4 ms·

What are dreams for?

57 points by CharlesW 3y ago

mactavish88 3y ago
Odd that there’s no mention at all in the article of Carl Jung’s perspective on dreams - being one of Freud’s more prominent students and having spent an inordinate amount of his life analyzing his own and others’ dreams. EDIT: The reason I bring this up is that it seems as though the prevailing reductionist perspective on dreaming is that it’s “random noise” created by the brain. This article effectively says the same thing, but says that the noise is created by arbitrary muscle twitches during sleep while the brain “learns the body”. Jung and his students spent a huge amount of their time looking for patterns in that “random noise”. It’s entirely possible that there are layers to the purpose of dreams. Yes, they could help the brain “learn the body” better. But why those specific dream characters and not others? Why those specific scenes and not others? How do those scenes and characters relate to what’s going on in a person’s life right now? It seems unlikely that evolution would produce very wasteful complex processes - it seems far more likely to me that they also serve a use in a certain type of psychological (and therefore ultimately physical) energy dissipation or tension resolution - an idea that seems to come up through Jung’s insights. Jung and his students then analyzed out common themes in the symbols in people’s dreams and discovered themes that were common across cultures, implying connections to common biological and sociological patterns (e.g. the fact that each of us grows older facing different kinds of challenges along the way).
- slfnflctd 3y ago
  > How do those scenes and characters relate to what’s going on in a person’s life I started writing down super-brief summaries of parts of my dreams on a near daily basis a while back. There are absolutely clear connections between things I've seen, heard or experienced recently and things which show up in dreams. One curious aspect of this is that there's often a delay of at least several days between the actual event and when something like it shows up in a dream, usually after I've stopped consciously thinking about it.
  - mactavish88 3y ago
    My understanding of Jung’s hypothesis about this was that every facet of the dream (the scene, the characters, etc.) is you - your psyche. In other words, your subconscious is effectively using those images as puppets to act out a play of sorts that reveals or releases some kind of tension.
- kmill 3y ago
  Even if it's just random noise, if you feed noise into a system you can measure the response and infer properties of the system based on what resonates. I think shouldn't be surprising that if you pay attention to what pops up in dreams you can gain some understanding of our minds. Fourier analysis is just a lot more straightforward than Jungian analysis... and it's made harder from how it's trying to analyze a system from within itself.
- Frannyies 3y ago
  In modern brain science another theory is that a dream is a type of replay of things the brain is busy with and allows for fine-tuning of it. Like when you learn something and it's better the next day. If it's just a brain region which has to be awake for the rem sleep to do what it does, it can also be a compensation mechanism. I'm not following the idea that energy has to dissipate. The firing origin is not some electricity which needs to discharge,
robviren 3y ago
My take is that it is not entirely disimilar from some AI research I have seen where applying conditions to simulations that are not real actually trains the model better in some ways in addition to training with real data. I remember they were using a robotic arm simulation with different gravity, friction, and other physical constants. It makes sense to me that if you saw a small version of an animal but never saw a large one you might dream of a big one. Then if you ever saw one your brain would not have to have a brand new thought at something it may have thought impossible. I think dreams make our brains more flexible than is possible with just real data.
- sublinear 3y ago
  Do you really need dreams to accomplish that though?
  - kordlessagain 3y ago
    Attention needs to be distracted, maybe.
  - enjoylife 3y ago
    For the example the op gave, probably not for an adult. But younger kids might. Also for complex domains, I find that dreams enumerate more possibilities/scenarios than I would have if awake.
iamnotsure 3y ago
Mark and sweep GC.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Pretty much this IMHO. Memory consolidation and defragmentation. Do I need to store these two memories as separate memories? Do I need to keep them at all? With these types of questions, I could explain many of my dreams, especially the more superficially strange ones.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  But also planning: some situation that worries you, you might dream about how to solve that solution. I've had that many times.
  - x86x87 3y ago
    This also happens when you are awake though.
mannykannot 3y ago
I have sometimes wondered if what we seem to remember of dreams is just a rationalization our conscious mind makes of the state it finds our brain in when we awake. If, however, scanning shows a good deal of similarity between the states a subject’s brain goes through while asleep and when recalling a dream afterwards, the most parsimonious explanation would seem to be that memories of dreams do represent what was going through one’s mind while asleep.
