The best and worst experiences you had last week probably happened when you were dreaming.
tl;dr—Compared to waking life, dreams are pretty wild and emotionally intense. Example - in a dream last week all my teeth fell out which was pretty distressing, and nothing as interesting happened to me in waking life. How emotional/ extreme an experience is seems like a good proxy for how good or bad it is. So probably the best and worse experiences you’ve had last week were whilst you were dreaming.
Why might this be true?
Dreams are extreme. In my recent dreams I’ve been in a fistfight, been flying and lost all my teeth. The most extreme things that I’ve done in the last week IRL include eating three chocolate pastries and having a large coffee.
Dreams are emotional. The last times I’ve felt grief, screamed in fear, or experienced infatuation have all been whilst I was dreaming. The most extreme emotion that I’ve felt in the past week was probably disappointment from losing a game of age of empires.
The ‘extremeness’ and ‘emotionalness’ of an experience seem like reasonable proxies for how good or bad the experience is.
Why might this not be true?
Dreams are less ‘vivid’. Sensations or emotions in dreams can be less vivid than IRL. If I break my leg in a dream, it will hurt, but maybe not as much as if I were to actually break my leg.
Dreams are ‘dissociative’. Dreams can kind of feel like watching a movie of playing a game. If a hippo is charging at me in a dream, I might be a lot less scared than if a hippo is actually charging at me.
Dreams are short. If we take REM sleep as a rough proxy for dreaming, the ratio of dream to awake time is roughly 1:10, so there’s less time to have these experiences (though plausibly a minute of dream experience feels longer than a minute of waking experience, eg. sometimes I go to sleep for 15 minutes and it feels like it’s been hours)
My best guess
The average minute of dream experience will be either more good or bad than the average minute of waking life experience, maybe by 3-5x
Probably the best and worst experiences that a random person had over the past week happened in their dreams
I really have no idea
Given it’s hard to tell, I expect there’s a lot of individual differences here. I might have particularly wild dreams or a particularly mundane waking life.
Does this matter?
If my speculations are in the right ballpark, it’s not implausible that our dream experiences are more than our waking experiences in determining what our lives are like overall. If you buy a hedonistic theory of well-being, you might think that how good or bad people’s lives are is largely determined by the quality of their dreams.
Regardless of the above, my guess is people will tend to underweight the importance of their dreams as a constituent of wellbeing because we don’t remember them.
Lucid dreaming, sleeping more or less, and taking some kinds of medication are potential ways of changing your dream experiences. I’m not recommending any of these.
I’d be pretty interested to see an experience sampling study comparing people’s assessments of their experiences whilst dreaming and awake, and think I’d probably change my mind significantly depending on the results.
Gratitude Emailing
I’ve recently started ‘gratitude emailing’ - emailing a friend with things that I’m grateful for, who emails back with things they are grateful for, and then I email back etc.
I’ve found it hard to create a habit of gratitude journalling in the past, but this has been pretty easy and fun. I think this is because:
There’s a social expectation to keep doing it
Things that are in my email inbox feel more urgent
I feel like I’m helping my friend by doing it
It’s nice to hear about what someone else is grateful for
It’s a good way to keep in contact with someone (the friend I email is my mum, and it’s a nice way of staying in touch)