A.I. For Lucid Dreaming - Why AI Can't Teach You Lucid Dreaming (And Why That Matters)

So, A.I. is everywhere at the moment. It writes slightly too perfect poems, imitates celebrities in a creepily invasive parasocial way, pretends to be your girlfriend/boyfriend (please stop doing this people), and generally gives people the impression it understands far more than it does.

And for plenty of basic tasks, that’s fine (ish). But for lucid dreaming? It’s mostly sending you in the completely wrong direction, and doing it with a very confident smile and a whole bunch of sycophancy. This makes it infinitely more dangerous and irritating.

The problem with outsourcing your thinking

I’ll be honest. I got excited when A.I. first appeared on the scene - it finally felt like we were living in the sci-fi future we grew up waiting for.

Hell, I even used this page to host an A.I. model trained on my own work - a little Chat GPT mini-me, so people could interact with "me" 24/7. Then I realised that was absolutely insane. So I retired it. Lucid dreaming is one of those few organic skills where letting anything else think for you makes the skill weaker, not stronger. The entire point of lucidity is metacognition - learning to question your assumptions, notice when your mind is taking shortcuts, and catch yourself drifting into familiar nonsense.

A.I. does the exact opposite to all of this. It fills in the blanks for you (often with utterly fictious hallucinations), which is lovely if you’re writing a shopping list and it's nothing important, but utterly unhelpful for training the part of your brain you need to recognise when you’re dreaming.

Lucid Dream A.I. only knows what’s popular, not what’s true

Here’s another massive fly in the ointment... A.I. models don’t have the ability to know if they're being accurate. They only know patterns. They predict what people tend to say online. And unfortunately, the lucid dreaming world is full of twaddle: recycled myths, wishful thinking, half-mad spiritual ideas, invented techniques, and advice from people who may well never have had a lucid dream, but love attention pretending they do on Reddit. A model can’t tell the difference between that and actual research.

If a myth gets repeated 40,000 times across Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok, the A.I. treats it as a fact. So... yeah, not very helpful.

You end up with a very convincing, charming digital brain, that is absolutely deranged.

You stop learning to think for yourself

Call me old fashioned, but I'm rather fond of knowing how to think. I don't need something to do it for me.

I don't want to freak out, unable to do anything, just because the internet has dropped.

Lucid dreaming is a subject that requires complete self-reliance - because in dreams there is no A.I. to come to the rescue and think for you.

So, where do you start? By developing your mind, your skills, your understanding... not outsourcing it.

I don't hate A.I.

I'm not a luddite, I don't hate A.I. - Like almost everyone else on the planet I'm currently still trying to work out what I really think about it all. There are good reasons to be positive, and just as many to be absolutely terrified.

My opinion on where it fits into life, my own and the life of my students, is a work in progress.

However, when it comes to replacing our own thinking, creativity, and self-reliance - that's a no-brainer: we do not want to atrophy our own abilities.

Like everyone else, I still dabble, then freak out and hate it, then get pulled back in when I need it to find something interesting to do on holiday - or need a document quickly proofread.

We're in a strange new world, one that is going to take a great deal of critical thinking, self-awareness, and flexibility to navigate.

Now more than ever, we need functional brains to survive the future.