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What The Hell Are Dreams?

I can lucid dream (though it takes a ridiculous amount of effort.)

My son lucid dreams a couple of times a week.

He likes to take charge of his dream and do whatever he pleases.

I like to be aware and let the dream play out.

It's only recently that I've realised how AMAZING this is! - I can be fully aware in a detailed dreasmscape, populated by other characters who I have no idea what they will say or do or what might happen next.

I have no idea what dreams are for, but I know my brain is capable of something incredible. :)
I can Lucid dream to but wonder what's the next step ?
 
Lucid dreams are fascinating. I have only had a handful. I always have very vivid dreams, but I find true lucid dreams (dreams in which I know I am dreaming and can direct what is happening) are almost as rare as unicorns. They never last very long and only happen shortly before I wake up. On the few occasions I've had a lucid dream, waking out of it leaves me feeling disappointed that I couldn't sustain it for more than (what feels to me like) a few minutes. I envy people who have lucid dreams which they are able to sustain. It must be great!
 
My dreams are occasionally consistent from dream to dream, which I find interesting. For example I have a ‘dream London.’ It’s got tube stations and the British Museum and the Thames and Foyles bookshop and so on, but they are not arranged on the ground in the same way that they exist in real life, the geography is all wrong. Yet when I next dream I am in London, everything will be arranged consistently with my previous dream.
For a long time I had dreams which contained the same 'dream house'. Nothing spooky or weird about the house, except it wasn't anything like any house I'd ever lived in.
 
Anyone else ever have the feeling that someone else is living the life you were supposed to have, in a parallel dimension?
Yes. In fact I've sometimes dreamed that life, and had real difficulty in the moments after waking convincing myself this is the true reality, not the dream I was just in. And yet half an hour later I'll have forgotten pretty much everything about the dream except that I had it.
 
Some dreams may be telling the dreamer something they may need to know, some may be premonitory, some may be telepathic - but nowadays I struggle to believe that the vast majority of our dreams are anything more than us just stirring the slop-buckets of our daily lives. That's a disappointing conclusion to draw - it would be nice to believe that our nights are spent more productively than that - but there we are.

I really like the line that a poster above came out with, about our dreams being `thoughts with the brakes off`.

I dream every night and my dreams are extremely intricate and incredibly involved and usually suffused with an atmosphere of anxiety (although I always feel sad as I exit them). It's a good morning if I can recall as much as 25 per cent of them these days. I am just left to feel staggered as to where all this material has come from.

I never ever get nightmares. (We have a thread on this issue: https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/nightmares-who-gets-them-and-why.66136/)

The nature of my dreams seems to have changed as I have become older. There was a time when every so often I would have a striking dream, full of clear symbolism, which begged to be remembered and analysed. Accordingly, I have been through phases of being into `dream interpretation` of different kinds and have owned dream dictionaries and taken the precaution of keeping notebooks by my bed and so on. If I am to be really honest though, I can't really think of a dream from that period of my life which really imparted some message to me that I really needed to know. Mostly it was a case of tallying some extraordinary dream image with what I already knew (if deep down) was going on with me in my waking world.

All that stuff has since joined the sad array of Fortean interests which have fallen by the wayside as I slowly but surely morph into a being one Boring Old Git.

Ironically, my dreams these days seem somehow younger - as I have got older. They are full of manic energy and much faffing around and seem to have no discernible plot or clear purpose. I no longer seem to dream much about people that I know - instead the characters in my dreams are strangers, but composites of real acquaintances.. It's the same with places: everywhere I visit in my dreams is a place composed of a mash up of real locations that I have known. And my dreams are full of incessant chatter. Lots of people talking endlessly and verbosely. I only need to nod of on a sofa and - lo! - some stranger is gabbling to me in a prolix way about Some Very Urgent Topic - all of which is forgotten upon waking, of course.
 
Some dreams may be telling the dreamer something they may need to know, some may be premonitory, some may be telepathic - but nowadays I struggle to believe that the vast majority of our dreams are anything more than us just stirring the slop-buckets of our daily lives. That's a disappointing conclusion to draw - it would be nice to believe that our nights are spent more productively than that - but there we are.

I really like the line that a poster above came out with, about our dreams being `thoughts with the brakes off`.

I dream every night and my dreams are extremely intricate and incredibly involved and usually suffused with an atmosphere of anxiety (although I always feel sad as I exit them). It's a good morning if I can recall as much as 25 per cent of them these days. I am just left to feel staggered as to where all this material has come from.

