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> dreams are primarily visual precisely because ... This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted. In my experience, at leas

> dreams are primarily visual precisely because ... This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted. In my experience, at least, dreams are not primarily visual. They have a visual component, but also a vague auditory component, a motor-experience (feeling of movement) component, etc., and all of those feel equally important. And most of all, there is a "felt experience" component that actually feels like the primary element of it; emotion is the core element of that, but a better description is "the lizard brain's interpretation" of what's happening in the dream, that feels like the central element of the dream. The visual part is also not in full colour generally, in my case, it's like early movies during the transition from black-and-white, with slight colour tints generally towards the bluish colour regions. I'm curious what others' dream experiences are like, and in particular whether it's the case that most people do experience them as primarily visual.

agumonkey 6y ago
To me the most peculiar aspect of dreams is how vivid the universe you're in is. It feels as emotionally impactful as the best moments of your life. Super weird
- krapp 6y ago
  The same brain that simulates your entire perception of reality from external inputs is using all of its resources to simulate its own, with itself as an input. What's really weird is how dream-reality always makes sense to you in context, regardless of how absurd or random it is, because your self awareness and identity are being simulated the same way, both in dreams and in reality. It's like a virtual machine inside a virtual machine.
- alexpetralia 6y ago
  I've thought of dreams as unique in suspending self-doubt. For some reason, while in a dream, we are incapable of doubting what is going on. Everything feels incredibly vivid and real. Then we wake up, and we go back to doubting: "Ah, must've been a dream!" Edit: Perhaps immersive psychedelics (LSD, ketamine) are similar actually. Speculatively, one could define "real" as our ability to doubt, "fantasy" as the suspension of doubt.
  - adamjb 6y ago
    Dreams made a whole lot more sense to me when I learnt about idea of the brain as a predictive processing machine. It asserts that the brain works as a sort of recursive two-sided process, with theory creation on one side and evidence collecting on the other. Recursive in that the visual processing system might get a "is that a door?" theory from a higher level system, which it'll then answer by collecting and trying to match evidence from multiple lower level systems ("is that an edge?" "is that a shadow?" etc.) until it eventually reaches the level of processing stimuli directly, with each system on the way acting as both questioner and answerer. In this framework dreaming is when the evidence collecting side becomes a lot less rigorous than it usually is, so it says "sure, why not" without reference to a stimulus (i.e. a way to be falsified). In other words it's the brain's predictions continuously coming true.
    - sundarurfriend 6y ago
      > brain as a predictive processing machine. It asserts that the brain works as a sort of recursive two-sided process, with theory creation on one side and evidence collecting on the other. SlateStarCodex has a nice article[1] about this. > The key insight: the brain is a multi-layer prediction machine. All neural processing consists of two streams: a bottom-up stream of sense data, and a top-down stream of predictions. These streams interface at each level of processing, comparing themselves to each other and adjusting themselves as necessary. > ... > You’re not seeing the world as it is, exactly. You’re seeing your predictions about the world, cashed out as expected sensations, then shaped/constrained by the actual sense data. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...
  - rtx 6y ago
    One theory I had read a longtime ago was that nightmares were a way for the subconscious mind to wake-up the conscious mind.
- lisper 6y ago
  I occasionally have lucid dreams, where I realize I'm dreaming. When that happens, I can take control of the dream and do cool things like fly. Usually this only lasts a minute or two and then I wake up. But on a handful of occasions I've reverted to a non-lucid state, where I forget that I just figured out that I'm in a dream, and I lose control again. It's super freaky, and raises some pretty deep existential questions: who/what exactly am I when I'm in that state? How can I ever really be sure that I'm not dreaming?
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    In another kind of "weakly lucid" dream type I know I'm dreaming but I don't have (full) control. So I can't make people answer what I want, but it feels like I can "mentally manipulate" them and push their answer to a certain direction, like make an attacker friendlier or so.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    > I occasionally have lucid dreams, where I realize I'm dreaming. When that happens, I can take control of the dream and do cool things I experience lucid dreams I can control quite frequently. The thing I do most often is let the dream play out, but go back in (dream) time to replay certain scenes differently if I'm not happy with the outcome. It's really pretty cool - like being in some kind of super-advanced VR simulation, or under the influence of some impossible drug. If anyone ever figures out tech to make this just happen (kind of like simulation VR goggles in scifi films), they are going to be very, very rich.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
magicalhippo 6y ago
For me, the dreams I remember seem indeed more like experiences. I'm often aware that I dream, and can sometimes steer it. While it feels like a movie most of the time, it's not really visual in the same sense. Like just yesterday I became aware that I was dreaming. In the dream I had somehow ended up in jail. The majority of the dream was me trying to escape in various ways, a bit like a reverse Ocean 11 thing. As I was dreaming I could picture the places around me, I particularly recall the gate in the main corridor. However even though my dreams are usually very visual in some sense, it's much closer to how I picture things in my mind when reading novels, rather than explicit images like when watching a movie. I've always had a hard time with visualizations when reading novels. Like I'll read the page or two the author uses to describe some location, but most of the time the details don't really "sink in". Instead my mind seems to quickly grab hold of the high-level things, like it's an old apartment building, and the details are just generated based on that. Whatever detailed description the author makes usually doesn't affect the mental image I've already built. I guess it's not that weird that the dream visuals feels more like that out of a book, both cases being generated by the imagination.
hx2a 6y ago
I've had recurring dreams that were entirely in math. And by that I don't mean a dream where I was sitting in math class or something. I mean the actual substance of the dreams were equations that I was trying to make sense of. In my awake life I like math a lot and am comfortable solving equations. The dreams themselves, though, were terrifying in ways no other dream has ever matched.
dqv 6y ago
I experience the same color dullness, although warm colors like red are more vivid for me. Something I've noticed that I've never heard anyone else talk about is text-based dreams. That is, the dream primarily happens in a text interaction where the visual space is completely engulfed by a chatroom-like interface. The visual element is not the primary aspect of the dream, instead the text in the dream is projected into the visual space. Obviously this is because I spend a lot of time in chatrooms.
- opan 6y ago
  I've had many dreams featuring IRC or the chat of an old MMO. I also heard it's very uncommon to see text in dreams, though.
mailslot 6y ago
I’m able to consciously enter dreams from waking state. Basically, lucid dreaming on hard mode. Like going through sleep paralysis on purpose. Dreams are so close to waking state, I’m always in awe when I successfully transition. Touch, taste, smell, every sense. It’s like waking reality, but with god mode. That said, vision is really really weird. If you pull your sight into your dream body (hard to explain), then it’s just like you’d expect. It’s like it’s possible to see multiple perspectives at once, and it’s visual, but it’s all like one continuous field of view. Sometimes I don’t even really notice that I’m looking forward, backward, and from above all at once. When I’m just playing around, I like to smash things and jump so high that I fly above the clouds, feeling the cold air above and the weightlessness at the apex. It’s no more visual primary than waking, IMHO.
- ford_o 6y ago
  How do you pull it off?
  - mailslot 6y ago
    I use my own secular simplified technique inspired by Tibetan dream yoga and wake induced lucid dreaming (WILD). It’s as “simple” as learning to remain aware and observant when falling asleep, without rousing oneself. No deity worship or chakra alignments necessary. Meditation practice helps tremendously, but my first success, I accomplished by trial and error. A lot of instruction on the Internet suggests focusing on something, visualizing something, counting, eating supplements, etc. I have found all of that unnecessary.

