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Something about dreams that fascinates me is that I usually am genuinely surprised by events that occur in dreams. I interact with other characters whose motiva

Something about dreams that fascinates me is that I usually am genuinely surprised by events that occur in dreams. I interact with other characters whose motivation I cannot understand and whose actions I cannot fully anticipate. It feels like there's a foreign entity acting as DM. This isn't fake surprise. Sometimes I'll wake up and think, "who on earth were those guys and what were they trying to do? And yet their actions make sense..." or, "who came up with that punchline? It's legitimately funny and I never saw it coming, so it can't have been me..." And yet I know it's all being generated by my own brain somehow. Through some kind of privileged access level. And then I think about the bicameral brain structure. Does our brain have two halves so that it can function in a self-play training mode during sleep? Are each halves of my brain experiencing the same dream from opposite points of view? Apologies for the tangent; this is almost totally unrelated to the article and probably something well known to neuroscience for decades. But still, it fascinates me, and the more we learn about the effectiveness of self-play in AI, the more I wonder.

jes5199 2y ago
I think you may have hit upon a novel combination of ideas here. There is something called "social simulation theory" regarding the purpose of dreams, but I don't think it has a neuroanatomical description included.
- HaZeust 2y ago
  >"I don't think it has a neuroanatomical description included" Genuinely curious, but then why bother?
  - jes5199 2y ago
    because you can make descriptions of useful human cognition without specifying the implementation. When you’re reading python code, do you ask, “wait, which hard register is this local variable stored in??”
svnt 2y ago
I don’t think this requires two halves, although it certainly seems possible that is what is happening. I believe it only requires that your sensory and post-sensory systems be unpredictably generative when feeding to your subjective sense-making/observer. This could be provided for within a coherent whole brain.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  That would work for dreams of wandering through some random landscape, but I'm talking about dreams where I interact with people who seem as smart (or smarter) than me, who can tell me jokes that make me laugh. What you describe would be like learning chess by exploring random boards, but I'm talking about dreams as self play: learning chess by playing as white against black, without any window into black's strategy. To do that well seems to require running two brain instances in relative isolation. Dreams would be the only safe time to do that, and a bicameral brain hardware would be the most straightforward implementation. I doubt my optic nerve can play chess against my cerebellum.
  - juliendorra 2y ago
    Is it possible that you are confusing the feeling of the dream with the content of the dream? For example can you remember and write down any of these jokes? Do they make any sense outside of the dream? The dream may give you the feeling that someone is telling you a joke, and the feeling that makes you laugh, without the actual joke existing as a real structured text joke.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      I can, yes. I'm lucid enough after waking up to confirm that they're sometimes pretty good jokes, and very unlike what I'd come up with when awake. They're not comedy gold, I'm not a comedian, but they're but decent for me - and they would fall flat if you knew in advance how the setup was going to land. I'm aware of the possibility you're hinting at; it's my default expectation for a dream to feel sensible but not be sensible. Like dreaming that I can speak Spanish fluently, but when I wake up I realize that none of those were real words. It's when this doesn't happen that I feel so amazed: when I wake up and reflect and it still feels like there must have been someone else in there with me, whose moves I was unable to introspect, but they were nonetheless coherent.
vjerancrnjak 2y ago
It’s a very conscious part of sleep. So who knows what’s actually going on elsewhere, and if you ever make it conscious, would it just be an interpretation of this temporary conscious machinery inspecting what was previously running without it with no labels. It is similar to solving problems. You want most of it to happen in unconsciousness, otherwise it’s too slow. Things are learned when they are natural, without thought.
Davidzheng 2y ago
By the way, on dreams: Doesn't the existence of dreams mean that consciousness is like a subprogram in the brain that is usually "plugged in" to reality (or rather some rendering of reality done by the rest of the brain) but the rest of the brain can in fact simulate other scenarios for the consciousness to plug into? Also I think split brain experiments basically support that you can split a consciousness into two tbh... Anyways obviously above is speculation
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  That's one way to think about it I guess! I always think of it more like the channels that write to the sensory input registers get switched, just like when I configure my microcontroller's ADC0 to read from INT_REF instead of EXT_REF by flipping a bit at a certain memory address.
- plakspin 2y ago
  You know how a loud sound or a flash of light can alter your dream ... For example you hear your alarm clock and all of a sudden you are dreaming you are in an ambulance? My theory is that we are always in a "dream" state. Stimuli that manage to reach our conscious attention will alter this dream. When a asleep only very strong stimuli will reach us so for the most part our "dream" is in a feedback loop mostly doing its own thing. When awake though we have a much more weaker filter for stimuli . The direction that our "dream" takes is fully controlled by it.
bananaflag 2y ago
> "who came up with that punchline? It's legitimately funny and I never saw it coming, so it can't have been me..." Sometimes, when I dream, I am envious of people being witty in ways I think I can't be, and when I wake up I'm like "..."
- djmips 2y ago
  Or dreams with music scores or dreams where you are composing a music score. But once I didn't quite wake up and I got it down in a sequencer. Freaked out my boss who didn't believe me when I said I made it.
  - jeffparsons 2y ago
