Dreams

Title is just kidding.

But following a yoga nidra script in between waking up and sleeping has actually a lot of overlap, in substance, with Waking Induced Lucid Dreams (WILD).

Experience report:

At ca. 6 am I wake up, go to the bathroom and go back to bed.

I put on this track by Ally Boothroyd (shoutout - thank you for the yoga nidra stuff). I guess I sort of dose off something like 10 min into the script. Basically followed some of the body scan, I remember going through toes.

Yoga Nidra and waking induced ludic dream (WILD) protocols have quite some overlap. You don't move and you attend to the senses.

At some point I either sleep and dream that I lie in bed, or I sort of dose and think very visually, dreamlike.

It's hard to say which. Given the content and the fact that there was a lot of third person imagary of my bedroom, even though I was lying in bed with eyes closed, maybe the complete thing below is just the content of a dream;

Not 'experiencing falling asleep', but already sleeping and dreaming of falling asleep.

Still, I remember Ally mentioning 'a white owl'. Would be interesting if that is in the audio track or I dreamt it.

Then at some point I think 'this is interesting, I witness the process of falling like almost never before'. I feel like some wave goes through my brain, making loud sounds and providing a carpet of imagery or something.

I feel bathed in violent sensations, the feeling of falling and other stuff happening. I keep still and observe; I think "from having medidated, I know how to observe and let be".

Doing WILD and lucid dreaming can help teach one equity in the face of nightmares or intense situations. What is supposed to happen, when it is just stuff of the mind? Best to lean back and enjoy the ride as it unfolds.

I start having the impression that can I roll my body around, while still thinking I am awake in my umoving body.

Rolling left, right, then keep rolling to the side. I think 'maybe if I roll very fast, I fall into a dream after'. (Such an 'infinite fast rolling on the head-toe axis' is another WILD sensation that can happen and is very intense).

Then I think, "If I already feel like I can move my dream muscles, I can also just start the dream".

In a mix of first and third person perspective, my 'body' pries itself from the shakles of unmovable muscles, my blanked wrapped around like the cocoon of a caterpillar.

There are grey sticky threads, like silk, that tear off as I fly into my room. And I feel I fly into the dream.

Scene cut, now a 'false awakaning'; Dreaming that I get up from bed.

I know I am in a lucid dream. Without hesitation, I jump out of the window and fly. But nothing renders around me. Instead I fly into a narrowing tunnel of 'dream world', then just black.

Hard cut, next scene. I believe I hear Ally saying 'a white owl' and I it seems like the list of images of her script appear in my dream.

There is a tiny window opening in a thick wall, with white light (moon light) coming in. For some reason that made sense to me as response to 'white owl'.

The scence morphs, the window is part of a round tower, there are more windows opening. The lighting is dark because they are small windows.

I fly upwards and come to a slanted ceiling. Air rushes (into or out) of the windows and I think 'the tower is filling with water'.

The dream now becomes an action movie where the protagonist tries to escape before the water drowns him.

In first person, I lift one eighth of the ceiling as if it was the door of a tent fly out (easy lol). I fall to the floor, but save myself by shooting air out of my hands last second. The movement has some aspects of explosive pushups which I was doing the last couple of days.

I am in a small city, the dream goes on at the doorway of some building, with some new characters,

I am intrigued, but then -

I am woken suddenly from the Ally Boothroyd track; Where she suddenly says something whispered but kinda loud in a different voice from the rest of the video up until then.

---

Now for some analysis.

This is a dream from a while back.

I remember I thought This is a cool Borges story, or This could be a Borges story.

The dream was a story about a man that was as good as blind on the left eye.

Here is an attempt of writing the story:

---

Blind not because of a desease of the eye nor of the visual nerve, nor of the cerebral matter processing the data, although perhaps that might come closer to it.

It was his internal left eye that was affiliated with a disease that is perhaps at the core of what humans are.

The good idea that evolution hit on, the principle of design that makes us find meaning from noise, that makes us palpate the environment for proof or disproof of it's fabrik.

Not merely a blessing nor a course, the human spirit.

To build machines that build machines that build machines that abuse the cerebral matter, to say 'here is object A', 'here is object B'.

So self rightous, so self assured, without a trace of doubt. Indeed without even the concept of doubt.

What says 'here is object A' does not deign to entertain the notion 'I might be wrong'.

Like when a child walks in a dark cellar, they are scared of the monsters, not the possibility nor the dream of one. The monsters themselves just say they are there, without doubt.

This left inner eye was blind from meaning. Where others see a face in the cloud, this eye would see furniture where really there was a path to walk.