- vharuck 3y ago
  This seems likely to me. When we recall memories, we "fill in the gaps" during the recall process. For example, paraphrasing a quote because you can't recite it verbatim: you'll express the ideas and emotions important to you, include impactful words or phrases, but otherwise make it up. Dreams are like really fuzzy memories. So when we try to recall them, we have to add a lot. When a person talks about a dream they had, they're probably saying more about their mental state as they're recalling the dream than during the dream.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    I cannot remember dreams at all unless my sleep is interrupted.
anothernewdude 3y ago
For? What is the nuclear waste from a reactor for? It's a byproduct.
- Sosh101 3y ago
  But it's a process, and one that presumably consumes quite large amounts of energy. Doesn't sound like a simple byproduct to me.
vjerancrnjak 3y ago
Interestingly, all of the descriptions can be experienced as you fall asleep. If you can pay good attention, you can experience paralysis consciously when it starts. You will even experience twitching and you will see it has nothing to do with visual dreaming. You can also experience the shift of this balance center mentioned in the article, feeling as if you’re turning or falling. If you can persist the attention, even though this shifting feels very scary, you will have a feeling as if your face is squished against the pillow and not the back of your head. The body feels the closest when it is paralyzed, you feel an expansion of your experience, not a reduction. The name for this is conscious sleep (yoga nidra) and there’s some research on it.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I wish I could do that. If I am paying attention I wont fall asleep.
  - david-gpu 3y ago
    It is a very subtle skill. It's not paying attention with the intensity of e.g. playing a game. It's more like barely observing what's going on in front of your mind's eye, barely floating above the water without sinking into oblivion. You get better at it with practice. Not that I'm an expert, but it is an interesting experience.
    - b800h 3y ago
      This is correct. I experience hypnogogic and -pompic hallucinations, and the same technique works to experience them more vividly and for extended periods of time.
  - vjerancrnjak 3y ago
    It depends on where your brain creates the anchor. For me it is very close to visual thoughts so I can very easily feel when the attention moves to a place where you can relax to paralysis. Thoughts are just thought beginnings where the attention creates this illusion of a continuous thought. So when attention is moved you will see hundreds of thoughts arising, seemingly random, all over the place, almost as if you’re dreaming, but the attention can be moved to avoid this pointless loop of random thought observing. Attention starts with feeling the distance from the observation point created by the brain to your body parts. Then this attention needs to eventually make the feeling of your body very close which for me results in a paralysis. But the whole process does not feel like I’m guiding it. It’s like the attention mechanism of the brain finds a place from which it can consciously sleep. There is no effort at all.
phkahler 3y ago
I'm convinced there is a connection between dreaming and EMDR (therapy). Anyone who has reprocessed a chain of old memories can probably understand that. On two occasions I've had REM while conscious with eyes closed and witnessed a bunch of reprocessing.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Not everyone is paralysed in sleep of course.
jawns 3y ago
I like to think of dreams as our brains' leisure time, an opportunity for them to do whatever they want to do, unencumbered by the demands of sensory processing or conscious thought. However, that doesn't mean our brains necessarily take it easy. Indeed, I've noticed what I would consider considerable cognitive load in certain dreams. Here's a great example. I recently had a dream in which I was at a party, playing a game with some friends. We had to come up with a silly name for a person, given their profession. I was assigned "dentist," and so I thought through some possibilities: Paul A. Tooth, Paula Tooth, Paul M. Out, Paul M. Allout, etc. Then another person at the party, who was assigned "obstetrician," announced the silly name they had come up with, and I chuckled at it. What's fascinating to me is that until they announced the name, I had no perception of the critical thinking necessary to construct it -- even though it was my own brain that was creating it! Somehow, as I was perceiving myself thinking up silly dentist names, another part of my brain was simultaneously thinking up silly obstetrician names, but I could only perceive the thinking about dentists. Isn't it fascinating that our brains can pull that off?
- topherclay 3y ago
  It's interesting that you included the funny dentist names that you came up with but you didn't include the funny obstetrician name (that you also came up with).
  - jawns 3y ago
    I thought it would be amusing to see if anyone could guess it.
    - Sosh101 3y ago
      Perhaps another "Paul M. Out"
    - appplication 3y ago
      Bertha Lots
- gsinclair 3y ago
danielbln 3y ago
Slightly off-topic, but I can't stand people tell me their dreams. It annoys me to no end, but I can't quite figure out why.
- jawns 3y ago