    I have this when I'm drifting off to sleep but not quite gone yet. I can effortlessly compose compelling melodies in my head, sometimes even parts for multiple instruments simultaneously, as if I'm simply listening to someone play it. But if I want it to go in a particular direction, it does. The couple of times I've willed myself to wake up and find a keyboard, the melodies still made sense — I wasn't just a drunk guy thinking he can sing. I've occasionally been able to do the same with architecture: design a massive sprawling palace with ease as I fly through it. And much like the music, on the one and only (I think?) time I woke up and sketched as much as I could remember, it still all made sense. But in my normal waking life I am creatively constipated. My mind aggressively criticises and crushes ideas before they get a chance to grow organically. I have one side of the creative process in my waking life (filtering) but very little of the other (synthesis). This makes me think a couple of things: 1. I totally get why artists use drugs so much. Any way to tap into that other state must be incredibly tempting. 2. It would be so amazing if we could figure out how to record in high fidelity and interpret what's going on in these altered states of consciousness. Maybe you've composed a whole symphony while you slept once, and you just don't know it!
    - mola 2y ago
      You should check out "the artist way" it's a book about releasing you creativity. One of the pillars is the concept of morning pages. Just a stream of thought writing 3 pages the first thing you do after you wake up. I guess it helps training yourself to be less in "critique mode"
beagle3 2y ago
Don’t remember where I read this theory, but the gist is that dreams are simulated events for practice/preparation, and they are therefore surprising and very diverse - you need to practice social interactions, fight or flight, shame, freezing, etc - and since you don’t have a lot of time, many dreams will sample many or all these themes.
- crummy 2y ago
  I'll be grateful for all the prep dreams when I finally find myself doing an exam I'd forgotten about while naked.
null_driver 2y ago
I tend to rely on old traditional methods and recently came across this dissection which opened up my interpretation of the whole dreaming process (a way in which we are "renewed"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz4SRe-PH7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz4SRe-PH7A
geon 2y ago
The problem is, you might dream the joke is very witty, but when you wake up, you realize it is completely nonsensical. Your brain didn’t really dream the joke. It dreamt the emotional response to it. The joke itself was just a prop. Not sure where I’m going with this.
- wruza 2y ago
  Also happens with drugs, the you understood everything thing, teleportation, repetitions, etc, repetitions, etc. We get used to our usual normal-functioning consciousness, but there’s a whole universe of its potential modes and what-causes-what and in which order. For example, dream scenarios may easily happen in reverse, from a random emotion to drawing the scene around that, to the sense of reality, when you just remember a concept of it. Everything can be backwards, orthogonal, not in order. All “it” has to do is to make it feel normal. All these “backwards”, “normal”, “time”, “because” are not something just granted, you have to actively experience these all the time.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  In that case, it wouldn't still be funny and unexpected when I woke up.
mandmandam 2y ago
> I interact with other characters whose motivation I cannot understand and whose actions I cannot fully anticipate. It feels like there's a foreign entity acting as DM. My head canon on this phenomenon is that we are not quite as integrated (or isolated) as our conscious 'self' would have us believe. Neuroscience and Buddhism alike seem to back this up... The concept of 'anatta' [0] has held up strongly for thousands of years (how could it not?). As far as I can tell, neuroscience is also increasingly clear that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon - and strange things happen when this is disrupted. Most who have experienced psychedelics will agree that our brains are capable of providing utterly novel, previously unimaginable experiences; stranger even than most dreams. For example, DMT users across a wide range of cultural backgrounds describe seeing 'machine elves' [1]; "People describe these entities as distinct, autonomous beings that typically present with some kind of message." Then, look at people who 'hear voices'; a phenomenon which is quite scary in our culture, and quite normal or respected in other, older cultures. The voices can say things which surprise us even in our waking lives, sometimes even offering powerful insight, without any ingestion of substances. So... There are these ways to experience surprising characters made by our own brains - dreams, drugs, and other oddities. My personal view is that these are always active, mostly doing their thing in the background; something like flora and fauna in the sea of our sub/consciousness. Sleep can reveal them, as can 'altered' states of mind.. As if the light of consciousness dazzles us, and we can't see the gloriously intricate machinery in the dark. 0 - https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/a/25302 https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/a/25302 1 - https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-elves.htm https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-...
MattGrommes 2y ago
What I always wonder when this happens is, did I actually come up with something witty in a dream or did my brain just generate the feeling of having come up with something witty without actually having a cause. I had a dream once where I had 3 really good ideas for a particular product but when I woke up I couldn't remember the 3rd and best idea. Then I started wondering if there actually was a 3rd idea or did my dream just skip to the "That's a great idea" stage with no actual idea, leaving me with just the feeling. Brains are weird, dreams doubly so.
- rspeele 2y ago
  "Why would you need to see it? You're the genius who invented the product in question!" > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LtT0xZ11wM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LtT0xZ11wM
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    Brilliant clip. :) I'm sure we've all had dreams that feel like that. If I had to put a point on it for this one, the "self-play" game happening here is your brain serving up instantaneous new plausible and unanticipated excuses for why you can't see the object that you're struggling to get a glimpse of!

