The Purpose of Dreams
May. 27th, 2021 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithHere's an article suggesting that weird dreams minimize the tendency to become too dependent on ordinary patterns.
It's cute watching mainstream people try to figure out how dreams work. The science can be useful, but they rarely know enough about dreamlore to sort things properly. Consider some types of dreams:
* Echo dreams are a simple replay of recent events, part of the memory sorting and storing process. Less often, this kicks up considerably older memories. Another example is practice dreams, where the sleeping brain repeats exercises from waking life, such as doing homework or a sport maneuver, often a way of cementing the skill.
* PTSD replay nightmares are a failure of that memory process, where the mind can't "put away" the events. This type of filing error can be very difficult to fix, especially since mainstream culture has little fluency with dreams.
* Ordinary nightmares can be a test of the survival reflexes (featuring primal fears like predators or falling), or a way of facing daytime issues (being unprepared for a test, flubbing a hot date) in a less-risky environment.
* Allegorical dreams are typically messages from the subconscious, and easily mistaken for the nonsense type of surreal dream if you aren't familiar with dream dynamics or your personal symbolism. Dreams of imprisonment, for instance, tend to represent situations of helplessness in the waking world, advising you to seek more control over your life before something really goes wrong. These are important.
* Surreal dreams can be nightmares, allegorical messages, system tests, or freeform connections across neurons that create nonsense rather than meaningful ideas. It isn't always obvious what they are, but dismissing them all as nonsense -- or any other single subtype -- is unwise.
* Closely related, some vivid and often odd dreams can be caused or enhanced by substances ranging from hallucinogens to prescription drugs to herbs and spices. These can also overlap with other categories of dreams.
* Storytelling dreams or other inspirational dreams are common among creative people, a feature of the extrapolative and imaginative engines. While anyone can have short narrative dreams, not many have the range to dream whole stories, novels, paintings, inventions, or other large pieces. It can be very difficult to bring through whole ideas from elsewhere, and this tends to take practice.
Dreams can also do some other things that not all societies pay attention to.
* Dreams of the dead, especially positive and novel ones, can be interactions across the layers of reality. The dream realm, like the afterlife, is unbound by time and so connected souls may find each other there.
* Deities, spirit guides, and other noncorporeal entities can touch people's dreams. These can be illuminating, terrifying, or both.
* Some people can travel to other worlds in their sleep. These worlds may be ordinary or bizarre, and the latter are easily confused with other types of surreal dreams if you don't know about worldwalking.
* Some people can visit other people's dreams. Cultures with strong dreamlore are most prone to having family members share dreams.
* Dreams can include memories of past lives. These are easiest to identify if the world is fairly ordinary but the time is widely separate from your current one.
* Visions of the past, future, or far-flung present may appear in dreams. As mentioned above, dreams are unbound by the timespace continuum of the waking world.
When you look at that breadth of variety, you can see that dreams don't have just one purpose or function. They do a lot of different things. If you are trying to test the validity of a particular hypothesis, then, you have to look for dreams in its target type, because otherwise the nonrelevant types can screw your results. Now ideally, dream scholars would look across multiple sciences and also cultures strong in dreamlore to compile that data for comprehensive study. Nobody seems to do that, and dreamlore is one area where silo thinking will definitely screw your results. You can't measure a frameless phenomenon accurately with a tight frame.
It's cute watching mainstream people try to figure out how dreams work. The science can be useful, but they rarely know enough about dreamlore to sort things properly. Consider some types of dreams:
* Echo dreams are a simple replay of recent events, part of the memory sorting and storing process. Less often, this kicks up considerably older memories. Another example is practice dreams, where the sleeping brain repeats exercises from waking life, such as doing homework or a sport maneuver, often a way of cementing the skill.
* PTSD replay nightmares are a failure of that memory process, where the mind can't "put away" the events. This type of filing error can be very difficult to fix, especially since mainstream culture has little fluency with dreams.
* Ordinary nightmares can be a test of the survival reflexes (featuring primal fears like predators or falling), or a way of facing daytime issues (being unprepared for a test, flubbing a hot date) in a less-risky environment.
