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I never understood why some people enjoy describing their dreams. My dreams are generally pretty messy, make little sense, and are often embarrassing in some w

I never understood why some people enjoy describing their dreams. My dreams are generally pretty messy, make little sense, and are often embarrassing in some way so I don't particularly feel like sharing them. OTOH my wife will happily spend 15 minutes telling me her latest dream every time she wakes up. Turns out, according to TFA, I'm the odd one!

camillomiller 3y ago
Dreams are one of the most fascinating mechanisms of the human mind. I understand the feeling of exposure, as they might well be revelation of the subconscious and unconscious mind that bypass your awake self-imposed limits and shames. For that very reason, though, your wife is doing something quite intimate when sharing them with you.
- solardev 3y ago
  Why is this any more fascinating than nails growing or some hairs falling out or eyeballs moving around during sleep? Body does body things all the time. Sometimes I have incoherent thoughts while I sleep. So what? Sometimes I have them when I'm drunk or really tired or whatever too. Even when fully awake and conscious, most people (myself included) don't have the most exciting thoughts, certainly not enough to monologue about. I don't get this mysticism around sleep and dreaming. Everyone does it, and it's not particularly magical. Or intimate, for that matter. Friends share details of their dreams way too often, and I wish they wouldn't... 99% of the time it just sounds like the mind "metabolizing", I don't need to know what happened, much less sit down with some silly book to randomly assign meanings and weights to every minute of it. It's like some people believe the dreams are a portal to a higher consciousness. But frankly they just sound like noise.
  - alexvoda 3y ago
    I agree with your 3rd and 4th paragraph. However, I argue that that your first sentence frames things poorly. Nails growing, hairs falling, the body doing body things is fascinating. Are dreams exceptional compared to other behaviours of the body? No. Are they fascinating? Yes. Are many people disproportionately obsessed with them? Also yes.
    - solardev 3y ago
      I guess we're all fascinated by different things... to me they're not very different than your stomach growling in the middle of the night. But you know, to each their own! I'm sure there's millions of folks who think the things I find fascinating are really boring.
rottencupcakes 3y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_3zhkDwpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_3zhkDwpg
gverrilla 3y ago
To describe dreams is to deal with words, with consciousness. To describe them is to try to make sense of them, somehow - of the words, too. To speak them is to make those words material, real, to give them a sound you can hear. To share them is only thus being human.
- akavi 3y ago
  This comment feels like a deepity[0] to me. Saying anything at all is "to deal with words". Discussing anything at all about your internal state is "to deal with... consciousness". Yes, it is deeply human to put to words internal thoughts and share them with others (that's what I'm doing in this comment, after all). But there's nothing special about dreams in that regard. And unlike most ideas we attempt to communicate, dreams are by their nature fragmentary and illogical (or perhaps "pre-logical" is better phrasing). While humans love imputing meaning and profundity to obscurant musings (whole academic careers have been built on that fact), that doesn't mean they are actually meaningful and/or profound. [0]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:deepity https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:deepity
  - gverrilla 3y ago
    I must admit I stopped abruptly. It's not a complete thought, and the last phrase was "aborted", for which I'm sorry: I lack the mastery I would want with English language to continue, considering the complexity of the subjects I tried to touch upon and my broad experience thinking, reading, writing and dialoging about them. Nevertheless, I stand by what I said, although it's "poor", but right now I'm not willing to debate. The best I can do is to point out to authors like S. Freud and the surrealists, so you can perhaps see deeper into my comment, and wish you the best! :)
  - Lammy 3y ago
    What an awful anti-intellectual neologism. People on HN love to talk about rubber-ducking their code, but do it for your dreams and get made fun of. Unless you’re a famous writer :)
    - 3y ago
Keirmot 3y ago
I’m exactly like you. In my personal opinion, dreams don’t matter, they’re just our brains doing whatever it needs to do to stay healthy.
langsoul-com 3y ago
Dreams sometimes are wild, effectively just becomes another story. I had a dream where I was speeding down the frozen highway on an electric scooter. The game was to get faster and dodge traffic. Each time I got hit and died, I'd restart from the beginng. This occurred several times before I woke up
- Kiro 3y ago
  Not a good enough story to be worth telling anyone. Also not very wild.
  - ehnto 3y ago
    Not worth telling anyone at all? Maybe not worth a blog post, but I'd tell my partner and we would have a chuckle. This could lead into a conversation about internet fueled exceptionalism draining the joy out of the simple things in life, nothing is ever good enough in the shadow of the exceptional things constantly happening everywhere to everyone.
NovaDudely 3y ago
The most fascinating of mine are when I am in the situation of doing something like Standup comedy or whatever. By that I mean all the jokes absolutely suck or have no real punchline - it is like jokes made by current LLM. I'm not saying I am great at comedy, but I do WAY better than dream me does. But I am like you, they almost never have any cogent meaning or structure. As Charlie Brooker put it once "Dreams are... weird"
klyrs 3y ago
I only share dreams with a sentence or two, and only with specific loved ones who will enjoy the one or two details that would be interesting to them. Like, my dad's dead, so I tell my mom if I have a nice dream with him in it. Or a friend said something snarky to me in a dream, and she guffawed when I told her. Why was Donald Trump driving a moving truck for me last night? But most of the time, I agree, my dreams are garbage that nobody needs to hear.