jes5199 2y ago

I think you may have hit upon a novel combination of ideas here. There is something called "social simulation theory" regarding the purpose of dreams, but I don't think it has a neuroanatomical description included.

HaZeust 2y ago
>"I don't think it has a neuroanatomical description included" Genuinely curious, but then why bother?
- jes5199 2y ago
  because you can make descriptions of useful human cognition without specifying the implementation. When you’re reading python code, do you ask, “wait, which hard register is this local variable stored in??”

svnt 2y ago

I don’t think this requires two halves, although it certainly seems possible that is what is happening. I believe it only requires that your sensory and post-sensory systems be unpredictably generative when feeding to your subjective sense-making/observer. This could be provided for within a coherent whole brain.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
That would work for dreams of wandering through some random landscape, but I'm talking about dreams where I interact with people who seem as smart (or smarter) than me, who can tell me jokes that make me laugh. What you describe would be like learning chess by exploring random boards, but I'm talking about dreams as self play: learning chess by playing as white against black, without any window into black's strategy. To do that well seems to require running two brain instances in relative isolation. Dreams would be the only safe time to do that, and a bicameral brain hardware would be the most straightforward implementation. I doubt my optic nerve can play chess against my cerebellum.
- juliendorra 2y ago
  Is it possible that you are confusing the feeling of the dream with the content of the dream? For example can you remember and write down any of these jokes? Do they make any sense outside of the dream? The dream may give you the feeling that someone is telling you a joke, and the feeling that makes you laugh, without the actual joke existing as a real structured text joke.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    I can, yes. I'm lucid enough after waking up to confirm that they're sometimes pretty good jokes, and very unlike what I'd come up with when awake. They're not comedy gold, I'm not a comedian, but they're but decent for me - and they would fall flat if you knew in advance how the setup was going to land. I'm aware of the possibility you're hinting at; it's my default expectation for a dream to feel sensible but not be sensible. Like dreaming that I can speak Spanish fluently, but when I wake up I realize that none of those were real words. It's when this doesn't happen that I feel so amazed: when I wake up and reflect and it still feels like there must have been someone else in there with me, whose moves I was unable to introspect, but they were nonetheless coherent.

