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#sleep#dream#lucid#more#https#while#night#problems#sleeping#during

Discussion (87 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ml_basicsabout 2 hours ago
During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems.

For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.

hackable_sand3 minutes ago
This is exactly how I learned programming.

10-hour days practicing. Full night sleep afterwards.

MITSardine20 minutes ago
In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it.

I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.

renegade-otterabout 2 hours ago
Yeah, when you are stuck, put away that red bull and step away from the keyboard, kids.
pants2about 2 hours ago
This might be why agentic development/vibe coding leads to more burn out. It's been a long time since I've truly been 'stuck' on a problem and needed to sleep on it to figure out the answer. Now I just ask Claude to fix it until it's fixed...
krashidovabout 2 hours ago
FWIW I've had the opposite experience. Whenever I work late the output is absolute garbage. If I work past midnight it takes me 3 hours to get done what would have taken me 30 mins in the morning, and with way less frustration and stress. Your inputs to the LLM are only as good as how fresh your mind is so I've made it a rule to not work past midnight (unless there's an emergency).

In the good old days you would reach flow and actually know when you're too tired to continue. Now you can just say "please just fix it" over and over again and get yourself in a slophole much easier.

malux85about 2 hours ago
Then you're not challenging yourself with hard enough problems (those include the set of problems Claude cannot solve)
npongratz41 minutes ago
That's awesome! I had a somewhat similar experience (shared previously [0]):

> I proved a topology theorem in a dream once.

> Before I went to sleep, my inability to prove it had been bugging me all day long, and I suspected it'd be featured on the next morning's (way too early) final exam for my university course. I solved it in my dream, woke up, wrote on my whiteboard what I remembered and sure enough, it was correct. I worked it a few more times to cram it into my memory before running to my exam.

> To my great delight, the ability to prove that theorem was featured heavily in one of the exam's questions, and helped me do quite well on the exam overall.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40651913

usernotusedabout 1 hour ago
Interestingly, I observed the same when I was practicing the drums. I would fail multiple times to reproduce a drumming part, sleep on it, and succeed on the first try the day after.
nagaiaida14 minutes ago
yep, same with guitar. go to sleep fumbling through a riff even though you "know" it, wake up playing it smooth as hell
jwrallie40 minutes ago
Difficult parts on videogames as well. It could be attributed to slow response times due to being tired or accidentally memorizing a bad pattern, resting also could help with those.
GuestFAUniverseabout 1 hour ago
Can confirm this level of problem solving.

Had physics problems to solve and can remember to this day when I woke up in the library after I got exhausted from not solving the last one, that my subconscious discovered during sleep that I missed that certain vectors were orthogonal (which was the necessary key insight to solve it).

jvanderbotabout 1 hour ago
I can confirm - I woke up to the resolution to my two hardest problems during PhD. Three, if you count "I should look for this kind of inequality" (which did turn out to exist), but I think that's more of an _idea_ than a solution.

The hard part is paying attention to it. With enough attention your mind will fix it.

nick_about 2 hours ago
AFAIK this is called sleep consolidation.
vanviegenabout 2 hours ago
I once solved a particularly nasty bug, causing a c++ server to segfault in production about once a week, in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up, and I rushed to my laptop to find the insight was real. I had been trying to comprehend that segfault for several long days. It wasn't the most restful night though.
Xeoncrossabout 3 hours ago
AI does the work during the day and we learn while sleeping. Society doesn't collapse from ignorance. We have a new movie plot gentlemen.
throwatdem1231134 minutes ago
This is why I would smash my head against a wall trying to beat a boss in Dark Souls for an entire evening, then wake up the next day and beat them on my first or second attempt.

Very common phenomena that is discussed frequently in the souls community.

t-shaped16 minutes ago
That’s so on point. One time I was stuck on One Reborn from Bloodborne for a whole evening. While I was sleeping I figured out the optimal path to best the Chime Maidens. I woke up and beat the boss in 5 mins.