* Allegorical dreams are typically messages from the subconscious, and easily mistaken for the nonsense type of surreal dream if you aren't familiar with dream dynamics or your personal symbolism. Dreams of imprisonment, for instance, tend to represent situations of helplessness in the waking world, advising you to seek more control over your life before something really goes wrong. These are important.
* Surreal dreams can be nightmares, allegorical messages, system tests, or freeform connections across neurons that create nonsense rather than meaningful ideas. It isn't always obvious what they are, but dismissing them all as nonsense -- or any other single subtype -- is unwise.
* Closely related, some vivid and often odd dreams can be caused or enhanced by substances ranging from hallucinogens to prescription drugs to herbs and spices. These can also overlap with other categories of dreams.
* Storytelling dreams or other inspirational dreams are common among creative people, a feature of the extrapolative and imaginative engines. While anyone can have short narrative dreams, not many have the range to dream whole stories, novels, paintings, inventions, or other large pieces. It can be very difficult to bring through whole ideas from elsewhere, and this tends to take practice.
Dreams can also do some other things that not all societies pay attention to.
* Dreams of the dead, especially positive and novel ones, can be interactions across the layers of reality. The dream realm, like the afterlife, is unbound by time and so connected souls may find each other there.
* Deities, spirit guides, and other noncorporeal entities can touch people's dreams. These can be illuminating, terrifying, or both.
* Some people can travel to other worlds in their sleep. These worlds may be ordinary or bizarre, and the latter are easily confused with other types of surreal dreams if you don't know about worldwalking.
* Some people can visit other people's dreams. Cultures with strong dreamlore are most prone to having family members share dreams.
* Dreams can include memories of past lives. These are easiest to identify if the world is fairly ordinary but the time is widely separate from your current one.
* Visions of the past, future, or far-flung present may appear in dreams. As mentioned above, dreams are unbound by the timespace continuum of the waking world.
When you look at that breadth of variety, you can see that dreams don't have just one purpose or function. They do a lot of different things. If you are trying to test the validity of a particular hypothesis, then, you have to look for dreams in its target type, because otherwise the nonrelevant types can screw your results. Now ideally, dream scholars would look across multiple sciences and also cultures strong in dreamlore to compile that data for comprehensive study. Nobody seems to do that, and dreamlore is one area where silo thinking will definitely screw your results. You can't measure a frameless phenomenon accurately with a tight frame.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-29 12:20 am (UTC)Oh hey and back on the subject of dreams: I don't know what fever dreams are like for other people, but I've had a few over my lifetime. For me, a fever causes a single repetetive dream that always picks up where it left off when I get up to pee and then go back to sleep. I had a fever dream yesterday (likely a side effect of the covid-19 vaccine). In that one, I was in pieces and slowly putting myself back together. Another fever dream I had over a decade ago was about my brain being an Internet node in charge of routing packets of data around the Internet. But in it, I had to grab the packets and put them in the right pneumatic tubes by hand. It was an exhausting dream.
Again on the subject of dreams: I frequently have dreams that would be nightmares for other people, but they're merely entertaining to me. One dream I had years ago was like a cross between The Thing and Resident Evil. Another dream I had, I was an alien creature hunting and eating people.
I also have lots of surreal dreams. I remember one that began normally enough with me going outside into the yard of the place we currently lived at. I was just enjoying the breeze for a bit when suddenly the world gave a weird, brief contraction-like spasm and suddenly there were dead orcas everywhere. Some had manifested inside of trees or in the ground, or were just floating around in the air. It was like a major glitch in the Matrix.
My favorite dreams are dreams that tell stories. Like one dream I had when I was still dreaming in sienna and white. There was this big old house that the Addams Family would have loved, but like, it was in two parts connected by a bridge of sorts with a train track running under the bridge. And there was a narrator talking (happens in some of my dreams, especially the story dreams) talking about how the house had been owned by a family of Satanists until they got run out of town by the local yokels. That's all I really remember of that dream, even though I remember the narrator was telling this intricate story like a legit history of a real world place.
