Dreaming.
Dreaming is weird. Some funny things about dreams. Television and video games seem to have interesting influences on dreaming. Older people that grew up with black and white televisions are way more likely to dream exclusively in black and white than people that grew up with coloured tvs, Video gamers learn lucid dreaming more easily than non-gamers, and exhibit greater levels of control over their dreams than non-gaming lucid dreamers.
The neuropathways that are active during waking activities become active during the same activities while asleep, and some studies indicate that while dreaming about activities, one's performance in those activities improves while awake, so that dream practicing hours count towards practicing hours, strengthening the neuropathways involved with the activity.
This raises interesting questions to me, like how fiction influences the formation of dreams. How different were dreams before the advent of film, and television? How influential was art, and period styles? Were dreams largely narrative? Do any other activities aid to one's lucid dreaming proficiency than video games? Where their ancient analogues?
Since the body becomes active, and the neuropathways become active involved with bodily movements, but the body doesn't move simply because of paralysis, could one become a gymnast, or martial artist by studying technique while awake, but only physically practicing it while asleep? Hmmm.... hmmm...
The neuropathways that are active during waking activities become active during the same activities while asleep, and some studies indicate that while dreaming about activities, one's performance in those activities improves while awake, so that dream practicing hours count towards practicing hours, strengthening the neuropathways involved with the activity.
This raises interesting questions to me, like how fiction influences the formation of dreams. How different were dreams before the advent of film, and television? How influential was art, and period styles? Were dreams largely narrative? Do any other activities aid to one's lucid dreaming proficiency than video games? Where their ancient analogues?
Since the body becomes active, and the neuropathways become active involved with bodily movements, but the body doesn't move simply because of paralysis, could one become a gymnast, or martial artist by studying technique while awake, but only physically practicing it while asleep? Hmmm.... hmmm...
Comments (40)
Dreams can be shaped and one's memory of dreams is improvable. Analysands--persons undergoing psychoanalysis--can greatly improve their dream recall.
The reason why one couldn't become a gymnast by sleep-practice is that one must learn real-world lessons about momentum, gravity, capacity, and so forth. Imagining that one will land in a certain way isn't the same as actually feeling one's body striking the mat and "sticking". That said, it seems to be true that mental practice can help improve real-world performance. Baseball pitchers who mentally practice techniques seem to improve real world performance. People who are nervous speaking before groups can reduce anxiety by imagining themselves giving a relaxed, competent presentation. Such exercises aren't silver bullets -- stage fright dogs some performers their whole lives. Thorough preparation helps. If you aren't quite sure of how the song goes, you have good reason to be nervous.
The contents is all I too considered before, but I hadn't considered the forms they take, or their characteristics, until I read about the influences of video games and tv on this.
If one could accomplish physical maneuvers in their dreams that they couldn't in real life, then this at the very least man facilitate their accomplishment in RL. As the muscles, and body movements involved with the activity may only be able to be, at first, facilitated in dream, which actually in real life activates those muscles, and trains the neuropathways in this respect. I agree that it may be a stretch to think that one could learn it all in their sleep, and then wake up from a coma with master gynmast skills, but I could see how it may be helpful joined with real life practice.
Dream time seems to enable our memory to consolidate what it has experienced during the day.
If our experience of fiction, film or TV take an active role in our life, then a rehearsal of these experiences would not be surprising.
Happy B-Day BC!
Sometimes a candle is just a candle... but most of the time it's a dick.
1) Dreams as changing in form according to sociocultural/historical context.
2) Dreams as a kind of virtual gym.
Both very interesting. My dreams vary a lot in terms of lucidity, realism, coherence and so on. And though I dream in color images and sound, others seem to be more limited. So, looks like there's a huge variation in contemporary dreamers' experiences maybe not leaving much more room for historical variation. But I don't know. I'd like to hear more on that. As a kind of aside, when I was younger, I was entranced by books that claimed they could teach you to lucid dream and do all kinds of amazing stuff on your night-time adventures. But now I reckon they were just in for a quick buck. Maybe I was wrong though and this leads on to the virtual gym idea. If you could control your dreams well enough for long enough maybe you could get similar effects to those that visualizations have been shown to produce on physical performance. Any dream ninjas here want to share their secrets?
