I'm curious to know if frequency of dreaming correlates to anything. Most people I talk to "rarely have dreams" (probably meaning they just dont remember them).
For some reason in my case I have a vivid dream every night, sometimes multiple per night, and can't remember the last time my sleep was dreamless.
I've heard keeping a dream journal can help you remember/have more vivid dreams, but I only write my dreams down it it affected me very strongly so I can interpret what my psyche is saying, so this only happens maybe once every few months.
So what gives? Why do some people dream a lot more than others?
And relatedly, what about people that claim to not have any dream at all?
> To really be sure that an individual does not dream, we would have to follow him for years and perform awakenings from REM sleep to see if he dreamed. If the individual never reported a dream after years of awakenings from REM sleep then we could reasonably conclude that either the person does not dream, that he or she lacks the ability to recall dreams, or that he or she is a liar who, for some reason, wants to conceal the fact that he does in fact dream.
I also thought that I don't dream much, but I started the habit of trying to remember if I dreamed something when waking up and if it's in the second half of the night I can almost always remember vivid dream content. Trying to remember dreams after being awake for a while (e.g. 5 minutes after getting up) is much harder in my experience. Most people have at least 2-4 REM sleep phases at night, to have none whatsoever would be quite unlikely unless you're regularly very sleep deprived.
Totally agree. Generally if I can't get the ball rolling remebering last nights dream before I'm really awake, I won't be able to get much detail at all.
> Most people have at least 2-4 REM sleep phases at night
One of the things I've noticed in taking a dream journal over the past few years is that when I remember a night's dreams thoroughly, they're often split into a handful of distinct sections, with each one being an almost entirely self contained story and scene. I never made the connection until now but I wonder if each 'scene' is a specific REM cycle.
Some people have mostly bad dreams. If I become aware that I am dreaming I stop everything in the dream and "go back to sleep" in the dream. It results in better rest. Everything I've learned in a dream would only be helpful in a world where we wear watermelons for shoes and the trunk of our cars open into hidden ballrooms. It is a really dumb place to spend too much time
My take on dreams is that they're not literal. The mind is structured on a network of symbols and relationships between them, so the language of dreams are metaphors, double entendres, similar-sounds, etc.
Why it is important is because it tells a story about what's going on in your emotional state that you're otherwise unaware of or repressing in conscious experience. It can also provide solutions. It can be a powerful tool for maintaining mental health and wellbeing.
This isn't to say you should be reading "dream interpretation" guides or speaking to interpreters. The point is we already speak the languages of our own dreams because it's our own mind. What seems like nonsense on the surface quickly reveals itself to have a surprisingly clear meaning on introspection from a slightly different angle. Follow your intuition, listen to your psyche, you wont regret it.
> This isn't to say you should be reading "dream interpretation" guides or speaking to interpreters.
The problem with using guides and interpreters is that you don't know whether they explain your unconscious associations, or just substitute their own.
If you interpret your own dreams, you can be sure that all associations were generated by your own brain. Maybe during the dream, maybe during the interpretation. Who cares; either way, it's about your brain.
My simple interpretation method is to write an outline of the dream, and to some words add an arrow and write what it reminds me of. Usually at least three things in the dream remind me of the same topic -- that is the core message of the dream.
Anecdata: I usually dont remember my dreams unless I wake up early or at least not all the details of it. However, some times, before I sleep I imagine myself in some situation I always wanted to be. For example, a soccer player in a cup final, an activist making people aware about how politicians are dividing them and such things. And then I have vivid dreams and next day I remember most details. Not sure if others also experience this but at least it makes me very happy next day. That's why I so much hate days when I have night or early morning meetings at my job.
I always assumed this had more to do with the different psychology of how different people wake up.
I usually have amnesia in the few minutes after I wake up, and I lose everything. Like when I used to drive my mom to work as a teenager, she would wake me up right before, and I would just put on pants and hop in the car. Halfway there, I'd sometimes admit I had no memory of how I got into the car.
But if I am focussing on writing my dream right away, usually by writing it down in detail, I can recall it later.
I'm definitely jealous of people who somehow remember it so clearly without any special time commitment. Dreams always feel like living a second life
Also, dreams are quickly forgotten, even if you make an effort to recall them.
Once I was writing a dream diary. I had a dream, and I was like "this reminds me of another dream I had a few weeks ago". I opened the diary, and saw that the "few weeks ago" was actually yesterday.
So, if the dream from yesterday feels like a few weeks ago, and the dreams before yesterday are either forgotten or feel like an ancient past, it is quite easy to believe that you usually don't dream, even if you actually dream every night.
I'm fairly certain this is due to the same reason it's easier for a chess player to recall 'real' chess positions rather than if you just placed pieces randomly. Causality makes it possible for us to "compress" memories into a small enough representation. Dreams usually don't follow the same kinds of rules.
I'm remembering a particularly vivid dream I had perhaps a month or two ago. I remember the settings it took place in, some of the characters, some of the story elements, though to call it a "story" is a bit of a stretch, just a rambling sequence of unconnected events. I often dream consciously, So I can remember actually wanting to pay attention to how cause and effect worked, but when I woke up, I couldn't recall how stuff managed to happen.
Without that thread running through everything, dream recall would seem to go very against how the brain normally works. Not that techniques can't help anyway.
Some anecdata... but I do have aphantasia so my dream experience is probably a bit different from most.
In the past i never much noticed or remembered dreaming, only when waking up agitated from a nightmare (hasn't happened in years)
But i've been a double espresso drinker for years. Since i started cutting out the dinner espresso (e.g. having my last coffee at lunch) i dream almost every night (sometimes 2 distinct storylines) and can remember them for a few minutes after waking but they fade quickly after.
GPT-2 would suffice for something as non-sensical and rambling as dreams.
No fine-tuning using the dataset, but here's the result of typing in a dream prompt into Talk-to-Transformer:
[PROMPT - a dream from DreamBank]
>>> I was putting together a plastic bag full of buttons and sewing paraphernalia. It was time to break out of a Hong Kong prison and I was on the fourth tier cell block. I had to wait till the window washers were busy and distract them by throwing ping pong balls so fire hoses filled with cyanide could be squirted on passers-by. I threw a rock through [...]
[RESULT]
>>> [...] a glass door. I was careful not to pull my stitches. I threw another rock out the window. We needed a diversion. I needed to take care of myself. The next thing I knew, I was in a helicopter about to take off. By this point my emotions were in flux, like people around a train wreck. It was hard to know what to do with them. I wanted to be strong but didn't have the will. I wanted to be a martyr. I wanted to be.
Sometimes when I try to force the AI in AIDungeon to do something specific, the reaction is often weirdly reminiscent of the behavior of dreams.
For example, I once kept trying to force an elf to teach me how to say certain phrases in their language (in an attempt to see if the AI could invent an imaginary language to some degree of consistency), and the character kept "laughing it off" and abruptly changing the subject.
I wonder if it's because an invented language has a gigantic number of permutations, the frequency of which swamps English-language replies. Then the most likely next word/statement that completes the input prompt is always going to be the latter due to the relative frequencies.