vjerancrnjak 2y ago

It’s a very conscious part of sleep. So who knows what’s actually going on elsewhere, and if you ever make it conscious, would it just be an interpretation of this temporary conscious machinery inspecting what was previously running without it with no labels. It is similar to solving problems. You want most of it to happen in unconsciousness, otherwise it’s too slow. Things are learned when they are natural, without thought.

Davidzheng 2y ago

By the way, on dreams: Doesn't the existence of dreams mean that consciousness is like a subprogram in the brain that is usually "plugged in" to reality (or rather some rendering of reality done by the rest of the brain) but the rest of the brain can in fact simulate other scenarios for the consciousness to plug into? Also I think split brain experiments basically support that you can split a consciousness into two tbh... Anyways obviously above is speculation

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
That's one way to think about it I guess! I always think of it more like the channels that write to the sensory input registers get switched, just like when I configure my microcontroller's ADC0 to read from INT_REF instead of EXT_REF by flipping a bit at a certain memory address.
plakspin 2y ago
You know how a loud sound or a flash of light can alter your dream ... For example you hear your alarm clock and all of a sudden you are dreaming you are in an ambulance? My theory is that we are always in a "dream" state. Stimuli that manage to reach our conscious attention will alter this dream. When a asleep only very strong stimuli will reach us so for the most part our "dream" is in a feedback loop mostly doing its own thing. When awake though we have a much more weaker filter for stimuli . The direction that our "dream" takes is fully controlled by it.

bananaflag 2y ago

> "who came up with that punchline? It's legitimately funny and I never saw it coming, so it can't have been me..." Sometimes, when I dream, I am envious of people being witty in ways I think I can't be, and when I wake up I'm like "..."

djmips 2y ago
Or dreams with music scores or dreams where you are composing a music score. But once I didn't quite wake up and I got it down in a sequencer. Freaked out my boss who didn't believe me when I said I made it.
- jeffparsons 2y ago
  I have this when I'm drifting off to sleep but not quite gone yet. I can effortlessly compose compelling melodies in my head, sometimes even parts for multiple instruments simultaneously, as if I'm simply listening to someone play it. But if I want it to go in a particular direction, it does. The couple of times I've willed myself to wake up and find a keyboard, the melodies still made sense — I wasn't just a drunk guy thinking he can sing. I've occasionally been able to do the same with architecture: design a massive sprawling palace with ease as I fly through it. And much like the music, on the one and only (I think?) time I woke up and sketched as much as I could remember, it still all made sense. But in my normal waking life I am creatively constipated. My mind aggressively criticises and crushes ideas before they get a chance to grow organically. I have one side of the creative process in my waking life (filtering) but very little of the other (synthesis). This makes me think a couple of things: 1. I totally get why artists use drugs so much. Any way to tap into that other state must be incredibly tempting. 2. It would be so amazing if we could figure out how to record in high fidelity and interpret what's going on in these altered states of consciousness. Maybe you've composed a whole symphony while you slept once, and you just don't know it!
  - mola 2y ago
    You should check out "the artist way" it's a book about releasing you creativity. One of the pillars is the concept of morning pages. Just a stream of thought writing 3 pages the first thing you do after you wake up. I guess it helps training yourself to be less in "critique mode"

beagle3 2y ago

Don’t remember where I read this theory, but the gist is that dreams are simulated events for practice/preparation, and they are therefore surprising and very diverse - you need to practice social interactions, fight or flight, shame, freezing, etc - and since you don’t have a lot of time, many dreams will sample many or all these themes.