This man in order to understand where he was, closed his eyes and in a peculiar, fast, swisching motion of his head, he seemed to clear it's content for a moment.

Where before there was a piano, wierdly poised, standing oblique, on a single foot, across a background that seemed vaguely like a living room.

He now saw the path on the meadow he was walking in, and could go on.

Able to get a glimpse of the world-as-is, uncluttered from the layers upon layers of meaning that this eye was stacking, unbidden, incescently, cluttering, into his mental world.

---

Sort of documentary style. A huge big river damn.

There are 4-5 different kinds of huge, toy-like mechanisms that move from the top of the damn to the bottom. With water keeping little wheels etc. moving. Some look a little like the wheely turning parts of a wind measure device - called anemometer.

Fri Aug 25 2023

[…]

The surrounding dream is some mundane stuff. I am about to board a car full of old people. Later, I missed my ride. I meet my brother and some other random dude by singing Alein Alein. Our voices resonate and we find each other. Each alone, but then not anymore.

Either way, at some point in between there is a mage, she looks like Philipa from The Witcher. With a lot of extra feathers and jewelry.

Dialog:

Her: /this and that is like in computers… a waste walker /…

Me: Wow, I think from the beginning those were called garbage collection algorithms, but I find that so cute that you call those waste walkers! haha!

Then I go on to talk about how I find the early history of computing fascinating.

The early computer scientists discovered everything already…

Well yeah, in other words, there is not much progress.

This just made me think of the alternative universe nomenclature/dictionary we find in Neal Stephenson Anathem (2008). I just love this book. This linguistic trick of replacing words with alternative words - makes you realize something about the essence of the referent. To ponder alternative names for it.

Waste Walker my friends.

Aug 2024

Movie style, we follow the character of a young man, maybe a knight.

Scene: sort of a Game Of Thrones castle corridor but later basically a supermarket aisle. But doesn't matter.

Knight walks down the corridor and looks at his arm. He is sort of infected. It started as a red streak and then became darker. There is a mage - more or less Mel from ASOIAF. She cursed the dude and controls him through the curse now. There is some dialog. She takes his arm and the streak now grows into a nice awful disgusting insect flame parasite demon thing. It's a bit of a mix of a scorpion and a centipede¹, it's long and nimble with pincers at the front and a dart at the rear end. And it sort of crawls out of the arm and moves its head in the air.

Nice horrific aesthetics - burning, inflammation, fire, blood, infectious possession, parasite, insect-alien, demon, poison thing.

And the concept that she controls this animal demon parasite inside the knight – so disgusting, so intriguing. I love it.

Then the night decides to test if she is as powerful as she claims, maybe she underestimated his leftover agency. He pulls out a sword. The next thing is that she is on the floor, he strikes with a little jump, full weight, pointy end of the sword at her heart. The sword glows and burns there is a little explosion, red, orange, sort of flame force fields blasting outwards. This is her security spell triggering, she sort of vanishes in the explosion. Being re-spawned at a place she deems safe, no doubt.

I get the impression the spell is a one-time setup thing, a non-stacking, consumable thing. She likely has to cast that again at some cost.

The knight's sword blade burned or blasted away, but he still had the handle in his hands. As he stands up, the audience sees his whole face is blasted off, too. So we look at a human skull amidst a few flames now.

By some magic or another, this doesn't kill him though. He just lost a huge chunk of his life now. The demon parasite has no appearance anymore as I wake up at this point.

I smile and think, What a sick dream, nice dark fantasy aesthetics. Turn around and sleep another round.

I like chat-gpt analyzing my dream: The author seems to have a rich visual imagination, as indicated by the vivid and detailed descriptions, and they seem to relish in the grotesque, drawing pleasure from the fusion of horror and fantasy elements.

I love open places, solar punk, and golden, clean cities flying in the sky. Full of libraries and people laughing and looking at the sky. With water, clouds, flowers, and little magical technological spells and machines flying around.

But my imagination is a muscle, I want to stretch it in different directions. To not use disgusting and grotesque imagery from time to time when doing mind-palace means you are missing out on tapping into mysteriousness and deep intrigue.

Tue Aug 1 2023

[…]

I become lucid, ignore the current dream and say. Let's fly into space.

Then the stars. The scene morphs, it is a deep night with heavy rain. I fly through a complex of buildings. High, blue-white walls, clean and solid. The night is thick like a blanket on the scene. I fly into a spacious room, similar to a university lecture hall with stone steps, and stone walls like a church but from a high-tech civ. The walls are smooth and thin - I know via the implicit logic of the dream. This is a temple built by space elves.