I would like to know what small children (1-2 years) dream, but we can of course never really know for sure. My daughter (2 years) definitely seems to have nightmares. She also seems to have conversations in her dreams, as she often speaks answers to questions while sleeping. Personally I very strongly remember some wild dreams when I was very young, probably around the age I started remembering things at all, so around 2,5 years. These dreams were often synesthesic, I could see sounds in extremely saturated, moving, three-dimensional colors, and could "taste" geometric forms like pyramids and cuboids. I have never taken LSD, but I imagine the experience to be quite similar. The closest (but not very close) thing I have seen to these dreams is the stargate sequence in 2001.
This website is actually part of a bigger one called DreamResearch.net where you can find interesting info such as some investigations into what children dream.
It seems that there are some "cognitive prerequisites for dreaming", which are mostly developed around the age of 5-7, which might explain your dreams being so crazy and full of colors, as in those ages you are still developing "the ability to produce mental imagery" and "narrative skills".
I remember a few vivid dreams from around kindergarten. One even had music that, I kid you not, I remember to this day. My working theory is that I actually heard that music somewhere and the dream just cemented it in my memory.
I had the same horror dream from about 2 years old to 12. It repeated before sleep walking or when I had fever. It brought the same feelings and had the same motifs every time, and it was looping (I'd get massively scared and the dream would restart and the same sequence of events, quite long, would get to the end again). Sometimes I would get to explore a new motif in more details but this would happen after several repeats of the same old horror.
Characters and scenes looked a bit like they were out of a Disney movie (Aladdin, Pinocchio, I remember the guards from Aladdin and the princess/fairy from Pinocchio), which I guess I watched a lot when I was young.
Yeah, I almost bounced too. But, I decided to try a few random words I imagined might exist in the dreams they talked about on the home page. For example, I searched for "boot" in the series of dreams from the Vietnam Vet. At first, I thought I would have liked to see the entire list. But, after reading a few of those war dreams, I didn't really want to read anymore (and I can't really articulate why).
Just curious, does anyone here have dreams with some recurring themes? I've tried googling for this but sadly most of the content seems to be related to spiritual/mystical "explanations" of it. And I don't bring it up with anyone in real life so as to not appear like a kook.
I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great probability that it falls into these 2 categories -
1. I suddenly find myself naked in public, the rest of dream usually involves me trying to remedy the situation. This is the stage where I usually wake up (in a panic with elevated heart rate).
2. Snakes. Not even sure what is up with this one. I am pretty afraid of snakes in real life, more so than normal people. But then there's a bunch of other things I am equally scared of, but I don't dream about them at all.
A theme that comes a lot for me is getting bitten by a spider in the dream. The catalyst I've noticed is heart burn/acid reflux. I think recurring themes in dreams are linked to recurring/similar events during the day. The same neuronal pathways are followed so you get similar dreams that link up with those events. Or maybe not! Who really knows?
I believe the actual nature of dreams are not as we remember them. When we recall a dream and makes it a conscious thing we interpret it as we interpret other recollections by making a coherent story of the basic memory. So I dont’t think we can know what the brain process actually were when dreaming. Different things may coalesce into a dream process. And when it is recalled and interpreted it is formed into a meaningful but relatively arbitrary direction.
Fear of being somewhere specifically without clothes is something deeply ingrained within us but not really typical among animals. I wonder if these "man-made" fears are more likely to appear in dream scenarios.
Don’t so quickly discount mystical descriptions of dreams, even if you aren’t a religious person yourself. The thing that is special about dreams is that unlike our conscious waking experience you have no control over how they manifest themselves. They aren’t scientific or rational at all; they are human. Dogs have dreams, and we wouldn’t expect them to have a rational, non-mystical explanation for them. In a sense your dreams are the only way your body can communicate unconscious (and therefore irrational) fears or desires, short of a panic attack or mental breakdown.
Your fear of snakes is likely older than humanity itself, so even if you can have rational control of yourself around a snake in real life they could terrorize your dreams. Snakes used to be a real and present danger in our environment for millions of years of our evolution. They are the unknown environment, the cunning adversary, the unforeseen consequence of carelessness.
In a similar way, you might find that you can manage to present yourself in social situations, there is a very human fear of being found out, cast out, laughed at, and/or rejected socially, since we are social creatures. Even nudists have dreams of finding themselves naked in front of their peers. If you spend your day putting on a facade of some sort, which you probably do if you have a job, then somewhere there is a part of you that you don’t want others to see, and in your dream they all see it big time and you have to deal with it.
For me I have found if I really think hard about the situations I find myself in dreams they are correlated to thoughts or things I've heard/seen or experienced throughout the day. Suppression of thoughts would manifest itself certainly in a dream but for me specifically it's garbage collection. I've also found that it's fairly easy to recollect what prompted that dream scenario since presumably it's still at the forefront of the my memory circulating around my brain if you will. While this is my own judgement, if accurate for other people, I'm not sure your assertion that "They aren’t scientific or rational at all" would be correct.
Oh yes, and specifically about anxieties like you describe. It makes intuitive sense to me that your brain would simulate anxiety-inducing situations in order to exercise those high-stakes decision-making pathways (or similar). Escape sequences are very common for me.
Example: “waking” up on the last day of a semester, only to discover that I am enrolled in a required class that I never actually attended...woops.
I dreamed myself a sci-fi miniseries and it was extremely weird so it's not just you. I work in games/entertainment so I assume it's just how my brain organizes stuff.
As a kid, age 6-8 probably I had many dreams about owls. I never figured out why or what would have triggered it.
Between my 20s and 30s I did a lot of selfdefense training. I would dream a lot about conflict situations where I would have to fight (or run). In real life I might have had 3 conflics in those 10 years. Anyhow, fighting in a dream was like being submerged in molasse: every movement had resistence and was painfully slow, while opponents moved normally. This was freaking me out.
That slowness is very common, AFAIK. I have it, too, specifically if I try to punch things. Good thing, too - a couple of times that has failed to work and I've woken up just in time to see my first punch a wall or my elbow smash into the radiator next to my bed. Hurts.
I don't know if it's related, but sometimes in my dreams I fly by taking advantage of this oddly sluggish momentum. All it takes is to launch myself into a spinning motion like a frisbee, and I'll fly a good distance.
There's a city I have been visiting in my dreams for years now. It's a very different experience each time, but the streetcars are always the same[0], as well as the general impression of the place.
At this point I can identify a few areas like "old town" or "business district" or "very large square with an enormous roundabout".
I don't know if I'd call it recurring, since it's pretty rare, but: Sometimes I lose my mind in my dreams. I can feel myself losing my grip on my faculties, as if something were ripping my mind apart. It's hard to describe, visuals become distorted, things split apart into colours, my grip on reality feels slippery. I imagine having a stroke might feel that way, although I hope it's less dramatic. This is just sheer terror.
Also rare, but in a similar vein, sometimes I wake up into a dream, over and over again. I'll be in bed, relieved I'm finally awake, until I soon realize I'm still asleep and wake up again. When this repeats enough times, it becomes pretty desperate.
These sound quite hardcore. I had the "wake up twice" dream once back in middle school, and it has stuck with me ever since. I remember it whenever someone mentions the topic of dreaming. I can only imagine how much of an impact a dream where you wake up more than 2 times would have.
My dreams are always of the sense that I'll get physically lost and die for it -- as in, I'm driving up a winding road, and I take a wrong turn, and that turn causes me to skid off past a guardrail and plummet to the ground, infinitely below. Or walking back from buying groceries, and all the signs are blank, then turning out into the woods and falling down in a pit in the sidewalk.
