I was watching Waking Life last night. And during a discussion on lucid dreaming, a character said two things that tend to give away the fact that your dreaming are 1) trying to read and it looks like gobbledegook on a page and 2) you have no control over light levels (flicking a switch will produce no effect.)
The former, I 've heard of before (although I have seen text in my dreams that was completely legible). But I’ve never heard the second.
So is that actually a common feature? That in dreams you can’t control light levels so flicking a lightswitch will help you figure out if you’re dreaming or not?
Keep in mind that all of this is generalization. While it’s true the light switch doesn’t ALWAYS work, it does sometimes. And I don’t think it’s that you can’t control light levels, but that, in general, machines don’t really work like they’re supposed to.
Also, another fun trick when you’re dreaming is to count your fingers. It sounds really weird, but it’s one of the best tricks to realize if you’re dreaming or not. Sometimes you’ll actually have five, but often you’ll have seven or six or some other weird number.
Master of Lucid Dreaming and Sleep Paralysis Tripping, reporting for duty!
I’ve never encountered the light switch. I’ve never even messed with a light switch in a dream.
The words on pages turning into gibberish happens all the time, though. Another telltale thing is people having names that don’t make any sense: Merlin Minnozza, Fatso Crumb, etc (both real examples from my own experience.)
What I’ve generally found is that any sensory stimulation or physical feeling that you can have in real life can be accurately re-created by your brain during a dream…IF you have actually had it in real life. If you’ve been shocked, stung, cut or smacked, you will generally be able to feel those in a dream. If you’ve been stoned, your brain can recreate the sensation of being stoned in a dream (with 100% accuracy, complete with dry-mouth and the altered time perception that THC can trigger.) I think that every sensory experience you’ve ever had is recorded in your brain’s “archives” and can be dredged up during dreams.
However, if you’ve NEVER experienced a certain stimulus and you find yourself experiencing it in a dream, but not feeling like it “should,” that’s a clue that you’re dreaming.
Example: most people have never fallen off a cliff and hit the ground. This is why you usually wake up if you’re falling in a dream before you actually hit. If you actually do hit, in the dream, you won’t feel any pain; there is your cue that it is a dream. Likewise, most people have never had their hand chopped off. If you find your hand chopped off and it doesn’t feel the way you’d imagine it to, you’re probably dreaming. Your mind will create sensations to fill in for what you think should happen, but they’re rarely accurate. I got shot in the head once, in a dream, and didn’t feel a damn thing. It was at this point that I realized I was dreaming.
In my case, the writing bit is spot on. I can nearly make out the words if I try really hard, but that’s as far as it gets. And being able to fly. That’s a dead give away. I can be walking along slowly and decide “this is boring and slow” and up I go.
Different dreams are presented in different levels of detail, so you can’t really pick a single “trick” to figuring it out…Rather you need to develop a frame of mind to be able to identify the types of things that are most often inconsistant with reality. I find that looking at a clock of any kind, then turning away and glancing back will almost always weild a different time in dreams.
Lucid dreams are a great opportunity to experience the joys of rape and ultra-violence. Doing this stuff is usually a clue that you’re dreaming (if it’s stuff that you usually don’t do.)
Ooooooh, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, if it sort of fits in the the general “things not working the way they’re supposed to…” or the exaggerated control (e.g./ tyring to use a volume knob to slowly turn up the volume to modify it slightly but it just jumps to REALLYREALLYLOUD or silent.)
Never had any additional digits, although when I have the “my teeth are falling out” dream I seem to have an infinite supply and can keep spitting them out one after the other.
Uh… okay. Now, as a lucid dreamer I will wake myself up in those two cases because I find that to be quite wrong.
Never committed acts of ultra-violence, but after eating a lot of chocolate brownies one night dreamt I was witnessing ultra-violence until I said “Okay, enough! This is obscene. Wake up NOW!”
I have had a couple of lucid dreams and recently felt like experiencing them again. I read a book on how to lucid dream and one of the easy tips was, as ThatGuy says, to look at the time, glance away and look at it again. Or open a book to a random page, close it and open it again to the same page and the words will have changed. The times I did have lucid dreams, I had them because I suddenly realised I had had the same dream before.
The night after I read the book, in my dreams, I did the book thing only to find it completely normal for words to scramble around lol. Even if I’m flying it feels/seems completely normal in my world and not extraordinary. I’ve even said aloud to myself sometimes in a dream, “I’m in a dream” but I don’t believe it and so I don’t lucid dream dammit.
I used to not be able to read in dreams, but lately, I’m finding that I can.
I think my mind is trying to cope with the lack of reading, which I’m aware of in lucid dreaming, and so, it has tapped into my brain’s reading processes.
“Hey, reading subroutine, get up.”
“No. No. I’m sleeping, make up some gobbledygook.”
<Pointing a big gun at the reading subroutine.> “I said, ‘GET UP.’”
I wish, I have been shot, stabbed, and strangled…they all hurt terribly=(
Some indications of a dream state to me are a total inability to dial a telephone, no matter how careful I am, I can’t seem to not make a mistake on one or more numbers=(. I absolutely cant run, I can walk, sometimes I can fly, but I can’t run. Also, guns don’t work right, I shoot the bad guy and he keeps on coming like Michael Myers=(
When I lucid dream, I *know * I can fly, so heights in them never give me problems. Similarly with have sex, I know it will feel good and be satisfying, although I don’t have an orgasm. I can hit *monsters * and they do fall down. I can run faster than anything usually. Don’t ever remember lightswitches or reading. Things tend to just be. No need to read since you already know what it says.
Ever had bubble gum dreams? Where you have been chewing gum of some sort, and need to or want to get rid of it and you literally have to reach a finger in and dig it out a little stretchy bit at a time? And I also get the loose tooth dream [which I absolutely HATE =(]
I can read just fine in my dreams. In my MUDding days, I’d even have dreams in text.
I can tell when I’m dreaming because dream stuff starts happening. One thing is that I have trouble eating in dreams. Often I’ll have this huge plate of food, but things keep happening whenever I try to take a bite (people will talk to me, or I’ll drop my tray, or there will be a loud noise and I’ll have to look over…sometimes it’s different stupid stuff over and over again). These sorts of repetative rediculous things are what usually clues me in.
In my case, I’m usually trying to either get away from something or to get someplace quicker, and I decide to try to fly. I know I can’t really fly, but I decide to try anyway. I climb up on something and jump off it and will myself to stay up. Then I’m like, of course I can make myself fly because it’s a dream, dammit
Just a few nights ago I realized I was dreaming. It didn’t involve beating the living hell out of someone and it not hurting them or being unable to run. Just some detail didn’t work right, and aI realized Iw as dreaming. I went around asking people if they were were dreaming too, but nobody else seemed to get it.
Unfortunately there were no attractive young women around for me to grope. That’s another thing I do in lucid dreams.
There’s a trick to that. I used to get mighty pissed off as a kid when the Slow Walking Monster was coming to get me. I could hide in the best hiding place ever, but as soon as the monster comes into the room, my hiding place is the first place he looks! :mad:
Yeeeeaaars later, some said to me: “Well, duh! It your dream. You can’t hide from yourself!” With that knowledge in mind, I was able to delay the Slow Walking Monster’s “discovery” of my hiding place.
I’ve found that it works the same with any monster-delaying technique (shooting them, locking them out etc.)
I can read, but can’t write; can hear over a phone but can’t talk over it, and can fly but can’t run. I also can’t eat. Those are the obstacles that usually bring me to lucid dreaming - once I recognize them, I figure out that I’m dreaming.
