Virtual reality might have crippled my lucid dreaming capacity!

Hello! I've been practicing lucid dreaming for a while now due to a project I worked on back in college. So here is some background on my problem. When I dream, particularly during nightmares, I perform my reality check which consists of counting my fingers and trying to make something unusual happen. However my dream self seems to get confused with the results. Its hard to explain, but basically I fail a reality check, realize I'm not awake, but cant seem to fully process what that actually means. I will then continue on the dream sequence aware that I can influence everything but not entirely sure why I can do it.

Or even stranger still, I wont perform a reality check, but if something becomes frustrating or scary from within my dream I suddenly acknowledge I have the capacity to take control of or change the situation on command, but my dream self can't figure out why, or what even led me to realize I can influence the world around me in the first place.

But here's the kicker, even though I'm aware I'm not awake, I AM NOT aware I'm asleep! For example when things become not to my liking from within the dream I know I can, and I often will just outright stop the dream and wake up (I'll still be sleep paralyzed however).

So how is this possible..? I mean, if you know your not awake then of course that means your asleep, right? I mean what else could you be? dead?

I have a theory. You see I'm a video game designer and I'm very use to getting immersed in my team's projects and changing the game "on command" in order to design a compelling experience. It doesn't help that the last game I developed was related to dreaming and designed to follow the flow and logic of dreams, and was on the Oculus Rift (virtual reality). Naturally, my dreams began to take place in the space of the game, and during the dream I didn't acknowledge I was dreaming, it felt like I was in virtual reality playing our game! And this is where I think my capacity to lucid dream broke. My mind is still carrying the conventions of virtual reality.

So to tie it all together: I recognize I'm not awake and not in control of my physical body, but not that I'm asleep (virtual reality?) I recognize I can regain control of my body at any time by simply ending the sequence I'm experiencing (virtual reality?) I recognize I can influence and control the sequence to create an ideal experience (virtual reality designer?) Because I worked on a virtual reality project directly tied to the imagery of dreaming, I now cant recognize dream signs as dream signs and cannot gain full lucidity. I'm simply existing in my dream space as one would exist as a virtual avatar in a virtual world. :whyme:

What should I do now?

Don't panic! Dreams are very impressionable, so it's quite likely that yours have been strongly colored by your VR experiences, as you suggest. My own dreams have been strongly colored by video games, to the extent that if I don't like how things are going in a dream, I sometimes restart the sequence as if from a save point and play it through again!

It's not unusual to achieve states of semi-lucidity where you gain elements of dream control but remain less than fully aware of the fact that you are dreaming. Awareness is anything but binary! To the waking mind it might seem obvious that if you're not awake, then you must be dreaming, but dream logic is not always so straightforward. It might well be that your VR experiences have given your mind an a plausible alternative explanation, but I wouldn't worry too much about this. In a very real sense dreaming IS virtual reality--and I look forward to the day that tech has reached the point where we can "plug in" to our dreams at will. There's no reason to think that your experiences with VR will perpetually prevent you from recognizing the dream state. Rather, it sounds to me like you're already achieving semi-lucidity if you're at least recognizing that you're not awake and gaining some control over the environment.

It might help to practice distinguishing between VR and dreaming, by remembering to do frequent RCs every time you find yourself engaged in VR simulations, in order to better attune your mind to the difference.

Any time I get immersed into something and start going crazy for it, it shapes my dreams quickly. It is the way I learned to incubate in the first place.

When it is a video game that I am immersed in, I often have dreams that I am "in" the game. even without practice in virtual reality, this doesn't seem weird in a dream because "your focus determines your reality" so when in a dream, your reality is the game, it makes sense that you don't notice anything, because when playing any game there is a space that you are literally imagining yourself in (usually you are imagining yourself in reality). This can be a problem because I will spend tons of time in a dream aware and weird things happening, but because I am "playing minecraft" it makes perfect sense.

So this can be a problem, but it is simply something that you have to work with. It is the same reason that when you are dreaming you think that you are in waking life, so use whatever you needed during waking to snap that idea out of your head and apply it to the time spent on video games. Make sense? It is just a 3rd reality that you are working with, and if you don't have a firm grasp on which one you are in, then the first one to go will be dreaming.