Oh yeah, I just assumed everyone saw the green lady. You know, green skin, bald, tusks, too many eyes.
She's been visiting for a couple decades, but she just stares, so you get used to her. I figured it was one of those common ones like you have a surprise exam and you forgot your pencils or you have a candy bar for a head.
Only recurring dream I have is I'm back in college and it's the end of a semester, suddenly I realize there's some math class I haven't been attending and I have just a few days to cram everything I've missed in time for the final.
I have this dream constantly. Always that I forgot to ever go to the class, never that I'm struggling in a class or that I'm going to fail I class I've been attending. I wonder, did you skip a lot of classes in College?
I’m not the person you are asking but I got the same type of dreams, and yes I practically didn’t attend to at least a quarter of the classes in college. I didn’t like some lecturers, so I would study through textbooks and ask my friends about important exam dates and would generally have fears about missing these exams but somehow I still have these type of dreams.
Hah, I don't think it depends on that really. I've never really missed classes in college (mandatory attendance yay!) but I still get those dreams occasionally.
I've had that a lot for years after College. During College, I skipped a lot of classes and instead studied by borrowing books from the library, it worked well in terms of learning but it meant that if I failed my exams, my teachers would probably not hesitate to expel me. That added a lot of pressure and is most likely why I've been having that dream regularly since even 15 years later.
It's funny to know this is a dream theme that others have. It's not the only recurring nightmare theme I have but it's a major one. You're right that it's just that I forgot to attend or something, like I just totally forgot I was enrolled for the course.
In my case, there's some real-life precedent for it. I enrolled in one course in undergrad, and dropped it right away my first week or so for some reason I don't recall. Toward the end of the semester, before finals, I found I was still enrolled, but had never set foot in the classroom or anything.
I was sort of panicked, but went and talked to the professor, and he was fine with it. He basically verified that I never did anything with the class and it was somehow deleted from my record completely.
I still don't know why it wasn't dropped in the first week, although this was before electronic registration systems.
Me too. This is creepy. I mean, being naked, chased by monsters, flying, or talking to people who are dead... okay, those are some ancient archetypes or whatever. But the missed math class in college is just too modern and too specific.
I have both the naked in public dream (or sometimes, in underwear) and the missing class dream. Also a similar dream where I have a work schedule that I should know but I didn't write it down (used to work a job with irregular shifts).
They underlying theme is probably low self-confidence.
Same. And the math is always in-intelligible gobbledygook. Probably my subconscious shaming me for managing to get my M.Sc. without taking Differential Equations and Transforms
I have this dream too, except it is the English language class and there was a book to be read on our own (Hound of Baskervilles) that I forgot to read.
I have exactly that. It can be from highschool or university but the setting is always the same - there was some class that seemed easy, I took it for granted, didn't attend, and now only a few classes left before the end of semester and I am facing a dilemma: I haven't done anything, I am afraid of confronting the teacher who might not even know me, and I am uncertain if I can still make it or if it's already too late and I failed the class.
Since I was younger, whenever I am ill - like a fever or something - I have a recurring dream about boulders at the top of a mountain with changing numbers on them. It just kinda loops ... very strange
I wonder how these kinds of dreams are affected by dealing with the underlying anxieties.
I remember having the "naked in public" dream in the past. I've also had a fair amount of body shame for most of my life.
But after getting in better shape and spending time on nude beaches and in the occasional (mixed gender) nude sauna in the last few years, my body shame pretty much disappeared. I now feel almost no self-consciousness from being naked.
I can't recall having a single "naked in public" dream since getting more comfortable with my body.
Getting in better shape did make it easier, but I think just being naked around others and seeing that no one really cares that much what your body looks like is the more important ingredient.
I guess it's a form of de-conditioning. We've been trained to expect this extremely negative response from others when we take our clothes off. Doing it over and over and receiving no negative response whatsoever seems to eventually alter the expectation.
For years, I’ve had a recurring dream where I’ve returned to a location of many fond childhood memories, my grandparents’ home. More recently, the dreams focus on the impossibility of my being there again after all these years, the paradox resolved by some handwaving of my subconscious.
I've had the naked dream a LOT, usually taking place at work. It's the place where I'm most anxious and insecure.
Another I've had is being at the top of a very tall skyscraper that starts shaking from an earthquake, and I have to get down somehow. Like everything around me is about to crumble and it's totally out of my control.
Hey. Same - I have recurring dreams (across years) on the themes you mention + a few more (inventing "flying", cosmic apocalpypse). Shall we connect to see if we can solve this mystery? - see its connected to personality or life experiences?
Yes. Some common ones:
1) Being back in school, missing an exam or test.
2) My car is out of control: won't stop going backwards, accelerates uncontrollably, etc.
3) Finding secret / "extra" rooms in my house.
4) Most recently with covid: being in a store, and realized I've forgotten my mask.
There are definitely other themes but these are the most common.
Absolutely same as first one. Naked, in social settings, people around me not even noticing my that state, i am trying to act normal as well as find my clothes.
In my twenties I had recurring dreams about being in a field of golden wheat during the summer, with a guilty feeling I hurt someone.
They really were weird. Maybe testosterone? Maybe Freudian? Maybe it was due to a stint job I had at the Coroner’s Office in high school? Maybe nothing?
Those dreams ended in my thirties, after a breakdown in grad school.
I pop a gasket (just really bad anxiety), and all those dreams subsided? Crazy?
Life became the nightmare after the breakdown though.
I used to dream vividly at night and while awake I was always the most calm and rational person in the room until a couple of years ago when I ran into financial (and love-related) problems and then struggled for years with extreme anxiety. I lost my capability to dream/remember my dreams.
After having mostly fixed those problems I found that I was still anxious and unwilling to live in the now, always fearing the future or regretting the past. My dreams were nowhere to be found. For the longest time I felt like I was living in a nightmare.
These days, to some degree, I have returned to being somewhat calm and rational. Last week I've been waking up every morning, either in the middle of a vivid dream or at least with some recollection of what my dreams were that night. It's so soothing to have my dreams return. It makes me feel even more calm and rational (my favorite state of mind).
Cognitive therapy for a short while plus meditation helped me, it seems.
One I sometimes have is needing to go the bathroom but all the bathrooms I can find have disgusting problems that send me looking for another bathroom instead of relieving myself there.
These always involve either bathrooms from my past (such as at schools I once attended or at places I once worked) or bathrooms in places that as far as I can tell are dream places.
I don't recall these dreams ever involving a real bathroom that I currently had or recently had access to.
When I wake up and remember one of these broken bathroom dreams, I inevitably am in fact in need of an urgent trip to the bathroom, so I suspect that the dream is my sleeping mind's way of telling me I need to wake up and go.
When the dream bathrooms are real bathrooms from my past, such as at a school, they are usually exaggerated. If the real bathroom had 3 stalls the dream version might be much bigger with several dozen stalls with the real 3 merely the 3 closest the door.
I did a fair amount of reading about dreams in my youth and kept a dream journal for years.
In most cases, dreams are the subconscious speaking to itself in an idiolect (a dialect of a single person). While certain themes are somewhat common, exact meaning of a dream is rooted in your own personal experiences and what those images mean to you.
