I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access.

I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.

While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.

Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.

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.

I thought this was already known! Why else would we be out of touch with reality for several hours per day?? Any non-trivial task that requires focus will improve via sleep: Speaking a new language, playing the guitar, pickleball, flying a helicopter, coding, etc.

"communicate" seems like the really interesting part of this, but gets a one-off mention only.

like, how does this communication work? how does one sleeping person communicate skills to another sleeping person?

have we found the mechanism? was it awake poeple communicating to sleeping people? the reverse?

Reminds me of Ramanujan learning during sleep from Namagiri.

There are umpteen stories in Hindu scriptures of baby learning in the womb of the mother and how the expecting mother must only be exposed to good thoughts and a good environment for giving birth to an intelligent and well rounded child: stories of Abhimanyu (learning how to break the Chakravyuha formation in his womb while mother was learning it but his learning was incomplete when mother fell asleep during the lecture) and Prahlada (mother learning about Lord Vishnu against the wishes of her demon husband Hiranyakashyapu). Wonder if any studies have been done on this as well.

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.

I've had some incredible product ideas while asleep, down to very intricate technical detail. The problem has been that when I wake up, reality kicks in, and I realise that, say, even if I built that incredible messenger app for dogs, they still wouldn't be able to communicate with us.

Ah, very soon we will need to work in dreams. Can’t leave any stone of productivity unturned, right?

Where I live the building emits a low rumbling like a spaceship in a sci-fi show. After binge-watching The Expanse then Wheel of Time I had this dream: In order to penetrate the forsaken's magic one must send a sequence of signals, and according to Naomi Nagata on the Rocinante, the sequence of 12 signals resulted in a temporary bypass of the magic, the /count/ was the key. I woke up and wondered what problem this applied to, then tried it with a recent PRNG problem I was having where George Marsaglia's XOR-shift sequences were mostly useless for GLib.get-monotonic-time() as the seed...

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.

Happens to me all the time, waking up with a solution (or a new problem :/) to complex software issues.

I regularly have abstract dreams I have trouble remembering. I wake up feeling like I understand problems better but I can't articulate why. However, I can indeed tackle problems from the day before more easily.

It's pretty fascinating. What's even more fascinating is often times when I do remember the dream, a lot of it is nonsense. And yet I'm doing better at the things I dreamt about.

Kinda related but I used to practice guitar in my dreams. If I had been learning something I’d often dream about playing it over and over again, and even going beyond that and figuring out “solos” and melodies and stuff over the chord. Can’t be sure if it translated into any real life skill, but it felt like I was actually learning or at least strongly reinforcing what I’d been practicing.

20 years ago I was struggling to build an app that worked in ie6, FF and chrome. While still sleeping I asked my girlfriend what flavour JavaScript she liked. I don’t think it was a good dream.

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.

I rarely remember my dreams in the morning, only a handful times in my life. At one I was a Chinese citizen and experienced a dense feeling of being a little ant in the greatest Empire the universe and time had ever seen (China). A nothing in the whole. There are no words. Another one was an insane, out of the world sex experience. Dreams are wild.

So I guess having dreams about recurring meetings is... honing corporate skills?

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.

Interesting comment they have towards the end about "targeted memory reactivation can disrupt sleep".

It is important to note the study they are referring to is "targeted memory reactivation with sleep disruption", there are methods of doing targeted memory reactivation without sleep disruption.

I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of affectablesleep.com, and though we are mostly focused on slow-wave (deep) sleep, we have been looking into memory reactivation, lucid dreaming and other stimulations for additions.

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.

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.

This "research" has no controls, no blinding, no quantitative data. The historic work mentioned all come from a time when there was no reliable way to confirm that someone was actually asleep. The recent research is full of weasel words like suggests, seems like, appears to, with no actual hard facts to measure and review.

So called Sleep Learning systems have been around for over 100 years but to date there is no rigorous suggesting that any of them work for acquisition of new information and/or skills.

I'll never understand HN's fascination with obvious pseudo science.

Thinking of problems before falling asleep does sometimes help me in finding solutions in a dream. Though I may still be half awake when doing this.

I have been saying this for years.

When I was young I somehow figured out how to control my dreams. By the time I was an adult and working in software all my dreams were always iterating over solutions to problems I had at work. And every day I would come into the office with the ability to move forward on projects with insights in leaned that night while sleeping.

But the problem is we forget as soon as we wake up

Not about sleep learning but lucid dreaming in general: I have long been puzzled and disappointed that we are not pouring more research, interest, and funding into controlling the induction of lucid dreams. There are ways to learn to do it now, but they are slow and unreliable. Gadgets exist but they're fringe - there is no great lucid dreaming movement like there is with longevity, for example.

