[derefr]

> By definition a person knows when they are having a lucid dream or not.

Do they? I mean, the qualia of "I'm having a lucid dream" might not have 100% overlap with the fact of having a lucid dream.

Certain drugs can give people something they will describe as "a feeling of being very sure about things" without that feeling having any particular referent—whatever they think about, they tend to describe experiencing an "epiphany" about. (The subset of people who think tend to frame things through a lens of religious faith tend to describe this drug experience as a "religious experience", a "contact with the divine." Mostly, it seems, because they direct their attention to their religious beliefs, and end up having a feeling of sureness about those, while other trippy things are happening.)

I wouldn't find it hard to believe that there is a thing you can do to the brain that makes it believe you are in conscious control of affecting the world you are sensorily experiencing. By itself, this would just make you experience dreaming as normal, but with a sensation that whatever you're doing in the dream—and however the dream is proceeding—it was your choice for you to do those things, and for the dream to proceed in that fashion. Without actual control of the dream, this would likely cause ego-dystonic thoughts: questioning why you directed the dream to go the way it did, because it seems so out-of-line with your normal waking desires.

[nonbel]

> "Do they? I mean, the qualia of "I'm having a lucid dream" might not have 100% overlap with the fact of having a lucid dream."

I cover this objection in the next sentence:

>"If you will not trust their self report of that info there is no reason to trust anything else they report about the dream either."

If you don't trust the self report of such basic aspects of the dream, why would you believe anything they say about it at all? Either way, the "LuCiD" scale they came up with is unhelpful for identifying lucid dreaming.

[robotresearcher]

Good luck proving that conscious will has any effect on the world whether waking or sleeping. People report that it does, and that's all we are sure about.

[derefr]

I wasn't really talking about "free will" or anything so airy; more about 1. your predictive model of your own behavior lining up with your actual behaviour; and 2. your predictive model of the causal effects of your behavior lining up with the actual observed world.

In dreams, neither of these are true: "you" don't behave the way you'd expect of your waking self, and the things "you" do don't result in what you'd expect out of the real world.

[Nomentatus]

Re the last sentence. I have in fact deliberately behaved in ways I never would in life, in a lucid dream; and flown around which doesn't work in real life. Did you swap negative for positive.

[derefr]

That's not ego-dystonic decision-making; that's just different things being possible in the embodied environment and you being aware of that.

That is: you can fly in a dream; you can't fly in real life. But if you could fly in real life, you probably would. Therefore, it isn't shocking to "watch yourself" decide to fly, if flying is obviously an option.

Consider, by contrast, ripping your own limbs off. Perfectly possible in reality, but nobody does it. If you did it in a dream, you'd wonder why "you" wanted to do that. It wouldn't make sense for you to make that decision, so probably "you" aren't you at the moment.

You might try some stuff, e.g. stepping off a cliff in order to fly, only if you're really quite sure you're in a dream. But "being sure you're in a dream" means "being sure your actions have no long-term consequences in reality", which allows many more things to be ego-syntonic.

[Nomentatus]

Actually, every decision you make while asleep is different from the one you'd make while awake. The mind is less organized; different parts of the brain are active. See the studies re EMG suppression of various parts of the brain, and the effect of that on artistic ability for a close parallel.

Rarely - you can recapture that very different way of being while awake and have skills you never had before.

[Squithrilve]

There are ways to communicate from the REM state back to the real world used in research on lucid dreams:

> Previously to sleeping, volunteers like Worsley agreed on preset eye movements they would perform once they achieved lucidity in their dreams, which La Berge could record in the lab.

Source: http://dreamherbs.com/eminent-dreamers/stephen-laberge/