From what I read, dreams are more apparent when you have poor sleep, as it either happens mostly (or at least recall ability is increased) during REM, which occurs when you're not fully asleep.
Interesting! Anecdotally, I have one friend who has vivid, very involved dreams that she can recall almost nightly, and she works as a professional artist who is talented and prolific across a few different areas of visual art.
As mentioned by the authors, the causal relationship cannot be answered by this study. But if you want to recall your dreams more frequently, I highly recommend keeping a dream journal (also mentioned in the link). In my teenage years I went from remembering an average of a dream per week to vividly remembering 3-4 dreams per night. As soon as you wake up, immediately start writing all details you remember. Whether or not this increases your creativity in the waking world, it's fun to see what your brain constructs while you're asleep.
I've written down every dream I've had for the past 10 years. Hard to say whether it's improved my creativity, but it's fun to search and see trends. Like you said, dream recall improves if you immediately record dreams upon waking.
I wrote a very crappy web app for this back in 2012: http://keepdream.me/. It emails me every morning to ask what I dreamed and records my reply. There must be better alternatives now.
I don't get particularly vivid dreams but I sometimes get dreams of really interesting stories. The dream itself is like a movie, I'm not the main character but I'm just kind of watching it unfold.
What's really interesting is that these "dream movies" always have a half-decent plot. IMO a lot of movie plots are really bad and stick to typical tropes and lessons. My dreams don't stick to these tropes and have actual twists, lessons, etc. Like if they were a real movie I might actually watch it.
For example one of them followed a rebellion against an oligarchy, but it never stuck to any main character. First we're introduced to someone, then eventually new people are introduced, and then eventually the original character dies but we just continue the story focusing on the new people, then even more people are added and they die and so on. So it's a bit more realistic and nobody gets plot armor.
Idk how creative I am, I usually identify as someone whose more left-brain.
I consider myself very fortunate that I have very vivid and often lucid dreams - for 50 years since I was a child. My dreams are like cinematic productions - crazy camera work and all. I dream in color and sound. Many of my dreams have soundtracks. I often wake up in the morning with the soundtrack still playing in my head and I turn on my phone and record. I have dozens of them now. When I was ten years old I had a dream where there was a credit role at the end of the dream. None of my friends had dreams like that so I realized at a young age that I had a gift. It's obviously a very personal gift as no one else can fully experience my dreams. I do write the good ones down and share them with close friends. Of course the nightmares are also very vivid too, and also sometimes have soundtracks. I consider myself a creative person but certainly not exceptionally so. But I do feel blessed to have interesting dreams that I remember.
I too am fortunate to have frequent vivid and lucid dreams. Some of the music generated in my dreams has been the most beautiful I have ever heard. I've always been afraid that I would have less lucid dreams as I got older after reading statistics on lucid dreams, but it's reassuring to hear that you were still able to experience vivid dreams as you got older
I realize that I have amazing dreams of intricate complexity and richness but only recall the impression I had of the dreams upon waking. The rich details dissolve away within minutes. I am left only with the sketchy, and disappointing, meta-data--the impression--I had of the dream.
i remember my dreams in full details, like the stage, lightning, color, cast, interactions, dialogs, etc.
but mostly only small part of the whole story
music i often hear either when i fall into sleep or wake up, but also when i play it in the dream like a guitar
also i dream of pseudo-code
yeah, sometimes i wish there was a way to screen-capture my dream, because some of them would make amazing blockbusters (like some dystopian lost worlds)
I've often wished for some kind of dream recorder. I have had some very intense dreams, even "inception" style where I fall asleep inside a dream. In these dreams I'll talk to witty people, hear incredible music, see fantastic sights. But once I wake up 90% of the dream is gone and I only remember some highlights.
A weird realization for me is all the events in the dream were produced by me. Yet in real life I'm useless in front of a piano, or a paint brush. It would be great if there was a way to tap into that creativity once awake.
> Yet in real life I'm useless in front of a piano, or a paint brush. It would be great if there was a way to tap into that creativity once awake.
Imagination and technical skill (that is, how well you use a piano or paint brush) are orthogonal domains. The way to tap into your imagination is to develop your technical skill to the level where you're capable of translating what you imagine to the physical motions necessary to convey it on canvas.
It's just a sign of the times. There was a long period of time when everybody dreamed in black and white, then when color TV was invented everyone started dreaming in color again.
I don't know if it's particularly creative to dream with a sound track just as I don't know if it's particularly creative to dream in black and white. But your brain is definitely influenced by cinema.
