Howard Rheingold

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Lucid Dreaming and AI?

May 7, 2025 · Post

Of the (more than a dozen) books I've written over the past 40 years, the one that still generates royalties in different countries was one I co-authored: Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. My agent put me together with Stephen LaBerge, then at Stanford, who had been exploring lucid dreaming -- becoming aware of the dream state while dreaming, then directing the dream. As part of my research, I compiled stories of important discoveries and inventions made in dreams -- Kekule's chemistry dream, Mendeleev's Periodic Table, Loewi's discovery of electrochemical nerve transmission, and many more.

I asked chatGPT to compile an annotated, referenced, linked list:

🧪 Scientific & Technological Breakthroughs

  • Dmitri Mendeleev – Periodic Table

  • Friedrich August Kekulé – Benzene Ring Structure

    • Kekulé claimed that a dream of a snake biting its own tail led him to conceptualize the ring structure of benzene. Nature+1Universität Bonn+1

  • Otto Loewi – Chemical Transmission of Nerve Impulses

  • Elias Howe – Lockstitch Sewing Machine

  • Larry Page – Google’s PageRank Algorithm

    • Page conceived the idea of ranking web pages by backlinks in a dream, which became the foundation of Google's search algorithm. Business Insider

  • Niels Bohr – Atomic Model

    • Bohr reported that a dream of electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets around the sun influenced his model of the atom. CERN

  • Albert Einstein – Theory of Special Relativity

    • At 16, Einstein imagined chasing a beam of light in a dream, a thought experiment that contributed to his development of special relativity. University of Pittsburgh

  • Srinivasa Ramanujan – Mathematical Theorems

    • Ramanujan claimed that many of his mathematical insights were revealed to him in dreams by the Hindu goddess Namagiri.

  • Nikola Tesla – Rotating Magnetic Field

    • Tesla envisioned the principle of the rotating magnetic field, fundamental to AC motors, during a dream while studying in Graz. Google Arts & Culture

🎨 Artistic & Literary Inspirations

  • Mary Shelley – Frankenstein

  • Robert Louis Stevenson – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  • Paul McCartney – “Yesterday”

    • McCartney awoke with the melody of “Yesterday” in his head, initially fearing he had subconsciously plagiarized it.

  • Keith Richards – “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”

    • Richards recorded the iconic guitar riff for “Satisfaction” after waking from a dream in the middle of the night. whynow+3Fox News+3HISTORY+3

  • Salvador Dalí – Surrealist Imagery

    • Dalí utilized hypnagogic techniques, such as holding a spoon while napping, to capture dream-like images for his surrealist art.

  • William Blake – Visionary Art and Poetry

    • Blake reported experiencing visions from a young age, which profoundly influenced his artistic and poetic works. Home

🧘‍♂️ Hypnagogic Techniques for Creativity

  • Thomas Edison & Salvador Dalí

    • Both Edison and Dalí employed a technique involving holding an object while falling asleep; the object would drop as they dozed off, waking them to capture fleeting creative thoughts from the hypnagogic state. Live Science

Another part of my research was about learning to lucid dream. The method that worked best for me was to write "Am I dreaming?" on a slip of paper, then take the paper out of my pocket around once an hour while awake, and test reality: If I hop and land, I'm probably awake. If I hop and hover or fly, I'm dreaming. Eventually, because of repetition, I will pull out the slip of paper in a dream and either the letters will scramble into place or I fly instead of land. Then the fun begins. Of course it is possible to emulate life's pleasures, from food to sex, and it is also possible to explore one's psyche: "show me scenes that depict my higher self."

I also designed dreamwork software in the mid-1980s, which I named "Dreamworks" and failed to protect the trademark. Activision killed the project after the programmers absconded with their pay without producing any code.

All this is to preface my interest in this recent piece from Reality Sandwich (an excellent and prolific source of info on altered states of consciousness). I don't agree with the title premise: AI tools could supercharge, not eliminate, dream interpretation. Now that vibecoding enables people who are not programmers to create apps, I've been thinking of a dreamwork app that chains together existing apps: Existing app that detect syour voice and records your dream descriptions when you awaken from dreams in the night, speech to text app that transcribes all of a night's verbal reports in a single record, generative art apps that create a number of images specific to the night's dreams. In the morning, the diligent dreamworker expands on their nocturnal reports (details beyond those reported in the middle of the night fade away instantly if not immediately recorded upon awakening) and chooses and/or modifies the generated images. Here's where AI could come in: A database of dreams can yield insights because messages from the subconscious can repeat, often in different guises, over days, weeks, months, even years. Subtle connections between images, puns, metaphors, characters, references can be mapped and added to the records. The longer and more detailed the digital dream diary, the richer the associations.

If you can code this, or know someone who can, please do, and let me know and I will spread the word.