DonLorenzo

I'm currently doing: -Real Solar System -Deadly Reentry -Ferram Aerospace -KSP Interstellar and some usability/VAB upgrade mods: -Kerbal Engineer -Editor Extensions It makes for an entirely different game, one quite a bit harder than stock. Check out my YT series with it in my signature if you're so inclined

I use an app that roughly tracks sleep phases and attempts to wake you up timed so that you awake happily and without any residual sleep inertia. You give it a deadline timer (if it hasn't detected a nice spot before then it'll wake you like normal) and a window it's allowed to go before that (if it finds a good timing). It uses accelerometer (you have to place it on your mattress near you) and the microphone to determine sleep phases. It doesn't always get it but when it does I wake oh so much happier. I don't know yet if it significantly helps dream recall, but it might. I use 'sleep as android' on, obviously, android. But there are many more. Perhaps give those a go, in any case, more life automation and gadgets are always a nice thing

Now this is going to be a simplification, but more or less it works like this: Your brain does a lot of things while you sleep, among others it paralyzes your muscles (so that you don't thrash about too much while unconcscious/dreaming) and dampens your senses. Incidentally that paralysis can happen while you're still awake/conscious and is then called sleep paralysis. It can feel frightening if you don't know what's up but it's harmless. Your brain also makes a chemical that inhibits the formation of long term memories, this is removed quickly upon waking and is the cause that you usually don't remember dreams, short periods of wakefulness every night (most if not all people wake up briefly in between their sleep cycles) and other things that happen while sleeping. I think you can see where this goes. The short term memory is more or less fine, this is why I advise to repeat the experience back to yourself immediately upon waking, so as to 'store' it in short term memory until the memory effects diminish and you can properly remember for longer. Writing it down aids in this as well. As I said, it's a bit of a hack simplification, but it's the gist of what happens

Gaming doesn't have to be charity I might pick up planetary annihilation, although I too balked at the early access price. I'm currently backer of: Star citizen Pillars of eternity The wolf among us The walking dead season 2 Starforge Episodic/early access, who cares I like it, I put my money down and somewhere in the future when I've already forgotten about it I get an email saying there's a game waiting for me

Awesome! Tonight I first dreamt I had to review some video game. I didn't like it and hated it more when I saw the title screen and saw that that subtly spelled 'Please commit suicide'. I thought that was too dark and crass for a mainstream title. Then I felt it was odd that that title screen was all that existed in the world or universe and then I woke up. I promptly opened my laptop and wrote a whole story about that dream. I remember thinking 'gee, that's very unlike me, why aren't I more tired. It's night and I'm in bed after all.' Yeah. Didn't really happen. Second dream was about crashlanding on the moon and breaking the rocket I was in. Sounds familiar? Yeah it happened to be the conclusion of my latest 'KSP to Mars' video >< Fortunately just as I was contemplating how to spend eternity on the moon another rocketship crashed (what are the chances!?). I remember briefly thinking 'guess that means multiplayer is in now'. But then I got distracted by the newcomers who were very distraught women that needed to be... consoled. It was fun. Third dream I remembered this morning but it has since slipped away. I think it had something to do with water. Maybe. Memories are strange

I mean after you've recovered, ofcourse

Oh what, I did not know about the fusion-boosting of fission bombs. I knew that it's important to shoot a lot of neutrons into the fissioning core, and that the materials involved had to be picked for that, but not exactly this awesome.

And yet more episodes, going further into the solar system & tech tree

Ok, alright. Bit of a snarky way to ask for more reading material, but go ahead read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC and/or this: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v3n3/FITZPATR.html Take it from there, they've got more references

Hey that makes me wonder.. could the space shuttle reasonable take off from a runway?

what kind and level of school are we talking about? Around here school means elementary school or at most high school. In that case I say just show up, do what you can and it'll be fine. What else can happen?

A fun thing to note is that the final breakthrough in the creation of the H bomb had nothing to do with (nuclear) physics. It was the development of the computer. People here have noted that the fission primary 'ignites' the fusion through 'clever shapes'. The principle of that had been well theorized, but physicists couldn't quite work out how to make them exactly. Remember we're talking about a structure that directs kilotonnes worth of energy in a very specific way on milli- if not nanosecond timescales WHILE IT'S VAPORIZING. It took the computational power of (I think) the ENIAC to work that out.