> IMO a lot of movie plots are really bad and stick to typical tropes and lessons
It's a huge problem. I have watched very little American media produced in the last decade because of this. Whenever some coworker talks about how great this new show is, I'll watch it and cringe. It's 90% an A-plot B-plot following the same tired template. Then 10% of it is doing some form of virtue signaling, grievance agitation or other propaganda technique to rile the plebs. I can only imagine people who watch it are desperate for any sort of escape from reality.
Outside the US, at least other countries play with different storytelling techniques. France with their 85 plots in a single story and Korea with their strong single plot driven by the main character's emotion. Plus, thankfully Japan's entertainment industry is going strong by having the different mangas compete with each other until the most interesting stories get adapted into an anime.
> Plus, thankfully Japan's entertainment industry is going strong by having the different mangas compete with each other until the most interesting stories get adapted into an anime.
That's not really true, it's usually the most popular as it's a money issue. Pick randomly a few seasonals and you'll find that most of them are not that good.
The existence of bad doesn't mean the absence of good. There's next to no good American media produced in the last decade. Maybe even longer. Counter that to a country that regularly produces new, original, captivating stories on a regular basis.
You said that the most interesting stories get adapted into anime, not that there are some anime that are good. The first statement is false, the second is true.
Among the manga market, there is a wide range of quality. The success of an individual manga depends heavily on creating a story worth reading and using that quality to attract an audience. Other factors are at play, and what's "good" is a matter of taste. Still, morbius as a manga would not have attracted an audience, so it would not have moved up market.
Otherwise unknown artists can and often do make a name for themselves by telling a good story, and their story gets boosted by a functioning entertainment industry.
Contrast that to America's entertainment industry. A filthy and incestuous cabal of people decide what does and doesn't make it. Ideological zealotry required to step foot at the gates. Serial rapists as the gatekeepers using their power to take advantage of others.
You can see it in other media, too. Same tired tropes most of the time.
You can even see it in social media, you can make out the common tropes shaped by the society/culture/subculture/mainstream media and while original thoughts and non-us/them|black/white comments are there, they get downvoted. Which is pretty sad. All the while, everyone thinks they're right and better than everyone else.
Japan's entertainment is not that different imo, most of it uses the same tropes, maybe with a small difference (that they later forget about). But yeah, some actually original content shows up more often.
Japan's entertainment is fundamentally different because the stories are proved in the manga market before they move up the entertainment chain. In America, the same nepotistic cretins write the same drivel - or are hired to fill in the mad libs template for a sequel's drivel - over and over again. Stories are tested by an executive before coming to TV or theaters. Not an audience.
I recall dreams seeming to follow movie-like structure sometimes. At least once, there was an additional thing: it seemed I was aware I was an observer of some story directed by someone else, and I was critically aware of tropes and artistic choices the creator was making.
(Maybe I'd been watching a lot of movies or TV shows at the time, not very immersed, and some of that audience mode was just getting tickled by the GC cycle?)
I have similar dreams sometimes, but in the first person. I meet people in my dreams and have interesting, complex conversations (at least they feel that way in the dream). I usually have lucid dreams too-- or it could be that these are the ones I usually remember. Oddly, I will sometimes know when I am about to wake up and I'll say goodbye to the folks I've met.
Anecdotally, I've found dream recall linked to novel experiences in real life. When I expose myself to new environments or interactions I tend to recall dreams more.
I read an article once where Robert Frost took a creativity test and scored extremely low (based on seeing images in Rorschach inkblots) and remarked afterwards that creativity was not about seeing the images but in training oneself to ignore the non-essential images (paraphrasing, have never been able to find this via google - supposedly this happened while Frost was Poet Laureate.)
Also the following points seem relevant:
1. ability to remember dreams is at least partially based on being woken up during them or shortly afterwards, this is why you can generally only remember the last dream you had.
2. A good nights sleep is often described as being central to high intelligence.
3. What is the relation between high creativity and high intelligence? Which brings me back to the question of how accurate the tests are, given that there generally agreed on foundational problems with all IQ testing methods (that I'm familiar with)
> 3. What is the relation between high creativity and high intelligence?
When asked "Which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?", psychologist Donald Hebb famously replied "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?" [1]
I'm no psychologist, but I'd imagine you'd find the relation between creativity and intelligence in the same context is similarly orthoganal.
1. Meaney M. The nature of nurture: maternal effects and chromatin remodelling. In: Cacioppo JT, Berntson GG. (eds) Essays in social neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, pp. 1–14.