Interesting. So now I have to both check that I'm not in a dream, AND not in virtual reality.
Essentially form a two stage reality check. I'll have to check while awake that I'm not in VR, then check that I'm not dreaming. Then while in VR check that I'm not in reality, and check that i'm not in a dream. But checking in a dream that I'm not in reality and then checking that I'm not in VR, that's going to harder than it sounds. Your sleeping mind can make the VR checks return positive. For example if my VR reality check is to touch my face and feel for goggles, my dream mind can return the sensation of goggles just because I'm thinking about touching goggles, thus leading me to believe I'm in VR.

And then there is the glitch effect, as in not being able to distinguish the results of your reality check from a glitch in the VR simulation you may have programmed. For example, lets say you wrote a VR program IRL to make a squirrel appear if you pressed the spacebar on your computer. You test the program in VR, and sometimes the squirrel appears and sometimes it doesn't because of a glitch. When the squirrel doesn't appear you don't assume your asleep, you realize the program just glitched up. Now within a dream how would you know the results of your VR check is accurate or merely a glitch in a program you wrote? Combine this with a dream state's short term memory loss and you could confuse your reality check or VR check with a glitching function you might have wrote earlier but forgot about until now.

Like Verre said, your sleeping mind now has a VERY plausible explanation for the weirdness going on from within a dream, and depending on how deep you have dived into VR, your mind also has many different ways of debunking your pre-planned reality checking countermeasures. I'm sure there is a method to still make a lucid dream work, but its going to take a lot of experimenting to figure out anything effective with so little research into VR's impact on LD.

On the bright side, you're the avante-garde in not one but two new frontiers of conscious perception! It seems like lucid dreaming is a growing hobby, as the ease of online information exchange means that more people are becoming aware of it than ever before, and a percentage of those become regular practitioners. Likewise, I have confidence that VR will become a popular phenomenon too, as the technology becomes better and more accessible.

You might not yet be doomed, at least at this point, to a tedious regimen of two-stage RCs. How well does the current VR replicate the experience of flying? I've always found gravity check RCs to be one of the more reliable ones, if not foolproof. That is, while sometimes I inexplicably fail to levitate or fly in a dream, if I do levitate or fly, then I can be sure I'm definitely dream. And since you definitely can't levitate or fly (without significant apparatus) in waking life, and you may or may not be able to plausibly simulate the feeling of flying in VR, this could still be useful single-stage RC. Flying or levitating = dream. Not flying or levitating = awake or VR. Since the conscious mind is awake during VR, the only important question is to distinguish whether or not you're dreaming, because if you're not dreaming, it becomes a much easier matter to figure out which of the other two states you're in.

The noseplug RC would also be a good one to quickly distinguish between whether or not you're definitely dreaming or in the waking/VR state, since dreaming is probably still the only one of those states where we can still feel ourselves breathing through a fully blocked nasal cavity. There are probably others; since VR in its current state of development affects only hearing and seeing, to the best of my knowledge, then RCs that rely on other senses will more rapidly and reliablly distinguish the dream state from the other two.

OH! okay check this out. I made a game about dreams because of how close VR is to lucid dreaming. Like if you fly in VR your body will fill in the missing physical sensations like it does when you fly in a dream. Since our game was associated with the concept of dreaming, it became very powerfully linked to the actual dreaming state from within my subconscious. So like I said before, my dreams started taking place within my game world. And that's where the problems started, the dreams were so vivid I couldn't distinguish them from my VR game while within my dreams. Since I had freedom to do whatever I wanted within the game (as a designer), my reality checks didn't work anymore in the dream.

But what if, what if,... I created a VR experience specifically designed to walk you into a WILD lucid dream. Essentially a bridge between your waking mind and the dream world, that you would use as you fell asleep. My theory is, if you fell asleep in a VR world that could not ever possibly exist in real life, then you wouldn't even need a reality check when you entered into that world via WILD. All you would need is a VR check, and that would be achieved by the VR subtly reminding you that you cant do something in the VR environment unless your asleep.

For example (and I'm going to nerd out here so bear with me)

Have you ever played Kingdom Hearts? In the beginning of the game you are in a very dark, neutral setting with a column of light a short distance in front of you. You have one written instruction, "Step into the light. Can you do it?"

What if I put you there, but didn't give you the ability to step into the light with your waking mind? As you try to WILD, every time you open your eyes and attempt to step into the light, and nothing happens, you know it means your still awake. But as soon as you can step into the light, or can no longer read the instructions telling you to do so (reading part of your brain often shuts down during sleep) then you know that your not in the VR world anymore, your in the Kingdom Hearts world! :boogie: This is so freaking appropriate because the setting in the game is called "The Station of Awakening", and the main character enters it while dreaming. He then goes to all sorts of different fantastic worlds throughout the remainder of the game.

