Thanks for the input on all sides. I don't know that I've reached any conclusions, but I've gained a lot from it.
John wrote:
I know that I lost my 2@1 boxing SAL. I've still got that in my mind, and it's a bonus for when the body is ready. I'm not certain what kind of a bonus that is, but that's what I'm going after.
The bonus you get in that is an example bonus. It means that when you try to teach this body how to box, in addition to your bod bias, best relevant attribute, and the world area bias, you'll get +21 for having a 2@1 example of how to box. That increases your chance to learn the skill at all by 21 percentage points, and it might give you a chance of success greater than 50% or even greater than 80%, which means that a high roll could mean you start at 1@2 or 1@3. After that, it's nothing. If you have a 5@1 bias before you try to learn it, and you roll a 01 on the learning attempt, you probably did not benefit at all from it; the benefit is thus theoretical, that depending on your skill learning roll you might learn the skill because of the previous example, and you might learn it better than most starting pupils.
On the other hand, I am aware that "dream training" is used in some fiction, and ought to be valid in some context.
In what context is it valid in the fiction? That's a good place to start, I'd think.
The only examples that come to mind all involve using recordings to give theoretical knowledge in the form of information to be repeated later--
The Misadventures of Merlin Jones, if I am remembering correctly, used sleep learning to get the football players able to pass their history tests by having them listen to recordings of Merlin's girlfriend when they were going to sleep. (I also remember the goofy part that when they were questioned in oral exams and tried to answer, the answers came out of their mouths in her voice.)
I expect there are other examples, but I can't recall any at the moment.
As I was saying, every martial arts film I've ever seen is stored in my head. Practice the moves that the Ninja Turtles did whilst dreaming. Have the 2@1 example bonus that I'm going to have when I can box. Something like that.
I have a hard time allowing "saw this in a movie" to be used as an example, and always limit such examples to 1@1. The reason is simple, and I speak from experience. When I was a boy, I saw a lot of Robin Hood and King Arthur stuff, and there were lots of sword fights. My brother and I got play swords or sticks and would sword fight like we saw on television: we bashed at each other's swords. You see, the people fighting on television are trying not to hurt each other. You can even see it when you watch wrestling--that heavy wrestler slamming that other wrestler down on the mat could probably crush him if he didn't break his own fall before he hit the mat. (I'm not saying "wrestling is fake", or that I could do what they do; I'm saying that they pull their punches because they really do not want to kill each other.) Copy the fighters you see in movies and you'll learn how not to hurt someone.
Mike had a lot of good points, and I don't want to minimize them, but I wanted to emphasize this one:
Memory isn't perfect though.
There's a lot to that. We're learning that eye witness accounts are unreliable because people remember very clearly what they thought they saw.
O.K., here's the thing: if this works at all, it is a kind of practice, not a kind of training.
I can go to sleep thinking my way through a song, and wake up still thinking it. It might be that in doing so I reinforce the patterns of the song, the words, the melody, and thus in some sense my ability to play that song. I do not thereby improve my ability to sing or to play the instrument--only to sing that particular song.
I have lain awake in bed tapping out piano parts on my leg or guitar parts on an air guitar, trying to reinforce those parts. They don't improve my ability to play the piano or the guitar, but they reinforce my knowledge of those parts, so I can play that song more reliably.
I can imagine going through the motions of a martial arts maneuver mentally, reinforcing how I would do it physically.
Let me turn it around. If I am practicing my guitar, I play through the parts. Sometimes I stop and go over the same part again. Sometimes I stop and think through the part, moving my fingers slowly or simply looking at the fretboard to imagine where my fingers ought to be. The mental process is thus part of my practice--but not all of my practice.
There was that Stallone/Snipes movie Demolition Man which included sleep teaching; that, however, used high-tech mind/machine interface to copy neural memories from a database into the neural pathways of the unconscious subjects, and doesn't apply here. A lot of high-tech applications could be imagined, but this is not one of those. This comment is entirely out of place in the past because I just remembered it.
So maybe what we're looking at is that someone who has to spend sixty hours over one hundred days practicing can spend one quarter of that time, fifteen of those hours, doing so while asleep. I think, though, that it's more complicated than that--he loses one hour of rest for every hour that he spends practicing and has to be asleep for at least two hours (that is, he is really sleep practicing for two hours, for which he gets one hour of practice and one hour of rest), and the sleep practice must be preceded by real practice and must never exceed twenty-five percent of the total practice time to this point. Thus once he has practiced for three hours awake he can sleep-practice for two hours asleep and count that as an hour of sleep and an hour of practice, but he can't practice for another sleep session until he has put in another three hours of real practice. He could, in theory, practice for real for forty-five hours and then spend thirty hours sleeping from which he would get fifteen hours of sleep and fifteen hours of practice, although I can't imagine too many situations in which you'd do it that way.
The sleep practice requires maintaining a level of consciousness that is not fully asleep nor fully awake. That I think might require a skill check, a P1@0 variant (which is where hypnosis falls).
That looks reasonably fair and balanced to me, but it's not final, so feel free to comment.
--M. J. Young