When I am in a period of intensive writing, I recall my dreams at a higher than normal rate. The dreams also feel more layered than normal dreams, although I recognize that this is not quite knowable. I will often record these dreams as part of keeping my literary diaries. My most compelling narratives are dreamlike, in that their composition borrows a structure from the mere recording of dreams. These narratives feel like dry land dreaming that, like dry land training for skating, allows me to dial in on the technical aspects of the very fluid experience that is dreaming.
This connection between dreaming and writing is of great interest to me. I am somewhat surprised that my most compelling writing was not inspired directly by any dream that I remember. The phenomenon of the one and the other are that similar. A kind of background hallucination can be intuited when writing fiction. In my experience, these hallucinations indicate that the writing has attained a degree of formal completion. I observe the characters of my story as though they were made of clay and also diminutive. Why clay? I am unsure, but I think it has to do with this clay’s yielding but inelastic quality.
This is further evidence that "dreams" aren't actually being recalled, but instead that people wake up with their brains in an inconsistent state and rationalize how their brains came to be in that state. Creativity enables us to create detailed rationalizations.
I’ve always theorized that dreams, or at least the interpretation of them, are primarily emotional states that our minds attempt to backfill with logic or narrative structure upon awakening. Even when attempting to remember the details they seem to slip away and transmutate. However the general “sense” or feeling remains.
The more I'm interested in my dreams and the more of them I write down the more of them I recall. But since all that writing and analyzing takes a long time, I rarely do it anymore, so I don't recall many dreams, but I'm still pretty creative.
That is your opinion and we disagree. And your last sentence is equally applicable to anything psychological content (conscious or otherwise, including simple sensing), is it not?
How is it opinion when it's logical fact. Dreams have no meaning in the same way the bible has no meaning. You assign the meaning and that can be meaningful to you personally, but the dream itself is random.
Bible or any written text has meaning. Let's say we take the most ungenerous position and consider it as willful psychological manipulation of masses. Does that deprive it of 'meaning', 'agency'?
"Logical fact".
I missed this bit in your argument. Presumably, you assert that the mind's modalities consist of a 'rational' state of consciousness and a dream state mode where the content matter is "random". It is true that the mind, unfettered by the necessity to navigate in real-time a physical reality, is no longer constrained by either physics or causality. This then results in content matter that can seem random (as narratives) but to deprive them of meaning does not follow.
I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required.
Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one
place did a correction later seem necessary.
— Mendeleev, as quoted by Inostrantzev
> By meaning I mean the brain isn't trying to communicate anything factual or relevant to you.
That does not map to my experiences with dreams and their content. But then, I -- my conscious self -- do not take an adversarial position regarding my inner Self. I benefit from reflecting on my dreams, otherwise I wouldn't waste my time. Integrating unconscious psychological content of my mind has always been a positive event, and promotes psychological health, stability, maturity, and (believe it or not) insights.
My claim is that you assign meaning without realizing it.
So my claim is all the benefits are created by your conscious self, but you perceive it to be from the dream. Similar to how religion helps people. Both are fiction.
Simple. I stare at a rock. The rock has no meaning even though I have no idea about the story behind the rock.
The burden of proof is always on the person assigning meaning to something. Why? because from a probability standpoint, no meaning is more likely. So the person claiming dreams have meaning must prove why their claim is real despite the low probability.
Why is meaning low probability? Because much more things in the universe have no meaning then have meaning.
For example, greek mythology. I know nothing of it. Yet I can make the claim that it is false and have a higher probability of being right then the person who claims greek mythology is real and has meaning and knows everything about it.
The majority of "meaning" is "found" the same way a christian "finds" meaning in the bible. It is common human behavior. By making a claim that someone has found meaning in some random thing this way, I am making a high probability claim because of the fact the behavior is so common.
Choline will do this for you, 3 eggs (yolks) is suggested to be enough for pregnant women, lecithin, choline bitartrate, CDP Choline, and any choline mimetic like Carnitine.
I've found a couple of 000 capsules filled with lecithin 30mins before bed is best.
A none supplemental alternative is water fasting but thats something that cant be done all the time.
Choline is an chemical in cells walls, it lowers the pressure in the alveoli to facilitate the gas exchange so it can increase physical performance and endurance, its used in connections between neurons, so it keeps brain fog/baby brain at bay.
When I learned about lucid dreaming in my 20s, I spent an inordinate amount of time (every day for years) developing the skill, including journaling — in as much detail as possible — my dream as soon as I woke up. Unfortunately, I cannot turn off the ability now and now have to deal with the consequence of recalling all my dreams: good and bad.
