Exploiting the Reality of the Human Mind

[Zetta_x]

Good morning,

I have just figured out a way to pretty much feel an familiar sensation using sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is when you are awake but you are locked into the paralysis state as if you were dreaming. The conditions you have are:

1) Conscious thoughts
2) Not completely awake - able to almost instantly dream if you wanted to
3) Able to see what is in current eyesight, I haven't been able to move my eyes around much but just the focus.

I went to bed around 12:30AM last night, woke up at 4:30AM, went to bed around 6:45AM. When my alarm went off at 7:30, I of course hit the snooze button... 5 minutes later I woke up from my snooze alarm and I once again hit the snooze button.

Except, I didn't fully fall asleep, I recognized what was going on and it was sleep paralysis. I was laying on my side facing the wall and when I looked at this black object along this white wall, it would put me to a deeper sleep but I would have control of my conscious thoughts. So I looked at this object and heard a loud humming sound as if I was going to a dream state and all of a sudden it felt like I had a mouth full of doritos chips and I was slowly crunching down on them with my teeth. I felt the flavor, I felt all of the chips as they were breaking apart and I felt me swallowing them. Apparently freaked out of how real the experience was... I was curious and went into a lighter sleep.

Once again, I looked at the black object on the wall and thought about eating doritos... it felt as real as it could be as if I was eating doritos. I began to get even more curious and decided to try flying. I looked at the black object to get into a deeper sleep (but not yet rem state) and I closed my eyes and tried flying. I felt body lifting up and getting pulled from the couch. I was not scared because I knew it was no real. Then I felt my head hit the foot stool near my bed and the pain was almost as real as it should of been. I felt the stinging pain hit my head and then it eventually left.

Then I got curious, I knew my 5 minute snooze alarm was eventually going to go off, so I heard and felt a buzzing noise as if my phone was going on. Still paralyzed, I consciously used my mind to distort my reality on moving the phone closer to my head. I touched my forehead and nothing happened. I began to move it to my temples (where the soft spot was) and it altered my perception with zigzags in the rhythm of the phone buzz. I felt the vibrations reach the deepest part of my mind as if there was something buzzing in my brain. It began to hurt my head so I stopped it.

From here, things got out of control... I was falling into more of a state of loosing consciousness and going into sleep so I tried to wake myself up. Unable to break the paralysis, I eventually jolted up and was able to move. Looked at my clock, it had only been 2 minutes.

Anyone know anything about this or find other exploits of the mind?

 

[FAST6191]

What you did that is usually termed lucid dreaming- congrats on managing it as many take a long time to get a fraction of what you appear to have done just messing around.

Personally I find that side of psychology pretty dull and will instead opt for the visual psychology (change blindness and such*) and trickery (silk silk silk... what do cows drink) and if you are coming from a stats/maths background you have a serious advantage there.


*choice videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAuAuGboOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

As for actual things kind of like it I suggest memory training
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6PoUg7jXsA

 

[Gahars]

I'm still bitter about the whole "not having telepathy" thing. I guess these various intricacies of the human mind will have to do.

 

[Zetta_x]

Ahh, so that's what lucid dreaming is. I have always figured lucid dreaming to be in the middle of a dream and realizing it's a dream. Then what little consciousness you have active to distort the heck out of the dream. When I do this, the feelings never seemed so real as what happened this morning.

I guess it works both ways, I'm almost 100% that during this my eyes were open and the visuals I have seen were the wall and not some product of my memory. However, I know the feeling of flying and hitting the ground was some combination of previous memories and I did not actually experience flying which is disappointing because that means I am limited by my imagination. While I do think I have an extensive imagination, it's still a limit nonetheless. I figured the doritos part started because I ate a crap load of them the previous day and relative to my other memories it was quite fresh.

But then it hit me, during my lucid dreaming, I was like as minimal amount of asleep as I could be. This allowed me to maximize my conscious awareness while not being completely awake. This is an exploit of the mind as I was more consciously awake and the sensations seemed as real as they get. All 5 senses were like working 100% efficiency. However, the sleep part was able to manipulate things at will and completely distort reality.

This scares me, it scares me a lot. Ever since I have been focused on my dreams and having sleep paralysis episodes, reality has seemed much less real. Over the years, I have been having mass confusion (but not enough to make me seem out of it) because I have been becoming disconnected with reality. What if I had confused my brain to think I was dead? I felt like I was given root access to an android device and almost destroyed everything.