Dreams of being naked in public are fairly common. Being naked is generally seen as a symbol of feeling vulnerable and, also, potentially intensely embarrassed about something (because most people would definitely not be comfortable being naked in public).
Snakes are a common symbol of sin in the Western world, which may or may not be pertinent to what it means to you/your subconscious.
Edit: I will add that sometimes dreams are just gibberish, like if you are feverish. "You're drunk, go home" type nonsense.
There are some themes that are way more common than others. Falling into a void is a very notable one.
The only recurring dream theme I have is this: You try to walk somewhere and it's slow, like moving in tar. It's exhausting and takes ages to e.g. walk down the street to your neighbor. Sometimes I'm even crawling trying to pull myself forward. I've heard similar variations from others too, so seems to be common.
Oh and my late grandmother had the same dream ever night for most of her adult life. Trauma in childhood due to war. I don't want to know how this feels.
I wonder if feeding this into a machine learning system could yield artistic/funny/useful gifs, especially for recurring dreams could give a pattern for a "meme".
This website is part of another one called Dream Research - https://dreams.ucsc.edu/ full of interesting info with a scientific approach into the world of Dreams, including analysis of the Dream Bank itself.
You can find some studies on what is the current thinking regarding dreams, and their purpose and meaning.
I've often wondered if dreams are fully constructed stories during REM or REM is more or less random vignettes of cognition that are assembled into a constructed story upon awakening.
Rewriting memories seems to be reasonably well understood, and if the recall mechanism for waking memories reconstructs a plausible story from memories, is it reasonable that the same is happening with dreams?
We always remember dreams, have there been experiments where the paralytic effect of sleep has been blocked? I remember seeing a cat video (ironic) of a cat having that part blocked by drugs or surgery and it jumping like it is catching a bird.
All my real dreams have been stories, however I've had a few dream like displays after waking up, but keeping my eyes closed. It's usually been repeating patterns of objects that change every 5-10 seconds, e.g fir trees, chairs, cars, hot air balloons etc. However, at least once, it was more akin to a film with people doing something in it like talking, driving vehicles etc. The display only appears in a small rectangular area on the right side of my vision, when I have my eyes closed and disappears when I open my eyes.
I sometimes remember dreams from easily 15y - 20y ago absolutly vividly, although I have had forgotten them in the mean time. Suddenly, during the day, like in a split second (maybe triggered from a scene or scent) I feel that "feeling" (or more like a superposition of all impression of that dream i had) of a dream long lost and the dream is fully present in that moment and I kind of "remember" it completely. Then it is fading away fast.
Every so often I have these vivid dreams with what feels like long story archs. In my youth / pre 30s more often then now. At the end of my 20s I started to keep a dream diary, not very consistently, but still.
So now, when I have these dream flashbacks, I immeadiately grab this journal or a piece of paper. I write everything down and draw sketches of the scene and really try hard to remember specifics of that dream. And then something really weird happens... i start to remember scences form other forgotten dreams and it feels like I opened a door or pathway in my memory and can look/explore fragments of these dreams. And the harder I try the better results I get. It is really an odd experience.
I can relate. I have a handful of recurring dream worlds that I visit. Sometimes I'll have a series of dreams over a few days that all take place in the same dream world. Months or years can go by and then I'll find myself dropped back into a dream world that I had forgotten about. Sometimes the world has progressed since my last visit, and sometimes I'm put back nearly where I left off last time.
The weirdest thing for me is that I swear I have a separate set of memories in these different dream worlds; a personal history exclusive to that dream world, where once I'm in that dream world, I suddenly remember previous visits to that world, places I've visited, events that took place. It's an incredibly strange feeling that can momentarily make me question my sense of self.
I should note that I nearly always dream lucidly. Not sure if that plays a role in this phenomena.
I have a series of dreams that happen in my town, whose geography in the dreams is as I naively imagined it as a child. The map of the dream town is an exact circle. The bus route from my home (my parents' home) to my school is a straight line (in reality it is more like a spiral). As a consequence, some places exist in my dream map that do not correspond to anything in reality. Sometimes I wake up with a feeling that it is important to go to those places in real life, because something important that I forgot is there.
Across a large street from my parents' home, there are some trees that kinda look like a beginning of a forest. In reality those are just a few densely growing trees, followed by more streets and houses. As a small child I didn't know, because we rarely walked in that direction, so in my dreams, there was a forest. Now I know what is actually there, and have walked there many times. But in the dream world, there still is a forest.
The dream map refuses to update and keeps the misconceptions of my childhood. Of course, during the dreams, it is a real map containing places that I merely "forgot" and "should visit again".
It is quite popular form of déjà vu called déjà rêvé. Happens to me all the time, more often when I'm stressed or sleep deprived but almost never when I'm physically exhausted.
> Nearly 80% claimed to have had such experiences and the associated frequencies are presented. Age was negatively correlated with the incidence and there was little gender dependence.
How do you know it's a "true" memory? Does that even matter to you? I don't think it would to me! But, I'm curious how confident you are about whether you're in the same space or your brain is rapidly manufacturing the sensation.
I have very long story arch dreams, an ex-girlfriend called them epic dreams. They're strange, some times I have recurring dreams with long story arcs in which I am in them as myself, sometimes I am in them as another person, sometimes they are narrated, sometimes they span generations, sometimes I'm not in them at all, sometimes they are episodes of a tv show that never had those episodes.
Examples - one dream was set in a post apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like A Canticle for Leibowitz, with narration, there was a kingdom being misruled by a duke and the only one who would be able to stop him was the exiled bishop, his brother, I turned out to be the bishop - an old man returning after many years of exile to the kingdom etc. etc. there were sword fights, radiation monsters, extra sensory perception..
Another dream was a very long special episode of Laverne and Shirley were the girls came out and had their first kiss, I think it was a Christmas episode also.
Actually funny enough I had three dream flashbacks just a couple days ago, first I remembered a comic book store and then I remembered no that store was from a dream, then I remembered a couple other locations from dreams that I had not had for lots of years and had forgotten about.
I'm completely the opposite. 50 years old and I have never once in my life remembered a dream. Never. I see things about dreams, such as this like, as interesting, but can relate to them at all, because they are things that happen to other people. I assume I have dreams, but when I wake up, I never have any recall of them.
To me it is important to start recalling my dream as literally the first thing after I wake up. Anything else... and the dream is probably lost.
It helps to have enough sleep, not wake up with an alarm, not have anything important to do after waking up. Have a pen and paper next to the bed, to remind you. Think about how you want to remember your dream, as you are falling asleep.
It's entirely probable that this experience is shared by plenty of others, we just don't hear much from you guys.
If you're curious to discover whether you dream or not, have someone wake you when you're in REM sleep. Your favourite search engine will help you to determine when this is happening. Usual caveats apply about taking advice from a random person on the internet.
If you're not entering REM sleep but you feel fine, hey, nice. Contact a sleep scientist and ask if they want to study you.
If you enter REM but have no dreams, hey, nice. You're apparently in the minority. Contact a sleep scientist and all if you want to study you.
If you write them down and actively try to remember, they enter a more permanent state in memory. I can more easily recall them that way and even continue the memory explosion.