AH! I don't know if this will actually work but I'm doing it!

***EDIT***

Oh man! and what if it also helped you with dream recall? I imagine it would already since you will always have a consistent starting point to trace back to, but what if it helped more? Like it trained you by using a series of flashing lights to at intervals to wake you up when your going out of REM sleep, so you could write down your dream and then jump back into the station of awakening when you your ready to fall back asleep. Haha and like for fun, within the VR simulation Namine could explain to you how the waking up lights work, since she is so associated with memories.

Actually,.. wait a minute. Is Kingdom Hearts a game about dreaming? Now that I really think about it, there is a LOT of dream related imagery and concepts within that game...

Sorry if your not really a gamer or don't dig Kingdom Hearts, like I said I'm nerding out but the concept is really what I'm trying to get across.

Okay, Prototype is done.. time to test! :D
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I'm not trying to bump this but after a few days of experimenting I sort of got it to work once. There was a big disconnect in being able to walk around in the station of awakening and what actually unfolded in my dream. I'm chalking it up to losing information due to my weaker dream recall capacity, but I was lucidly wandering around a flying hospital by the end of the dream cycle. Since my problem was technically solved I guess this thread is done, unless its not? Anyway If anyone wants to try the prototype or wants more info on why this might have worked (not entirely sure myself yet) you can message me and we can talk about it. I might just go ahead and post the prototype somewhere else online too, I dunno. Either way thanks for your responses!

If you are able to learn for sure whether its prototype works, I hope you share some more about this VR bridge, maybe on a new thread. Given that, if you think about it lucid dreaming (or any dreaming, really) is literally VR, a "bridge" meant to gently link us to dreams that is effectively made of the stuff of dreams makes pretty good sense.

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Originally Posted by Owls

But what if, what if,... I created a VR experience specifically designed to walk you into a WILD lucid dream. Essentially a bridge between your waking mind and the dream world, that you would use as you fell asleep. My theory is, if you fell asleep in a VR world that could not ever possibly exist in real life, then you wouldn't even need a reality check when you entered into that world via WILD. All you would need is a VR check, and that would be achieved by the VR subtly reminding you that you cant do something in the VR environment unless your asleep.

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Hey Owls, I meant to get back to this thread sooner then got distracted with RL stuff, but... WOW! I haven't heard this approach to lucid dream induction before (I think you're obliged to create a new acronym for it, VRILD :wink:) but what a fantastic idea! And I'm impressed that you already built a prototype and tried it out. I didn't even know that VR technology had reached a point where this would be feasible. It's awesome that you had a success already, even if it was only partial. I can't help but feel optimistic about where this could go!

Thanks! I've actually since had full success with it. Turns out you don't have to actually wear the apparatus to bed, but wear it for a while before bed. Of course it needs more testing, but I've found if you enter a state of deep meditation or self hypnosis while in VR, and really absorb the scene into your sub-conscious and connect it to the act of dreaming, it becomes easier to enter that world in a dream. And since your focusing on one simple task, in this case stepping into the light, its easier to carry that into your dream.

In short,

Open up your sub conscious. Saturate your primary senses with a simple environment and reality checking objective. Go to bed.

Depending on how receptive you are to hypnotic suggestion, this should help people speed up the path to lucidity. This is actually more of a MILD method, but the same basic thinking goes into a WILD induction where you fall asleep with the device on. But its kind of hard to sleep with all those wires everywhere and equipment on you, especially if you don't like to sleep on your back.

If you have Windows, an Oculus Rift DK1 and some time try it out! press "a" at anytime to stop the prototype.

ADrive | Online Storage, Online Backup, Cloud Storage

Well now I'm getting pretty consistent positive results but I cant test the prototype with anyone else but myself and close friends! I'm the only person I know who owns VR tech, so I have to loan it out. I tried reaching out to the VR community and even the kingdom hearts community and nobody is down to try it. People seem to generally respond with disinterest or act as if I'm trying to preform some sort of evil ritual on them, or sell them snake oil utterly wasting their time. I guess I was too hopeful other people would get just as excited about this, but I suppose I was wrong. I guess that makes sense because VR is all about science and since you cant "scientifically" prove that anyone has ever had a lucid dream, nobody is interested in testing it. I'm sorry guys, but unless anyone in this community has VR tech, I think this bridge will only work for me. :blue:

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Originally Posted by Owls

If you have Windows, an Oculus Rift DK1 and some time try it out! press "a" at anytime to stop the prototype.