camillomiller 3y ago

Dreams are one of the most fascinating mechanisms of the human mind. I understand the feeling of exposure, as they might well be revelation of the subconscious and unconscious mind that bypass your awake self-imposed limits and shames. For that very reason, though, your wife is doing something quite intimate when sharing them with you.

solardev 3y ago
Why is this any more fascinating than nails growing or some hairs falling out or eyeballs moving around during sleep? Body does body things all the time. Sometimes I have incoherent thoughts while I sleep. So what? Sometimes I have them when I'm drunk or really tired or whatever too. Even when fully awake and conscious, most people (myself included) don't have the most exciting thoughts, certainly not enough to monologue about. I don't get this mysticism around sleep and dreaming. Everyone does it, and it's not particularly magical. Or intimate, for that matter. Friends share details of their dreams way too often, and I wish they wouldn't... 99% of the time it just sounds like the mind "metabolizing", I don't need to know what happened, much less sit down with some silly book to randomly assign meanings and weights to every minute of it. It's like some people believe the dreams are a portal to a higher consciousness. But frankly they just sound like noise.
- alexvoda 3y ago
  I agree with your 3rd and 4th paragraph. However, I argue that that your first sentence frames things poorly. Nails growing, hairs falling, the body doing body things is fascinating. Are dreams exceptional compared to other behaviours of the body? No. Are they fascinating? Yes. Are many people disproportionately obsessed with them? Also yes.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I guess we're all fascinated by different things... to me they're not very different than your stomach growling in the middle of the night. But you know, to each their own! I'm sure there's millions of folks who think the things I find fascinating are really boring.

rottencupcakes 3y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_3zhkDwpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_3zhkDwpg

gverrilla 3y ago

To describe dreams is to deal with words, with consciousness. To describe them is to try to make sense of them, somehow - of the words, too. To speak them is to make those words material, real, to give them a sound you can hear. To share them is only thus being human.

akavi 3y ago
This comment feels like a deepity[0] to me. Saying anything at all is "to deal with words". Discussing anything at all about your internal state is "to deal with... consciousness". Yes, it is deeply human to put to words internal thoughts and share them with others (that's what I'm doing in this comment, after all). But there's nothing special about dreams in that regard. And unlike most ideas we attempt to communicate, dreams are by their nature fragmentary and illogical (or perhaps "pre-logical" is better phrasing). While humans love imputing meaning and profundity to obscurant musings (whole academic careers have been built on that fact), that doesn't mean they are actually meaningful and/or profound. [0]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:deepity https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:deepity
- gverrilla 3y ago
  I must admit I stopped abruptly. It's not a complete thought, and the last phrase was "aborted", for which I'm sorry: I lack the mastery I would want with English language to continue, considering the complexity of the subjects I tried to touch upon and my broad experience thinking, reading, writing and dialoging about them. Nevertheless, I stand by what I said, although it's "poor", but right now I'm not willing to debate. The best I can do is to point out to authors like S. Freud and the surrealists, so you can perhaps see deeper into my comment, and wish you the best! :)
- Lammy 3y ago
  What an awful anti-intellectual neologism. People on HN love to talk about rubber-ducking their code, but do it for your dreams and get made fun of. Unless you’re a famous writer :)
  - 3y ago

Keirmot 3y ago

I’m exactly like you. In my personal opinion, dreams don’t matter, they’re just our brains doing whatever it needs to do to stay healthy.

langsoul-com 3y ago

Dreams sometimes are wild, effectively just becomes another story. I had a dream where I was speeding down the frozen highway on an electric scooter. The game was to get faster and dodge traffic. Each time I got hit and died, I'd restart from the beginng. This occurred several times before I woke up

Kiro 3y ago
Not a good enough story to be worth telling anyone. Also not very wild.
- ehnto 3y ago
  Not worth telling anyone at all? Maybe not worth a blog post, but I'd tell my partner and we would have a chuckle. This could lead into a conversation about internet fueled exceptionalism draining the joy out of the simple things in life, nothing is ever good enough in the shadow of the exceptional things constantly happening everywhere to everyone.

NovaDudely 3y ago

The most fascinating of mine are when I am in the situation of doing something like Standup comedy or whatever. By that I mean all the jokes absolutely suck or have no real punchline - it is like jokes made by current LLM. I'm not saying I am great at comedy, but I do WAY better than dream me does. But I am like you, they almost never have any cogent meaning or structure. As Charlie Brooker put it once "Dreams are... weird"

klyrs 3y ago

I only share dreams with a sentence or two, and only with specific loved ones who will enjoy the one or two details that would be interesting to them. Like, my dad's dead, so I tell my mom if I have a nice dream with him in it. Or a friend said something snarky to me in a dream, and she guffawed when I told her. Why was Donald Trump driving a moving truck for me last night? But most of the time, I agree, my dreams are garbage that nobody needs to hear.