  I think it's for the same reason that "It was all just a dream" is such a terrible plot device. There is a meaninglessness inherent in the retelling of a dream. You know at the outset that it didn't actually happen, so why is it interesting?
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    > There is a meaninglessness inherent in the retelling of a dream. There is meaning in the person considering the dream meaningful enough to tell it.
  - duopixel 3y ago
    I used to feel the same when I thought dreams were utterly meaningless, then I had a series of undeniably meaningful dreams and I became not only interested but proactively curious (ie have you seen this character in other dreams? Was anything important happening in your life when this dream happened? How did this event in the dream make you feel, if anything?). So now I have a question for you: what is your personal stance on dreams?
- madphilosopher 3y ago
  I've run amateur dream groups, where people get together and tell each other their dreams, and then each participant interprets the dream back to the dream-teller. One method was to start one's interpretation by saying, "If this were my dream..." This helps the interpreter relate what they are hearing to their own life, and anything they might say to the dream-teller is really about the interpreter and their own psyche. So you might try such a self-reflective stance if you ever get stuck having to listen to someone else's dream. With that said, if I ever choose to tell a trusted friend about a compelling dream (in a non-dream-group context), I try to relate the story in about 20 seconds, just hitting the highlights, cause I know how you feel about having to listen to someone else's unsolicited dream story!
justupvoting 3y ago
Hadn't seen it mentioned anywhere, but thought it might be interesting for you folks who do technical and scientific work: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ McCarthy's perspective on language is interesting in this regard: dreams being a sort of pre-language mind for operating an animal without the kind of consciousness that developed in us quite some time ago. That mind remains, it is distrustful of the language virus that took over, but it tries to help. It's an interesting thought.
- gausswho 3y ago
  Thanks for this read. I enjoyed its down-to-earthiness. I felt pranked at times the author's assertions of obvious truth that are quite challengeable. It felt like there were many but here's one I could recover: "There are no languages whose form is in a state of development. And their forms are all basically the same." I made a double take at that, and moved along for the ride. Ultimately I wonder if my enjoyment of the piece is because it takes great acrobatics to be bereft of reason, just enough to make you think. No, not you. That other you.
guilhas 3y ago
Dreams are fine tuning of the model I remember watching a movie of someone being decapitated, and that night I dreamed of that scene with some relative's face. It generated a primitive, a feeling of sadness So consciously I can't explain why, or need to, I just know, I will know be sad if she dies, and don't want it to happen
bane 3y ago
I'm just coming out of a very stressful period that encompassed nearly every waking and resting minute of my day for several years. After a fairly major life change and quite a few problems clearing up I noticed that I was suddenly dreaming again. I hadn't realized that I had stopped so I'm not even sure how long it's been, but now that I'm doing it again see how damaged my sleep has been. After just a few good sleep cycles with dreams I feel like my mental state has been turning around significantly. What are dreams for? I'm not sure the specifics, but they definitely make me feel better.
listenfaster 3y ago
“ Blumberg plays the drums, and, when he learns a new rhythm, he wonders whether sleep is involved. “You struggle and struggle for several days, then one day you wake up and start playing and boom—it’s automatic,” he said. “Did sleep play a role in that? If I had been recording my limb movements, would I have seen something interesting? That keeps me up at night.” As a musician whose spent many late nights practicing, I’ll be thinking about this all weekend. It took me a long time to give sleep the respect in my life it deserves! Same thinking applies to any problem solving for me, really. How often have you woke about after a refreshing sleep with an elusive solution readily apparent the next morning?
friend_and_foe 3y ago
I think there's a lot going on when we dream, and it's not all directly related or cause and effect of a single process. The idea that a twitch causes a neurological response that we interpret as a part of a dream sounds nice, until you ask yourself why sleepwalkers act out dreams. They're not twitching, their minds are wandering and their bodies are responding. I have a feeling the guy is on to something, but I don't think it's quite as simple as "the reverse of what we thought is true". I would think the body and mind take advantage of downtime to do all the things they need downtime to do, and it makes sense evolutionarily for them to multitask so as to spend the least amount of time incapacitated as possible. So probably, many unrelated or tangentially related things are going on, and possibly even some hokey shit for good measure.
euroderf 3y ago
I've read here & there that smoking weed makes it impossible to remember dreams. Now that weed is more widespread and openly discussable in the USA, can anyone verify or refute this claim ?