To explain the "sienna and white" comment: In early childhood I dreamed in black and white for some reason, dunno why cuz we had color TV. Then for a while I dreamed in sienna and white. Then I was dreaming in low-res color. The resolution kept going up until I started having high definition dreams so realistic that the first time I had one, I was confused as to why I was in a forest and how I'd gotten there. Took me a few minutes in dream time to figure out I was dreaming, though the fact I wasn't freaking out over being lost in an unfamiliar forest should have been a major clue. And when I say these were high-def, I mean it. The details were incredible, I could see the veins in leaves if I got close enough. The leaves moved like in real life. Hell, eveything moved like in real life. In most dreams, the details kind of fall apart when I look too closely at them, and the landscape moves in unredictable ways. But in the high-def dreams, that wasn't true. Details let themselves be seen, and the landscape made sense and had a continguousness that isn't usual for my dreams. It was like actually being outside. The only thing that clued me into it being a dream was I was climbing a steep hill without getting winded. It was as easy as walking on a flat surface. I loved those dreams... for a while.
See, what happened was that I started suffering from multiple false awakenings inside these high-def dreams, which let me tell you is scary as all heck. I got so scared of those, so scared of falling asleep one day and never waking up to live out my entire life in a high-def dream, that I forced myself to go back to normal, middle-res color dreams. But before that change back, I did figure out that the high-def dreams had a faint blue cast to them that wasn't at all obvious until after I woke up.
Oh and sometimes after binging a TV series like Dr. Who or Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I will dream up entirely new episodes my brain came up with.
But my most common dreams are:
1. I'm living with my family still (hasn't been true since 2005) and we're in the process of moving. Often involves me packing. The houses we're moving to or from are usually derelict or have a strong Addams Family vibe to them.
2. Dreams where I discover I never graduated high school and have to retake high school. (UGH!)
3. Dreams where I discover I'm still on the payroll of a former employer and they want me to come back. Usually in these I do go back, at least in a part time capacity, since I could use the extra money. But I hate those when I wake up.
One last thing about dreams: I can read in dreams. Not like, I look at a bunch of weird scribbles and know what they mean, but like, there are actual words in the books and websites of my dreams. I've had dreams where I was scrolling Livejournal's friend feed or the Tumblr dashboard, and my mind was making up believable sounding headlines and other posts and images. I've occasionally remembered headlines from dreams as being real headlines. Hell, one time I even had a dream where I was looking at a sign in Spanish. I don't know Spanish well enough to read it, and in the dream I had no idea what it said, but I recognized some of the words. I feel certain that if I had been able to screenshot that dream, that the sign would have had real Spanish words on it. And my theory is that either my brain was accurately recreating a real sign I saw frequently (in the clinic I go to) or else it was real words but in a word salad.
~
On the topic of spiritual dreams, I once had a dream where I was being sent a message from another universe. In that universe, I had an older brother, and at some point I had died. He and that world's version of my younger sister were reaching out to me because it gave them comfort to know I was still alive in some other universe. I told Mom about it and her reaction was interesting. She told me that a few years before I was born, she'd had a miscarriage and hadn't told anyone about it, not even Dad. Blew my mind.
As to past lives, I dreamed once about being a young black boy who got pushed off a wall, basically murdered.
Thoughts
Date: 2021-05-29 01:01 am (UTC)There are several believed to reduce the chance of PTSD, but nothing that's a guarantee.
>> Sadly there will still be plenty of people (mostly kids, but some adults too) who will get PTSD from events that good, kind adults in a position to help arent aware of. (Child abuse, bullying, other traumatic school events, rape, spousal abuse, among others.) <<
However, there are self-care steps that can also lower the chance. Among the best is playing Tetris or another visual-sorting game. This engages the brain's filing system and makes errors less likely. If everyone carried something like that on their smartphone (or a physical version if preferred) then it would be much more available when needed.
>>Oh and sometimes after binging a TV series like Dr. Who or Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I will dream up entirely new episodes my brain came up with.<<
Done that. Also read whole novels.
>>One last thing about dreams: I can read in dreams. <<
It's said to be impossible, but some people can do it. Seems more common in graphic languages like Japanese than alphabetic ones like English.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-29 12:24 am (UTC)Go you!
Date: 2021-05-29 12:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-29 04:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-29 11:12 pm (UTC)