I go to the front where there is an altar. There is a candle on the altar. In a childish lust for destruction, I grab it and throw it on the floor.

I try to challenge the dream, or the god in the dream, to do something about it. I invoke the mental concept of a higher being - god. But nothing happens, this time.

I go through a door behind the altar, I am in some spacious altar room. Everything is heavy with a water theme. As if the walls are made from glass and it is pouring and dark night outside.

There are sort of quadratic wells of dark water on the floor with mosaics in between.

I look at the patterns. It looks like this:

+--------+> +--------+  +--------+  +--------+
| +    + |  | +    + |  | .......|  | .......|
|  +  +  |  |  +  +  |  |  ...   |  |  ...   |
|   ++   |  |   ++   |  |    ... |  |    ... |
+--------+  +--------+  +--------+  +--------+

Eh… close enough (^_^)

I think, oh what garbage those matrixes come up with. I accidentally tacitly assume my dream is generated by a generative ANN AI!

I turn to the end of this temple's back room and there are yoga mats and candles arranged on the floor.

I know where all that water came from. It's raining like never before where I live here in Germany since days.

Those yoga mats are so my subconscious telling me to relax more!

In waking life, I wonder. The generative AIs, also the LLMs, come across like they must be sort of the same kind of substance as what the brain is doing. These things come across like the substance of what minds are built out of. I think soon we will build a little architecture around that and voila, the cake is done.

Sun Jul 30 2023

In space. Documentary style.

Narrator: … and so you can imagine taking some mercury of volume such and such and spreading it in an ever thinner line… And at some point, it would split into the elements such and such.

At this point, there are some visuals like a digital mind map style thing you might expect from a modern web presentation thingy.

The distance such stretched is then such and such, and a star that is exactly this far away from us is called the quicksilver something something.

And there are/really/ cool visuals that look roughly like some Hubble images like this one:

I remember wondering as a child that if you cut a piece of cheese further and further and further, does it become a liquid? And if you cut it further does it become other elements?

What a shame I did not ask any adults. Something is wrong with the education system. These questions should be nurtured - education should be about the curiosity of children. Not about some pieces of knowledge - but the processes of making knowledge.

Thu Jul 20 2023

There is a witch and I challenge her for a duel. She laughs and is very convinced she is more powerful than me.

She shoots lighting, I make magic defense shields.

I do meta magic, which I am very proud of. Make magic spells that make magic spells. Spells that are like computer programs. And spells that quickly, Darwinistically grow into spell-making creatures, and shoot their magic bolts.

As the level of abstraction rises in the magic duel, the scenery changes and eventually, the visual is just a sky in a storm. The witch isn't there anymore but eventually, she is sort of the storm around me. This then becomes a maelstrom with yellow lighting - that looks more drawn than physically real.

I get sucked into the vortex, which funnels smaller and smaller. There is a hole with a dark blue, deep and clear sky. I feel if I would get sucked in, I would lose the duel so I try to fight. Not by fighting but by concentrating in a loose meditative way on flying outwards, not inwards into the vortex.

It works a bit but then I get sucked anyway again. I try to wake myself up and for a short moment have a false awaking dream content. I think, well fuck it, I lost that duel. How bad can it be?

I sort off go through a portal that is again round like the vortex hole. Then I have another episode entirely involving that witch which makes me smile and think dreams are fun!

Loosing is fine. How else can you find the edges of your abilities but go to where the challenges lie?

Jul 2023

I dream of a video game where a glowing ball with a trail flies from left to right. This is completely 2D. On the x axis there is time and on the y axis there is my heart pulse.

Say 60, 50 etc. There is a continuous sound that is pitched higher with a higher pulse. The = y-axis is layered like a cake and colorful. Low is green, but very low is orange. Higher is more yellow, orange and then red.

You also get little animations when the ball flies between regions of the color cake. There is also lighting like fine lines. When you cross you get little points for flying and or bling sounds.

I try to concentrate on making the pulse go lower or higher. I go high and everything is about danger and high performance for a short while. I go low and the pitch becomes that of some pipe organs' lowest keys.

I get scared for a moment and think, wow 14 is dangerously low.

This dream came from me looking at my smart watch heartbeat meeter the last couple of weeks and trying to manipulate my pulse by will.

This dream game was well designed and would be amazing to play - A recurring theme when I dream of video games.

You could make the little player ball have the visuals of a little furry, ball animal. With magic furry glowing animal creatures flying around and making tiny lovely blingy and purring sounds.