crummy 2y ago
I'll be grateful for all the prep dreams when I finally find myself doing an exam I'd forgotten about while naked.

null_driver 2y ago

I tend to rely on old traditional methods and recently came across this dissection which opened up my interpretation of the whole dreaming process (a way in which we are "renewed"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz4SRe-PH7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz4SRe-PH7A

geon 2y ago

The problem is, you might dream the joke is very witty, but when you wake up, you realize it is completely nonsensical. Your brain didn’t really dream the joke. It dreamt the emotional response to it. The joke itself was just a prop. Not sure where I’m going with this.

wruza 2y ago
Also happens with drugs, the you understood everything thing, teleportation, repetitions, etc, repetitions, etc. We get used to our usual normal-functioning consciousness, but there’s a whole universe of its potential modes and what-causes-what and in which order. For example, dream scenarios may easily happen in reverse, from a random emotion to drawing the scene around that, to the sense of reality, when you just remember a concept of it. Everything can be backwards, orthogonal, not in order. All “it” has to do is to make it feel normal. All these “backwards”, “normal”, “time”, “because” are not something just granted, you have to actively experience these all the time.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
In that case, it wouldn't still be funny and unexpected when I woke up.

mandmandam 2y ago

> I interact with other characters whose motivation I cannot understand and whose actions I cannot fully anticipate. It feels like there's a foreign entity acting as DM. My head canon on this phenomenon is that we are not quite as integrated (or isolated) as our conscious 'self' would have us believe. Neuroscience and Buddhism alike seem to back this up... The concept of 'anatta' [0] has held up strongly for thousands of years (how could it not?). As far as I can tell, neuroscience is also increasingly clear that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon - and strange things happen when this is disrupted. Most who have experienced psychedelics will agree that our brains are capable of providing utterly novel, previously unimaginable experiences; stranger even than most dreams. For example, DMT users across a wide range of cultural backgrounds describe seeing 'machine elves' [1]; "People describe these entities as distinct, autonomous beings that typically present with some kind of message." Then, look at people who 'hear voices'; a phenomenon which is quite scary in our culture, and quite normal or respected in other, older cultures. The voices can say things which surprise us even in our waking lives, sometimes even offering powerful insight, without any ingestion of substances. So... There are these ways to experience surprising characters made by our own brains - dreams, drugs, and other oddities. My personal view is that these are always active, mostly doing their thing in the background; something like flora and fauna in the sea of our sub/consciousness. Sleep can reveal them, as can 'altered' states of mind.. As if the light of consciousness dazzles us, and we can't see the gloriously intricate machinery in the dark. 0 - https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/a/25302 https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/a/25302 1 - https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-elves.htm https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-...

MattGrommes 2y ago

What I always wonder when this happens is, did I actually come up with something witty in a dream or did my brain just generate the feeling of having come up with something witty without actually having a cause. I had a dream once where I had 3 really good ideas for a particular product but when I woke up I couldn't remember the 3rd and best idea. Then I started wondering if there actually was a 3rd idea or did my dream just skip to the "That's a great idea" stage with no actual idea, leaving me with just the feeling. Brains are weird, dreams doubly so.

rspeele 2y ago
"Why would you need to see it? You're the genius who invented the product in question!" > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LtT0xZ11wM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LtT0xZ11wM
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Brilliant clip. :) I'm sure we've all had dreams that feel like that. If I had to put a point on it for this one, the "self-play" game happening here is your brain serving up instantaneous new plausible and unanticipated excuses for why you can't see the object that you're struggling to get a glimpse of!