I am actually feeling bizarrely awful about this (I’m in the habit of exaggerating whenever I’m telling a story that shouldn’t have major consequences, but it feels wrong on a forum about truthseeking and I feel guilty for getting karma for it).
My statement about lovecraftian dreams is technically true but not nearly as interesting as I made it sound. I didn’t actually have dreams about the world ending in tentacles or anything. I did wake up in the middle of the night and feel compelled to write a song entitled “Mindspace is deep and wide” that briefly features alien gods, but there was not actually a cool dream preceding it, and while I think I had vaguely interesting dreams relating to the solstice that month, I can’t recall them now.
I HAVE had extremely powerful dreams that were clearly inspired by my narrative influences at the time, so the important point still stands.
This. You dream about your experiences, not your beliefs. I had a dream about Mafia (the game) last night, because I found a place to play it online and played it for several hours.
Actually, it’s only very rarely that I can relate my dreams to any of my experiences, recent or otherwise.
I find it rather amazing how many people’s dreams, when they describe them, sound basically mundane, like things that could more or less happen in real life. For me, dreams have always been, not just too weird to possibly mistake for reality, but too weird to make sense of after the fact.
I have one dream in particular which I remember because it was probably the happiest dream I’ve ever had, and left me in a great mood when I woke up, but if I tried to describe it I wouldn’t even be able to explain why it was happy.
The emotions invoked within a dream are a further fact about the dream, beyond the narrative and the sensory experience. Once a person has finished telling you all the mundane, nonsensical details of their dream, they have failed to impart the powerful emotions, the experiential gestalt, the sense of awesome import that moved them to recount the dream in the first place.
I tell them, “There was a toy bunny on a white field … it was horrifying.” The listener is unimpressed by this, because seeing a toy bunny is not a reason to feel horror. In this way, stories about dreams are not like stories about real life. I could say, “There was a toy bunny on a white field, and this was the most terrifying thing in the universe.” But that is confusing the order of things: I saw a toy bunny, I experienced a profound horror, and I projected that horror onto the bunny.
The dreams that I tell people are the ones with the coolest-sounding stories, not the dreams that mean the most to me.
I find it rather amazing how many people’s dreams, when they describe them, sound basically mundane, like things that could more or less happen in real life.
At least twice as a child, I actually completed homework assignments in dreams. Or at least I thought I’d completed them upon waking.
I wonder if those experiences have something to do with why I react to non-realism with such hostility.
It’s interesting that you say that. I’ve always treated non-realism with sympathy, and it took a while for the concept of “beliefs that correspond to reality” to anchor itself. It is possible that this correlates with my interesting and not-like-real-life dreams...
Not sure which way, if at all, the causation acts though.
I’m like this too, except that I can make sense of the weird dreams: just not with normal reasoning. I wake up from dreams with weird and complicated plotlines with the absolute conviction that the plotline was /consistent in dream-logic/. I usually make the effort to remember an interesting dream when I wake up though, so I have a good database of information to work from.
Dream logic involves things like: if you willed something to happen hard enough, it happens (so you can jump from buildings if you just willed a soft landing into happening), every building has secret passageways (and in a pinch you could always dive into a cupboard first and will the secret passageways into existence after), if in a situation which resembles a video game puzzle, it’s always possible to visualise a level mini-map, never run down stairs because they frequently terminate into an abyss without warning (and then you’re forced to wake up)… Oddly, I rarely realise I’m dreaming (if I do I normally force myself to wake up—into another dream). I simply act in my dream as if these things are simply “true”.
I don’t have the unusual emotional response though, my normal emotional responses just get multiplied by a variable factor. (I don’t feel happy about anything I wouldn’t feel happy, to some degree, about when awake.)
But then again, I’ve always had a fairly weak grasp on the real world. I have a particularly poor memory for details, and as a result it’s hard to trust my own sensory inputs. It’s quite interesting when I’m talking to my OH, because while I find it odd how he finds it so hard to remember his dreams, he finds it odd how I find it so hard to remember what I said and did this time last year. It feels like these two things are related; I’m not sure how though.
