4 ms·
Strange (and boring... you've been warned) little anecdote. Yesterday (like so many days, ha) I spent too much time typing out silly posts for HN. Last night,
by dreamr 14y ago
Strange (and boring... you've been warned) little anecdote.
Yesterday (like so many days, ha) I spent too much time typing out silly posts for HN. Last night, I couldn't sleep well because of some noise outside and I had this dream. One of those dreams where it is so vivid and the story line is so clear, and there are "scenes" almost like a film where the "camera" zooms in on some aspect, that you wake up remembering the details and go "WTF? What does that mean?"
So I thought about some of the things I remebered for a little bit. Some of these details made absolutely no sense. They served no purpose in the storyline of the dream. And suddenly it hit me they were derived from words I had used in HN posts. Not topics, but individual words. My brain had woven them into the story. And it had done so with some pretty crafty storytelling. I'm not sure I could have done it so well if I was awake.
As if you gave someone a list of random words and said, "Make up a story and weave each of these words into the story."
I guess this is nothing unusual. Probably happens to people every night. But it left me thinking about how just how "self-driving" the brain is. What the heck is it doing when we go to sleep? It is running on its own software, to use a computer analogy. And it's not exactly "open source" code. I would love to see how that code works.
- gnosis 14y ago"An uninterpreted dream is like an unopened letter." Dreams often have many layers of meaning. You might want to try keeping a long-term, detailed record of your dreams, and spending some time each day trying to make sense of them and relating them to your life and to other dreams. You might be surprised to find just how rich they are with meaning.
- philwelch 14y agoYou can read meaning into anything. For the most part though, dreams are just synapses firing randomly. I wouldn't read too much into them, or at least not take the interpretations too seriously.
- dreamr 14y agoWhat's that movie with Eddie Murphy where he's an alien spaceship? It like this team of little people (cells, proteins, DNA, whatever) trying to make sense of all the stupid stuff you, the lumbering gene robot, got up to during the day. All I gave them to work with was a bunch of words on a webpage. Doesn't make for the most interesting or coherent storyline for a dream. One can imagine them saying, "When is this guy going to get off that stupid website and give us some real material to work with?" :)
- akldfgj 14y agonot entirely randomly, but processing stuff that's been "on your mind" and not packed away in long-term memory. I imagine it (non-scientifically) as the brain's trash compactor, finishing up all the half-completed thoughts of your day, not necessary in any sort of logical way, like mashing the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together regardless of how well they fit, to get something that just barely fits together at a glance.