I never ever get nightmares. (We have a thread on this issue: https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/nightmares-who-gets-them-and-why.66136/)

The nature of my dreams seems to have changed as I have become older. There was a time when every so often I would have a striking dream, full of clear symbolism, which begged to be remembered and analysed. Accordingly, I have been through phases of being into `dream interpretation` of different kinds and have owned dream dictionaries and taken the precaution of keeping notebooks by my bed and so on. If I am to be really honest though, I can't really think of a dream from that period of my life which really imparted some message to me that I really needed to know. Mostly it was a case of tallying some extraordinary dream image with what I already knew (if deep down) was going on with me in my waking world.

All that stuff has since joined the sad array of Fortean interests which have fallen by the wayside as I slowly but surely morph into a being one Boring Old Git.

Ironically, my dreams these days seem somehow younger - as I have got older. They are full of manic energy and much faffing around and seem to have no discernible plot or clear purpose. I no longer seem to dream much about people that I know - instead the characters in my dreams are strangers, but composites of real acquaintances.. It's the same with places: everywhere I visit in my dreams is a place composed of a mash up of real locations that I have known. And my dreams are full of incessant chatter. Lots of people talking endlessly and verbosely. I only need to nod of on a sofa and - lo! - some stranger is gabbling to me in a prolix way about Some Very Urgent Topic - all of which is forgotten upon waking, of course.
As I get older my dreams seem to be harking back in some ways. I dream of my children as they were when they were small. Last night I dreamed I was pregnant, I could feel the baby moving and turning and my abdomen was swollen. My youngest child is 26 and I am WELL past childbearing age, which I also was in the dream, but in the dream I was only in my early 50's (rather than my 60's as I actually am).
 
I've been studying Jung and have come to the module about dreams.
Man and his Symbols (edited by Jung) is quite accessible for the lay man and is all about dreams. The examples show that understanding them requires a lot of effort, knowledge and skill.
Jung: I have spent more than half a century in investigating natural symbols, and I have come to the conclusion that dreams and their symbols are not stupid and meaningless.
Jung: The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.
Have there been any developments since Jung?
 
Woah... between 17 and 78%. That's not research, that's a wild guess. A huge range covered there, hardly worth publishing an estimate like that. That's like Microsoft Windows saying your download will be finished in 15 hours, no wait 3 mins 12 secs, no wait 4 hours and 12 minutes, no wait....
Well to be fair M$ Windows does do that ...
But yes the spread did seem a tad wide
 
Woah... between 17 and 78%. That's not research, that's a wild guess. A huge range covered there, hardly worth publishing an estimate like that. That's like Microsoft Windows saying your download will be finished in 15 hours, no wait 3 mins 12 secs, no wait 4 hours and 12 minutes, no wait....

These two numbers, and the implied range between them, were from two different studies. So, one study suggests 17%. Another study suggests 78%. The two studies had different parameters and strategies for collecting and categorizing information. So, no wild guess, just medical science grinding along.

If you click on the links for the % numbers, you will see the two different studies. You then can read the studies, if you are well-caffeinated and like going down rabbit holes. Please let us know what you find :)
 
Most of my dreams just don't make sense
Back in the day at uni, I spent a few months writing down my dreams on waking. What happened was that the fragmentary and nonsensical elements of the last sleep cycle’s dream, gradually, as recollection increased, joined up to become detailed narrative with common sense explanations for the 'dream jump cuts' caused by part recollection.

I'd be the first to admit this might just be my conscious brain making sense of fragments, but still, interesting exercise. I discontinued the experiment when it got to the point that I was taking an hour to write everything down.

If you plan to do this; first be comfortable in your own skin...
I do get recurring non-existent places in my dreams.
Likewise. I recently woke at 3am ish with such a place in my head and knowing that it was a repeat visit, I spent a few moments committing the details to conscious memory. The next day I jotted them down and although the joins were seamless, I could identify almost every facet of the dream-place from bits and pieces of real places.
 
This is interesting, suggesting that inside our heads, dreamscapes are quite realistically imagined.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220825164025.htm

Eye movements in REM sleep mimic gazes in the dream world​

Multiple brain regions coordinate to conjure wholly imagined worlds​

When our eyes move during REM sleep, we're gazing at things in the dream world our brains have created, according to a new study. The findings shed light not only into how we dream, but also into how our imaginations work.

When our eyes move during REM sleep, we're gazing at things in the dream world our brains have created, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Francisco. The findings shed light not only into how we dream, but also into how our imaginations work.


REM sleep -- named for the rapid eye movements associated with it -- has been known since the 1950s to be the phase of sleep when dreams occur. But the purpose of the eye movements has remained a matter of much mystery and debate.
"We showed that these eye movements aren't random. They're coordinated with what's happening in the virtual dream world of the mouse," said Massimo Scanziani, PhD, senior author on the study, which appears in the Aug. 25, 2022, issue of Science.
 