Very real phenomenon. Happened so many times

matthewfcarlsonabout 2 hours ago
I read a short novel about a technology that allowed you to have a VR like experience while dreaming. Of course, there was all the fun/perverted stuff you can think of but also it was immediately put to use as a corporate tool. Over a few years, more and more white collar jobs shifted to night shifts where you worked via dream VR. Then people were available during the day to do whatever, watch their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. In many ways- it was a very promising future.
mlbossabout 1 hour ago
I don't think this will ever work. Sleep acts as a compression for our daily life. Brains takes in daily new information and compresses it based on what we already know. The stuff dreams are made off are just a variant of what happens in day life.
eichinabout 1 hour ago
powernapcomic (maritza campos) is a surreal dystopian version of this (with the corporate part turned up to 99). Excellent sci-fi and very weird...
dgb23about 2 hours ago
Aside, but I struggled a long time with regular sleep. I have been a night owl since I was a kid. I experience late hours as magical, don’t know how to describe it. So I always slept too little, then not at all, then drifting and sleeping in.

But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier.

No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did improve many small things, like getting rid of bad habits, being more content, appreciating sleep more, prioritizing things differently.

I wish everyone good, healthy sleep.

rcarmoabout 2 hours ago
So I guess having dreams about recurring meetings is... honing corporate skills?
saltcuredabout 2 hours ago
Is the main theme that you suddenly realize you aren't wearing pants?

And if so, would you say it has improved your pants wearing performance on the job?

suprjamiabout 2 hours ago
It also counts as overtime, right?
nikolayabout 1 hour ago
This is nothing new as there's even a term for it - "hypnopedia." People used this widely to learn new languages in the past, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence about its effectiveness.
thenthenthenabout 3 hours ago
Two months ago my partner recorded me speaking in my sleep. I was speaking fluent Mandarin. I always thought sleep time is used for learning (among healing etc), but now I am convinced.
detribabyabout 3 hours ago
Well you’ll have to give us more. Do you speak Mandarin at all?
tsukurimashouabout 2 hours ago
spoiler, he is Chinese and only speaks Mandarin
consumer451about 3 hours ago
And, what was the partner's ability to benchmark? What is their level of familiarity with the language?

I would love to believe.

jtbaylyabout 2 hours ago
It was a recording. I dare you to ask for it.
jesse_dot_idabout 3 hours ago
Lucid dreaming is a cool concept but I've never been able to pull it off. I still try, though!
stldev7 minutes ago
I was fortunate to be taught by my father when I was younger. It may be an age/luck-of-the-draw thing, but check out "MILD"; it's the name for the simple technique that worked for me.
JumpCrisscrossabout 3 hours ago
It sort of just happened to me a few years ago. It’s neat—flying is fun. (As is the opposite, when it just doesn’t work and I wake up sort of laughing at myself for having spent, presumably, hours jumping around in my dream.)

But at least for me, the price was dreams, the moment I go lucid, ceasing to be self directed. I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifies anymore. (If I’m lucid.) I have to kind of create my own magic, which isn’t particularly restful.

mynameisashabout 1 hour ago
My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She lucid dreams very regularly, and she says she spends a lot of that time flying.

I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.

I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.

karmakurtisaaniabout 3 hours ago
Yep, same. The dream gets incredibly boring after you get control of it.
kbrkbrabout 2 hours ago
Not if you are an aphantast.
chrzabout 2 hours ago
but but, you can do whatever you want?
satvikpendemabout 3 hours ago
Keep a dream journal. There any many methods for achieving it but if you keep a dream journal long enough you'll start getting consistent lucid dreams.
macrolimeabout 1 hour ago
Most consistent way of achieving it I've managed is use a watch with an alarm that vibrates and is trivial to turn off or turns off by itself, then set it to go off after sleeping 5-6 hours. When waking up, don't move and focus on the black behind the eyes, then after a few seconds it may turn into a dream and you go straight from waking into a lucid dream.
zeta0134about 2 hours ago
My tell is to recognize any room with a piano in it. I naturally want to sit down and play this piano, but the keys are totally wrong. No problem, I'll look around and, lo and behold, dozens more pianos all... with the keys in the wrong places. I can't play anything. "Oh, this again. I must be dreaming. How frustrating."
microtonalabout 2 hours ago
A very regularly occuring dream is that I'm in a train and realize that I don't have a ticket (never happened IRL), so I want to buy an e-ticket, but the ticketing app does not work. The text changes all the time, the buttons move around, weird errors, and then I realize 'yep I'm in a dream again'.

