Relevant XKCD, because there’s always an XKCD for that.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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i usually remember transit systems in dreams.
caught this meme being evil
ADHD makes it even worst.
Some drugs and little bit of alcohol and you would have very interesting dreams, I can tell you.
I swear to OCD Jesus that it's becoming a badge at this point
Just a heads up Lemmy. You aren't supposed to identify with the NPC character. If you do there is a problem.
Ok bot
You can learn to lucid dream. Most everyone I assume. Once you do, you can establish different places or scenes where you play things out regularly, and then you start being able to remember things a bit better, because it's like you actually went on a visit to this place, there's something to keep jogging the memory onward to "what I was doing last night." I can tell you what my past few years of dreams have been like as they gradually shifted and changed, but that'd be very boring.
Even with lucid dreaming, there is an element of randomness, and a big part of that is "today's consolidated memories" so expect those things to come up as plotlines, sometimes in very amusing ways.
These days I don't take control but I do still have the places, so it's interesting seeing my subconscious resolve things in these places. Lot more other people in my dreams now, reflective of my improved mental health and social connectedness.
If i start lucid dreaming i might start programming even in my dreams...and i fear that
I don’t want full lucidity, because I like seeing what my subconscious comes up with. I have enough control to steer dreams away from things I find unpleasant, and I’m happy with that.
But I also have recurring “places” I go to in my dreams. There’s one particular place I enjoy going to, which feels like close to Florida (in my mental GPS) and has an eastern coast, but its geography otherwise is more like southern California, with mountains and rocky beaches/islands. It has the games, rides, and boardwalks of New Jersey, as well as an unlit stretch of a moonless beach that I once experienced in Delaware. (I was a child, and I vividly remember walking into a pitch black void, hearing the waves crashing, but not knowing how far away the water was. My family was ahead of me and kept telling me to keep going. That moment comes up a lot when I think about the future.)
Anyway, I’ve spent dream times all over that place. Sometimes it’s part of a road trip and I’m just traveling through, sometimes I’m visiting people who live there, sometimes there are events going on, or I need to navigate a busy, multi-story shopping mall.
It’s a pretty pleasant place, honestly.
How long did it take for you to be able to choose when to lucid dream?
I learned as a kid to deal with nightmares. I would be scared, and then wonder if this was a dream, and poof. I was free.
Can't do it anymore though :(. I think, as a kid, it just kinda started happening. It wasn't intentional at all; a natural solution to recurring nightmares I guess. It made for some cool times.
A couple years of working on it. Lots of "intention" work, going to bed with the idea that you'll be lucid this time. Find things in your dreams that ONLY happen in dreams, use these as cues. The more you deepen these thoughts, the more likely you are to, one day, go "Oh I'm dreaming!"
The first time lasts maybe 1-2 seconds before you forget you're dreaming again. But each time you do it, it can get longer and longer, and then you can try things, like flying or fantasy sex.
a few months, but i've always had a sleeptime paracosm. i was very ill, on a lot of drugs, and living somewhere awful enough i preferred dreaming.
I kept a dream journal for a couple weeks a long time ago. Writing as much as I could remember as soon as I got up from a dream I thought was interesting. I stopped because when I would read through them later on, I would notice that these dreams were mostly imaginative diarrhea that made no sense.
I did too, and also stopped. This is the last dream I had written down, and I didn't understand it at the time, I still don't understand it now.
"Me and my sister (not real sister) are taveling together, and we have the help of the universe/internet. She can talk to it, and I can... do something I forget. We go to like a Mexican restaurant, and try and get some food. I ask universe if I could speak to it as well, it says no. We also learn that there are 6 other people with connections to the universe in Southern England (apparently where we are). As an internet sweep begins (everybody but us is frozen and things lag a bit), one of the other internet people comes to the store. Then... I wake up lol. Thats the end"
I could feel this. Like how the person you were with was your sister, but also not your sister. You had a sense of familiarity with whoever you were traveling with, the same feeling as when around your sister. But at the same time, she wasn’t literally your actual sister. It makes sense in dream-thought, even if it doesn’t make sense in awake, logical thoughts.