The have been a few times I was so upset at my dream the night before, that I really did not want to go to sleep the next night.
 
This is interesting, suggesting that inside our heads, dreamscapes are quite realistically imagined.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220825164025.htm

Newly published research on mice indicates the rapid eye movements during the REM phase of sleep seem to correlate with gaze shifts in the "dream world." This related ScienceAlert article gives more details about the mouse research mentioned in the earlier article.
Rapid Eye Movements During REM Sleep Represent Gaze Shifts in the Dream World

According to a new study published in the journal Science, the characteristic eye movements that give rapid eye movement (REM) sleep its name represent gaze shifts in the dream world of sleeping mice. The findings reveal an observable readout of the internal sense of direction in the dream state. They also provide valuable new insights into the cognitive processes of the sleeping brain. ...

REM sleep is often associated with dreaming. Therefore, some have proposed that the nature of REM eye movements may relate to the content of an ongoing dream. Others have suggested that the rapid eye movements instead reflect random brainstem activity. Testing these hypotheses remains a challenge. ...

A saccade is a rapid, simultaneous movement of both eyes between two or more phases of fixation in the same direction.

Many previous studies have relied on the subjective and potentially inaccurate reporting of dreams by humans. Instead, Yuta Senzai and Massimo Scanziani focused on the head direction (HD) system of the mouse as an objective readout. While awake, the activity of HD cells in the mouse’s thalamus encodes the direction of the animal’s head as it explores or navigates the environment. Changes in HD cell activity are often accompanied by fast saccade-like movements of the eyes in the same direction.

Senzai and Scanziani recorded HC cell activity using extracellular linear probes. They simultaneously monitored the movements of both eyes with head-mounted cameras in awake and sleeping mice. They found that the direction and amplitude of rapid eye movements during REM sleep encoded direction and amplitude of the heading of mice in their dream environment. ...

The findings indicate that rapid eye movements provide an external readout of an internal cognitive process occurring during REM sleep and reveal a coordination that may underlie the realistic and vivid experience of dreams.

“If rapid eye movements reflect thoughts during sleep, reading the eye movements of others, while observing them sleep, would open a window for reading and potentially manipulating their thoughts during dreams,” write Chris De Zeeuw and Cathrin Canto in a related Perspective.
FULL STORY: https://scitechdaily.com/rapid-eye-...eep-represent-gaze-shifts-in-the-dream-world/
 
My dreams are occasionally consistent from dream to dream, which I find interesting. For example I have a ‘dream London.’ It’s got tube stations and the British Museum and the Thames and Foyles bookshop and so on, but they are not arranged on the ground in the same way that they exist in real life, the geography is all wrong. Yet when I next dream I am in London, everything will be arranged consistently with my previous dream.

I have very similiar dreams set around my hometown but it has bits "added on" which seems to make perfect sense in my dreams
 
If anyone's interested, I came across a good little book on dream symbols that is based on the results of psychoanalysis:
Dictionary for Dreamers, Tom Chetwynd
Published several times under ISBNs 0041310225, 0586081593 & 1855382954.

Proving useful to me so far.
 
I had a mid afternoon kip today and went in a light relaxed sleep for 10 minutes or so but saw my deceased step dad pushing a shopping trolly near me in the local front street (which looked a bit different )...what does it mean.
 
I wonder whether what sometimes triggers a dream, even a dream story is the brain clearing up an emotion. In other words instead of a dream story frightening you your brain wants to “push” an emotion that you have maybe been repressing; fear, anxiety, etc. The other part of the brain makes up a story make the rush of emotion seem valid or logical.

If you are repressing anxiety then the brain triggers anxiety during sleep and you make up the story of being in an exam, unprepared, naked and wondering what to do with the flatulent elephant you promised to look after for Joseph Stalin.
 
When I was a child/teenager I had a recurring dream which if I described it here would sound completely mundane and not scary in the least, but which was terribly scary when I dreamed it (and if I think about it now, which I don't really want to). No idea what those dreams were all about.

Lately I often have dreams where the radio in real life (my alarm clock is set to radio) seeps into my dreams and I will dream that I am talking to the radio presenters and getting somewhat frustrated because they never respond and just carry on talking. There is no 'radio station' scene in these dreams; for example last Saturday I was having what I thought was a nice picnic with the two presenters, except everything I tried to add to the conversation went unnoticed by them.

Eventually of course, I woke up and realised the radio was on. Every time it happens I never realise I am dreaming even though it has happened often enough that one would think I would figure it out by now.
 
