It’s funny that the working reality tests for dreaming are pretty stupid and decidedly non-philosophical. For instance, the virtual reality the brain sets up for dreams apparently isn’t good enough to do text or numbers properly, so when you are dreaming you’re unable to read the same text twice and see it saying the same thing, and digital clocks never work right. (There’s an interesting parallel here to the fact that written language is a pretty new thing in evolutionary scale and people probably don’t have that much evolved cognitive capacity to deal with it.)
This reminds me of a horrible nightmare I had back in High School. It was the purest dream I had ever had: the world consisted of me, a sheet of paper, and a mathematical problem. Every time I got to the bottom of the problem, before starting to solve it, I went back up to make sure I had gotten it right… only to find it had CHANGED. That again, and again, and again, until I woke up, a knot in my stomach and covered in sweat.
To realize that this dream has an explanation based on neural architecture rather than on some fear of exams is giving me a weird, tingly satisfaction...
It’s funny that the working reality tests for dreaming are pretty stupid and decidedly non-philosophical. For instance, the virtual reality the brain sets up for dreams apparently isn’t good enough to do text or numbers properly, so when you are dreaming you’re unable to read the same text twice and see it saying the same thing, and digital clocks never work right. (There’s an interesting parallel here to the fact that written language is a pretty new thing in evolutionary scale and people probably don’t have that much evolved cognitive capacity to deal with it.)
There’s a whole bunch of these: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming/Induction_Techniques#Reality_checks
This reminds me of a horrible nightmare I had back in High School. It was the purest dream I had ever had: the world consisted of me, a sheet of paper, and a mathematical problem. Every time I got to the bottom of the problem, before starting to solve it, I went back up to make sure I had gotten it right… only to find it had CHANGED. That again, and again, and again, until I woke up, a knot in my stomach and covered in sweat.
To realize that this dream has an explanation based on neural architecture rather than on some fear of exams is giving me a weird, tingly satisfaction...
Isn’t fear of exams also due to neural architecture?
How does that work out?