Thread: Hearing Real Sounds In A Lucid Dream

I know that there have been similar questions asked, but not specifically what I am looking for. If I am mistaken, please of course, correct me by leaving a link to the post I can follow.

So, I was wondering, basically, when you are lucid dreaming and are receiving an external stimuli - a sound - in real life, could you hear that sound in your dream? If yes, how accurately? Could you hear a song with all its words and instruments, or would they be in some way different? If you were constantly woken up by something that happened in real life, like fireworks that kept going off or something, could you hear them inside your dream and decide not to wake up? If you had achieved a level where you could control your dreams, could you even listen to a tape of dialogue of some language you are currently studying and understand it? Could you even reply to it?

Thank you so much!

Different people can do this to varying extents. Personally, external noises wake me up pretty easily instead of appearing in my dreams. Occasionally some noise has filtered into my dream world but always by coincidence and waking me up after a few seconds. I guess we might incorperate real world noises into our dreams more often than we think and just never know about it. But I don't think anyone can listen to an outside noise for more than a couple seconds without tuning it out or waking up as it is engaging too much in the physical world.

From the end of one of my DJ entries:

I'm now flying outside. There is a concrete parking structure that looks a lot like the one at the local mall right in front of me, and there is another park off to the right. I head toward the park to fly up onto one of the baseball backstops there. As I’m making my way over there, I hear the very faint sound of smooth jazz music. I realize that there’s only one place that music could be coming from: my parents’ clock radio. [I notice that the music is playing at normal speed, too – this demonstrates to me that time does indeed pass at the same speed in my lucid dreams as it does in the real world.] The combination of the music and my knowledge of where it's coming from cause the dream to fade and me to wake up.

Hi there my friend,
A dreamer may actually here external sounds. But it won't translate well. The buzzing of a bee outside the real world, will be a noisy screech inside a dream. Hope this helps

This happens quiet commonly for me, especially when I am napping and my family is awake and about. Sometimes I don't take a sound thought of it, some times the sound make a dream out of those sounds. I think the sounds effect everyone differently, it does have some interesting results. I can see the sounds not easily bothering someone whos use to napping with all sorts of sounds about and vice versa.

I also think the clarity of those sounds also vary, sometimes they aren't very clear so listening to say a lecture while sleeping probably won't help you know the material any better.

I often listen to boring lectures to help me go to sleep, particularly if I'm taking a nap in the middle of the day or crashing for the night in an unusual location. Most of the time, I either don't sleep long enough to enter REM, or my headphones fall out of my ears while I'm sleeping, so nothing interesting happens. However, if the headphones stay in and I remember a dream, about half the time the lectures are incorporated into the dream. Sometimes, it's just a disembodied voice, but other times there's a DC who randomly starts saying exactly what the lecturer in the IRL recording is saying.

Some examples of this happening:

• We're in this hot-air-balloon-type thingy, trying to get away from someone. One of the passengers decides it's a great time to tell me all about propositional logic.
• I'm lucid, having fun flying down a railroad track, but I'm annoyed because there's a voice droning on and on about something uninteresting and I can't get it to stop!

I only recall one occasion in which the dream actually incorporated the meaning of the words I'm listening to. Basically, the Apocalypse was unfolding exactly as the Bible had foretold. When I woke up, I found that a boring sermon about the Bible was playing in my ears.

I haven't been able to do this with music, however. I set up a playlist on my MP3 player called "Sweet Dreams", containing about 82 minutes of lectures followed by one of those binaural beat tracks, and finishing with some nice uplifting music that I wouldn't mind as dream BGM. So far, however, the headphones have always fallen out. Tonight I'm going to bind them with a headband; if something interesting happens I'll post it here.

Update: Experiment was a failure. I woke up in the middle of the night after a dream, but the headphones had fallen out despite my efforts. I tied the headband tighter and restarted the playlist. This time, however, the battery ran out!

..I don't know about studying, but I know music transfers into dreams.

I sleep with classical music on (to mute audio hallucinations), and I've been dreaming about the concept "music" a few times since I started doing that. I even invented some beats in my last dream!

This happens to me quite often. Sometimes a door will slam shut or something, and in my dream, that sound of the door slamming would be, for instance, a boulder falling onto a car. When I wake up, I usually realise that the sound I heard was more realistic than normal "dream sounds" and I can usually remember what the sound was and identify it as, "Oh, someone must have slammed the door." It's really weird, too, because I seem to know it's going to happen. For example, if the above scenario played out, I wouldn't hear the noise, and then have a dream that explains what it was. Rather, I'd be dreaming about the falling boulder, and the car below, and the door would slam right as the boulder hit the car, as if I knew there was going to be some sound to go with the impact.

As for words and other people talking during my sleep, it's sort of the same thing. The only difference is that, when I wake up, I only remember little things here and there, like if someone was talking about grocery stores, I'll remember the topic, and that someone mentioned "milk" and "bread". I've tested this and asked people what they were talking about while I was sleeping, so I'm not crazy.

I have been documenting the effects of sounds on my dreams for a few months now and have found a real and measurable effect on rapid eye movement. REM is either briefly interrupted or the rate of blinking increases drastically the very second the sound starts.

I used external sounds to induce a lucid dream once, it was an app for my ipod that basically plays the sound of a woman saying "This is a dream" at given times and I'm pretty sure it induced a lucid dream once but it also woke me up a few times

The closest thing I have experienced to this is when I had my only LD to date. The air and temperature felt identical to the way my room feels with all of my fans going, and I awoke without my comforter on feeling the same sensation.

I was experimenting with an everyman-2 schedule and this was after the second or third night of only sleeping 4 1/2 hours. The power went out and the temp was >85F inside, since the was nothing else to do I went to lie down (about 2:00pm). After 45 minutes I got the buzzing in my head that I always get when I'm in "sleep paralysis" or the in between dreams state, I had gone straight into REM with no lapse in consciousness. I was still able to hear my breathing and at some points I felt allot of pressure in my forehead as if my blood vessels were about to burst.

I had one of my most lucid lucid dreams, I set my intention to teleport to the house I grew up in and landed ass first into the kitchen sink there. I went to the back yard and it was all hot and swampy, I made ice cream fall from the sky and ate some. I also did a bunch of other crap and went between the "sleep paralysis" state and a dream a good decent amount of times. I also heard my mother make a call to the power company.

Tl;dr: Heard my own breathing and also heard my mother make a call to the power company.