The nicer lucid dreams are those were you can fly or make spectacular light and colors, but I find that it's usually a difficult balance to avoid waking up.

magiclawabout 3 hours ago
I was really into it in my early 20's. One way to tell if you are mentally in the state to lucid dream is if you no longer feel tired. One night, after a grueling hike, I was completely exhausted when I went to bed. I closed my eyes, and moments later all my exhaustion just vanished, and I began to explore the space.
galleywest200about 2 hours ago
Another way is to try to see what the clock faces say in your dream. Also, see if the light switches behave as you would expect.
bryanrasmussenabout 3 hours ago
typeishabout 2 hours ago
there's a wearable dropping this year that's supposed to make it easier to lucid dream: https://www.prophetic.com/
andaiabout 2 hours ago
> In perhaps the most striking example of learning during sleep, Konkoly, Paller, and several collaborators witnessed what amounted to conversations with people who were in the midst of dreams. Independent lab groups in the U.S., France, Germany, and the Netherlands asked lucid dreamers to answer yes-or-no questions and solve simple math problems. Electrodes measuring body and brain activity verified that the participants were not awake. Martin Dresler, a sleep researcher at the Donders Institute, who ran the Dutch experiments, said that they were able to verbally deliver new information to the sleeping mind—and to receive responses. Some people could remember the questions they had been asked when they woke up. “This is a form of very complex learning,” he told me.

https://xkcd.com/269/

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brisket_bronsonabout 1 hour ago
Omelette du fromage
nomelabout 2 hours ago
Edison, famously, solved problems in a light dream state [1].

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-na...

praveen4463about 2 hours ago
I feel walking outside and thinking is a better way to practice skills and solve problems. A tired mind just sleeps and usually doesn't remember current events.
samtheDamnedabout 2 hours ago
chaqchaseabout 2 hours ago
Sounds like mental rehearsal more than magic. Interesting, but I'm not sure what to do differently day to day.
CrzyLngPwdabout 3 hours ago
Argonaut998about 2 hours ago
Interestingly this is not something native to Tibetan Buddhists. Neoplatonists had something similar, and even Orthodox Christian monks speak about literally "praying ceaselessly" which inludes prayer during sleep, it's definitely all lucid dreaming
franzeabout 1 hour ago
yeah i hate it when i work while sleeping

Me: "I'm gonna plan the workshop tomorrow, more than enough time."

7,5 h Later

Brain: "Hey, here is everything, worked the whole night, no need to thank me!!!"

Me: "I need coffee..."

petraabout 3 hours ago
Have anybody managed to use sleep to learn language? How ?
neomabout 2 hours ago
I have dyslexia and in high school learning my lines for plays was really hard but I loved doing plays, so I recorded myself saying my lines on tape (yah, I'm old) and used double cassette to fill 2 tapes with them, then run them over night while I was sleeping. I've never used this in my adult life but it worked pretty well for my lines and I suppose maybe you could use it to learn a language?

Edit: Claude tells me I was a head of my time, apparently it works but not net new, you have to also be working on it awake, it's called 'targeted memory reactivation (TMR)": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12592824/

spudlyoabout 2 hours ago
While I think it's a compelling idea that playing speech in your target language while you sleep can help, I don't think it's ever been demonstrated to work.

Having said that, that sleep is incredibly important for learning anything! I practice my language learning during the day, a little bit every day, and I prioritize getting good sleep. This is mostly just trying to go to bed at the same time every night, avoiding alcohol, and giving myself an hour before bed with low lights to read and calm my mind. When you sleep, memories are consolidated, organized, and tagged for long-term storage. I will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and bouncing around in my mind are echos of phrases and words from my target language. I figure it's working.