Jul 2023

In my dream, the first-person main character is a small child. I use telekinesis to make a glowing ball thing fly to my hand. It is a toy. Golden yellow glowing, bee kind of thing the size of a fist. Feary-like with antennae with golden spheres on their end. It is flying around in some anti-gravity fashion, very high-tech.

This toy has an AGI computer chip and it was made to educate the young person investigating with it. It was made to make the user understand how to build intelligence in a computer.

I ask it How do you work? and it answers with something along the lines of This is what you are supposed to figure out. It is programmed in a way where you cannot just ask it like this. But you need to ask the right questions, do experiments etc.

In waking life, I wonder - even if we had such a toy that would want us to understand its intelligence. What are the questions we want to ask?

And of course, the toy is a metaphor for nature, for we can ask nature by speaking the language of experiment and observation.

2023

A month or something after I started using chat-GPT (so early 2023), I became lucid in a dream and dreamt of prompt engineering. Instead of doing one of the usual tricks like opening a door and saying There will be x landscape behind the door. I put my dream hands in front of my eyes and sort prompt the dream the way I would the llms.

One prompts chat-GPT through a chat interface, and the inscrutable pattern-matching machine comes back like a myriad mirror of imaginary thought stuff.

In my dream, there was no chat interface. The interface was direct thought-to-thought. There was no prompt, just the machinery of mind that I use that would usually come up with a prompt. There was an abstract prompter and an abstract prompted machine. The inscrutable pattern-matching machine was "the dream", or those parts of the brain making the dream.

This, of course, is just the content of the dream. It doesn't need to mean much about the actual workings of my brain.

Still, it was quite salient to dream about making a prompt in the abstract, then the rest of the brain coming up with some storyline-fitting dream content. The cool thing about this dream was the experience of "prompt engineering" in a pure form (a common feature when it comes to dreaming about a skill).

One funny thing about prompt engineering. After making more experiences, I noticed the best way to get something out of these models is to be super straightforward. The same as with good code, if your prompt is large, you don't use the tools you have correctly.

So I was able to throw away completely what I was thinking in those early days about how to prompt. The model is not a plant that needs growing, the model is a mirror of ice that you ask straightforwardly for sharp edges. And if the request becomes too large, consider throwing away what you want do to and figure out some other piece or representation of your problem where you can communicate usefully with the model.

2018 - 2023

I made it a goal and challenge to shoot fireballs in a dream and I can count the few dreams over years where I "only" got sort of something working.

Some were with anime visuals, basically drawn fire like Avatar, The Last Airbender. This was not completely satisfying to me yet. Another one was when I achieved setting dream furniture on fire by magical willpower in a "physically" convincing way.

Then, I spend like 2 weeks getting into blender, made a nice donought.

And I start thinking in vertexes. This was one of the biggest perspective-building tool usage experiences I ever had.

So I walk around experiencing the squishiness of objects in the world with a different eye and feel. How I would build this with 3D tech.

Each cubie of my Rubik's cube now has 8 vertices in my mind. I can count 9 times to 5 by walking the vertices of one face with an extra vertex in the middle of each cubie face. To count to 100 I can walk the front face, which is green, then the right face, which is red, and then go for 2 cubies to the back, which is blue.

Alternatively, I count every vertex twice and do the front face + 1 cubie on the right.

To count further I go left, orange, then up, white and finally bottom, yellow. Then I would have counted 6 x 9 x 5, which I never needed. Sometimes I start with yellow - just for fun. Or I zoom in further and imagine the vertexes made up of patterns of 3|3 or 4-star sub vertexes. Sometimes I imagine them as edges in a light pattern at the bottom of the ocean because I enjoy the flair and mystique of it.

Dream:

I become lucid and think let's fly into space. I fly into the sky, and the visuals change to some video game-like screen full of different hues of blue and green blue.

I sort of jump into the lowest part of the screen, as if I could choose which player to play on the screen and I chose the bottom. Now I control a first-person video game character.

The visuals are like a 3D scene of a cave, sort of underwater but also in space. Very pastel cyan, blue, and green.

Then I think, oh I should try to make fireballs and shoot them. I shoot these plasma blobs and I swear my newly gained blender mind can render them as these gooey blobs and color them sort of orange glowing. (The lighting still mixed this with blue).

So I shoot those gooey plasma balls with my hands, throwing without throwing but letting them shoot out with force or magic will. Like I would expect it to work in a video game. They target hone into objects, and stones in the video game cave and make them fall apart with cute animations.

Afterward, I think yes I am satisfied with how I achieved the challenge..