I could never understand people who had boring dreams. If I could pick between living in the dream world (my dream world is usually internally consistent between dreams) and the real world, I’d pick the dream world. If I wake up in the morning and don’t have anything pressing to do, I close my eyes and go back to my dream (since about half an hour of real time dreaming corresponds to about 2-3 hours worth (or “about one story’s worth” of dream-time activities). As a result, I feel like people who have mundane dreams are really missing out...
I’ll think that my dreams make sense while I’m having them, sometimes I’ve even written down plot elements from my dreams when I woke up in the conviction that they were brilliant and I would have to reuse them. Unfortunately, things that seem brilliant when I’m still half asleep tend to look anywhere from stupid to lunatic once I’m properly awake.
My dreams do have recurring consistent elements, but I’ve actually lost the ability to make things happen in my dreams by willing them hard. For a while when I was a kid I could, but after some point I found that if I tried it, I would simply wake up instead, and this is still the case.
It often seems as if my dreams are being created by someone who’s in an adversarial relationship with me, and if I learn anything about using dream logic to my advantage, they will eventually catch up and change it on me.
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.)
Whenever I’m doing something visually stimulating for a while before bed, it ends up going in my head while I’m in the process of falling asleep. Tetris, MarioKart, any puzzle game involving moving pieces. Sometimes if I look at a lot of .gifs (really short animations) I get semi-dreams in the form of a lot of little clips. This is all especially weird because most of my waking thoughts are verbal, but my dreams are nearly all visual.
It’s happened at least two or three times that I can recall that I’ve come home late after a night out, gone to bed, and had dreams where I was still out. Also, the first time I lucid dreamed I was woken up by an argument on the street outside my room—I fell back asleep and had a lucid dream, and didn’t realize until someone told me the next day that the fight had actually been real and it had merged seamlessly into my dream.
I think these are exceptional though—otherwise I don’t think I tend to have dreams based on my experiences.
I frequently have dreams about whatever I’m currently obsessing over, be it video games, romantic interests, or whatever.
This is particularly fun when you’re spending a month designing a lovecraftian Solstice ceremony.
I am actually feeling bizarrely awful about this (I’m in the habit of exaggerating whenever I’m telling a story that shouldn’t have major consequences, but it feels wrong on a forum about truthseeking and I feel guilty for getting karma for it).
My statement about lovecraftian dreams is technically true but not nearly as interesting as I made it sound. I didn’t actually have dreams about the world ending in tentacles or anything. I did wake up in the middle of the night and feel compelled to write a song entitled “Mindspace is deep and wide” that briefly features alien gods, but there was not actually a cool dream preceding it, and while I think I had vaguely interesting dreams relating to the solstice that month, I can’t recall them now.
I HAVE had extremely powerful dreams that were clearly inspired by my narrative influences at the time, so the important point still stands.
Would you feel better if we took some of that karma away?
Probably. :P
Done.
This. You dream about your experiences, not your beliefs. I had a dream about Mafia (the game) last night, because I found a place to play it online and played it for several hours.
Actually, it’s only very rarely that I can relate my dreams to any of my experiences, recent or otherwise.
I find it rather amazing how many people’s dreams, when they describe them, sound basically mundane, like things that could more or less happen in real life. For me, dreams have always been, not just too weird to possibly mistake for reality, but too weird to make sense of after the fact.
I have one dream in particular which I remember because it was probably the happiest dream I’ve ever had, and left me in a great mood when I woke up, but if I tried to describe it I wouldn’t even be able to explain why it was happy.
The emotions invoked within a dream are a further fact about the dream, beyond the narrative and the sensory experience. Once a person has finished telling you all the mundane, nonsensical details of their dream, they have failed to impart the powerful emotions, the experiential gestalt, the sense of awesome import that moved them to recount the dream in the first place.
I tell them, “There was a toy bunny on a white field … it was horrifying.” The listener is unimpressed by this, because seeing a toy bunny is not a reason to feel horror. In this way, stories about dreams are not like stories about real life. I could say, “There was a toy bunny on a white field, and this was the most terrifying thing in the universe.” But that is confusing the order of things: I saw a toy bunny, I experienced a profound horror, and I projected that horror onto the bunny.