But then I always wonder if I'm remembering the original or the remembrance. Like for childhood photos. There is even one for which I still remember exactly where I was when it bubbled up, but I don't recall the topic at all…
I sometimes dream about code or debugging, especially when my team is working on a deadline. A few times I dreamt of solutions to problems we had. It felt good on the spot, calming and relaxing. Unfortunately, after waking up, they don’t make any sense.
In the vaguest sense possible. Dreams for me feel very concrete but definitely aren't. If I was debugging something in a dream and became lucid, and attempted to read the "code" on the screen, it would be impossible. Just a swirl of letter-like things that made no sense whatsoever.
I actively try to fall asleep every night working through a problem or designing some intricate/problematic code in my head. I'm not sure if it's that cognitive work right before falling asleep or the dreams (where I'm usually working through and/or coding that problem a few different ways, often for what feels like hours in my sleep), but I almost always wake up with enough of an idea to get started and/or some revelation that'll help in some way with the high level design.
More abstract than that and at software level. For example "hyper-meta-recursion" of functions or DNA-strings. Or neural net as a ball, where wayward thoughts lose their momentum. Or maybe dynamics of self-reflection and consciousness of such a ball... Also anti-gravity is one of problems I have definitively solved, but do not remember the solution right now.
I feel like there might be a link between the different awareness during exhaustion, and dreams.
Like, if you’re on deadline and pushing through with a few hours of sleep a night, both panicked and not quite sure how you’re getting done what you’re getting done, then you might have foggier dreams, or feel that background panic while in the dream environment.
(Note: I consider interests, waking dreams (ideas, meditations, & imaginations), and dreams to be on a sort of subjective-metaphorical continuum.)
Anyway whenever I "dream" about programming it's almost always a scheduling cue. The exact type of programming, technique, language, etc. will provide details as to the type of scheduling that needs to be done.
For example, an interest in lisp seems to point to high-level, conceptual plan-making/life-design which leads toward a schedule. BASIC interest seems to point toward making a simple schedule / zeit-plan and working up from there. Getting with the program, metaphorically.
I mention this in part because you brought up the deadline...and that is related to schedules and timing.
If I dream about debugging, there's almost certainly a timing issue in my schedule, something unrealistic or problematic.
When intensely focused on solving a problem, or following a day of uninterrupted implementation, I have had programming dreams that go on all night. The dream is nothing but the text of the code (usually highlighted with my custom theme) in a buffer that takes up the whole of my visual field in the dream. I have never been able to make out any particular details of the code, and it is not clear to me whether such dreams are at all productive since they don't get at the abstract level of the problem.
Has anyone seen research linking dream content to the causes of the dream? What I'm imagining is dream journals like the ones on the website, accompanied by things that are happening in the patient's life that might explain the dream.
E.g.
Dream: I saw my mom and gave her a hug.
Posited cause: I've been thinking about my mom a lot recently because her birthday was last week and I really miss her.
Do you not dream? I'm almost 50 and I don't have a memory of ever dreaming. I probably do, but have some sort of selective amnesia so that I don't remember dreaming when I wake up. Does anyone else out there experience the same thing?
Yep, me too. It's very rare I'll remember anything even moments after waking up. If I do, I can only remember an abstract story (with a lot of missing pieces) rather than an experience with sound or vision.
Do you see pictures of things in your mind? For example, if I tell you to imagine the ocean waves coming into the beach, do you "see it in your minds eye"?
I do, almost as if it's a photo or video, but some people don't. I wonder how this affects dreams.
I'm 45 and I do not dream very often (or I forget when I wake up). Remembering only a few per year. But, when I was young I dreamed often.
The human mind, and dreams in particular, are fascinating.
If you want to try and coax the awareness out, put paper and pencil/pen next to your bed so that as you’re waking up you can jot down anything that might be the edge of a dream.
Even if you start with a single word once every few weeks, in time that can grow.
I have more than two hundred pages of dreams typed out.
It was a lot easier to do this when I was younger as I had much more time in the mornings. I remember everything vividly but once ten minutes have passed since waking it's pretty much gone unless I make a conscious effort to commit it to memory.
It's great fun to go back and be prompted to remember some of the crazier ones or Ctrl+F to see how often various people and things pop up.
My dreams are often pretty epic and often have sound tracks. Frequently I wake up and record them - including the music. If I don't take notes and record songs immediately, then both are lost forever.
i always love a chance to share what i have discovered about dreams.
for most of my life i never really thought much about how dreams work. i shared the same notion with most people, that they are a kind of sloppy simulation of real life. but it always stuck in my mind that this didnt make any sense: the physics of life are too complicated for the brain to simulate in real time in a way that recreates sensory inputs. and why would the brain have hardware that was dedicated to performing dream simulations? wouldnt that be rather a lot of hardware and energy for no apparent reason? but i always chalked it up as one of the great mysteries of our time and didnt dwell on it. and then the answer came to me.
it is well known that it is possible to "lucid dream." i have experienced this, and it is what precipitated my effort to understand dreams.
the answer is that the brain works with abstractions, it stores everything in the world, physical objects as well as feelings and concepts, as a kind of model that can be recalled. as you experience more things, the library of abstractions grows larger.
you are a small part of your brain. there is a part of the brain that holds a "simulation." this is your consciousness, you live inside this simulation, everything you experience is inside this simulation. it is a simulation of the physical world, but it contains much more than physical objects. it contains mental "primitives" that inform your emotions, your identity and your feelings about the world and your place in it. the non-physical aspect of the simulation might be called the "ego" and people who experience so-called ego-death are actually experiencing the simulation with these things taken out of it. at the core of the simulation is some kind of atomic, immutable "self" that is discreet and separate from all experiences, traumas and emotions. so to make it short, your being lives inside a simulation where the physical world is simulated as well as you as a person.
there are other parts of your brain that manage the simulation. some parts of the brain create new abstractions from sensory data. other parts of your brain monitor sensory data looking for things that it recognizes, looking for abstractions that have already been created. and another part of your brain is responsible for placing those abstractions into your simulation when they have been found in the environment. when the abstraction is placed into the simulation, you experience it. your brain is constantly monitoring reality through sensory data and recreating it in your brain-simulation using "assets" that already exist, assuming there is nothing too new in your environment. it is possible for this machinery to break, which is what we call a hallucination. a hallucination is not the creation of something that doesnt exist, it is the mistaken placing of a pre-existing asset into the simulation. objects are a composite of many different abstractions, and this is why hallucinations can have strange, ethereal or other-worldly qualities. a human figure can be placed into your simulation without the concept of humanity accompanying it, or the presence of a person can be placed without a physical manifestation. all kinds of weird things are possible. the takeaway is that the simulated world that is created for you by your brain is very sophisticated, hard to get right, and the symphony of neural mechanisms to make it all work is probably breathtakingly complex.
why? its an optimization. experiencing raw sensory data is too inefficient. the scope within which you make decisions must be narrowed. and this leads into the answer to dreams: there are other optimizations at play. there is yet another part of your brain that actually looks inward at the simulation and the assets that have been placed within it. it will then guess what other assets should be in the simulation based on experience, and place those assets into the simulation. these guesses assets are the same as any other assets, of course. the...