Quoting Monitor
I would. Is there another way to define it?
As for lucid dreaming, I have realized that I was dreaming in a dream before, but then I forgot about it right away. It would be cool to be able to lucid dream though, but I'm of the opinion that nothing can be taught, only learned, and people learn things because they're interested, look for the information, correlate, interpret, and incorporate information into their learning process, and become skilled at things in this way. So that if someone is a good lucid dreamer, They began with a talent for it, I think, and what worked for someone else may not work for you, and vice versa.
I didn't mean to limit the idea to physical disciplines, line a gym, I just thought I'd mention those for their physical components. I imagine that learning a new language, solving math problems, or whatever it is that you're doing and interested in would be the same.
No probably not. But If it were associated with a physical process then it's function would be to in some way help maintain some balance or equilibrium. As a mental event could it have a function other than dream practice? Do dreams help reinforce what we believe about ourselves? We can certainly project meaning on our dreams but not much and not reliably. Random white noise visuals that on occasion yield something we can use?
I'm not sure it makes sense to say one has become a gymnast or martial artist if the practice is only done while asleep. We would be reluctant to refer to a person as skilled in a discipline without a demonstration of the skill. There are also variables in dreams that would hinder a direct translation from dream practice to non-dream practice ([i]e.g.[/I], gravity and the limits of one's muscles moving through space). If the dream world could be controlled to perfectly mimic non-dream practice, there might be a possibility of mastery through dream practice alone, but absent that I would say dreaming only makes improvements on skills already developed by real-world practice.
Dreams provide me with characterizations/personifications of my emotional life with which my dream self can interact. And I find that interaction often cathartic as well as informative. So much more than random white noise. I guess it's a matter of coming up with plausible narratives that seem to go beyond just faces in clouds.
But the dreams and the dream self are from the same source. If it's cathartic, is this providing the same function as your body sweating to regulate your temperature?
If I say it's "me" that does all this, I'm left with a concept of "me" that in these instances is purely unconscious, and that seems odd. Returning to dreams; when I dream and things get uncomfortable, I can wake myself up from within the dream. But is that my dream self waking me up or my "real" self? And how do they differ? The character of the brain that is in charge during sleep, the sleeping self, is just very difficult to pin down, and my tendency is to think of the self in general as something that cannot be clearly demarcated anyway.
Huh? That's not right. The 'dicks' is probably tongue-and-cheek (ba dum ch'), but it still reflects a misunderstanding to consider Freud's concern with dreams as only with their contents. While the distinction between the manifest image of the dream and the 'latent dream-thoughts' is important to their interpretation, he makes it clear that he is concerned with their particular form, and the fundamental question as to the essence of dreams is why they take this form and not any other. He is everywhere interested in the particular form of thinking that is involved in dreaming and the unconscious, including analysing why dreams become distorted for example (i.e., that there is a repressing/censoring function that inhibits repressed thoughts and drives from appearing too explicitly in the manifest image). But the main thing that he is concerned with in this regard is 'the dream-work':
The point of the book is to argue the thesis that dreams are interpretable as coded wish-fulfilment, not necessarily exposing a supposed latent sexual content behind all psychical phenomena. After all, many of his case examples do not involve sexual interpretations at all (including the famous 'Irma's injection'). Whatever you're dealing with in real life that is particularly traumatic for you to confront directly, and so repressed, will be expressed in the unconscious and in dreams where it is bound-up in a free-associative manner with other suppressed instincts like sexuality. While he thinks that a majority of dreams of adults deal with sexual latent contents, I don't think he believes that this is because the essence of dreams involves sexuality necessarily, but because the sexual instinct is the most suppressed of instincts (and arguably one of the most powerful at the same time). This leaves powerful unconscious wishes of a sexual nature to be fulfilled in dreams, according to Freud.