I used to have a lot of lucid dreams where I was able to spot I'm in a dream and start controlling what happens. The caveat was that my subconscious stopped making any effort, and I had to really consciously make things happen in the dream. Turns out I wasn't very creative in that state, and my lucid dreams went stale really fast. I'm glad it's over now.
I'm curious what you consider to be the bad consequences of recalling your dreams? I remember at least one dream every night and enjoy going back over any of them.
I especially like that I can identify a dream as the cause if I wake up in a weird mood. I worry that if I didn't have this recall, I might wake up just being vaguely pissed at my husband (because he was being a jerk in a dream).
But lucid dreamers can often control the nightmares. I can anyway; if I don’t like the dream, I just change it a bit. I enjoy nightmares usually though, but probably because I know I can change them or wake up at will.
I have a similar story to the comment you're replying to and remember most, if not all, of my dreams each night -- which are almost entirely vivid nightmares I'd prefer not to remember. Lucid dreaming is a skill that can help (waking up or taking control when you recognize a nightmare is a dream), but IME it's high-effort enough to maintain the skill that I now just try to sleep as little as I can instead.
I did the same thing in college and learned fairly quickly that I don't really care to remember all of my dreams. Nights where I remember all of my dreams don't feel restful and are sort of disorienting.
It's hard to describe exactly what was so unpleasant about it for me, but there's some element of time perception involved...it was as though my memories of dreams were encoded on the same track as my waking memories, and my days were missing the "pause between songs" so to speak.
Thankfully, at least for me, this is an effect that goes away quickly after I stop keeping a dream journal. I have had a similar effect when stressed/overworked, though, where I start dreaming in code. That's terrible.
The "unrestful" part, I am familiar with it from my chess dreams. Sometime I would dream of a position on a chessboard and of course have to think about what the best move is. Threads are everywhere. It takes time to figure out the move. When I finally have the move, the board grows and suddenly there might be a bishop somewhere far away on that grown board destroying all my "best move" plans. The cycle starts anew.
After such a dream, when I wake up, I really feel like "damn, I should have found the best move and shown them!" but also like my brain is burned out from thinking so much and visualizing so much in my mind. Not restful.
But fortunately I have better dreams as well and sometimes, when I feel lonely, my brain turns on self-healing mode or something and I dream of someone I love. I will gladly take all the exhausting dreams, to keep the good ones.
The "dreaming in code" thing is just awful. The worst sleeps I've ever had were filled with a tormenting "problem" to "solve" which was just pure absurd abstract theorizing, attempting to fit bits and pieces together that had no tangible relation to a real world problem.
Like you, this has always happened to me when I have been stressed and overworked, usually if I've spent a whole day rushing to get something completed that is a little difficult and I haven't appropriately broken down a problem into manageable chunks.
I assume they meant aphantasia. As far as I know, there's no evidence that people with aphantasia cannot dream, however. Anecdotally, I believe I have aphantasia and I very rarely remember any of my dreams, but it does happen.
I dream every night. Been that way since I was 14. And I have bipolar disorder. Guitarist, vocalist, published photographer, writer among other things. But the creativity also bled into my technical work.
I also have Closed Eye Hallucinations, which means that at night mostly when I close my eyes the light patterns turn into physical images. For a long time they were tortured faces but I see lots of things; trees, mountains, people... So my psychiatrist thoughts on this was that the brain creativity creates these images out of patterns from the light and dark when you close your eyes.
I recently got the book Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams: A Guide to Awakening Consciousness During Dream Sleep by Charles McPhee, but it sounded a little scary and full-on! So I haven't tried its techniques yet. Anyone here done that?
I'm sure I would've tried it in my 20s, when I was experimenting with everything e.g. once I did a mantra for 2 weeks non-stop.
I had Ann Faraday's The Dream Game, the only really good book on interpreting dreams I've seen. One of its techniques is to treat all the parts of a dream as characters, and talk with them, ask them questions, or put them in dialogue with each other.
I had a dream diary, where I'd write down every dream I remembered. After a while doing that, I'd remember them almost every night. But then I'd write them down, then wake up and realize I only dreamt writing them down. So I'd have to write them down again. I had to stop when every day I'd have to write them down 4 times! Write them down, wake up, realize I only dreamt it, write them down again, wake up, realize I'd only dreamt that, write them down yet again, wake up etc. Too much.
