[HN Gopher] Active dreaming is better than meditation and safer ...
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Active dreaming is better than meditation and safer than
psychedelics
Author : superb-owl
Score : 25 points
Date : 2022-11-25 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (superbowl.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (superbowl.substack.com)
| calculated wrote:
| Nice article, I haven't heard before of this concept. Only one
| thing is that for some reason I expected a guid on how to get
| into the process of active dreaming.
| superb-owl wrote:
| I planned on including something like that here, but the
| article was getting pretty long. Stay tuned for a followup!
| luqtas wrote:
| science barely knows if psychedelics are effective treatment for
| mental diseases. heck, we even have difficult with drugs made
| specifically for the purpose!
|
| you cited studies with less than 20 participants, is this science
| or just a blog post with a click-bait title?
|
| despite all, great insights...
| superb-owl wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| We actually have some great evidence that psychedelics are very
| effective at treating mental illness. See [1] for a meta-
| analysis. Nothing has reached phase 3 clinical trials, but MDMA
| is on its way [2].
|
| If you look at the addendum, which goes through all the
| studies, I'm pretty candid about how horribly underpowered most
| of them are. My main goal with this article is to convince
| folks that this is a promising line of research, and we should
| be doing more to explore it.
|
| But also yeah...kind of a clickbaity headline.
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32529966/
|
| [2] https://maps.org/mdma/ptsd/phase3/
| davesque wrote:
| Meditation seems like a fundamentally different thing to me with
| different benefits. Kinda seems like apples to oranges. I think
| part of the problem is that the whole mindfulness movement has
| sometimes sold meditation as a kind of self hypnosis. But I've
| always liked to think of it as just doing nothing on purpose.
| Active dreaming seems not so much like doing nothing.
| superb-owl wrote:
| The "doing nothing" aspect of meditation is kind of
| paradoxical.
|
| On the one hand, many meditation instructions will explicitly
| tell you to abandon any intentions or goals, as they will
| almost certainly get in the way.
|
| On the other hand, nearly everyone who starts meditating does
| so with a goal in mind. They want to improve their mental
| health, achieve some personal insight, or access the strange
| mindstates described by expert meditators.
|
| Both Active Dreaming and psychedelics address those same goals.
| But the way they go about it is very different--there is
| definitely a lot more "doing" involved.
| CrypticShift wrote:
| As I understand it, there are two phases in meditation that
| should be clearly distinguished to avoid confusion.
|
| - Phase 1. When you engage in it, you indeed need to "abandon
| any intentions or goals" and "do nothing on purpose" because
| your goal is that emptiness.
|
| - Phase 2. Once you attain that state of "emptiness", you are
| now (and only now) able to very sharply focus the mind on a
| particular object, thought, or activity.
|
| Active dreaming could be seen as one of those activities. You
| need at least a minimum degree of that meditative "emptiness"
| for unlocking the process you called "Active dreaming".
|
| I think "Active imagination" [0] is a term Jung used for a
| similar technique.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_imagination
| aatd86 wrote:
| It's not doing nothing actually.
|
| It's about observing one's own thoughts (basically brain
| chatter and sometimes sensations, perceptions) from a
| distance. Meta-cognition. :)
| superb-owl wrote:
| This is definitely one form of meditation. There are plenty
| of others though!
| skydhash wrote:
| I do lucid dreaming, mostly when I wake up one or two hours
| before I intended. It's often the most pressing things on your
| mind, and it seems like a weird oscillation between being awake
| and asleep (I sometime achieve the same state when falling asleep
| with stimuli like having the TV and the lights on). It feels like
| your unconscious create a world using the figments of the things
| on your mind. And you're just a character experiencing the
| unfolding events. Then your conscious thought emerges and notices
| the irregularities and tries to fix them. I'm a visual person, so
| for me the "edits" feels like what you see on TV when altering
| time. Until you got tired again, and things go back to the first
| state.
|
| The peculiar thing is that you do not question the constructed
| reality and try to wake up. You just feel that you can alter it,
| and indeed do so. I'd like to have a scan of my cerebral activity
| because I often wake up very mentally tired after such sessions.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your experience!
|
| You're lucky that you have a foot in the door with lucidity.
| There are ways to modulate that feeling so it's more
| productive, and doesn't leave you feeling exhausted. I'd
| encourage you to experiment with different ways of interacting
| with the dream world to see what works best for you.
| leobg wrote:
| "Active imagination" has been a big thing in Jungian therapy.
| There are quite a few books on the topic from the 1970s etc. if
| you search for that term.
| superb-owl wrote:
| For sure! I took the "Active" in Active Dreaming from Active
| Imagination.
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