Unfortunately I cannot watch those videos now as I am at work, but my Ph.D. program requires me to do a dissertation (I can still put it off for a few years because of the course work). Psychology and Sociology are both fields I would love writing my dissertation on (of course using a heavy indepth analysis of statistics). Both are areas of subjectivity but if you look at it with a viewpoint of relativity, there are so many inferences that can be made that haven't been done before.

Edit: I will watch those videos soon

 

[FAST6191]

Strictly speaking lucid dreaming is the ability to exert "concious" control over a dream and the method you describe for some reason seems to be the most popular method of trying to achieve it, the method you used seems to have faded from the popular methods (although it is the one that usually sees it happen to me) for trying it but it is pretty good too.

Disassociation from reality is a fairly serious deal (with it being more prevalent among those that play in some of the more interesting areas of maths and physics) although recognising such things usually means you are not about to fall off the deep end and family history is usually a good indicator of potential things/far more important, I am not much of a psychiatry type though so kidney destroying levels of salt with that one. I would be more inclined at this stage to peg it up to not exactly having a schedule for the last few years- lack of a sleep pattern, lack of a real schedule, lack of anything to really tether you to the world (student loans, part time/summer job and PhD grant probably means you will not have had to face becoming a starving homeless type should not feel like doing much of anything for a week) and all the things you are warned about when having to step into the real world. This tends not to lead to people being that sympathetic (and so in sync) with the rest of the world, which is what I imagine you are probably using as a point of reference.
If I pondered whether this started around the time you learned about fractals, randomness generation, fancy geometry (non euclidean geometry among other things) or tied some of the previous items to stuff like sub atomic physics it might be a kind of leading/memory implant style question but it quite often comes with an "oh".

Re Psychology and Sociology in your dissertation. A fascinating subject to be sure but do remember to (re)read freakonomics before you decide upon a topic or else you run a bit of a risk of being pulled up for plagiarism or worse non original research; when speaking to some of the people of the people that taught me stats (they played the external examiner a lot) it seemed around the time it hit there was what would later become dubbed the CSI effect in terms of volumes of postgrad stuff and they are a bit sensitive to it.

 

[Zetta_x]

You are a very wise person Fast! I would like to expand on much of the points brought up but you covered it pretty well. It seems you have some interest in the unknown; any large life events that would motivate this interest?

 

[Cyan]

I had very few sleep paralysis (3 or 4 times, and it's very recent, I never had one when I was younger).
I started recognizing it and I acknowledge it but I still can't do anything when it happens.
I would like to try different things, like lucid dreams or moving/analyzing my environment, but it doesn't last long enough and I end waking up fully.

It's like a bubble poping out and a transparent layer over the real world disappearing suddenly. the brain going back to reality in a second.

 

[Zetta_x]

I had very few sleep paralysis (3 or 4 times, and it's very recent, I never had one when I was younger).
I started recognizing it and I acknowledge it but I still can't do anything when it happens.
I would like to try different things, like lucid dreams or moving/analyzing my environment, but it doesn't last long enough and I end waking up fully.

It's like a bubble poping out and a transparent layer over the real world disappearing suddenly. the brain going back to reality in a second.

That was the hard part of yesterday morning. Usually I have a mini-panic attack (and I'm not one to have panic attacks) and eventually jolt myself out of it. Usually during sleep paralysis, I have no control what-so-ever, and what I consider evil starts spawning around the room and haunting me. It was hard being able to control things without actually waking myself up in panic especially when I felt pain of hitting my head. I've lived in this house all my life, I can only imagine how familiar I was of my surroundings and how that can be taken advantage of.

 

[Zorua]

I had 3 instances of sleep paralysis in a row about two weeks ago. However, unfortunately for me, I could not convert them into lucid dreams and I ended up getting freaked out. I too saw a black object right across my room. Haven't been paralyzed since.

 

[raulpica]

I've already had sleep paralysis something like 7-8 times. It actually happens to me at least once every 3 months, since the few last years.

I can't do anything except to freak out Nowadays I know how to jolt out of it so I can awake pretty soon from it, but it's still an obscenely unpleasant happening for me

 

[Cyan]

I didn't see any evil "form or silhouette" when I experienced sleep paralysis, but I felt like there's someone or something near, like an invisible ghost, watching and trying to do things on my body (compressing, pushing my lung, etc.) but I guess it's caused by the effect of paralysis itself.
The last one, I heard and felt like there were a heavy wind in the room, the sheet was moving because of that wind, but when I wake up fully there were of course no wind at all in the room.

