Oftentimes, if I need to fall asleep I’ll pick a really peaceful one. When I was younger, I had one where I was a full sized person in a world made entirely of legos, including tiny living lego people. I’d fall asleep, dreaming of building secret tunnels under the ocean, vast cities with towers a mile high, train tracks for the lego people that climbed mountains that rose above breathable atmosphere to reach secret veins of special legos. It was only during the day that floods, earthquakes and rival lego people threatened.
On a related note, I have such awesome ideas for a Minecraft mod.
I’m a very visual person. When I read books, my mind creates mental images and associates emotions with those images. If it’s a really good book, the experience is very similar to dreaming. My conscious self is utterly submerged, and I live vicariously through the character. Six hours later (I’m a fast reader), the dream ends and I set the book down, and become myself again, and find I have visual slideshow of the entire book. I have never noticed a typo in a book. I remember virtually every fact about every book I’ve ever read, so long as it has some sort of narrative I can use to construct these images. So for example, I can read a history book once and never forget. I can look at a map, and navigate to anywhere on that map. I have an excellent sense of direction. I can close my eyes, and imagine myself anywhere I’ve been. I know it sounds like I have a photographic memory, but not really. If you gave me those tests where they show you a picture with a bunch of things, then ask you to repeat them back, I’d do pretty normally. My memory is average for details, excellent at the big picture.
I like to daydream. I have a bunch of different daydreams, and they function sort of like a screen saver for my brain. If I’m not doing anything mentally taxing, I turn on one and tune the world out. I can still remember as a child imagining all my stuffed animals as a council, sitting in a circle and doing something. Most involve a faceless, nameless protagonist who has some sort of magical powers. There are almost never meaningful relationships, and never names, in these daydreams. It’s kinda creeps me out, what this fact says about me. These daydreams are very similar to what I experience when reading a book, in form if not content. These stories always involve some sort of enemy that needs defeating. Most run several years, until I get bored of them. I use them to help fall asleep. If anyone is interested, I could post one here.
I also have a really strong reaction to music. I can sit and listen to the same song on repeat for an hour, and I might as well be high, given how differently I think.
I mentioned earlier that books swallow me up, and spit me out later. I’m not capable of analysing anything I read critically the first time through. I have to go back and read it again, as an outside observer.
I have a bad habit of getting into emotional feedback loops. The need to control my emotions was what led to my current interest in rationality, and eventually here to Less Wrong. I would be a very different person if I hadn’t needed to master my emotions at such a young age.