3 ms·
Apropos of nothing, non-lucid (i.e. regular) dreaming has become a great aid to my songwriting and story-writing over the past few years. I have really long and
by noduerme 3y ago
Apropos of nothing, non-lucid (i.e. regular) dreaming has become a great aid to my songwriting and story-writing over the past few years. I have really long and vivid dreams where I'm other people in other parts of the world - sometimes other worlds altogether. I've been gay, straight, woman, man. I've been an otter and a pelican. I've spent weeks holding off an army of zombies. I've fought in post-nuclear wars. Each dream can last days or weeks of dream-time. The high level of detail of the situations - and their total lack of relation to my quotidian life - makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe. But wherever they come from, I find they tell me things about my own life and help me answer questions, sometimes really practical questions about code, other times emotional questions about what I want to do. And they're a great source of novel creative material.
I've never tried to lucid dream, but I'm afraid that if I could control them my dreams would lose the thing that makes them so valuable to me, which is that from their strangeness and randomness, I get to interpret what my other selves are trying to tell me. If my conscious mind controlled them, I think I would lose insight into that; I even wonder whether losing those voices and other lives in my sleep would be a step toward going insane in waking life.
- NukedOne 3y agoWhat do you think makes you have these vivid dreams?
- meindnoch 3y agoTypically medications. E.g. SSRIs, antiretroviral drugs, and a lot of others.
- noduerme 3y agoMy gut answer is that they're real, and that when we're sleeping or when we die our consciousness slips seamlessly into parallel universes. But it may just be that my brain has really long-form ways of trying to solve puzzles by turning them into audio-visual experiences. [edit] I'm not on any meds, never taken antidepressants, and I've never done psychedelics. I do smoke pot occasionally, but oddly it tamps down the intensity of the dreams; the most vivid or memorable ones occur when I'm completely sober.
- NukedOne 3y agoDo you drink black or green tea? L-Theanine can make you have vivid dreams.
- noduerme 3y agono... 3-4 cups of coffee a day, then usually some whisky or vodka. To be honest, I don't think my dreams are more vivid than other people's; I just think I remember them better because I focus on trying to save them when I wake up. My father and brother both claim they never dream, but once in awhile they've remembered bits of one and they sound as wild as mine.
- ilikegreen 3y agoTake what I say with a grain of salt — please do your own research — but I think both THC (to which you allude earlier in this thread) and alcohol affect REM sleep/deep sleep. In fact, THC might suppress REM sleep, rebounding when sober. That is why frequent smokers (specially before-sleep smokers) experience very tough nightmares when trying to sober up.
- noduerme 3y agoWhat you say rings true. I'm not much of a THC user. Maybe once every couple months. When I do, I sometimes have very wild dreams early in the night, but I'm less likely to remember them. I don't use it much before bed, because although it feels as if I slept soundly, it always makes me wake up tired. I'm much more familiar with alcohol, and my sleep is divided by it each night into two parts. The first four hours of sleep are usually dreamless. At almost exactly four hours, I wake up and drink water. The next 3-4 hours are where the dreams occur. If I'm really catching up and can stay in bed for a full 9-10 hour sleep, the extra hours contain the most vivid, hallucinogenic dreams. So in my experience, I think both those substances impede good dreaming. I don't mind nightmares. I kind of like them. Even if they're horrific I end up recalling them to help myself get back to sleep; then usually the ending changes.
- 3y ago
- p1mrx 3y ago> makes me think I may have actually lived those lives in some other versions of the universe I think dreams illustrate the human brain's remarkable ability to 3D render detailed fictional events, which explains a lot of the crazy stuff people have believed throughout history.
- noduerme 3y agoDefinitely. I also love the notion that dreaming is a kind of multimedia LLM that feeds your physical output back into your input channels and causes you to autocomplete yourself; although it's less romantic, it seems more likely than a many-worlds hypothesis.
- p1mrx 3y agoThere are reasons to suspect that the many-worlds hypothesis might be true, but none of them have anything to do with the content of our dreams. Trying to explain everyday experience using quantum mechanics usually leads to pseudoscientific hogwash.
- noduerme 3y agoI know it sounds like hogwash. I'm not trying to make a case for it scientifically. But viscerally it seems plausible, given that we don't know how our "consciousness" interacts with these many-worlds. As a mental exercise, imagine you died and your consciousness carried on in another branch of the multiverse. How might you subjectively experience merging those branches? Could it be that waking up from a violent dream of one world and finding your current consciousness in a different one is how we experience a flattened version of the tree of possible outcomes? I would not be so quick to say, with such certainty, that I know to what degree any organism can experience the division of universes. I believe I've died many times in many timelines and wake up each day in one I'm still alive in... sometimes with fading memories of the one I just left. (Obviously, there's no way to prove or disprove this, so I normally don't trouble to tell people; they'll either find it out for themselves or I'm wrong, just a broken set of neurons seeking some higher order in its own chaos).
- thelastparadise 3y agoSrinivasa Ramanujan was known to use dreams for deep mathematical insights.