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.)
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.)