Thus, it seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong here, that Freud's emphasis on sexuality is due to the particular contextual nature of the society in which he finds himself, which abjects and represses sexuality, leaving no socially-acceptable public means for its expression. You may disagree with Freud on all of this (and I don't necessarily agree with him on everything), but let's at least get him clear before we shoot the gun.
Quoting Baden
While the scientific research on dreams mainly supporting the hypothesis that dreams are 'running through the day's activities' may be getting at a particular feature of dreams, I feel that this is only scratching the surface and belies a more fundamental question as to the phenomenological essence of dreaming, whatever that may be. What I mean by this is that it leaves the analysis of dreams wanting in a similar way that Heidegger finds the ontic questions posed in empirical sciences of anthropology and psychology wanting with regards to an ontological analysis of human (qua Dasein) modality.
What's more, is that my experience of dreams defeats these hypotheses. While obviously dream-contents derive from experience, I almost never dream about 'the day's events', and I rarely dream about some future prospect, say, exercising it as a 'test run' in a virtual gym.
You misunderstand what I mean by form, and characteristics. I don't recall him talking about sensory modalities, chronology, spacial, or physical characteristics. Talking about the form as in what particular symbols, and the forms they take in essence stand for, is talking about the content, and not the form in the sense that I mean in.
You definitely read too much into my quip about dreams all being about dicks, although I do think that dreams are not nearly as libidinally charged as Freud thought that they were, that his Platonic symbolic essentialism was malarkey, and there is no such thing as the unconscious, preconscious, or any of that.
Not that relevant, it was a passing comment, I probably misunderstood the whole book, and don't know anything about him, don't really care to discuss it in any case.
"Running through the day's activities" is poor phrasing. It makes it sound like some kind of playback mechanism. So, if that's the way the researchers you've read are putting it, they're putting it badly. I see it more as a processing of excess/latent/repressed emotional energy. The result doesn't have to look like the day's events at all. But it's often easy - for me at least - to link the nature of my dreams to events of emotional salience occurring during the day. There's a kind of symbolic grammar to dreams that's satisfying to untangle.
Quoting Shevek
As per the above, if by "dreaming about the days events", you mean having these events replay in your dreams, that wouldn't be surprising. But it is likely your dreams are based on the emotional impact of those events.
Quoting Shevek
We do need more philosophy of dreams, and of the imagination for that matter.
There's different kinds of dreams, mostly we focus on REM dreaming, because it's more interesting, but non-REM dreaming is way better described as recounting the days events -- but in REM dreams we can meet new people, the laws of physics don't apply, and we have a deja vu sense of familiarity with people and things, even though they're quite unfamiliar in how they're composed, situated, or how continuous they are throughout the dream.
Dealing with latent emotional content is far more persuasive of a suggestion than memory facilitation for REM dreaming, whereas non-REM dreaming seems to fall more in line with ideas of memory facilitation.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC534695/
That's a study that attempts to link memory consolidation to dreaming, and goes into the distinction. They also though, I think importantly, don't claim that dreams are all about memory consolidation, more than involve it. It also seems to endorse the position that there are mental contents during all stages of sleep, but REM is the one where brain states are closest to being awake, and recollection is highest. Also suggesting that based on reports, NREM sleep has more episodic content, about time, place, events and things, whereas REM has more to do with semantic, or symbolic content, which is rarely about actual things that have happened to us.
I don't recall him focusing specifically on spacial or physical characteristics as a part of "form" either. But I suspect Freud would consider those aspects a part of the "manifest content" of the dream. What he considers the form of a dream is its ''dreamwork'', or the particular logic, composition, and ordering of specific images and thoughts. For example, he considers why dreams appear distorted, "condensation", or how seemingly disparate images and thoughts are combined into one, and ''displacement", or how the dream redirects subconscious thoughts or desires into seemingly unrelated contents.
Quoting Wosret
I don't think they are as libidinally charged as he argues either, but that might come down to the particular repressions of an individual and society. Freud's social context was much more prudish. But I don't think you need to be committed to a 'pansexualism' to gather valuable ideas from Freud. Unfortunately, I think references to this are often used in unfair dismissals of Freud.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'Platonic symbolic essentialism'.