Also I tried sandplay, a kind of psychological therapy, which was absolutely amazing, and seems very similar to getting the parts of a dream talking. The therapist (or whatever they call themselves. Mine was a new-agey author/guru type, but there was nothing new agey about what he said in the sandplay room) has a room with a sandbox in the middle, and shelves full of hundreds of objects, toys, figurines, etc of all kinds around the walls. You walk around the room, selecting whatever object you feel drawn to, and put it in the sand. With as little thinking about it as possible. Then when you feel like stopping, stop. (I kept putting more things in, dozens, until he asked me to stop, and regrettably we only got to talk about a few of them.) Then they ask you to talk about each thing in the sand, what they mean, what one is doing next to another one etc. The answers just pour out, and it's like being able to see inside your head. I found it absolutely incredible, highly recommend! It's fun, painless, you can do it any time... and suddenly the insights/revelations usually locked away and only accessible from dreams/hallucinogens/psychological work, are freely available, gushing out.
My wife creates illustrations fairly consistently and she has uncanny dream recall. Like, sometimes it takes 5-10 minutes for her to tell me the complete dream. She has a strong memory in general which at times is very inconvenient because she can accurately remember all my goof-ups...
I dictated by dreams into a microcasette for 4 weeks straight. I noped out at the end as the dreams became more lucid, almost out of body. 30 yrs later I still remember some of the dreams. I should like to try it again now that my work utilizes my creative strengths.
I never remember my dreams, to the point that I am not convinced I actually have dreams. I sleep well, wake up refreshed most mornings, but have no recollection of having dreamt. Probably all the caffeine...
By now I'm pretty sure that during a large period of my life I almost didn't dream. I dreamt perhaps once a month, and usually in clusters of a few days. Nowadays, I dream very often, almost every night. I also wake up more often during the night. Unless my brain rewired significantly, I think the conclusion that I simply didn't dream back then is quite likely.
I also don't remember my dreams at all. This is the way it's supposed to be for us.
If you remember your dream it means you were woken up in the middle of it. Something is disrupting your sleep whether it's the brain itself or something else. The waking up in the middle of the night thing could be sleep apnea.
For people like us we're not suppose to remember dreams. But if we do, it means our sleep was disrupted.
I learned to lucid dream as a teenager - it was incredible for resolving internal conflict and doing emotional work (everything in a dream is a reflection of the mind). Since then I’ve used it to solve both rock climbing problems and software problems. The basis of lucid dreaming is dream recall and a healthy skepticism about the permanence or validity of “reality.” It sounds like a difficult skill to develop but anyone who tries makes surprisingly quick progress, with quick gains in dream recall.
For resources I recommend Andrew Holocek’s books (amazing, drawing upon Tibetan Buddhist techniques) plus the app I made for lucid dreaming shapedream.co (I’ll happily give anyone free access to its tools and guides - just write me).
This was my experience too. Although it’s been 5+ years since I actively tried to lucid dream, I still have nearly the same level of dream recall and average 1-2 accidental lucid dreams per month.
The app looks wonderful! It might be the perfect excuse for me to get back into it. I’d love to maybe discuss some of your recommended reads—I’ll drop you a note.
Personally, I expanded on this to enter a dream state at will in quiet, comfortable circumstances. I find it fun to run my own mental holodeck.
I dropped regular lucid dreaming once I gained this ability and focused on improving “dreaming” at will.
Interestingly, I haven’t had any lucid dreaming since starting antipsychotic medication. Hasn’t affected entering states at will. If anything, it’s made it easier because I have much clearer cognition and the difference reality and imagination is more well-defined.
How did the researchers make sure that the participants were recalling the dreams they actually had? I understand the brain scan activity, but how could they tell that the actual subjective experience of the dreams was being accurately remembered?
I was gonna comment about this. ZMA really seems to have an impact on how vivid my dreams are. When I forget to order another bottle my dreams are far less interesting.
It's quite odd. It makes me think about how heavily our experience of life is impacted by our chemistry.
Yeah I like it even though the science says it’s bunk. I feel more well-rested. I tried the constituent minerals separately but the effect wasn’t the same. Either a placebo or the dosage/formulation in ZMA has a unique effect.
>ZMA really seems to have an impact on how vivid my dreams are.
I notice this with zinc/magnesium/calcium. Having taken it every night since adolescence, it's pretty much a requirement for good sleep. Without, REM city. Granted, less calcium and more magnesium these days.
>It's quite odd. It makes me think about how heavily our experience of life is impacted by our chemistry.
Agreed. There's probably a good argument to be had that developing a supplement dependence for sleep has likely affected the course of my life, for better or worse. Probably worse, but who knows.
