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How do you differentiate between the dreams being detailed and the dreamers simply being convinced of the dreams being detailed? It's certainly my impression th

How do you differentiate between the dreams being detailed and the dreamers simply being convinced of the dreams being detailed? It's certainly my impression that my dreams are extremely visually detailed, to the point that I'm often able to read things in dreams (and remember it later).

agarden 7y ago
And I never experience dreams with that kind of visual detail. Occasionally I dream a dream that leaves an impression of being very realistic, but even those don't have any visual details to the point where I could read letters. My waking ability to visualize is poor too. I have a very vague mental picture of what my wife's face looks like, and I cannot see it all at once. Nor can I visualize an entire chessboard in my head, despite being able to play chess blindfold well enough to beat novices.
rapnie 7y ago
This is interesting. I hear from others that their dreams are very mundane, i.e. very similar to real life. Mine are very crazy, absurd adventures. Very fun and mind-blowing to remember them when waking up, so I am training my dream recall. In my dreams familiar people from all stages in my life meet together. I always thought I dreamt them in great detail, but I have now learnt that only their 'essence' is there. Just enough for me to know as a fact it is them. I am also trying to become a lucid dreamer (with full awareness during the dream). I succeeded several times, but only very briefly. The excitement causes me to wake up. But the best way for me to know I'm in a dream is when I am reading some text. Texts are inconsistent and when I reread a sentence it might be completely changed.
- feanaro 7y ago
  > But the best way for me to know I'm in a dream is when I am reading some text. Texts are inconsistent and when I reread a sentence it might be completely changed. This is exactly what happened to me just last night. I was able to read a page from a book, which was visually perfect, as if I was reading a real book. However, once I read it and diverted my gaze, then looked back to it, some of the words had changed (not all). This made me realize I was in a dream.
- philwelch 7y ago
  Do you have these vivid and fascinating dreams every night or is it less frequent than that? What may be going on is a cognitive bias where you only remember your more memorable dreams, and the mundane ones are just forgotten.
jerf 7y ago
"How do you differentiate between the dreams being detailed and the dreamers simply being convinced of the dreams being detailed?" A good question. I've developed the same test that the "rationalists" sometimes use to tell if you have an opinion. If you can remember something in one way, and it seems to fit, but you can remember something in another and it equally seems to fit, then you don't really remember the detail of the two ways it seems to fit, you just have a vague idea. I can draw you a map of my (real life) office. It will be fairly accurate within what I can see, and I can put down specific names. If you swapped two names, I could figure out that does not corresponding to my memory of the office. I remember when we went out to a team lunch two months ago, and I remember the specific order we sat in the booth, and many details about the specific booth we sat in. And to be honest, I would rate my memory as below average. By contrast, I call to mind a dream right now in which I encountered a crowd of creatures on a hill. I definitely remember it was a "crowd". But... were there a few of them? Yeah... I suppose that fits. Or were there hundreds of them? Yeah... I suppose that fits. I remember they were about 1 foot high and basically the critter from Aliens... but did they have claws or hand-like things? Either fits my memory. Did they have long tails? I think so, yeah. Were they articulated or solid? Yeah... either way, really. I remember them as a "crowd of creatures like the aliens", but when I really drill down... I don't actually have that many details. Were I an artist, I could draw you a picture that fits my dream fairly well... but I could then turn around and draw a picture that in the waking world and light of day would be fairly substantially different, but that my brain would say matches the dream just as well. I've read things too... but... what color were they? Usually I don't have an answer to that. (I think the common idea that "people dream in black and white" is inaccurate... people dream in not color. They encounter concepts like "words written on a sign" and they just plain don't have color at all. I occasionally do remember explicit colors, but it's an exception.) What was the font? Was it all uppercase? Yeah... maybe. Was it spread across multiple lines? I dunno, I can remember it either way pretty equally fluidly. Don't get too caught up on these specific examples; for instance I can call to mind a specific instance where I would say concretely this text was on two lines, specifically. I'm not saying these details never appear. What I am saying is that for most people, I suspect if they examined their own dreams like this they'd discover it has less concrete content than they thought. I would also suspect that there are the exceptional people out there who do dream highly specific dreams every night. But I bet they're the exception. Hard to know. Given the evidence that the act of recalling memories involves destructively reading them and then rewriting them back out, I would also suspect there's another group of people who actually have vague dreams and turn them concrete in the very act of remembering them, but I won't be able to prove or disprove that hypothesis pretty much until we have full brain simulation, so take that with the appropriate levels of salt. (This is also useful for real life memories. I chose concrete memories I'm confident about like my office layout. By contrast, something like "the wall color or pattern of the hotel I visited a couple of months ago"... well... I know it's in the "boring beige" spectrum but beyond that I can mentally decorate it in any number of specific ways without it triggering any conflicts with my memories, so, I don't remember that. By contrast, I do remember the layout reasonably well. But I don't remember the counter colors, or even whether they were formica or granite.)