I would have thought in a society where we want a gadget or magic pill for anything and everything, our interest in this would be through the roof. You can live a whole other lifetime in a dream, either your own or of some other character or world you step into. You can replay the past see the future, countless times. Controlled lucid dreaming seems like the closest we will likely ever get to immortality. Why aren't we more bullish about facilitating it?

Lucid dreaming is a cool concept but I've never been able to pull it off. I still try, though!

This has always been clear as day to me, but I just couldn’t prove it. I used to take naps right after practicing guitar because I believed it would help me learn faster! LOL

Is this dream yoga?

https://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/Tenzin-Wangyal-Rinpoche-T...

I've been intensively learning German for a year and once or twice a week in dreams I have brief dialogues with the locals. Very useful as additional speaking practice :)

> 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/

Referenced Paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf067

Omelette du fromage

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.

This is fascinating, but it feels like exactly the kind of topic where the effect size and reproducibility matter more than the headline. Dream research is very easy to oversell.

When I was beginning to use AI for everything, as most of us had, I would start dreaming that wall of text that had a personality sat between me and reality. For several nights I would dream this way with the wall becoming translucent and displaying text but the "real" actions (other people, scenes) was happening on the other side of the wall. I've dreamed in videogames as well. I'm not sure if I was getting any learning done, but I'm pretty sure my brain was exercising modes of thought that would push knowledge from "system 2" down into "system 1."

Edison, famously, solved problems in a light dream state [1].

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

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.

There's a long history of doing yogic practice in the dream state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga

While you're sleeping I'm practicing my skills. Enjoy being poor, suckers!

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..."

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.

Have anybody managed to use sleep to learn language? How ?

Rich Hickey proven right again. (tongue-in-cheek reference to his Hammock Driven Development talk)

Sounds like mental rehearsal more than magic. Interesting, but I'm not sure what to do differently day to day.

In “Why We Sleep” by Harvard sleep researcher Matthew Walker, he says that during REM sleep your brain revisits emotional experiences but in a chemically safe environment. Stress-related chemicals like noradrenaline are greatly reduced so you can replay difficult or painful memories but without the full emotional intensity you felt at the time. The brain can process and “defuse” those emotions.

TLDR, sleeping on it works.

The newyorker has fascinating and well written medical stories. For example, Dhruv Khullar always writes amazing columns https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dhruv-khullar

That’s why we say “let me sleep on it”.

My favourite part of coding is going to the park, sit on the bench and dream the problem. After a while, some times it needs several visits I write any code.

Unfortunately most employers see this as slacking. It cannot be done in a noisy open plan office.

At one place few other devs were into this. We would be spending most of the working day in the park. Managers were not happy, but work was delivered always.

I quite effectively use this technique at work.

It's gonna be really sad in 10-15 years when all the sc bros are hustling and grindsetting their dreams away.

Srinivas Ramanujan famously said he did most of his work at night in dreams.

As a total aside, I've had sleep issues my whole life and can sometimes inadvertently induce lucid dreaming, and then I can think for hours while sleeping; it's amazing. Unfortunately a bit inception-y, but whatever.

This happens to me both sleeping and awake. When I’m stuck on a problem and decide to walk away from it for a while, I subconsciously spin off a thread in my mind and move on to something else. The number of times I’ve had a eureka moment 3-5 hours later (not realizing I was even percolating on it) has to be in the hundreds.

Happens probably twice a week when I sleep on the problem as well.

To parlay this back to the current LLM craze, if we just export all our problems to some fuzzy non deterministic solver without ever trying to understand the problem, our collective brains will atrophy severely.

I use the LLM my work pays for, sparingly, because I refuse to let that atrophy occur.

I remember when I first started dreaming in Italian... it was pretty cool though.

Reminds me of Echopraxia (Peter Watts book)

Now there is no excuse anymore to be working less than 24 hours a day.

Now that there is proof of communication while dreaming, it is only a matter of time before someone manages to vibe code while sleeping.

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

Hah and people still make the argument LLMs and brains work the same lol

[dead]

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

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

There is no such thing as "should". The thing is possible, therefore humans will do it. The only question is, who is we?

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.

I built a mobile app called Lucidity (luciditydreams.com) aimed at helping people have their first lucid dream:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lucidity-lucid-dream-journal/i...

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.b3nz.lucidi...

Started building it 14 years ago after reading an article about lucid dreaming in my favorite science magazine, and no other apps out there existed to assist you with reality checks and the different induction methods. Recently added a 7-day lucid dreaming journey to guide you to your first lucid dream. I worked with lucid dreaming researchers for the program's content.

Feedback welcome!