David Lynch's work is often described as "dream-like", and you can definitely see that connection in these transcripts. This could easily be a scene in his movies:
> I'm at a Sunday night church gathering. I'm thinking, "I haven't done this in years." It's crowded. A drunk man next to me whispers, "Reproductive organs." I good naturedly tell him to shut up. I see a big sign that says "Brothers, Jesus..." Later someone, a male, says he has to take part of my reproductive system out. I just play with my nipples and enjoy it, i.e. I have an orgasm. I look at him and say, "I can't do that. I would feel embarrassed that I would have to go to orgasm with people watching." A girl whispers, "You can do it."
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadFor some reason in my case I have a vivid dream every night, sometimes multiple per night, and can't remember the last time my sleep was dreamless.
I've heard keeping a dream journal can help you remember/have more vivid dreams, but I only write my dreams down it it affected me very strongly so I can interpret what my psyche is saying, so this only happens maybe once every few months.
So what gives? Why do some people dream a lot more than others?
> To really be sure that an individual does not dream, we would have to follow him for years and perform awakenings from REM sleep to see if he dreamed. If the individual never reported a dream after years of awakenings from REM sleep then we could reasonably conclude that either the person does not dream, that he or she lacks the ability to recall dreams, or that he or she is a liar who, for some reason, wants to conceal the fact that he does in fact dream.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/dream-catcher/2012...
> Most people have at least 2-4 REM sleep phases at night
One of the things I've noticed in taking a dream journal over the past few years is that when I remember a night's dreams thoroughly, they're often split into a handful of distinct sections, with each one being an almost entirely self contained story and scene. I never made the connection until now but I wonder if each 'scene' is a specific REM cycle.
Why it is important is because it tells a story about what's going on in your emotional state that you're otherwise unaware of or repressing in conscious experience. It can also provide solutions. It can be a powerful tool for maintaining mental health and wellbeing.
This isn't to say you should be reading "dream interpretation" guides or speaking to interpreters. The point is we already speak the languages of our own dreams because it's our own mind. What seems like nonsense on the surface quickly reveals itself to have a surprisingly clear meaning on introspection from a slightly different angle. Follow your intuition, listen to your psyche, you wont regret it.
The problem with using guides and interpreters is that you don't know whether they explain your unconscious associations, or just substitute their own.
If you interpret your own dreams, you can be sure that all associations were generated by your own brain. Maybe during the dream, maybe during the interpretation. Who cares; either way, it's about your brain.
My simple interpretation method is to write an outline of the dream, and to some words add an arrow and write what it reminds me of. Usually at least three things in the dream remind me of the same topic -- that is the core message of the dream.
I usually have amnesia in the few minutes after I wake up, and I lose everything. Like when I used to drive my mom to work as a teenager, she would wake me up right before, and I would just put on pants and hop in the car. Halfway there, I'd sometimes admit I had no memory of how I got into the car.
But if I am focussing on writing my dream right away, usually by writing it down in detail, I can recall it later.
I'm definitely jealous of people who somehow remember it so clearly without any special time commitment. Dreams always feel like living a second life
Blinds open even slightly: no dreams.
LEDs on electronics uncovered: no dreams.
Full blackout: auditory hallucinations before I’m even fully asleep.
I recently became very anxious that I was "dreaming less".
Then I remembered that this couldn't be true because my cognition wasn't impaired. This indicates I'm still hitting REM
So what gives?
The answer, I'm not showering in the morning to go to an office.
No shower, no dedicated dream remembering time. Hence the perception of "fewer dreams"
Once I was writing a dream diary. I had a dream, and I was like "this reminds me of another dream I had a few weeks ago". I opened the diary, and saw that the "few weeks ago" was actually yesterday.
So, if the dream from yesterday feels like a few weeks ago, and the dreams before yesterday are either forgotten or feel like an ancient past, it is quite easy to believe that you usually don't dream, even if you actually dream every night.
I'm remembering a particularly vivid dream I had perhaps a month or two ago. I remember the settings it took place in, some of the characters, some of the story elements, though to call it a "story" is a bit of a stretch, just a rambling sequence of unconnected events. I often dream consciously, So I can remember actually wanting to pay attention to how cause and effect worked, but when I woke up, I couldn't recall how stuff managed to happen.
Without that thread running through everything, dream recall would seem to go very against how the brain normally works. Not that techniques can't help anyway.
In the past i never much noticed or remembered dreaming, only when waking up agitated from a nightmare (hasn't happened in years)
But i've been a double espresso drinker for years. Since i started cutting out the dinner espresso (e.g. having my last coffee at lunch) i dream almost every night (sometimes 2 distinct storylines) and can remember them for a few minutes after waking but they fade quickly after.
No fine-tuning using the dataset, but here's the result of typing in a dream prompt into Talk-to-Transformer:
[PROMPT - a dream from DreamBank] >>> I was putting together a plastic bag full of buttons and sewing paraphernalia. It was time to break out of a Hong Kong prison and I was on the fourth tier cell block. I had to wait till the window washers were busy and distract them by throwing ping pong balls so fire hoses filled with cyanide could be squirted on passers-by. I threw a rock through [...]
[RESULT] >>> [...] a glass door. I was careful not to pull my stitches. I threw another rock out the window. We needed a diversion. I needed to take care of myself. The next thing I knew, I was in a helicopter about to take off. By this point my emotions were in flux, like people around a train wreck. It was hard to know what to do with them. I wanted to be strong but didn't have the will. I wanted to be a martyr. I wanted to be.
For example, I once kept trying to force an elf to teach me how to say certain phrases in their language (in an attempt to see if the AI could invent an imaginary language to some degree of consistency), and the character kept "laughing it off" and abruptly changing the subject.
http://www.dreambank.net/grid.cgi
It seems that there are some "cognitive prerequisites for dreaming", which are mostly developed around the age of 5-7, which might explain your dreams being so crazy and full of colors, as in those ages you are still developing "the ability to produce mental imagery" and "narrative skills".
https://dreams.ucsc.edu/Library/domhoff_2020b.pdf - Chapter "Dreaming Is a Gradual Cognitive Achievement"
But seeing cats and dogs dreaming is fairly common.
Characters and scenes looked a bit like they were out of a Disney movie (Aladdin, Pinocchio, I remember the guards from Aladdin and the princess/fairy from Pinocchio), which I guess I watched a lot when I was young.
[0]: http://www.dreambank.net/more_info.cgi?further=1&series=jasm...
This and Sci-hub are two of many examples that bounce me over and over again because I have no inspiration on what to search or how
This site even has an entire primer on how to make a useful search query, because apparently its not even a familiar search bar?
And all the users are like “ah thats not a problem, just be so into this field like me that you already know all the papers you want to read!”
I Google for the paper's abstract then copy its DOI into the sci-hub search.
I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great probability that it falls into these 2 categories -
1. I suddenly find myself naked in public, the rest of dream usually involves me trying to remedy the situation. This is the stage where I usually wake up (in a panic with elevated heart rate).
2. Snakes. Not even sure what is up with this one. I am pretty afraid of snakes in real life, more so than normal people. But then there's a bunch of other things I am equally scared of, but I don't dream about them at all.
Your fear of snakes is likely older than humanity itself, so even if you can have rational control of yourself around a snake in real life they could terrorize your dreams. Snakes used to be a real and present danger in our environment for millions of years of our evolution. They are the unknown environment, the cunning adversary, the unforeseen consequence of carelessness.