More tips than being enthusiastic about it and genuinely wanting to, not really. I would try not to beat yourself up about it too much and try not to get frustrated, that might be counterproductive and it surely is counterproductive in the way that being frustrated isn't nice That said, I have this bundle of confusion to share about tonight. I suppose it's an example of fake wake-ups! Ok so tonight was interesting.. very meta. It wasn't quite what you call a lucid dream, there wasn't any 'godmode' going on, but it sure was confusing! Most of the time I believed it to be real, yet knew I was dreaming, but only in the dream! Lucidity embedded in a dream if you can believe that. As I said, very meta. So, I go to bed and then this happens: -------- I'm with a friend and we decide to try dream-sharing. A technique where you go to sleep in the same room, decide beforehand what the scene is going to be and then you dream is together. We go to sleep. We find ourselves stranded in some fields, there's a highway in the distance. As we walk it becomes apparent that we're very much trespassing and decide we'd better camp down before going any further. It's very soggy ground, but we get a fire up and roll out mats. Unfortunately there's a lot of beetles and mosquitos around and it's not a very nice time. We rest, but wake up in the middle of the night to artillery fire. ****, the landowner must've spotted us. It's actually laser-artillery and fortunately not that accurate. We take cover, but the beetles are still very annoying. My friend gets stuck upside down in a soggy pit of mud. After plodding around for a few minutes getting nowhere we wake up. There's some more friends around now (about 6) and we gleefully discuss our exploits and resounding success of the dream-sharing. I have my doubts however as the story my friend relates is quite similar but has him beeing rather the action hero, while I saw him get stuck upside down in the mud. I don't trust this dream-sharing technique so together with another friend we decide to upgrade it. We rig up a 6-way set of oculus rift-like devices and VR gloves, set up in pairs so that person A has a dominant right arm and person B a dominant left arm (movements are transmitted A->B for the right arm and B->A for the left). We hook all this into a PS2 8bit game of some sort (because why not?) and get all excited because 'information transfer will happen!'. All six of us go to sleep in a giant bed all hooked up like a scene from that Inception movie. What follows is best described as a long, drawn out yet exciting 8-bit pixelart combat movie hero epic. We all had to hold a front, and occasionally we'd run out of ammo, had to cover/rescue/help eachother as we fought hordes and hordes of 8bit monsters. It was intense, heroic and full of camaraderie (think Band of Brothers). Upon waking up everyone's had fun, there's some evaluation of combat strategy and it turns out that this time everyone was properly linked up. I get very excited and one friend as well, we're definitely going to sell this and make millions. I want to immediately try again, but the others aren't really up to it and would rather go to a party. So we go to a party. At an underwater pirate haunted castle. At first we try some more VR system tricks and get two people to work together even though they can't see eachother. The system also appears to give them superpowers where they can jump very high and zip around like The Flash. Back to the party, it's a bit strange of a party; in a big underwater dome stands a decaying wood castle and there's mold and rot everywhere and no host or indeed anything party-like. There's a number of people though and they're all having fun, consuming drugs and following the adventure route. It's the way through the castle where the whole group (like a flock of lemmings) has to solve platform-like puzzles (like tomb raider). At one bit resembling a large chimney everybody gets stuck. I take my turn to figure it out and do so, but in succeeding the pirate ghost alien is wakened and everyone but is captured but myself. The pirate ghost alien takes its golden throne and shines brightly when explaining he's come to enslave mankind and gloats that we'd not be able to defend against his army of 10 civilizations. I swim around the underwater pirate ghost haunted castle and fight four ancient fish, I barely make it but all of them give me a piece of a very old and horribly dirty metal diving suit. The inside seems coated with alien guts, which I take as a good sign. I wear the suit and confront the alien, he laughs and spears me through the shoulder. ****, not a magic supersuit then. Or perhaps it is, since I now have a spear of my own. I shoot the alien pirate conqueror and he's surprised, enraged and dies. That's it, story over. I wake up. I'm in my bed, happy to be remembering the dreams but a bit disappointed that the revolutionary VR system that'd make me rich wasn't actually real. I grab my phone and look at my sleep logging app, curious, it's reading one big continuous 'deep sleep' phase lasting over 6 hours. Oh well, must've been because I was dreaming so much. I re-set my alarm for a few hours later and go back to sleep. This time I wake up (or rather.. appear) in a car that's taking me somewhere from the airport in the Netherlands. It's my mothers car but being driven by my friend's girlfriend. He's in the back. I'm mortified by the speed we're going at first, then settle in and we discuss turbochargers for a while. ------------- Now I woke up, went to the bathroom and set about writing this little story. I had a look at my sleep-tracker and the graph looks way different. Also no alarm (fortunately it's still early enough!) so that one wake-up was definitely false. I hope this one isn't since that would mean I've probably wet my bed, am oversleeping and have typed this for nothing. Computer is working fine so far though so everything seems to be in order