As an aside, be careful with B6 supplementation; it can accumulate, causing adverse CNS effects.
Thanks for the heads up on the B6, I’ll have to do some research on that. The ZMA pills are convenient, but it wouldn’t be much more effort to just take some zinc and magnesium separately.
I have strong personal anecdotal evidence that dreaming and creativity are interconnected. I began dream journaling a few years back, recording descriptions of my dreams along with sketches and drawings. These sketches and notes often led to inspiration in my painting and drawing practice. Doing this also actually increased the lucidity and frequency of memorable dreams I was having in a kind of feedback loop. I have talked about this with other people who have tried dream journaling and it seems to be a common phenomenon.
179 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadI have tons of vivid dreams that I can usually remember. I am fairly creative, although many would probably us the adjectives 'weird' or 'smart-ass'.
I wrote a very crappy web app for this back in 2012: http://keepdream.me/. It emails me every morning to ask what I dreamed and records my reply. There must be better alternatives now.
What's really interesting is that these "dream movies" always have a half-decent plot. IMO a lot of movie plots are really bad and stick to typical tropes and lessons. My dreams don't stick to these tropes and have actual twists, lessons, etc. Like if they were a real movie I might actually watch it.
For example one of them followed a rebellion against an oligarchy, but it never stuck to any main character. First we're introduced to someone, then eventually new people are introduced, and then eventually the original character dies but we just continue the story focusing on the new people, then even more people are added and they die and so on. So it's a bit more realistic and nobody gets plot armor.
Idk how creative I am, I usually identify as someone whose more left-brain.
I have that too, surprisingly complex plots. I suspect it's because of what we consume - movies, culture, politics, etc.
i wake up with a feeling that what i heard was the most wonderful music ever, yet in reality hardly remember it
i remember my dreams in full details, like the stage, lightning, color, cast, interactions, dialogs, etc.
but mostly only small part of the whole story
music i often hear either when i fall into sleep or wake up, but also when i play it in the dream like a guitar
also i dream of pseudo-code
yeah, sometimes i wish there was a way to screen-capture my dream, because some of them would make amazing blockbusters (like some dystopian lost worlds)
A weird realization for me is all the events in the dream were produced by me. Yet in real life I'm useless in front of a piano, or a paint brush. It would be great if there was a way to tap into that creativity once awake.
i too hear the best music in the world in my dreams
yet after i wake up i forget it instantly
the only thing i remember then is the fact that i heard it, just not exactly what
Imagination and technical skill (that is, how well you use a piano or paint brush) are orthogonal domains. The way to tap into your imagination is to develop your technical skill to the level where you're capable of translating what you imagine to the physical motions necessary to convey it on canvas.
I don't know if it's particularly creative to dream with a sound track just as I don't know if it's particularly creative to dream in black and white. But your brain is definitely influenced by cinema.
It's a huge problem. I have watched very little American media produced in the last decade because of this. Whenever some coworker talks about how great this new show is, I'll watch it and cringe. It's 90% an A-plot B-plot following the same tired template. Then 10% of it is doing some form of virtue signaling, grievance agitation or other propaganda technique to rile the plebs. I can only imagine people who watch it are desperate for any sort of escape from reality.
Outside the US, at least other countries play with different storytelling techniques. France with their 85 plots in a single story and Korea with their strong single plot driven by the main character's emotion. Plus, thankfully Japan's entertainment industry is going strong by having the different mangas compete with each other until the most interesting stories get adapted into an anime.
That's not really true, it's usually the most popular as it's a money issue. Pick randomly a few seasonals and you'll find that most of them are not that good.
Otherwise unknown artists can and often do make a name for themselves by telling a good story, and their story gets boosted by a functioning entertainment industry.
Contrast that to America's entertainment industry. A filthy and incestuous cabal of people decide what does and doesn't make it. Ideological zealotry required to step foot at the gates. Serial rapists as the gatekeepers using their power to take advantage of others.
You can even see it in social media, you can make out the common tropes shaped by the society/culture/subculture/mainstream media and while original thoughts and non-us/them|black/white comments are there, they get downvoted. Which is pretty sad. All the while, everyone thinks they're right and better than everyone else.
Japan's entertainment is not that different imo, most of it uses the same tropes, maybe with a small difference (that they later forget about). But yeah, some actually original content shows up more often.