57 points by CharlesW 3y ago

Odd that there’s no mention at all in the article of Carl Jung’s perspective on dreams - being one of Freud’s more prominent students and having spent an inordinate amount of his life analyzing his own and others’ dreams. EDIT: The reason I bring this up is that it seems as though the prevailing reductionist perspective on dreaming is that it’s “random noise” created by the brain. This article effectively says the same thing, but says that the noise is created by arbitrary muscle twitches during sleep while the brain “learns the body”. Jung and his students spent a huge amount of their time looking for patterns in that “random noise”. It’s entirely possible that there are layers to the purpose of dreams. Yes, they could help the brain “learn the body” better. But why those specific dream characters and not others? Why those specific scenes and not others? How do those scenes and characters relate to what’s going on in a person’s life right now? It seems unlikely that evolution would produce very wasteful complex processes - it seems far more likely to me that they also serve a use in a certain type of psychological (and therefore ultimately physical) energy dissipation or tension resolution - an idea that seems to come up through Jung’s insights. Jung and his students then analyzed out common themes in the symbols in people’s dreams and discovered themes that were common across cultures, implying connections to common biological and sociological patterns (e.g. the fact that each of us grows older facing different kinds of challenges along the way).

slfnflctd 3y ago
> How do those scenes and characters relate to what’s going on in a person’s life I started writing down super-brief summaries of parts of my dreams on a near daily basis a while back. There are absolutely clear connections between things I've seen, heard or experienced recently and things which show up in dreams. One curious aspect of this is that there's often a delay of at least several days between the actual event and when something like it shows up in a dream, usually after I've stopped consciously thinking about it.
- mactavish88 3y ago
  My understanding of Jung’s hypothesis about this was that every facet of the dream (the scene, the characters, etc.) is you - your psyche. In other words, your subconscious is effectively using those images as puppets to act out a play of sorts that reveals or releases some kind of tension.
kmill 3y ago
Even if it's just random noise, if you feed noise into a system you can measure the response and infer properties of the system based on what resonates. I think shouldn't be surprising that if you pay attention to what pops up in dreams you can gain some understanding of our minds. Fourier analysis is just a lot more straightforward than Jungian analysis... and it's made harder from how it's trying to analyze a system from within itself.
Frannyies 3y ago
In modern brain science another theory is that a dream is a type of replay of things the brain is busy with and allows for fine-tuning of it. Like when you learn something and it's better the next day. If it's just a brain region which has to be awake for the rem sleep to do what it does, it can also be a compensation mechanism. I'm not following the idea that energy has to dissipate. The firing origin is not some electricity which needs to discharge,

robviren 3y ago

My take is that it is not entirely disimilar from some AI research I have seen where applying conditions to simulations that are not real actually trains the model better in some ways in addition to training with real data. I remember they were using a robotic arm simulation with different gravity, friction, and other physical constants. It makes sense to me that if you saw a small version of an animal but never saw a large one you might dream of a big one. Then if you ever saw one your brain would not have to have a brand new thought at something it may have thought impossible. I think dreams make our brains more flexible than is possible with just real data.

sublinear 3y ago
Do you really need dreams to accomplish that though?
- kordlessagain 3y ago
  Attention needs to be distracted, maybe.
- enjoylife 3y ago
  For the example the op gave, probably not for an adult. But younger kids might. Also for complex domains, I find that dreams enumerate more possibilities/scenarios than I would have if awake.

iamnotsure 3y ago

Mark and sweep GC.

steve1977 3y ago
Pretty much this IMHO. Memory consolidation and defragmentation. Do I need to store these two memories as separate memories? Do I need to keep them at all? With these types of questions, I could explain many of my dreams, especially the more superficially strange ones.
Towaway69 3y ago
But also planning: some situation that worries you, you might dream about how to solve that solution. I've had that many times.
- x86x87 3y ago
  This also happens when you are awake though.

mannykannot 3y ago

I have sometimes wondered if what we seem to remember of dreams is just a rationalization our conscious mind makes of the state it finds our brain in when we awake. If, however, scanning shows a good deal of similarity between the states a subject’s brain goes through while asleep and when recalling a dream afterwards, the most parsimonious explanation would seem to be that memories of dreams do represent what was going through one’s mind while asleep.

vharuck 3y ago
This seems likely to me. When we recall memories, we "fill in the gaps" during the recall process. For example, paraphrasing a quote because you can't recite it verbatim: you'll express the ideas and emotions important to you, include impactful words or phrases, but otherwise make it up. Dreams are like really fuzzy memories. So when we try to recall them, we have to add a lot. When a person talks about a dream they had, they're probably saying more about their mental state as they're recalling the dream than during the dream.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  I cannot remember dreams at all unless my sleep is interrupted.

anothernewdude 3y ago

For? What is the nuclear waste from a reactor for? It's a byproduct.