In a similar way, you might find that you can manage to present yourself in social situations, there is a very human fear of being found out, cast out, laughed at, and/or rejected socially, since we are social creatures. Even nudists have dreams of finding themselves naked in front of their peers. If you spend your day putting on a facade of some sort, which you probably do if you have a job, then somewhere there is a part of you that you don’t want others to see, and in your dream they all see it big time and you have to deal with it.
Example: “waking” up on the last day of a semester, only to discover that I am enrolled in a required class that I never actually attended...woops.
Between my 20s and 30s I did a lot of selfdefense training. I would dream a lot about conflict situations where I would have to fight (or run). In real life I might have had 3 conflics in those 10 years. Anyhow, fighting in a dream was like being submerged in molasse: every movement had resistence and was painfully slow, while opponents moved normally. This was freaking me out.
I don't know if it's related, but sometimes in my dreams I fly by taking advantage of this oddly sluggish momentum. All it takes is to launch myself into a spinning motion like a frisbee, and I'll fly a good distance.
At this point I can identify a few areas like "old town" or "business district" or "very large square with an enormous roundabout".
[0] Mostly various types of Ganz UVs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_UV which is interesting, because I've only been to Budapest once in my life.
Also rare, but in a similar vein, sometimes I wake up into a dream, over and over again. I'll be in bed, relieved I'm finally awake, until I soon realize I'm still asleep and wake up again. When this repeats enough times, it becomes pretty desperate.
Otherwise, I rarely have anxiety-inducing dreams.
She's been visiting for a couple decades, but she just stares, so you get used to her. I figured it was one of those common ones like you have a surprise exam and you forgot your pencils or you have a candy bar for a head.
... go on?
In my case, there's some real-life precedent for it. I enrolled in one course in undergrad, and dropped it right away my first week or so for some reason I don't recall. Toward the end of the semester, before finals, I found I was still enrolled, but had never set foot in the classroom or anything.
I was sort of panicked, but went and talked to the professor, and he was fine with it. He basically verified that I never did anything with the class and it was somehow deleted from my record completely.
I still don't know why it wasn't dropped in the first week, although this was before electronic registration systems.
They underlying theme is probably low self-confidence.
https://xkcd.com/557/
I remember having the "naked in public" dream in the past. I've also had a fair amount of body shame for most of my life.
But after getting in better shape and spending time on nude beaches and in the occasional (mixed gender) nude sauna in the last few years, my body shame pretty much disappeared. I now feel almost no self-consciousness from being naked.
I can't recall having a single "naked in public" dream since getting more comfortable with my body.
I guess it's a form of de-conditioning. We've been trained to expect this extremely negative response from others when we take our clothes off. Doing it over and over and receiving no negative response whatsoever seems to eventually alter the expectation.
Another I've had is being at the top of a very tall skyscraper that starts shaking from an earthquake, and I have to get down somehow. Like everything around me is about to crumble and it's totally out of my control.
There are definitely other themes but these are the most common.
1. I forget to take my mask when I leave my apartment. Apparently the door man doesn't notice.
2. When I try to go back to my apartment to retrieve my mask, the door man doesn't let me in, because you need a mask to enter.
3. I'm not allowed to enter any stores to buy a mask, because you need a mask to enter.
So I'm trapped outside in this catch-22.
They really were weird. Maybe testosterone? Maybe Freudian? Maybe it was due to a stint job I had at the Coroner’s Office in high school? Maybe nothing?
Those dreams ended in my thirties, after a breakdown in grad school.
I pop a gasket (just really bad anxiety), and all those dreams subsided? Crazy?
Life became the nightmare after the breakdown though.
After having mostly fixed those problems I found that I was still anxious and unwilling to live in the now, always fearing the future or regretting the past. My dreams were nowhere to be found. For the longest time I felt like I was living in a nightmare.
These days, to some degree, I have returned to being somewhat calm and rational. Last week I've been waking up every morning, either in the middle of a vivid dream or at least with some recollection of what my dreams were that night. It's so soothing to have my dreams return. It makes me feel even more calm and rational (my favorite state of mind).
Cognitive therapy for a short while plus meditation helped me, it seems.
Forgive yourself. Love thyself. Take care.
These always involve either bathrooms from my past (such as at schools I once attended or at places I once worked) or bathrooms in places that as far as I can tell are dream places.
I don't recall these dreams ever involving a real bathroom that I currently had or recently had access to.
When I wake up and remember one of these broken bathroom dreams, I inevitably am in fact in need of an urgent trip to the bathroom, so I suspect that the dream is my sleeping mind's way of telling me I need to wake up and go.
When the dream bathrooms are real bathrooms from my past, such as at a school, they are usually exaggerated. If the real bathroom had 3 stalls the dream version might be much bigger with several dozen stalls with the real 3 merely the 3 closest the door.
I'm barefoot and the floor of the public bathroom is too disgusting to walk onto is a common one I get.
And then, yes, I awake to discover I need to go.
One time though, I had a dream where I was successfully running so fast and so smoothly, it felt amazing, better than flying.
In most cases, dreams are the subconscious speaking to itself in an idiolect (a dialect of a single person). While certain themes are somewhat common, exact meaning of a dream is rooted in your own personal experiences and what those images mean to you.
Dreams of being naked in public are fairly common. Being naked is generally seen as a symbol of feeling vulnerable and, also, potentially intensely embarrassed about something (because most people would definitely not be comfortable being naked in public).
Snakes are a common symbol of sin in the Western world, which may or may not be pertinent to what it means to you/your subconscious.
Edit: I will add that sometimes dreams are just gibberish, like if you are feverish. "You're drunk, go home" type nonsense.
The only recurring dream theme I have is this: You try to walk somewhere and it's slow, like moving in tar. It's exhausting and takes ages to e.g. walk down the street to your neighbor. Sometimes I'm even crawling trying to pull myself forward. I've heard similar variations from others too, so seems to be common.
Oh and my late grandmother had the same dream ever night for most of her adult life. Trauma in childhood due to war. I don't want to know how this feels.
You can find some studies on what is the current thinking regarding dreams, and their purpose and meaning.
Rewriting memories seems to be reasonably well understood, and if the recall mechanism for waking memories reconstructs a plausible story from memories, is it reasonable that the same is happening with dreams?
We always remember dreams, have there been experiments where the paralytic effect of sleep has been blocked? I remember seeing a cat video (ironic) of a cat having that part blocked by drugs or surgery and it jumping like it is catching a bird.
I sometimes remember dreams from easily 15y - 20y ago absolutly vividly, although I have had forgotten them in the mean time. Suddenly, during the day, like in a split second (maybe triggered from a scene or scent) I feel that "feeling" (or more like a superposition of all impression of that dream i had) of a dream long lost and the dream is fully present in that moment and I kind of "remember" it completely. Then it is fading away fast.
Every so often I have these vivid dreams with what feels like long story archs. In my youth / pre 30s more often then now. At the end of my 20s I started to keep a dream diary, not very consistently, but still.
So now, when I have these dream flashbacks, I immeadiately grab this journal or a piece of paper. I write everything down and draw sketches of the scene and really try hard to remember specifics of that dream. And then something really weird happens... i start to remember scences form other forgotten dreams and it feels like I opened a door or pathway in my memory and can look/explore fragments of these dreams. And the harder I try the better results I get. It is really an odd experience.
