To clarify: my dreams certainly don’t make sense in regular logic. However, I’ve found they usually make sense if I replace certain axioms and resulting theorems about reality with alternative ones which apply to dreams.
Causation dissolves somewhat in dreams: it’s not that “things happen /because/ I will them to”, because “because” doesn’t make sense in dream logic. It wouldn’t work if I believed, in the dream world, that wishing things to happen causes them to happen (I have tried this). It’s more “when I want things to happen, much more often than not they do, though the precise mechanic by which this happens is indescribable using the rules of the real world”. There’s a very specific degree of “willing, but not insisting” which allows the events to happen almost always.
It seems to me that the mechanism is perfectly well describable: in my dreams, my desires and my perceived environment are both almost entirely influenced by a single common cause with a short causal path, and therefore tend to correlate. Outside of my dreams, my perceived environment is influenced by many other things which take a much longer causal path to affect my desires, and therefore tend to correlate less well.
Well, this is certainly how it works when viewed from the real world. A bit difficult to work out inside my dreams though, when causality is no longer a thing for that precise reason. Compounded with the fact that I still feel like I have free will in dreams, this makes the dream-environment (where I’m not aware that I’m dreaming, but have internalised the dream axioms) quite different from the real world.
Ah! I see. Yes, agreed, the causal mechanisms I believe exist while inside my dream are often hard to describe. (Indeed, often there aren’t any such believed-in mechanisms to describe.)
To clarify: my dreams certainly don’t make sense in regular logic. However, I’ve found they usually make sense if I replace certain axioms and resulting theorems about reality with alternative ones which apply to dreams.
Causation dissolves somewhat in dreams: it’s not that “things happen /because/ I will them to”, because “because” doesn’t make sense in dream logic. It wouldn’t work if I believed, in the dream world, that wishing things to happen causes them to happen (I have tried this). It’s more “when I want things to happen, much more often than not they do, though the precise mechanic by which this happens is indescribable using the rules of the real world”. There’s a very specific degree of “willing, but not insisting” which allows the events to happen almost always.
It seems to me that the mechanism is perfectly well describable: in my dreams, my desires and my perceived environment are both almost entirely influenced by a single common cause with a short causal path, and therefore tend to correlate. Outside of my dreams, my perceived environment is influenced by many other things which take a much longer causal path to affect my desires, and therefore tend to correlate less well.
Well, this is certainly how it works when viewed from the real world. A bit difficult to work out inside my dreams though, when causality is no longer a thing for that precise reason. Compounded with the fact that I still feel like I have free will in dreams, this makes the dream-environment (where I’m not aware that I’m dreaming, but have internalised the dream axioms) quite different from the real world.
Ah! I see. Yes, agreed, the causal mechanisms I believe exist while inside my dream are often hard to describe. (Indeed, often there aren’t any such believed-in mechanisms to describe.)