Sosh101 3y ago
But it's a process, and one that presumably consumes quite large amounts of energy. Doesn't sound like a simple byproduct to me.

vjerancrnjak 3y ago

Interestingly, all of the descriptions can be experienced as you fall asleep. If you can pay good attention, you can experience paralysis consciously when it starts. You will even experience twitching and you will see it has nothing to do with visual dreaming. You can also experience the shift of this balance center mentioned in the article, feeling as if you’re turning or falling. If you can persist the attention, even though this shifting feels very scary, you will have a feeling as if your face is squished against the pillow and not the back of your head. The body feels the closest when it is paralyzed, you feel an expansion of your experience, not a reduction. The name for this is conscious sleep (yoga nidra) and there’s some research on it.

quickthrower2 3y ago
I wish I could do that. If I am paying attention I wont fall asleep.
- david-gpu 3y ago
  It is a very subtle skill. It's not paying attention with the intensity of e.g. playing a game. It's more like barely observing what's going on in front of your mind's eye, barely floating above the water without sinking into oblivion. You get better at it with practice. Not that I'm an expert, but it is an interesting experience.
  - b800h 3y ago
    This is correct. I experience hypnogogic and -pompic hallucinations, and the same technique works to experience them more vividly and for extended periods of time.
- vjerancrnjak 3y ago
  It depends on where your brain creates the anchor. For me it is very close to visual thoughts so I can very easily feel when the attention moves to a place where you can relax to paralysis. Thoughts are just thought beginnings where the attention creates this illusion of a continuous thought. So when attention is moved you will see hundreds of thoughts arising, seemingly random, all over the place, almost as if you’re dreaming, but the attention can be moved to avoid this pointless loop of random thought observing. Attention starts with feeling the distance from the observation point created by the brain to your body parts. Then this attention needs to eventually make the feeling of your body very close which for me results in a paralysis. But the whole process does not feel like I’m guiding it. It’s like the attention mechanism of the brain finds a place from which it can consciously sleep. There is no effort at all.

phkahler 3y ago

I'm convinced there is a connection between dreaming and EMDR (therapy). Anyone who has reprocessed a chain of old memories can probably understand that. On two occasions I've had REM while conscious with eyes closed and witnessed a bunch of reprocessing.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Not everyone is paralysed in sleep of course.

jawns 3y ago

I like to think of dreams as our brains' leisure time, an opportunity for them to do whatever they want to do, unencumbered by the demands of sensory processing or conscious thought. However, that doesn't mean our brains necessarily take it easy. Indeed, I've noticed what I would consider considerable cognitive load in certain dreams. Here's a great example. I recently had a dream in which I was at a party, playing a game with some friends. We had to come up with a silly name for a person, given their profession. I was assigned "dentist," and so I thought through some possibilities: Paul A. Tooth, Paula Tooth, Paul M. Out, Paul M. Allout, etc. Then another person at the party, who was assigned "obstetrician," announced the silly name they had come up with, and I chuckled at it. What's fascinating to me is that until they announced the name, I had no perception of the critical thinking necessary to construct it -- even though it was my own brain that was creating it! Somehow, as I was perceiving myself thinking up silly dentist names, another part of my brain was simultaneously thinking up silly obstetrician names, but I could only perceive the thinking about dentists. Isn't it fascinating that our brains can pull that off?

topherclay 3y ago
It's interesting that you included the funny dentist names that you came up with but you didn't include the funny obstetrician name (that you also came up with).
- jawns 3y ago
  I thought it would be amusing to see if anyone could guess it.
  - Sosh101 3y ago
    Perhaps another "Paul M. Out"
  - appplication 3y ago
    Bertha Lots
gsinclair 3y ago

danielbln 3y ago

Slightly off-topic, but I can't stand people tell me their dreams. It annoys me to no end, but I can't quite figure out why.