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I don't have an Oculus Rift yet, but... it's on my DO WANT!!!!1 list.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Owls

I tried reaching out to the VR community and even the kingdom hearts community and nobody is down to try it. People seem to generally respond with disinterest or act as if I'm trying to preform some sort of evil ritual on them, or sell them snake oil utterly wasting their time. I guess I was too hopeful other people would get just as excited about this, but I suppose I was wrong.

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I'm sorry to hear this! But both lucid dreaming and VR are in themselves barely mainstream yet, so it makes sense that these two niche communities wouldn't overlap much to date... that's why I think you're so ahead of the times in merging the two. They seem naturally complementary, and I'm convinced that within the next couple decades we're going to be seeing both lucid dreaming become more widespread and VR technology get more advanced, with the potential for some marvelous crossovers. So don't get too discouraged, because it doesn't hurt to position yourself ahead of the game!

I have read this thread a while ago, but an experience I had yesterday made me realise how valuable this discussion can be.

You should know that I am in my last year of high school and currently applying for universities. Now yesterday, I was at the Technological University of Eindhoven (one of the best technological uni's in the Netherlands) and I had the chance of playing around with a VR machine (not the OR). The virtual world consisted solely of two rooms, one room to start in and another which had some sort of deep pit. The objective was to walk towards the edge of the pit and eventually try stepping into it (it was 30 metres deep). The first few seconds of wearing the apparatus were a little disappointing (I wasn't really immersed at first) but after looking around and taking a few steps I found myself completely forgetting about the real world. As I approached the pit, I felt that typical feeling of walking towards the a ledge at great height, or approaching the drop of a rollercoaster. I decided that I would step into it, convincing myself that it wasn't real, but as I stepped forward I did not expect my foot to hit the ground. Aside from causing me to stumble and almost fall on the ground, I was absolutely amazed by how a perception influences your bodily movements regardless of your knowledge.

The realism of perception in the VR machine got me thinking about reality checking. Although you have found a problem there, I think it might also open to new possibilities. As has been mentioned, there are reality checks that work and reality checks that don't work in VR. Of course, for someone not being able to distinguish VR from a dream you need the working ones, but the RC's that do not work in VR (yet do work in dreams) might be of great value as well. It provides us with a way to simulate a positive conclusion of a reality check, without having to visualize. For example, when in VR, you can walk through walls, touch ground where you can see it isn't, or fly as you mentioned. Using VR to simulate the realization ´I AM DREAMING!´ might aid your subconscious with actually believing this is possible.

I myself have some issues with being confident about being able to LD. Of course I believe it is possible but I have trouble convincing my subconscious that I am capable of doing it. Assuming there are more people with this problem, VR might help with this.

At least it was an amazing, eye-opening experience that has finally made me realize how subjective perception really is. I don't know whether anyone finds this post really valuable but I needed to vent these ideas, haha.

InnerVision

Once you try VR its very easy to realize the potential for this. I think for the next version of the prototype I'm going to drop the Kingdom Hearts angle, as it didn't excite and motivate non lucid dreamers to try it out as I had hoped. However InnerVision gave me an idea...

I suppose its true that performing a task in VR makes the experience more immersing than if you just sit and stare into the environment. Maybe the software would work even better if you were preforming some sort of common simple task over and over. Like walking through a door... I also suppose this software could frequently remind you to perform a reality check once crossing the doorway and remind you that the environment is associated with dreaming in predictable intervals.

So if you do this task a few dozen times every night before bed with the intention of retaining it in your subconscious it should increase the chances of you successfully becoming lucid. In theory, over time you should be more likely to see a door in your dreams, walk through it and perform a reality check.

But then again, you could do all this with a real door. Maybe there was something even more profound you could simulate in VR than walking through a door? I don't know...

You mention flying in one of your previous posts.. This would be one of the most obvious dreamsigns there could be, so if you'd do an exercise like you describe (nice idea btw!) in which you fly, you might be able to either turn that into a dreamsign and start recognizing it, or if you already fly often in your dreams it has immediate effect.