agumonkey 6y ago

To me the most peculiar aspect of dreams is how vivid the universe you're in is. It feels as emotionally impactful as the best moments of your life. Super weird

krapp 6y ago
The same brain that simulates your entire perception of reality from external inputs is using all of its resources to simulate its own, with itself as an input. What's really weird is how dream-reality always makes sense to you in context, regardless of how absurd or random it is, because your self awareness and identity are being simulated the same way, both in dreams and in reality. It's like a virtual machine inside a virtual machine.
alexpetralia 6y ago
I've thought of dreams as unique in suspending self-doubt. For some reason, while in a dream, we are incapable of doubting what is going on. Everything feels incredibly vivid and real. Then we wake up, and we go back to doubting: "Ah, must've been a dream!" Edit: Perhaps immersive psychedelics (LSD, ketamine) are similar actually. Speculatively, one could define "real" as our ability to doubt, "fantasy" as the suspension of doubt.
- adamjb 6y ago
  Dreams made a whole lot more sense to me when I learnt about idea of the brain as a predictive processing machine. It asserts that the brain works as a sort of recursive two-sided process, with theory creation on one side and evidence collecting on the other. Recursive in that the visual processing system might get a "is that a door?" theory from a higher level system, which it'll then answer by collecting and trying to match evidence from multiple lower level systems ("is that an edge?" "is that a shadow?" etc.) until it eventually reaches the level of processing stimuli directly, with each system on the way acting as both questioner and answerer. In this framework dreaming is when the evidence collecting side becomes a lot less rigorous than it usually is, so it says "sure, why not" without reference to a stimulus (i.e. a way to be falsified). In other words it's the brain's predictions continuously coming true.
  - sundarurfriend 6y ago
    > brain as a predictive processing machine. It asserts that the brain works as a sort of recursive two-sided process, with theory creation on one side and evidence collecting on the other. SlateStarCodex has a nice article[1] about this. > The key insight: the brain is a multi-layer prediction machine. All neural processing consists of two streams: a bottom-up stream of sense data, and a top-down stream of predictions. These streams interface at each level of processing, comparing themselves to each other and adjusting themselves as necessary. > ... > You’re not seeing the world as it is, exactly. You’re seeing your predictions about the world, cashed out as expected sensations, then shaped/constrained by the actual sense data. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-un...
- rtx 6y ago
  One theory I had read a longtime ago was that nightmares were a way for the subconscious mind to wake-up the conscious mind.
lisper 6y ago
I occasionally have lucid dreams, where I realize I'm dreaming. When that happens, I can take control of the dream and do cool things like fly. Usually this only lasts a minute or two and then I wake up. But on a handful of occasions I've reverted to a non-lucid state, where I forget that I just figured out that I'm in a dream, and I lose control again. It's super freaky, and raises some pretty deep existential questions: who/what exactly am I when I'm in that state? How can I ever really be sure that I'm not dreaming?
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  In another kind of "weakly lucid" dream type I know I'm dreaming but I don't have (full) control. So I can't make people answer what I want, but it feels like I can "mentally manipulate" them and push their answer to a certain direction, like make an attacker friendlier or so.
- GordonS 6y ago
  > I occasionally have lucid dreams, where I realize I'm dreaming. When that happens, I can take control of the dream and do cool things I experience lucid dreams I can control quite frequently. The thing I do most often is let the dream play out, but go back in (dream) time to replay certain scenes differently if I'm not happy with the outcome. It's really pretty cool - like being in some kind of super-advanced VR simulation, or under the influence of some impossible drug. If anyone ever figures out tech to make this just happen (kind of like simulation VR goggles in scifi films), they are going to be very, very rich.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