I could imagine dreaming that whole thing out myself (except maybe the being in England part, since I’ve never been there.)
Neither have I, I've never left America, I just suddenly became aware that we were in Southern England
I, too, took to writing dreams. Had one where Robotnik takes Sonic's wife and I have to help him or something. Hopefully no one finds these notes lol. Some things are better left in the past
Mario and Sonic crossover?
I've been actively Journaling my dreams for over 10 years, I'm scary good at remembering them now. For me my dreams act as inspiration for future stories, even if nonsensical in parts. I think it'd be a fun challenge to turn a dream of mine into a coherent story :3c
I'll be at your book signing
I kept one for a while because I had read a book that claimed doing so helped you recognize when you are dreaming. Knowing when you are dreaming lets you have lucid dreams and control the elements of your dream. I succeeded once. For just a very brief time before I lost it and woke up. But yeah, the dreams I thought were interesting were a whole lot less so when I reread them later.
I remember having a lucid dream like once
When I realised I was in a dream, I suddenly got very scared about being in a dream (like ???) and forced myself out of it, giving myself sleep paralysis
It sounds to me like the sleep paralysis episode began, then you realized you weren’t awake.
Our brains are really good at rationalizing all sorts of experiences. A lot of “editing” goes on in our brains between initially receiving a sensation, and becoming consciously aware of the sensation. Sometimes it can even trick us into believing things happened in a different order than they really did.
The fact that you felt a sense of panic, which is a typical reaction to sleep paralysis, makes me think some part of your brain became aware of the paralysis by that point. All parts of our brains don’t wake up simultaneously - deeper, older parts usually wake up before the outer, younger neocortex (where rational thoughts and impulse control take place.)
The awoken amygdala can send out panic alarms due to the body being paralyzed, but the young, rational part of the brain is still mid-waking up. As you begin to gain awareness, you could simultaneously realize you’re in an altered state of consciousness, but also feel terrified for no clear reason.
So, good news! You probably didn’t do anything to cause the sleep paralysis (except maybe by sleeping on your back?)
I've had sleep paralysis.I hate that shit.
It wasn't as bad for me as some people say, I had no sleep paralysis monster or anything
It was more just "wtf I can't move my body anymore"
It’s the worst when I’m driving long distances and find something great to occupy my mind with only to get distracted by something and not be able to remember what it was I was thinking about.
It bugs me how I get some of my best ideas while driving.
I’ve had a number of “car journals” throughout my life, because sometimes I just have to pull over and write some thoughts out.
Oh, I hate stuff like that. When I'm thinking, and I get distracted for a moment with… honestly, what even. And I get stuck on my thought like a scratched vinyl, just looping on the last part. Not moving past that, and suddenly struggling to remember where I was going with it, and where I came from with it. "…and then… uhm… uuuhhhhh… uh, where was I going with this?"
If only you can remember, you might solve all the problems in the world.
One cool use I'd like to see for AI one day would be recording dreams. A machine that reads your brainwaves, sends data to AI. The AI could be trained by showing someone an image, and then feeding the AI the description of the image, and brainwave readings, such that it can find patterns. Later, well-trained, it could translate brainwaves into concepts. Feed that into an LLM to connect these concepts, generate a title, sinopsis, and some prompts. Use prompts to make a video out of it, a trailer, and a poster. Add to a personal library. By having a local AI of your own, with your data, controlled by you, AI could have references of you, like name, general information, how you look, etc. Wake up in the morning, make yourself a cup of milk, sit in front of your computer, open your dream library. Browse around your own Dream Stream (though local, so no streaming. Unless server). A title/poster catch your eye? Read sinopsys, watch trailer. Interested? Give it a watch!
Bro, I just had the craziest dream. Come watch!!!
Lying in bed? Shit, I bet there's gonna be a sleep paralysis demon jumpscare any moment now
Wait, you just gonna leave us on a cliffhanger like that?