(Maybe I'd been watching a lot of movies or TV shows at the time, not very immersed, and some of that audience mode was just getting tickled by the GC cycle?)
for example if the setting is in school, my classmates would react to me as they would in real life
Nevertheless, taking advantage of the increased visibility into one's dreams for the sake of analysis is at least fun.
Have others noticed this?
Did they also score well on the Torrance tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrance_Tests_of_Creative_Thi... , based on Guildford but...
I read an article once where Robert Frost took a creativity test and scored extremely low (based on seeing images in Rorschach inkblots) and remarked afterwards that creativity was not about seeing the images but in training oneself to ignore the non-essential images (paraphrasing, have never been able to find this via google - supposedly this happened while Frost was Poet Laureate.)
Also the following points seem relevant:
1. ability to remember dreams is at least partially based on being woken up during them or shortly afterwards, this is why you can generally only remember the last dream you had.
2. A good nights sleep is often described as being central to high intelligence.
3. What is the relation between high creativity and high intelligence? Which brings me back to the question of how accurate the tests are, given that there generally agreed on foundational problems with all IQ testing methods (that I'm familiar with)
finally then, if it is true, the thing to help creativity would be to remember your dreams: https://www.wikihow.com/Remember-Dreams
When asked "Which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?", psychologist Donald Hebb famously replied "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?" [1]
I'm no psychologist, but I'd imagine you'd find the relation between creativity and intelligence in the same context is similarly orthoganal.
1. Meaney M. The nature of nurture: maternal effects and chromatin remodelling. In: Cacioppo JT, Berntson GG. (eds) Essays in social neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, pp. 1–14.
This connection between dreaming and writing is of great interest to me. I am somewhat surprised that my most compelling writing was not inspired directly by any dream that I remember. The phenomenon of the one and the other are that similar. A kind of background hallucination can be intuited when writing fiction. In my experience, these hallucinations indicate that the writing has attained a degree of formal completion. I observe the characters of my story as though they were made of clay and also diminutive. Why clay? I am unsure, but I think it has to do with this clay’s yielding but inelastic quality.
Is there any links to The Brain Network and neurogenesis?
https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/adult-n...
"Logical fact".
I missed this bit in your argument. Presumably, you assert that the mind's modalities consist of a 'rational' state of consciousness and a dream state mode where the content matter is "random". It is true that the mind, unfettered by the necessity to navigate in real-time a physical reality, is no longer constrained by either physics or causality. This then results in content matter that can seem random (as narratives) but to deprive them of meaning does not follow.
As the saying goes, YMMV. /gThe bible is trying to communicate, but it is not a factual piece.
That does not map to my experiences with dreams and their content. But then, I -- my conscious self -- do not take an adversarial position regarding my inner Self. I benefit from reflecting on my dreams, otherwise I wouldn't waste my time. Integrating unconscious psychological content of my mind has always been a positive event, and promotes psychological health, stability, maturity, and (believe it or not) insights.
YMMV.
So my claim is all the benefits are created by your conscious self, but you perceive it to be from the dream. Similar to how religion helps people. Both are fiction.
The burden of proof is always on the person assigning meaning to something. Why? because from a probability standpoint, no meaning is more likely. So the person claiming dreams have meaning must prove why their claim is real despite the low probability.
Why is meaning low probability? Because much more things in the universe have no meaning then have meaning.
For example, greek mythology. I know nothing of it. Yet I can make the claim that it is false and have a higher probability of being right then the person who claims greek mythology is real and has meaning and knows everything about it.
The majority of "meaning" is "found" the same way a christian "finds" meaning in the bible. It is common human behavior. By making a claim that someone has found meaning in some random thing this way, I am making a high probability claim because of the fact the behavior is so common.
I've found a couple of 000 capsules filled with lecithin 30mins before bed is best.
A none supplemental alternative is water fasting but thats something that cant be done all the time.
Choline please a role in the Transulfuration pathway, as does B6 By stimulating the CBS enzyme.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fels-jbs-p...
When I learned about lucid dreaming in my 20s, I spent an inordinate amount of time (every day for years) developing the skill, including journaling — in as much detail as possible — my dream as soon as I woke up. Unfortunately, I cannot turn off the ability now and now have to deal with the consequence of recalling all my dreams: good and bad.
I especially like that I can identify a dream as the cause if I wake up in a weird mood. I worry that if I didn't have this recall, I might wake up just being vaguely pissed at my husband (because he was being a jerk in a dream).
It's hard to describe exactly what was so unpleasant about it for me, but there's some element of time perception involved...it was as though my memories of dreams were encoded on the same track as my waking memories, and my days were missing the "pause between songs" so to speak.