Lately I often have dreams where the radio in real life (my alarm clock is set to radio) seeps into my dreams and I will dream that I am talking to the radio presenters and getting somewhat frustrated because they never respond and just carry on talking. There is no 'radio station' scene in these dreams; for example last Saturday I was having what I thought was a nice picnic with the two presenters, except everything I tried to add to the conversation went unnoticed by them.

Eventually of course, I woke up and realised the radio was on. Every time it happens I never realise I am dreaming even though it has happened often enough that one would think I would figure it out by now.
I've fallen asleep watching Discovery/History/Science channels and let me tell you....

...There is nothing so sobering as trying to hit on a beautiful woman at a bar and suddenly an alligator gar is trying to eat your face off whilst Jeremy Wade is narrating.

Even "How It's Made" can create some bizarre nightmares/dreams.
 
I've fallen asleep watching Discovery/History/Science channels and let me tell you....

...There is nothing so sobering as trying to hit on a beautiful woman at a bar and suddenly an alligator gar is trying to eat your face off whilst Jeremy Wade is narrating.

Even "How It's Made" can create some bizarre nightmares/dreams.
Yes. I listen to podcasts as I am going to sleep. Many, I lose the whole story as my mind wanders. The times, recently, when I have been listening to some true scary, violent stories, I have brief dreams that are disturbing or just anxiety inducing. When I replay the episodes (next day) that I realize I fell asleep listening to, I do recognize more of the story than I realized I heard and can directly related the very brief flashes of disturbing dream thought to the podcast story.

As a kid, I enjoyed watching horror movies. If I knew there was a movie on tv that I was unable to watch, I would have a nightmare relating to how scary I thought the movie was. My nightmares about the unseen movies were far scarier than the movies. I never had nightmares from watching a movie.

As a kid, I had nightmares. As an adult, I don't have nightmares. I may have dreams that I recognize as not being logical IRL, but can't understand when dreaming why they aren't right. In my dream state, this causes me great anxiety and affects my mood when I wake.
 
Here's BBC Radio 4's Screenshot programme on the subject of dreams in fillums and TV drama.

BBC Sounds: Screenshot

Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode take a deep dive into the cinematic subconscious to explore dreams in film and television.

Mark talks to Sandra Hebron, psychotherapist and head of screen arts at the National Film and Television School, about the origins and history of dreams in film.

He also speaks to director Bernard Rose, best known for his 1992 film, Candyman.

They discuss his debut film, Paperhouse, and how it portrays the blurred lines between reality and dreams.

Taking a look at everything from The Sopranos to The Big Lebowski, Ellen investigates some of film and TV's most memorable dream sequences with help from film critic, Anne Billson.

Ellen then speaks to independent film director, Tom DeCillo, whose 1995 film, Living in Oblivion sought to subvert the clichés of the cinematic dream sequence.
 
I’ve probably said this on other dream threads here that I believe that dreams are the brain’s way of processing the information we receive in a particularly symbolic way as an aide memoire to bring to mind in a survival situation. Let’s face it, all DNA wants is to survive and replicate so the brain distills information into a symbolic subconscious nugget that can flash up more quickly as a reaction than a list of facts that would help you in an emergency.
 
It has been said that the brain actually remembers everything. I have twice recently had dreams which took place in locations I know well, yet they looked nothing like they do in real life. What's up with that?
 
It has been said that the brain actually remembers everything. I have twice recently had dreams which took place in locations I know well, yet they looked nothing like they do in real life. What's up with that?
Don’t believe your brain entirely as it makes things up. It constantly updates the less-defined periphery of your vision with a made up version to fill in the bits you don’t see clearly. So if you’re asleep, the brain is seeing through this ability alone. Well. It’s a theory.

As we go about daily life, we generally operate under the assumption that our perception of the world directly and accurately represents the outside world. But visual illusions of various kinds show us that this isn’t always the case. As the brain processes incoming information about an external stimulus, we come to learn, it creates a representation of the outside world that can diverge from reality in noticeable ways.

Otten and colleagues wondered whether this same process might explain why we usually feel as though our peripheral vision is detailed and robust when it isn’t.

“Perhaps our brain fills in what we see when the physical stimulus is not rich enough,” she explains. “The brain represents peripheral vision with less detail, and these representations degrade faster than central vision. Therefore, we expected that peripheral vision should be very susceptible to illusory visual experiences, for many stimuli and large parts of the visual field.”
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/illusion-reveals-that-the-brain-fills-in-peripheral-vision.html#:~:text=The%20findings%20suggest%20that%20even,“see”%20in%20the%20periphery.
 
You know what would be really terrifying?
If, before you die, it’s not your life that flashes before you but the whole of your life’s dreams all at once.
That should take all of 20 seconds for me, I never seem to remember any dreams.
 
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