It's cool to see someone else on this list that does lucid dreaming. I do this, but it's not wide-spread as far as I know. I have had major periods of overwork where I literally worked full time except for sleep. By controlling my dreams and simulating an hour on the beach or something, I woke up more refreshed and ready to work again. When I don't dream (or more accurately, when I don't remember dreaming) it seems like I just went to bed and its time to go to work again, and I'm not ready to go back to work.
I also have performed real design work in dreams. During the above week of hell, I have gone to sleep, designed a solution to problems, and woke up ready to implement the design the next morning. I presented the design idea, and actually billed time for the design work.
This is not always reliable, however. Sometimes you don't dream or don't become lucid while dreaming. Sometimes you don't maintain full lucidity. You dream that you came up with a good design, and you wake up and realize that it doesn't make sense. Sometimes dreams get weird and seem reasonable until you wake up. Usually the consciousness achieved in lucid dreaming prevents the random dream-generators from kicking in, but occasionally there is some overlap where the lucid dream still has some fictional elements thrown in.
For those who don't know what we're talking about: Lucid dreaming is when you realize that you are dreaming. You thereby become conscious inside your dream. Once you realize its a dream, you can control it by visualizing what you want to see, and the dream-generating facilities of the subconscious take over and create what you visualized. Basically, it is a super-realistic holodeck. Anything you can imagine seems to be real. You get full sensory feedback, so you can do long division on paper, because you see the paper and the writing holds constant and seems real. You can think logically and generate a design or a check list in your head, and when you wake up you have accomplished real work/planning while sleeping.
-- Harvey Newstrom <mailto://newstrom@newstaffinc.com> <http://newstaffinc.com> Author, Consultant, Engineer, Legal Hacker, Researcher, Scientist. ----- Original Message ----- From: Theta 8008 <ubergoo@hotmail.com> To: <extropians@extropy.com> Sent: Thursday, July 01, 1999 1:33 am Subject: Re: Sex vs. sleep
> 8008
>
> >On the other hand, as pleasurable as sleep and dreaming are, I'd love to
> >have as many of those hours back as possible.
>
> Lucid dreaming helps reclaim sleep time. Of course, you can not
re-tile
> your bathroom during this time; but any mental or creative work can be
done.
> Or you can just use it as a vacation AFTER a full day of work.
>
> It is, after all, a very advanced form of VR available now and
without
> expensive equipment.
>
> Zero
>
>
>
> Telesis Foundation for Applied Memetics
> http://telesis.veindance.com
>
> CHAOSMOS: The Product is The Process
> http://www.angelfire.com/biz2/ubergoo/chaosmos.html
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________
> Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com
>