Awesome! Good luck all, persistence is key

Well I'll be damned, it turned out to be the Mk3 pod! I never did notice it before since the other engines have more steering authority that offsets the weird force. I'm assuming it's some mod that's being difficult as I don't recall the Mk3 having phantom forces

It's a curious perspective that 'the past' is super backwards. Hell, even in the 1800s people were doing the same stuff as we are now. As in, going to work, making money, worrying about pointless things, politics, science. And before that much the same, and before that. Sure, many things have changed, and in big ways. But not THAT big. if that makes sense

I'm on my phone now so no pictures, but it's the three man pod, a large SAS and then a methane tank and the engine. Can't go wrong with that I dont think!

Come to think of it, that would be pretty darn amazing to observe

Oh and another thing that I found interesting is that it is hard to the point of impossible for me to dream things that I've not actually experienced. Now I've never experienced teleporting, fireballs, unassisted flying and the like, so this goes more for the smaller chunks of things. For instance I have experienced fire, and know how radiated heat feels. I know what falling through the air feels like, I know what jumping feels like and I know what different places feel like so going between one and the other isn't really a thing. What I'm trying to say is that for me all those amazing and extraordinary things in dreams are all cobbled together out of bits and pieces of actual experiences, which I think isn't so surprising. My brain (and I think yours too) turns out to be not at all good at simulating a completely novel environment. I can do it visually, I can say, make me be in space or in some strange realm, but it doesn't feel like anything out of the ordinary. For instance I've never managed to get an actual zero-g environment to 'work' properly. The foundation just isn't there. A thought I felt like sharing this morning

It doesn't really matter. I've laid out things for you in that order, but it doesn't have to be a chronological order. Practising, learning etc. are all kind of contingent on actually remembering what's going on (and recalling that you had fun is nice too) but it's not like full dream recall is an actual prequisite. So go ahead and do it all at once As to what you 'should' do in those lucid dreams, there's really no one that can tell you. Try it all and see what is nice for you For me, one of the fun things I would do was go to a high place, dive down face-down and stop 1mm from the ground. Now what I do is take some nice scenery and just relax. No smartphones, no facebook, no phone calls, just me and my thoughts (and the occasional dream oddity), which can be very nice. Sometimes (but not often!) it's the other way around where I crave some action and excitement and I'll do that. One of the first things I tried ever was.. ahem.. spawning a willing and gorgeous lady. When that worked I thought why stop at one? In the end I had a warehouse full of them and things got kind a little out of control. Sometimes my control won't be complete. For instance I've tried changing the scene by teleporting somewhere or just outright changing everything. Didn't work that time. So I went smaller and instead created a taxi that would then take me somewhere else. Yet another time it'd be a social dream where I'd not gained full recognition but enough to use some special 'powers' like controlling others/turning them into dust/spawning friends. I don't know, maybe it all sounds a bit insane, but I think the best thing to recognize (and what I'm trying to illustrate) is that lucid dreams, just as regular dreams, will vary a lot and IMO it's best just to roll with it and experiment. One thing I predict you will be blown away by at first is how vivid and, well, REAL things seem. Dream memories are often fuzzy, not so while it's going on. I remember standing on the side of some dreamy mountain road and just spending an amount of time going 'holy **** holy **** holy **** holy **** WTF THIS IS HD *****es' On a related note, I just woke up and after all this dream talk I'd tried to get lucid (it's been a while) but I don't remember a thing. Oh well!

That's it, thread done!

Also, to stop derailing this thread completely, I've taken the liberty of doing a no-mod-power ghetto split and continuing the subject of lucid dreaming in its own thread here: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/70721-Lucid-Dreaming?p=988979#post988979

A particular thread in the Science Labs about the biological underpinnings of dreaming has been derailed a bit courtesy of yours truly, so I'm doing an unofficial 'split' in an effort to continue that conversation here and stop hijacking the sleep thread. Here's the conversation so far: So there's that. I hope this will become a nice thread of amazing and unreal experiences, undoubtedly censored heavily for untenable and salacious conduct in one of the last truly private spaces