Cthulhu_about 2 hours ago
Dexter, from Dexter's Lab, learned French.
throwforfedsabout 1 hour ago
There's a long history of doing yogic practice in the dream state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga
orthecreedenceabout 1 hour ago
Yes, "new research" is a misnomer here. The correct version is "people in lab coats have finally noticed ..."

Reminds me of the studies that say lobsters can feel pain. Like, no fucking shit. What multi-cellular (and even single-celled) organisms do not feel pain? Glad we're giving the western stamp of approval on these highly contested ideas.

azan_about 1 hour ago
I suggest you should drop the patronizing tone. People believe lots of things and a lot of them is completely bogus. That's why we need people in lab coats to evaluate them in systematic way.
orthecreedenceabout 1 hour ago
> I suggest you should drop the patronizing tone.

Wow, that is SUUUUCH a great idea. Thank you soooo much for the incredible advice!!1

ghm2180about 2 hours ago
The newyorker has fascinating and well written medical stories. For example, Dhruv Khullar always writes amazing columns https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dhruv-khullar
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hughwabout 2 hours ago
While you're sleeping I'm practicing my skills. Enjoy being poor, suckers!
matthewfcarlsonabout 2 hours ago
While you were sleeping, I was practicing the art of the blade
orthecreedenceabout 1 hour ago
While you were studying the blade, I was drooling on my physical self while trying to get two girls to kiss in a lucid dream.
jbogganabout 2 hours ago
My wife used to think that I had terrible sleep apnea because I'd repeatedly quit breathing for a minute or two at a time and then gasp for air, but it turned out I was just dreaming about freediving for lobsters.
lazyasciiartabout 2 hours ago
Uh, do you freedive while awake?
squibonpigabout 3 hours ago
It's gonna be really sad in 10-15 years when all the sc bros are hustling and grindsetting their dreams away.
notahackerabout 2 hours ago
Can't wait for the LinkedIn posts about their day to start even earlier than the 4am workout and 5am meditation with strategic dreaming between 1am and 3am.

Type LUCID in the comments for a how to guide...

Argonaut998about 2 hours ago
magiclawabout 3 hours ago
Now that's dystopian!
fizzbarabout 3 hours ago
Top performers manufacture 33% more hours in the day thanks to this one weird trick!
zombotabout 2 hours ago
Now there is no excuse anymore to be working less than 24 hours a day.
bethekidyouwant39 minutes ago
Where is the control group of regular dreamers exposed to the same sounds when in REM?

Lucid dreaming is just an unusually awake form of dreaming. Not surprising that they can hear things especially the ones that can move their eyes left and right when prompted…

The study should have simply been find people that can move their eyes left and right when prompted that still have REM brain waves tell them some random thing and see if they can remember it when you wake them up. I don’t know why that’s not completely obvious maybe it is and these guys are just grifters

nothinkjustaiabout 1 hour ago
Hah and people still make the argument LLMs and brains work the same lol
tkfossabout 3 hours ago
tl:dr "Andrillon warned against trying to harness the sleeping mind in the service of the waking world." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00276-0
econabout 3 hours ago
Proper sleep definitely isn't optional.
metalmanabout 4 hours ago
There is no such thing as "should". The thing is possible, therefore humans will do it. The only question is, who is we?
azan_about 3 hours ago
Well, you shouldn't smoke yet people do it. I think the article posits question whether we should in similar spirit.
econabout 4 hours ago
After two weeks I woke up and didn't notice it was German tv. Eventually after 5 minutes an unknown word came along. I still can't speak it.

When 13 i use to code till 1-2 am. In school I slept with my eyes open till 11. The information was stored and organized but I was unaware of it. I remember tests where all of the questions talked about topics I never spend a conscious thought on. But I knew all the answers. Quite the surreal experience.

Teachers sometimes wondered if I was still in the room or they just asked questions. My mind would grep the most recent chunk of speech, parse it and respond as if nothing unusual was going on. The mind raced but I talked slowly to portray the slight delay more natural.

I learned you don't want other people's bullshit in your head. It needs to be questioned first.