jawns 3y ago
I think it's for the same reason that "It was all just a dream" is such a terrible plot device. There is a meaninglessness inherent in the retelling of a dream. You know at the outset that it didn't actually happen, so why is it interesting?
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > There is a meaninglessness inherent in the retelling of a dream. There is meaning in the person considering the dream meaningful enough to tell it.
- duopixel 3y ago
  I used to feel the same when I thought dreams were utterly meaningless, then I had a series of undeniably meaningful dreams and I became not only interested but proactively curious (ie have you seen this character in other dreams? Was anything important happening in your life when this dream happened? How did this event in the dream make you feel, if anything?). So now I have a question for you: what is your personal stance on dreams?
madphilosopher 3y ago
I've run amateur dream groups, where people get together and tell each other their dreams, and then each participant interprets the dream back to the dream-teller. One method was to start one's interpretation by saying, "If this were my dream..." This helps the interpreter relate what they are hearing to their own life, and anything they might say to the dream-teller is really about the interpreter and their own psyche. So you might try such a self-reflective stance if you ever get stuck having to listen to someone else's dream. With that said, if I ever choose to tell a trusted friend about a compelling dream (in a non-dream-group context), I try to relate the story in about 20 seconds, just hitting the highlights, cause I know how you feel about having to listen to someone else's unsolicited dream story!

justupvoting 3y ago

Hadn't seen it mentioned anywhere, but thought it might be interesting for you folks who do technical and scientific work: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/ McCarthy's perspective on language is interesting in this regard: dreams being a sort of pre-language mind for operating an animal without the kind of consciousness that developed in us quite some time ago. That mind remains, it is distrustful of the language virus that took over, but it tries to help. It's an interesting thought.

gausswho 3y ago
Thanks for this read. I enjoyed its down-to-earthiness. I felt pranked at times the author's assertions of obvious truth that are quite challengeable. It felt like there were many but here's one I could recover: "There are no languages whose form is in a state of development. And their forms are all basically the same." I made a double take at that, and moved along for the ride. Ultimately I wonder if my enjoyment of the piece is because it takes great acrobatics to be bereft of reason, just enough to make you think. No, not you. That other you.

guilhas 3y ago

Dreams are fine tuning of the model I remember watching a movie of someone being decapitated, and that night I dreamed of that scene with some relative's face. It generated a primitive, a feeling of sadness So consciously I can't explain why, or need to, I just know, I will know be sad if she dies, and don't want it to happen

bane 3y ago

I'm just coming out of a very stressful period that encompassed nearly every waking and resting minute of my day for several years. After a fairly major life change and quite a few problems clearing up I noticed that I was suddenly dreaming again. I hadn't realized that I had stopped so I'm not even sure how long it's been, but now that I'm doing it again see how damaged my sleep has been. After just a few good sleep cycles with dreams I feel like my mental state has been turning around significantly. What are dreams for? I'm not sure the specifics, but they definitely make me feel better.

listenfaster 3y ago

“ Blumberg plays the drums, and, when he learns a new rhythm, he wonders whether sleep is involved. “You struggle and struggle for several days, then one day you wake up and start playing and boom—it’s automatic,” he said. “Did sleep play a role in that? If I had been recording my limb movements, would I have seen something interesting? That keeps me up at night.” As a musician whose spent many late nights practicing, I’ll be thinking about this all weekend. It took me a long time to give sleep the respect in my life it deserves! Same thinking applies to any problem solving for me, really. How often have you woke about after a refreshing sleep with an elusive solution readily apparent the next morning?

friend_and_foe 3y ago

I think there's a lot going on when we dream, and it's not all directly related or cause and effect of a single process. The idea that a twitch causes a neurological response that we interpret as a part of a dream sounds nice, until you ask yourself why sleepwalkers act out dreams. They're not twitching, their minds are wandering and their bodies are responding. I have a feeling the guy is on to something, but I don't think it's quite as simple as "the reverse of what we thought is true". I would think the body and mind take advantage of downtime to do all the things they need downtime to do, and it makes sense evolutionarily for them to multitask so as to spend the least amount of time incapacitated as possible. So probably, many unrelated or tangentially related things are going on, and possibly even some hokey shit for good measure.

euroderf 3y ago

I've read here & there that smoking weed makes it impossible to remember dreams. Now that weed is more widespread and openly discussable in the USA, can anyone verify or refute this claim ?