Ask HN: Do you practice lucid dreaming?

7 points · raunometsa · 9 hours ago

Hey!

I know this is a question we're not usually discussing here on HN but I'm sure some of you have at least once in their life experienced lucid dreaming if not practicing regularly.

Would be fun to hear about your experiences. I'm not actively practicing now but should pick it up again (it was a lot of fun).

What I always emphasise when talking about LD's this: it's REAL. It's a full virtual reality experience not only with visuals and sounds but with taste, touch, and emotions, too.

I'm putting together a small report called The State of Lucid Dreaming 2025. Here are 9 questions if you'd like to participate: https://dreamvr.co/stats/questions

And here are the preliminary results: https://dreamvr.co/stats

13 comments

wruza · 6 hours ago

It's a full virtual reality experience not only with visuals and sounds but with taste, touch, and emotions, too.

The commonly experienced downside is lack of real control. Once you get really involved, you just wake up. Nice if you can avoid that, but doesn’t work for me. I have to stay in the mid-zone that is similar to when you wake up but decide to sleep further.

After some success around ten years ago, I found that it’s not much better than just dreaming and gave up on it. Together with 5-HTP, normal dreaming is like a blockbuster compared to dull prose you can write yourself in LD. I don’t think that I could solve a “5 bullets vs 6 monsters on the block while on a jump stick” problem in LD. (The answer is to find an armed monster and kill it first to get more bullets). Or taking the knife out of perps hand and carving crosses on his knees. How can you come up with that in LD without waking up from laughing?

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guzik · 7 hours ago

LD is becoming popular again? I feel like I’m seeing more and more threads about it lately. Even my friends are getting back into practicing LD after abandoning it because of how hard it was to achieve. I think I’ve had a lucid dream twice in my life-each lasting about 4–5 seconds - and honestly, those were some of the most exciting seconds I’ve ever experienced. It’s like being a god, even if just for a moment. The problem? To get there, I had to grind for almost a year—writing down my dreams, doing reality checks etc. Too much effort.

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elmerfud · 7 hours ago

This is something that has always come naturally to me even when I was a child. I remember when I first learned about a lucid dreaming in my teenage years and I was surprised that this wasn't normal for everyone. Except for very rare situations I have always been aware that I am dreaming and once I am aware of the dream I can exert complete control over it.

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· 8 hours ago

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