Quoting Baden
Fair enough. I agree that it's poor phrasing, and maybe I'm getting it from pop psych characterizations of the research. I'm by no means well-versed in this type of research, but I wonder how the processing of 'excess/latent/repressed emotional energy' could be formulated in the framework of empirical psychology to be tested.
I finally remember some of a couple that I've had in the last few days. The first one, I was walking in like a nice downtown like area, though nowhere I remember being, and everyone was dressed fancy, like nice dresses and suits. They also seemed very tall, like I was at a lower perspective for some reason, though I never saw myself. I remember two women walking pasted some fancy dude like gesturing, almost like directing traffic, but was on the side walk, and one of the women's shoulders started to like like nervously move around weirdly. I then went and walked off into like the woods, and went down this path, and a women with like winter hiking gear was coming up past me, but then I got down into the path, and it was like a wall of dirt, so I turned to go back the way I came, and it was far too steep to go back somehow now. I then noticed that it was like a square hole, that looked like the walls were compressed or compacted, like from a garbage compactor, and I thought "well that ain't, good, I don't want to stick around to find out what's doing that, better wake up", and then I woke up. It wasn't like a lucid dream or something, like I knew the whole time it was a dream, or even got the impression of reasoning, or anything. I just thought that and woke up.
Then last night, I had this dream where I was living in the woods type deal with my older brother and sister, and I remember walking home, and then arguing with them about money, like we had sold something, and split it, but no one was happy, and then I had to go to work, and I thought, and said that I had hate being stuck at a job all day for hours without being able to leave. I then woke up.
I wonder if that last thing I said in my dream is true. I have a new job now, stocking shelves at a department store at night, but I don't think that I don't like going or being stuck there. I wonder why I said that.
I wonder if dreams tell you things that you don't know, or mean anything, or if they're just random? Maybe it doesn't mean precisely that, but something else. Maybe like normal I was the only one even working in my dream house with brother and sister like usual, and I was just overstating the difficulty, or undesirability of it. I feel like that is something I do. Like I actually like cleaning up, and doing house work, but I also sometimes feel that it's unfair, and wrong that I always do it, but then I don't really dislike it either. I dunno...
I saw meteorites flying through the air and on one rock were the letters S.B.H.A
After I woke up I googled it and lo and behold S.B.H is an acronym for Super Massive Black Hole and coincidentally there's one at Saggitarius A in the milky way, which according to reports is swallowing up asteroids.:P
What do you think it meant? Did it have any significance you think?
I don't know. I hope it doesn't mean anything bad though. I just don't know...
I too was fascinated with lucid dreaming in my youth. I would practice reality checking by holding my nose with my mouth shut and see if I could still breathe (if done in a dream you realize that you can still breath and initiate a lucid dream). Another method is to check your watch twice within a dream. If the numbers are different every time you are also dreaming, indicating that causality is altered in the dream also. There are also methods to increase your ability to remember dream by keeping a dream journal.
I kind of grew out of my fascination with lucid dreaming and just enjoy my dreams as they are without interference. I also read that if you practice weight lifting during a dream your muscles worked on in the dream will actually grow.
Anyhow, dreams are a glimpse into the soul, which I nowadays ponder about during the day.
I might start keeping a dream journal. I normally almost never remember my dreams, and even when I do it's only a few bits. I'd like to increase my recollection.
I realize that I'm trying to overcome the sleep paralysis that keeps my lids closed and there is intense effort and strain to open my eyes but I can't. Meanwhile in the dream I'm usually driving, both memorable accounts being a motorcycle and a limo with something like Gweneth Paltrow and Tom Hanks in the back seat (I saw them even though I couldn't open my eyes). I actually think I'm getting real visual data that is interfering what I see in the dream (blurrrr).
The other is hovering by tilting forward. It's like flying or floating but my toes nearly drag on the ground.
My little brother once told me that he dreamed that Nicolas Cage was frying left over potatoes in the kitchen.