, no need to thank me!!!"
Me: "I need coffee..."
https://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/Tenzin-Wangyal-Rinpoche-T...
Happens probably twice a week when I sleep on the problem as well.
To parlay this back to the current LLM craze, if we just export all our problems to some fuzzy non deterministic solver without ever trying to understand the problem, our collective brains will atrophy severely.
I use the LLM my work pays for, sparingly, because I refuse to let that atrophy occur.
Edit: Claude tells me I was a head of my time, apparently it works but not net new, you have to also be working on it awake, it's called 'targeted memory reactivation (TMR)": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12592824/
Having said that, that sleep is incredibly important for learning anything! I practice my language learning during the day, a little bit every day, and I prioritize getting good sleep. This is mostly just trying to go to bed at the same time every night, avoiding alcohol, and giving myself an hour before bed with low lights to read and calm my mind. When you sleep, memories are consolidated, organized, and tagged for long-term storage. I will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and bouncing around in my mind are echos of phrases and words from my target language. I figure it's working.
Reminds me of the studies that say lobsters can feel pain. Like, no fucking shit. What multi-cellular (and even single-celled) organisms do not feel pain? Glad we're giving the western stamp of approval on these highly contested ideas.
Wow, that is SUUUUCH a great idea. Thank you soooo much for the incredible advice!!1
Type LUCID in the comments for a how to guide...
Lucid dreaming is just an unusually awake form of dreaming. Not surprising that they can hear things especially the ones that can move their eyes left and right when prompted…
The study should have simply been find people that can move their eyes left and right when prompted that still have REM brain waves tell them some random thing and see if they can remember it when you wake them up. I don’t know why that’s not completely obvious maybe it is and these guys are just grifters
When 13 i use to code till 1-2 am. In school I slept with my eyes open till 11. The information was stored and organized but I was unaware of it. I remember tests where all of the questions talked about topics I never spend a conscious thought on. But I knew all the answers. Quite the surreal experience.
Teachers sometimes wondered if I was still in the room or they just asked questions. My mind would grep the most recent chunk of speech, parse it and respond as if nothing unusual was going on. The mind raced but I talked slowly to portray the slight delay more natural.
I learned you don't want other people's bullshit in your head. It needs to be questioned first.