One technique I learned a long time ago to make yourself conscious/lucid within your dreams is to train yourself to always look at your hands during the day. If you do this enough you tend to do it in your dreams as well, but in your dreams many times you don’t have the right number of fingers.

This becomes a triggering moment which can either wake you up, or with enough practice, make you lucid dream. If you get good at this you can spend your nights exploring what is effectively an interactive “AI art” generation program in your brain.

This was a really cool way to explore how the brain generates consciousness, because the experience of consciousness in your dreams is so different. In many cases the things in my dream felt “more real”, as it felt like the imagery was being generated from the raw trained model instead of trying to render variants of this model from the results of photons entering the brain. its hard for me to describe, but its the best way I can think of in terms of what we know about ai.

Anyways, I always found it funny that the finger issue became a real thing in AI image generation models, as it was something I relied on for detecting consciousness rendering bugs in my dreams.