I know that lightswitches are supposed to act strange in dreams (or the light that they are supposed to turn on, rather), but do flashlights (torches) act weird, too? What about car headlights? If you flip them “on”, do they turn on or not or do they act bizarre like lightswitches do? I’m still a lucidity beginner so I don’t have any experience with lights in my dreams and can only recall maybe one experience with a lightswitch in a ND and I’m not sure what the effect was of flipping it.
It all depends on your subconcious, there aren’t rules. I’ve never even seen normal lights behaving differently in my dreams.
Anything can happen in a ND or LD, so lights could behave as they do in RL, or not. Come on.
I don’t think that all lights behave strangely in LD’s. In a LD, as lights didn’t want to switch on, I created “magical” blue lights on the wall by snaping my fingers.
I think the problem with electrical light switchs is due to our brain not fully understanding what happens. The causal relation between pushing a button and a light coming on must not be obvious. IRL, we have learnt it worked but when it has to recreate it in a dream, our brain must have some difficulties with simultaneity.
If my hypothesis is correct, more “normal” lights could work better, like a lighter or a torch. I’ve never tested though.
They generally do what you expect them to.
The question was posed because I’ve read that light switches can be used as RCs but I guess you guys are saying they’re not reliable? In the Waking Life movie the guy used the light switch RC, didn’t he? I know, it was just a movie…
I know the idea that things do what you expect them to do but I thought that light switches acting strangely and words looking different if you look away and look back were givens as far as things that are generally accepted universal RCs that work for most dreamers.
And Basilus, so you agree “lights didn’t want to switch on” in your dreams so you created blue lights by snapping your fingers. Your fingers aren’t light switches. Unless you’re a robot or something.
It’s all about expectation. Waking Life (great movie!) was right, light switches make an excellent RC… if you expect them to.
I heard that looking at your hands make a RC, many people see multiple fingers. But, before I heard that, I used to look at my hands all the time (Castaneda’s suggestion for stabilizing LD’s) and they always looked very normal to me.
So, it may work as an RC for you or it may not. I find that reading is messed up in my dreams (but then again, I read LaBerge first, I wonder if it would be the same had I read a bunch in my dreams and THEN read LaBerge?).
I suspect that these common DS’s do have a reason for them. Perhaps the part of our brain responsible for helping us to read or following causal ideas like lightswitches do not work as well?
Either way you look at it, some RC’s work for some people, some don’t.
In my first Lucid dream I was driving a taxi around.
The lights would go crazy - I would turn them on, and after a few seconds the switch which turns the headlights on and off flipped back down. It was so hard to drive, as I could not see half the time and had to switch every 3 seconds… half the time they would response differently than the last time…
It was sweet, haha.
It is not uncommon for machines and gadgets to behave strangely in dreams. I’ve had my share of trouble. A volume knob that increases volume wichever way you turn it, buttons that don’t do anything. Even in LDs. I had to use the jedi mind trick on my computer screen. And on the computer nothing makes sense. The windows don’t behave properly. And try writing something when the keys are all jumbled and the words change every time you look away. You can’t write and look at the keyboard, it’s ridiculous. look up. try to write something appears correct or not. Look down to see where the keys are. they are not normal… find the right key in the wrong place. look up… the word has changed… erase. I couldn’t stand it.
I’ve had some almost nightmareish dreams where lights wouldn’t turn on at all when I really needed them to.
But other than that, all lights usually work as normal in my dreams. It’s different for different people, just like the “looking at your hands” reality check. My hands always look normal so I wouldn’t notice.
I had my first willed LD in a while the other day and the lights were acting strange in it as well.