agarden 7y ago

And I never experience dreams with that kind of visual detail. Occasionally I dream a dream that leaves an impression of being very realistic, but even those don't have any visual details to the point where I could read letters. My waking ability to visualize is poor too. I have a very vague mental picture of what my wife's face looks like, and I cannot see it all at once. Nor can I visualize an entire chessboard in my head, despite being able to play chess blindfold well enough to beat novices.

rapnie 7y ago

This is interesting. I hear from others that their dreams are very mundane, i.e. very similar to real life. Mine are very crazy, absurd adventures. Very fun and mind-blowing to remember them when waking up, so I am training my dream recall. In my dreams familiar people from all stages in my life meet together. I always thought I dreamt them in great detail, but I have now learnt that only their 'essence' is there. Just enough for me to know as a fact it is them. I am also trying to become a lucid dreamer (with full awareness during the dream). I succeeded several times, but only very briefly. The excitement causes me to wake up. But the best way for me to know I'm in a dream is when I am reading some text. Texts are inconsistent and when I reread a sentence it might be completely changed.

feanaro 7y ago
> But the best way for me to know I'm in a dream is when I am reading some text. Texts are inconsistent and when I reread a sentence it might be completely changed. This is exactly what happened to me just last night. I was able to read a page from a book, which was visually perfect, as if I was reading a real book. However, once I read it and diverted my gaze, then looked back to it, some of the words had changed (not all). This made me realize I was in a dream.
philwelch 7y ago
Do you have these vivid and fascinating dreams every night or is it less frequent than that? What may be going on is a cognitive bias where you only remember your more memorable dreams, and the mundane ones are just forgotten.

jerf 7y ago

"How do you differentiate between the dreams being detailed and the dreamers simply being convinced of the dreams being detailed?" A good question. I've developed the same test that the "rationalists" sometimes use to tell if you have an opinion. If you can remember something in one way, and it seems to fit, but you can remember something in another and it equally seems to fit, then you don't really remember the detail of the two ways it seems to fit, you just have a vague idea. I can draw you a map of my (real life) office. It will be fairly accurate within what I can see, and I can put down specific names. If you swapped two names, I could figure out that does not corresponding to my memory of the office. I remember when we went out to a team lunch two months ago, and I remember the specific order we sat in the booth, and many details about the specific booth we sat in. And to be honest, I would rate my memory as below average. By contrast, I call to mind a dream right now in which I encountered a crowd of creatures on a hill. I definitely remember it was a "crowd". But... were there a few of them? Yeah... I suppose that fits. Or were there hundreds of them? Yeah... I suppose that fits. I remember they were about 1 foot high and basically the critter from Aliens... but did they have claws or hand-like things? Either fits my memory. Did they have long tails? I think so, yeah. Were they articulated or solid? Yeah... either way, really. I remember them as a "crowd of creatures like the aliens", but when I really drill down... I don't actually have that many details. Were I an artist, I could draw you a picture that fits my dream fairly well... but I could then turn around and draw a picture that in the waking world and light of day would be fairly substantially different, but that my brain would say matches the dream just as well. I've read things too... but... what color were they? Usually I don't have an answer to that. (I think the common idea that "people dream in black and white" is inaccurate... people dream in not color. They encounter concepts like "words written on a sign" and they just plain don't have color at all. I occasionally do remember explicit colors, but it's an exception.) What was the font? Was it all uppercase? Yeah... maybe. Was it spread across multiple lines? I dunno, I can remember it either way pretty equally fluidly. Don't get too caught up on these specific examples; for instance I can call to mind a specific instance where I would say concretely this text was on two lines, specifically. I'm not saying these details never appear. What I am saying is that for most people, I suspect if they examined their own dreams like this they'd discover it has less concrete content than they thought. I would also suspect that there are the exceptional people out there who do dream highly specific dreams every night. But I bet they're the exception. Hard to know. Given the evidence that the act of recalling memories involves destructively reading them and then rewriting them back out, I would also suspect there's another group of people who actually have vague dreams and turn them concrete in the very act of remembering them, but I won't be able to prove or disprove that hypothesis pretty much until we have full brain simulation, so take that with the appropriate levels of salt. (This is also useful for real life memories. I chose concrete memories I'm confident about like my office layout. By contrast, something like "the wall color or pattern of the hotel I visited a couple of months ago"... well... I know it's in the "boring beige" spectrum but beyond that I can mentally decorate it in any number of specific ways without it triggering any conflicts with my memories, so, I don't remember that. By contrast, I do remember the layout reasonably well. But I don't remember the counter colors, or even whether they were formica or granite.)