Thankfully, at least for me, this is an effect that goes away quickly after I stop keeping a dream journal. I have had a similar effect when stressed/overworked, though, where I start dreaming in code. That's terrible.
After such a dream, when I wake up, I really feel like "damn, I should have found the best move and shown them!" but also like my brain is burned out from thinking so much and visualizing so much in my mind. Not restful.
But fortunately I have better dreams as well and sometimes, when I feel lonely, my brain turns on self-healing mode or something and I dream of someone I love. I will gladly take all the exhausting dreams, to keep the good ones.
Like you, this has always happened to me when I have been stressed and overworked, usually if I've spent a whole day rushing to get something completed that is a little difficult and I haven't appropriately broken down a problem into manageable chunks.
I also have Closed Eye Hallucinations, which means that at night mostly when I close my eyes the light patterns turn into physical images. For a long time they were tortured faces but I see lots of things; trees, mountains, people... So my psychiatrist thoughts on this was that the brain creativity creates these images out of patterns from the light and dark when you close your eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj9z510COyg
I'm sure I would've tried it in my 20s, when I was experimenting with everything e.g. once I did a mantra for 2 weeks non-stop.
I had Ann Faraday's The Dream Game, the only really good book on interpreting dreams I've seen. One of its techniques is to treat all the parts of a dream as characters, and talk with them, ask them questions, or put them in dialogue with each other.
I had a dream diary, where I'd write down every dream I remembered. After a while doing that, I'd remember them almost every night. But then I'd write them down, then wake up and realize I only dreamt writing them down. So I'd have to write them down again. I had to stop when every day I'd have to write them down 4 times! Write them down, wake up, realize I only dreamt it, write them down again, wake up, realize I'd only dreamt that, write them down yet again, wake up etc. Too much.
Also I tried sandplay, a kind of psychological therapy, which was absolutely amazing, and seems very similar to getting the parts of a dream talking. The therapist (or whatever they call themselves. Mine was a new-agey author/guru type, but there was nothing new agey about what he said in the sandplay room) has a room with a sandbox in the middle, and shelves full of hundreds of objects, toys, figurines, etc of all kinds around the walls. You walk around the room, selecting whatever object you feel drawn to, and put it in the sand. With as little thinking about it as possible. Then when you feel like stopping, stop. (I kept putting more things in, dozens, until he asked me to stop, and regrettably we only got to talk about a few of them.) Then they ask you to talk about each thing in the sand, what they mean, what one is doing next to another one etc. The answers just pour out, and it's like being able to see inside your head. I found it absolutely incredible, highly recommend! It's fun, painless, you can do it any time... and suddenly the insights/revelations usually locked away and only accessible from dreams/hallucinogens/psychological work, are freely available, gushing out.
I also don't remember my dreams at all. This is the way it's supposed to be for us.
If you remember your dream it means you were woken up in the middle of it. Something is disrupting your sleep whether it's the brain itself or something else. The waking up in the middle of the night thing could be sleep apnea.
For people like us we're not suppose to remember dreams. But if we do, it means our sleep was disrupted.
REM is not the definition of dreaming.
But when I do remember, it generally means it wasn't a good sleep
For resources I recommend Andrew Holocek’s books (amazing, drawing upon Tibetan Buddhist techniques) plus the app I made for lucid dreaming shapedream.co (I’ll happily give anyone free access to its tools and guides - just write me).
The app looks wonderful! It might be the perfect excuse for me to get back into it. I’d love to maybe discuss some of your recommended reads—I’ll drop you a note.
I dropped regular lucid dreaming once I gained this ability and focused on improving “dreaming” at will.
Interestingly, I haven’t had any lucid dreaming since starting antipsychotic medication. Hasn’t affected entering states at will. If anything, it’s made it easier because I have much clearer cognition and the difference reality and imagination is more well-defined.
The body and mind is fascinating. :)
from rats with electrodes to brain imaging tech
It's quite odd. It makes me think about how heavily our experience of life is impacted by our chemistry.
I notice this with zinc/magnesium/calcium. Having taken it every night since adolescence, it's pretty much a requirement for good sleep. Without, REM city. Granted, less calcium and more magnesium these days.
>It's quite odd. It makes me think about how heavily our experience of life is impacted by our chemistry.
Agreed. There's probably a good argument to be had that developing a supplement dependence for sleep has likely affected the course of my life, for better or worse. Probably worse, but who knows.
As an aside, be careful with B6 supplementation; it can accumulate, causing adverse CNS effects.