The weirdest thing for me is that I swear I have a separate set of memories in these different dream worlds; a personal history exclusive to that dream world, where once I'm in that dream world, I suddenly remember previous visits to that world, places I've visited, events that took place. It's an incredibly strange feeling that can momentarily make me question my sense of self.
I should note that I nearly always dream lucidly. Not sure if that plays a role in this phenomena.
It makes you think.
Across a large street from my parents' home, there are some trees that kinda look like a beginning of a forest. In reality those are just a few densely growing trees, followed by more streets and houses. As a small child I didn't know, because we rarely walked in that direction, so in my dreams, there was a forest. Now I know what is actually there, and have walked there many times. But in the dream world, there still is a forest.
The dream map refuses to update and keeps the misconceptions of my childhood. Of course, during the dreams, it is a real map containing places that I merely "forgot" and "should visit again".
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2017/00000...
> Nearly 80% claimed to have had such experiences and the associated frequencies are presented. Age was negatively correlated with the incidence and there was little gender dependence.
Examples - one dream was set in a post apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like A Canticle for Leibowitz, with narration, there was a kingdom being misruled by a duke and the only one who would be able to stop him was the exiled bishop, his brother, I turned out to be the bishop - an old man returning after many years of exile to the kingdom etc. etc. there were sword fights, radiation monsters, extra sensory perception..
Another dream was a very long special episode of Laverne and Shirley were the girls came out and had their first kiss, I think it was a Christmas episode also.
Actually funny enough I had three dream flashbacks just a couple days ago, first I remembered a comic book store and then I remembered no that store was from a dream, then I remembered a couple other locations from dreams that I had not had for lots of years and had forgotten about.
It helps to have enough sleep, not wake up with an alarm, not have anything important to do after waking up. Have a pen and paper next to the bed, to remind you. Think about how you want to remember your dream, as you are falling asleep.
If you're curious to discover whether you dream or not, have someone wake you when you're in REM sleep. Your favourite search engine will help you to determine when this is happening. Usual caveats apply about taking advice from a random person on the internet.
If you're not entering REM sleep but you feel fine, hey, nice. Contact a sleep scientist and ask if they want to study you.
If you enter REM but have no dreams, hey, nice. You're apparently in the minority. Contact a sleep scientist and all if you want to study you.
If you don’t recall any of your dreams, AND you currently smoke, you could give it a try.
I sometimes dream about code or debugging, especially when my team is working on a deadline. A few times I dreamt of solutions to problems we had. It felt good on the spot, calming and relaxing. Unfortunately, after waking up, they don’t make any sense.
And I actually remember one solution because I constructed a mental model so I would remember the unique groundbreaking solution I have just invented.
Thus I now remember a ball with curved arrows coming in and out, but I do not understand what it means and what problem it solves.
Like, if you’re on deadline and pushing through with a few hours of sleep a night, both panicked and not quite sure how you’re getting done what you’re getting done, then you might have foggier dreams, or feel that background panic while in the dream environment.
Anyway whenever I "dream" about programming it's almost always a scheduling cue. The exact type of programming, technique, language, etc. will provide details as to the type of scheduling that needs to be done.
For example, an interest in lisp seems to point to high-level, conceptual plan-making/life-design which leads toward a schedule. BASIC interest seems to point toward making a simple schedule / zeit-plan and working up from there. Getting with the program, metaphorically.
I mention this in part because you brought up the deadline...and that is related to schedules and timing.
If I dream about debugging, there's almost certainly a timing issue in my schedule, something unrealistic or problematic.
Just my subjective experience...
E.g. Dream: I saw my mom and gave her a hug.
Posited cause: I've been thinking about my mom a lot recently because her birthday was last week and I really miss her.
(edited for formatting)
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-p...
I do, almost as if it's a photo or video, but some people don't. I wonder how this affects dreams.
I'm 45 and I do not dream very often (or I forget when I wake up). Remembering only a few per year. But, when I was young I dreamed often.
The human mind, and dreams in particular, are fascinating.
Even if you start with a single word once every few weeks, in time that can grow.
It's great fun to go back and be prompted to remember some of the crazier ones or Ctrl+F to see how often various people and things pop up.
for most of my life i never really thought much about how dreams work. i shared the same notion with most people, that they are a kind of sloppy simulation of real life. but it always stuck in my mind that this didnt make any sense: the physics of life are too complicated for the brain to simulate in real time in a way that recreates sensory inputs. and why would the brain have hardware that was dedicated to performing dream simulations? wouldnt that be rather a lot of hardware and energy for no apparent reason? but i always chalked it up as one of the great mysteries of our time and didnt dwell on it. and then the answer came to me.
it is well known that it is possible to "lucid dream." i have experienced this, and it is what precipitated my effort to understand dreams.
the answer is that the brain works with abstractions, it stores everything in the world, physical objects as well as feelings and concepts, as a kind of model that can be recalled. as you experience more things, the library of abstractions grows larger.
you are a small part of your brain. there is a part of the brain that holds a "simulation." this is your consciousness, you live inside this simulation, everything you experience is inside this simulation. it is a simulation of the physical world, but it contains much more than physical objects. it contains mental "primitives" that inform your emotions, your identity and your feelings about the world and your place in it. the non-physical aspect of the simulation might be called the "ego" and people who experience so-called ego-death are actually experiencing the simulation with these things taken out of it. at the core of the simulation is some kind of atomic, immutable "self" that is discreet and separate from all experiences, traumas and emotions. so to make it short, your being lives inside a simulation where the physical world is simulated as well as you as a person.
there are other parts of your brain that manage the simulation. some parts of the brain create new abstractions from sensory data. other parts of your brain monitor sensory data looking for things that it recognizes, looking for abstractions that have already been created. and another part of your brain is responsible for placing those abstractions into your simulation when they have been found in the environment. when the abstraction is placed into the simulation, you experience it. your brain is constantly monitoring reality through sensory data and recreating it in your brain-simulation using "assets" that already exist, assuming there is nothing too new in your environment. it is possible for this machinery to break, which is what we call a hallucination. a hallucination is not the creation of something that doesnt exist, it is the mistaken placing of a pre-existing asset into the simulation. objects are a composite of many different abstractions, and this is why hallucinations can have strange, ethereal or other-worldly qualities. a human figure can be placed into your simulation without the concept of humanity accompanying it, or the presence of a person can be placed without a physical manifestation. all kinds of weird things are possible. the takeaway is that the simulated world that is created for you by your brain is very sophisticated, hard to get right, and the symphony of neural mechanisms to make it all work is probably breathtakingly complex.
why? its an optimization. experiencing raw sensory data is too inefficient. the scope within which you make decisions must be narrowed. and this leads into the answer to dreams: there are other optimizations at play. there is yet another part of your brain that actually looks inward at the simulation and the assets that have been placed within it. it will then guess what other assets should be in the simulation based on experience, and place those assets into the simulation. these guesses assets are the same as any other assets, of course. the...
> I'm at a Sunday night church gathering. I'm thinking, "I haven't done this in years." It's crowded. A drunk man next to me whispers, "Reproductive organs." I good naturedly tell him to shut up. I see a big sign that says "Brothers, Jesus..." Later someone, a male, says he has to take part of my reproductive system out. I just play with my nipples and enjoy it, i.e. I have an orgasm. I look at him and say, "I can't do that. I would feel embarrassed that I would have to go to orgasm with people watching." A girl whispers, "You can do it."