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.
Go you!
Date: 2021-05-29 12:55 am (UTC)