When I was a teenager, I stumbled across a website on lucid dreaming – that is, the practice of realizing you’re dreaming, while you’re dreaming, so that you can do cool shit like fly around and have sex. The website was text-only on a gray background, the most web 1.0 shit you can imagine. The text laid out a very simple protocol for inducing lucid dreams:

1. Every morning, immediately after waking, write down your dreams.
2. From these dream transcripts, compile a list of things that commonly appear in your dreams.
3. While awake, whenever you see one of these things, check to see if you are dreaming. This is often referred to as “reality testing,” and there are a number of methods:
   • Look at some text, look away, then look back to see if it has changed.
   • Try flipping a lightswitch on and off, to see if it behaves predictably.
   • Ask someone if you are dreaming, to see if you get a straight answer.
4. Eventually, you will develop a habit of checking whether you are dreaming, and that habit will carry over into your dreams. At some point, you will think to check if you are dreaming, while you are dreaming, and then congratulations, you have achieved lucid dreaming.

This procedure is simple, but extremely difficult in practice. It only works if it’s applied consistently over months or years. Consistent dream journaling is critical for improving recall, and constant reality testing is necessary in order to build a habit that will survive the transition to the dream world. In total, I’ve managed maybe a dozen lucid dreams using this method. And even when I do manage to become lucid, my brain has many tricks for undoing my hard work. I will become lucid, and then dream of waking up, only to enter another dream that I am no longer aware is a dream. I will become lucid, and then find myself presented with some sort of crisis which demands I put aside my lucidity to handle it — I might be handed an armful of precious eggs to carry, for example, or find that my clothes are unraveling. Lucid dreaming is hard, because the mind does not want to be lucid. And I think this explains a lot about our waking world.

One thing you learn while studying lucid dreaming is that we spend a lot of time non-lucid while we’re awake, as well. Like, do you usually remember your drive home from work? Or does your brain sort of turn off for a while, and only check back in when you’re in the driveway? How well do you remember the last meal you ate? If you live in a city, I can almost guarantee that there are houses on your block that you have never even seen before, despite walking past them every day. A lucid dreaming practice is as much about improving waking lucidity as sleeping lucidity. Because again, the mind does not want to be lucid.

The internet, where I learned about this shit in the first place, makes everything way more difficult. Things which would strain credulity in the analog world are commonplace in digital worlds. You can go to a concert where Travis Scott comes crashing out of the purple sky like a meteor and demolishes a seaside carnival. You can look at a photograph of Jesus Christ made out of shrimp. You can be added to a group chat full of strangers all waxing poetic about a new currency with a made-up name. You can do all of these things while you are at your job. You can do them while you are naked. You can work remote, and be naked while you are at your job. And it is impossible to reality test any of this.

If you look away from a line of text in your browser, it could very easily change while you’re not looking. Pressing a button on a webpage usually works, but it might stop working at a moment’s notice for no obvious reason. And as for asking someone online whether you’re dreaming? Well, try getting a straight answer from someone online about anything.

The internet also has a flattening effect on sensory experience. Obviously, part of this is the literal flattening effect of a screen, but there’s something else going on, too. Everything is equally close. Everything is equally important. Everything is equally true, and loud, and threatening.

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep introduces the idea that a dream practice is important because dreams are where our minds have the liberty to go all-in on whatever dumb patterns we keep falling into. Like, technically (according to the book), you’re never actually experiencing reality, just a story your brain is telling you, loosely based on sensory data. In your dreams, even that sensory data is gone, so all you get are the stupidest possible expressions of your emotional bullshit. If you’re a person who gets angry a lot, surprise, a lot of your dreams are gonna be about assholes who deserve it. I love being right, so last night I had a dream that I was playing devil’s advocate about school policy with a scornful English teacher, and I awoke still composing rebuttals to the points she’d made. Like, to be clear, I was full-ass awake, in the shower, still thinking about how I would argue with a person who was literally not real. And in that dream, we were not arguing in person. We were arguing in a group DM.

Traditionally, sensory data in the waking world serves to interrupt the patterns our brains like to follow, but social media actively reinforces them. It is easy to fill your feed with only content that triggers your habitual emotions. In fact, left unattended, your feeds will do this on their own. How many times have you read a post about something you hated, and then kept reading? How many times have you joined a parade of other anonymous people, all dunking on an equally anonymous person who said something you don’t agree with? How often have you blacked out while scrolling through five-second videos, only to realize an hour has passed?

The only time I see something akin to reality testing on the modern internet is when we’re trying to determine if something was made by AI. We search for repeating patterns in text. We examine the backgrounds for amorphous figures. We check the hands. But as the models improve, the methods of detection seem to become more and more vibes-based, and more of our parents depart into a dream world where Shrimp Jesus tells them to like and subscribe. We are witnessing a total collapse of reality, a point where fact-checking is useless, where the noise is the signal, where all we can trust are the people and objects in our immediate vicinity, and sometimes not even those. In times like this, a lucid dreaming practice starts to seem almost practical.

There are other, easier ways to induce lucid dreaming. You can schedule a sound to play in the middle of the night — something you can hear while dreaming — which will serve as a signal to become lucid. Similarly, there are plenty of tricks for reducing the pernicious influence of social media. You can uninstall the YouTube app from your phone, turn websites monochrome, install Chrome extensions that remind you how long you’ve been scrolling. These techniques are effective at addressing the immediate symptoms of non-lucidity. But our brains do not want to be lucid. Until we address this underlying fact, with long and careful practice, we will keep waking up into another dream, and another, and another.