magicalhippo 6y ago

For me, the dreams I remember seem indeed more like experiences. I'm often aware that I dream, and can sometimes steer it. While it feels like a movie most of the time, it's not really visual in the same sense. Like just yesterday I became aware that I was dreaming. In the dream I had somehow ended up in jail. The majority of the dream was me trying to escape in various ways, a bit like a reverse Ocean 11 thing. As I was dreaming I could picture the places around me, I particularly recall the gate in the main corridor. However even though my dreams are usually very visual in some sense, it's much closer to how I picture things in my mind when reading novels, rather than explicit images like when watching a movie. I've always had a hard time with visualizations when reading novels. Like I'll read the page or two the author uses to describe some location, but most of the time the details don't really "sink in". Instead my mind seems to quickly grab hold of the high-level things, like it's an old apartment building, and the details are just generated based on that. Whatever detailed description the author makes usually doesn't affect the mental image I've already built. I guess it's not that weird that the dream visuals feels more like that out of a book, both cases being generated by the imagination.

hx2a 6y ago

I've had recurring dreams that were entirely in math. And by that I don't mean a dream where I was sitting in math class or something. I mean the actual substance of the dreams were equations that I was trying to make sense of. In my awake life I like math a lot and am comfortable solving equations. The dreams themselves, though, were terrifying in ways no other dream has ever matched.

dqv 6y ago

I experience the same color dullness, although warm colors like red are more vivid for me. Something I've noticed that I've never heard anyone else talk about is text-based dreams. That is, the dream primarily happens in a text interaction where the visual space is completely engulfed by a chatroom-like interface. The visual element is not the primary aspect of the dream, instead the text in the dream is projected into the visual space. Obviously this is because I spend a lot of time in chatrooms.

opan 6y ago
I've had many dreams featuring IRC or the chat of an old MMO. I also heard it's very uncommon to see text in dreams, though.

mailslot 6y ago

I’m able to consciously enter dreams from waking state. Basically, lucid dreaming on hard mode. Like going through sleep paralysis on purpose. Dreams are so close to waking state, I’m always in awe when I successfully transition. Touch, taste, smell, every sense. It’s like waking reality, but with god mode. That said, vision is really really weird. If you pull your sight into your dream body (hard to explain), then it’s just like you’d expect. It’s like it’s possible to see multiple perspectives at once, and it’s visual, but it’s all like one continuous field of view. Sometimes I don’t even really notice that I’m looking forward, backward, and from above all at once. When I’m just playing around, I like to smash things and jump so high that I fly above the clouds, feeling the cold air above and the weightlessness at the apex. It’s no more visual primary than waking, IMHO.

ford_o 6y ago
How do you pull it off?
- mailslot 6y ago
  I use my own secular simplified technique inspired by Tibetan dream yoga and wake induced lucid dreaming (WILD). It’s as “simple” as learning to remain aware and observant when falling asleep, without rousing oneself. No deity worship or chakra alignments necessary. Meditation practice helps tremendously, but my first success, I accomplished by trial and error. A lot of instruction on the Internet suggests focusing on something, visualizing something, counting, eating supplements, etc. I have found all of that unnecessary.