I also experienced a "light" sleeping paralysis (if it's even possible?), not being paralyzed but feeling there's someone in the room.
The very first time I felt someone pressing my chest, I wasn't in a sleep paralysis state, I opened my eyes to see who was trying to wake me up but there were nobody in the room. that was freaky
Second time, I was fully awake and felt someone sit at the feet of my bed, but I didn't look who it was (I looked the other side, facing the wall) and waiting for something to happen or if the person will talk, but I felt the person standing up and not sit on the bed anymore but no walking sound. but when I asked my family they said they didn't went in my room at all. This one wasn't evil feeling, but felt like a good presence, someone watching over me.
not sure if real, or if I was asleep, or if I'm just mad

 

[Zetta_x]

I have seem to have sleep paralysis often when I am in uncomfortable positions:

For example, sleeping at a friends house. I don't sleep comfortably at a friends house and I think that uncomfortableness brings upon feelings that prevent me from getting deep sleep. Since sleep paralysis seems to be associate to a lighter form of sleeping, there seems to be a positive correlation between the two.

After I have had sleep paralysis the first time, I have had dreams of having sleep paralysis and not actually having it. The first time I had sleep paralysis, my brother taking a shower down the hall woke me up from hearing the water running. I remember hearing the water running in my dream and there was music going with it. I woke up staring at my blank wall but it was extremely narrow vision. Then I was going to go back to bed but I couldn't feel myself breathing or moving. So I was attempting to yell help but I couldn't do a single thing. I swear something was near my head but I couldn't see it, just hear it moving around. Finally, the full wall came into focus and I snapped out of it and pretty much ran out of the room as I was having a mini-panic attack.

Since then, I have had dreams of that reoccuring, I know it isn't sleep paralsyis because the visuals will be different; it's more of a dream of me being asleep in my room and weird shit happening.

Growing up, I often woke up in the middle of the night and things moving around the room like a flock of bees. Sometimes my backpacks start walking out of the room and my dresser is talking to me. One time, I woke up and everything in the room was colored red. However, in all of these occurrences, I never was paralyzed (as I often ran the second I could) and something usually wakes me up (which would indicate my brain probably wasn't done displaying a dream).

But I have had actual sleep paralysis enough times that I have learned to remain calm. Sometimes I hear extremely loud noises but those do not freighten me as much anymore. I know my brain mixes these sleep paralysis moments with things I see in horror movies because of my first moment was something out of a horror movie which makes me a little calmer when something starts walking around the room.

---

Apparently the extremely loud noises is called exploding head syndrome

 

[1stClassZackFair]

I started experiencing sleep paralysis last year and so far it's only happened four times. The last time was on May 12th during school time lol, After finishing the end of course biology exam I fell asleep on the desk and when I awakened I couldn't move. I felt as if I were alice falling down a rabbit hole then I fully woke up and wasn't sleepy anymore.

 

[Zetta_x]

I don't know how I would handle it in class. I'm curious how wide my eyes are open during this state and if I was just laying there unable to move with my eyes open... I'm pretty sure the class would freak out. Of course, my class sizes are particularly small so...

 

[1stClassZackFair]

I don't know how I would handle it in class. I'm curious how wide my eyes are open during this state and if I was just laying there unable to move with my eyes open... I'm pretty sure the class would freak out. Of course, my class sizes are particularly small so...

I was resting my head on my arms so i'm pretty sure no one saw my face lol

 

[Zetta_x]

I don't know how I would handle it in class. I'm curious how wide my eyes are open during this state and if I was just laying there unable to move with my eyes open... I'm pretty sure the class would freak out. Of course, my class sizes are particularly small so...

I was resting my head on my arms so i'm pretty sure no one saw my face lol

Almost makes me want to try for the reactions

I've always wondered what I look like in those few minutes

 

[1stClassZackFair]

I don't know how I would handle it in class. I'm curious how wide my eyes are open during this state and if I was just laying there unable to move with my eyes open... I'm pretty sure the class would freak out. Of course, my class sizes are particularly small so...

I was resting my head on my arms so i'm pretty sure no one saw my face lol

I've always wondered what I look like in those few minutes

Probably like this

Spoiler

 

[Zetta_x]

@1stClassZackFair That's hilarious because that's what I really imagine myself looking like if I'm having a panic attack and impossible to make any major movements!