Canitoch said:
Anyone have any dreams where they've woken up and are just astonished or wish it were true or something?
The most fascinating dreams are the (hyper)real ones which are not lucid.
A brief thought experiment, if you will. If you have an eidetic memory, please just bear with me for a moment.
For the rest of you, imagine, now, an average day of your life. You go through your routines, and so on, get whatever work you have to do done, eat some food, talk to friends, family, whoever. You go to sleep. You wake up the next morning. (Ok, whatever, the eidetic-mem people can try this too, it just won't work exactly the same way.)
Of this past day, as with most days, you have only some vague memory. Those things which happened most often, as usual, spring easily to mind. You could tell me, perhaps, what you ate for breakfast, or the songs on the radio.
Ok, here's the part everyone's familiar with, and the movie industry has used to create sci-fi blockbusters, and whatever. The memories themselves, under examination, don't show that you actually weren't dreaming. Other people corroborate the story, however.
I don't care about this point. From one perspective, I have no way of "proving" anything about the universe not being totally sollipsistic, that the fossils are a joke I haven't gotten yet, and I'm not really communicating with anyone.
This is because I treat the waking world as actually real. I interact with it and the people in it, who I treat as existing independantly of myself, yadda yadda. You don't
have to do this. Things go rather... poorly... if you treat the world as one huge illusion, however.
So we're ascribing truth, at the very least, to the "Material Object Hypothesis" - the world around you is very much real. But what about the dream world(s)? You experience those, too. You experience those in a very specific way, with the convenience of discontinuous start- and end-points. (That is, falling asleep and waking up, in whatever manner you do so.)
Thus a problem, especially with the "wish it were true" dreams is this. You, according to your memories, did actually experience whatever sense stimuli. If you think we have free will, and it was a non-deterministic dream, and not lucid, then you technically made decisions about how to act. If it was lucid, congrats, you just found out "what would I do if no-one was watching".
If you are a determinist, well, let's hope you think everyone ought to take agency responsibility for their actions. And so for our discussion here, we'll treat the result as what I said in the last paragraph.
Anyway...
Cua said:
... turn the tables on the evil in my dream and kick ass.
This is a very good idea. On the off-chance that dream worlds are instantiated somewhere, the residents may not get to thank you, but rest assured they are grateful. (ok, bad pun)
Funny dreams are nice too, if you can remember the punchlines:
Subconscious Unconscious said:
"Sure, sure, we're all buddies until they're throwing darts at the wall to decide who gets to greet the idiots from the advertising division. Then suddenly it's a game of 'who has the least morals or the most ice cream'."
"What flavour?"
"I dunno, probably bubblegum. I mean, you're trying to bribe marketing."
The brief joking aside, here's some tips:
- If Dell Computing ever wins a defense contract to manufacture new VTOL aircraft, you want to find a bunker and you want to find one fast. Note that mono-rail transport systems advanced quite a bit before this happened.
- Testing out "quantum uncertainty" chess games can have interesting results. Make sure that someone writes down what company produced the pieces or such games can be difficult to reset. By "difficult" I mean that you will get to be best friends with Teller and Ulam and their revolutionary method of moving a chess board's pieces back to their starting positions.
- Remember rule one from Pratchett's Thief of Time. This tip works for the waking world too.
- If you are trying to do work in your dream make sure you have enough money to pay your taxes. (great comic series)
- And it can also help to keep a notepad handy for when you finally escape (aka waking up).
Is anyone here capable of feeling pain in their dreams (from dream stimuli, like, say, getting shot) without waking?
(P.S.) For the people with eidetic recall - do some of your dreams, or perhaps all, does your usual memory apply? If so, is this even more disconcerting than I imagine it is?
People with "normal" memory recall sometimes find it very easy to distinguish a dream because they can remember
all of it, in contrast to usual events. Only the most important events are stored "completely", and even then most people are filling in major gaps with supplied material - except, curiously, in the case of smells and emotions.
Those are seemingly perfectly stored, and can set off long chains of memories. Some of my friends with synesthesia store sounds as textures, or other sense impressions instead, or in addition to, smells. When one can recall such memories from dreams, it is unnerving.
EDIT: I made a very stupid grammar mistake. Now it is fixed.