Gonna say it. That's a terrible idea. Dreams are random data streams based on what is being stored into long-term memory as you sleep. Being able to witness dreams is not something you want. Experiencing dreams while they're happening is cool, sure, but being a passive witness to the madness in your skull is not going to be a pleasant time. That's not even including being able to view other people's dreams. The accusations of infidelity. Nope, let's open that pandora's box.
Am baffled by the inclusion of ai in this comment, though. Feels... out-of-place? Like trying to predict the future, badly. Like retro-futurism.
What is wrong with re-watching one's dream? I mean, sure. I've written some dreams down, and looking back some of it's kinda cringe (also crappy, cause dreams are random and I can't remember well)
Also, if dreams are "random data streams based on what is being stored into long-term memory as you sleep", why random-ass dreams? Not always I wake up feeling like "damn, what a topical dream!" It's, like, "Oh, Robotnik took Sonic's wife and I gotta help him", like. What in that is being stored in my mind?
being able to view other people's dreams
I did mention it's a private thing. Not like Smart Pipes sharing your last poo to your online followers
Am baffled by the inclusion of ai in this comment, though. Feels... out-of-place?
Why is AI out of place? I mean, if it (or machine learning, at least) can "see" or "learn", or "spot" patterns, and then replicate them, it could be used to try and see a pattern between one's brain activity, and what imagery could be associated with it. If it can find these associations, it could then work backwards from the brain activity to the image. Like, it receives brain activity when I see or think of an apple, and it knows the context of the apple. Then, without the context, and with enough training, it could figure out when you're thinking apple. In theory, at least. Not sure how brain activity works, and if there's anything differing in different contexts that could be picked up like that (i.e. that you could somehow differentiate between thinking apple or any other thing going on in your brain)
Not OP, but I can see their point. I may have a different perspective from them, though.
Dreams aren’t simply movies our brains make up. They are multi-sensory beyond sight and sound. In particular, I can feel things in my dreams. Not just textures, but emotions. Those emotions include enthusiasm for nonsensical ideas that take place in those dreams, or fears based on abstract concepts expressed through metaphors (but that wouldn’t make sense IRL.) I’d say that emotion is key to our enjoyment of dreams, and that emotion comes from inside us. Without it, we’d basically be watching abstract art films and wondering, “This is weirder than I remember. Why did I like this so much before?”
Can such a dream-capturing device recreate all the emotions present in the dream?
But also, would we really want a device that could force someone into experiencing something so intense? It sounds like something that could easily be used to manipulate people, and that worries me.
Not like Smart Pipes sharing your last poo to your online followers
oh damn you can get paid for that?
For updating your waste status? Well, if you're Scout Condor, maybe.. The average person, though? I don't think so. You can, however, get tons of coupons from cool restaurants, through targeted ads
aww i only made scout 1st class when i was a kid. i never even heard of the scout condor rank that's pretty cool people got that
my last dream had me explaining to somebody that i do actually know how to use vim and don't need any teaching. i was doing something high-stakes i think, like we were stealing a famous museum piece or something, and someone took out a hacker laptop with vim and i needed to operate it. the question was being asked right in the moment. i think the whole scene was just training or practice though.
Nightmare version: It's Emacs.
Writing mine down so I don't forget it:
Do you know those picnic huts that are all roof and open on one side?
Well in my dream I was going to supper with friend and family, came across a hut and felt adventurous.
So I climbed it to balance across.
Something I have done before irl.
But in the dream it was very long and crumbled under my feet in slow motion like in an action movie.
I didn't make it all the way across before waking up.
I didn’t make it all the way across before waking up.
We never do, do we?
I don't know what that means but it sounded deep.
Had I not woken up then, I wouldn't have remembered it at all.
Even more faux deep.
OH MY GOD. This made me remember a fleeting moment from today's dream. I feel that it was GLORIOUS but I already forgot it :d
So true, but absolute cinema dreams always stay in my dreams