The dreams that I tell people are the ones with the coolest-sounding stories, not the dreams that mean the most to me.
Hm. I can almost always trace my dreams to my experiences. That’s interesting.
At least twice as a child, I actually completed homework assignments in dreams. Or at least I thought I’d completed them upon waking.
I wonder if those experiences have something to do with why I react to non-realism with such hostility.
It’s interesting that you say that. I’ve always treated non-realism with sympathy, and it took a while for the concept of “beliefs that correspond to reality” to anchor itself. It is possible that this correlates with my interesting and not-like-real-life dreams...
Not sure which way, if at all, the causation acts though.
I’m like this too, except that I can make sense of the weird dreams: just not with normal reasoning. I wake up from dreams with weird and complicated plotlines with the absolute conviction that the plotline was /consistent in dream-logic/. I usually make the effort to remember an interesting dream when I wake up though, so I have a good database of information to work from.
Dream logic involves things like: if you willed something to happen hard enough, it happens (so you can jump from buildings if you just willed a soft landing into happening), every building has secret passageways (and in a pinch you could always dive into a cupboard first and will the secret passageways into existence after), if in a situation which resembles a video game puzzle, it’s always possible to visualise a level mini-map, never run down stairs because they frequently terminate into an abyss without warning (and then you’re forced to wake up)… Oddly, I rarely realise I’m dreaming (if I do I normally force myself to wake up—into another dream). I simply act in my dream as if these things are simply “true”.
I don’t have the unusual emotional response though, my normal emotional responses just get multiplied by a variable factor. (I don’t feel happy about anything I wouldn’t feel happy, to some degree, about when awake.)
But then again, I’ve always had a fairly weak grasp on the real world. I have a particularly poor memory for details, and as a result it’s hard to trust my own sensory inputs. It’s quite interesting when I’m talking to my OH, because while I find it odd how he finds it so hard to remember his dreams, he finds it odd how I find it so hard to remember what I said and did this time last year. It feels like these two things are related; I’m not sure how though.
I could never understand people who had boring dreams. If I could pick between living in the dream world (my dream world is usually internally consistent between dreams) and the real world, I’d pick the dream world. If I wake up in the morning and don’t have anything pressing to do, I close my eyes and go back to my dream (since about half an hour of real time dreaming corresponds to about 2-3 hours worth (or “about one story’s worth” of dream-time activities). As a result, I feel like people who have mundane dreams are really missing out...
I’ll think that my dreams make sense while I’m having them, sometimes I’ve even written down plot elements from my dreams when I woke up in the conviction that they were brilliant and I would have to reuse them. Unfortunately, things that seem brilliant when I’m still half asleep tend to look anywhere from stupid to lunatic once I’m properly awake.
My dreams do have recurring consistent elements, but I’ve actually lost the ability to make things happen in my dreams by willing them hard. For a while when I was a kid I could, but after some point I found that if I tried it, I would simply wake up instead, and this is still the case.
It often seems as if my dreams are being created by someone who’s in an adversarial relationship with me, and if I learn anything about using dream logic to my advantage, they will eventually catch up and change it on me.
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.)
Whenever I’m doing something visually stimulating for a while before bed, it ends up going in my head while I’m in the process of falling asleep. Tetris, MarioKart, any puzzle game involving moving pieces. Sometimes if I look at a lot of .gifs (really short animations) I get semi-dreams in the form of a lot of little clips. This is all especially weird because most of my waking thoughts are verbal, but my dreams are nearly all visual.
It’s happened at least two or three times that I can recall that I’ve come home late after a night out, gone to bed, and had dreams where I was still out. Also, the first time I lucid dreamed I was woken up by an argument on the street outside my room—I fell back asleep and had a lucid dream, and didn’t realize until someone told me the next day that the fight had actually been real and it had merged seamlessly into my dream.
I think these are exceptional though—otherwise I don’t think I tend to have dreams based on my experiences.