(i)
A side effect of my sleep disorder is that I have lots of really vivid strange dreams, which I remember well when I wake up.
Last night I dreamt that something inexplicable/apparently paranormal (details not important) happened, and that I posted to tumblr saying “hey, so this really weird thing happened, and I can’t come up with a mundane explanation for it, does anyone have any ideas?”
In the dream, I got several replies to the post, offering potential explanations. I posted again thanking people for their input and saying that, as it happened, none of those could apply in this case.
“Obviously,” I added, “from your point of view, the most plausible explanation at this point is ‘some random person on the internet is lying.’ But I’m curious what the most reasonable explanation is from my point of view, given that I know it really did happen.”
At which point I woke up, making the answer immediately clear: the most reasonable explanation was that it did not, in fact, happen, because I was dreaming – even if I was quite sure it had happened.
(ii)
A while ago I had another dream along the same lines.
In that dream, something had happened that could happen in real life, but happens much more frequently in dreams – I don’t remember what it was, but something like “leaving the house and then realizing you’re not wearing pants,” or “finding out you’re signed up for a class you haven’t gone to all semester.”
Within the dream, I noticed this, and turned to the person next to me. “You know,” I observed, “if I were being strictly logical, I should now conclude that this is all a dream and none of it is really happening. Just goes to show how silly and impractical that kind of thinking is.”
Whereupon, of course, I woke up, and subsequently felt very silly indeed.
(iii)
I’m pretty sure my subconscious is trying to tell me something.
I’m a little concerned that what it’s trying to tell me seems to be “you’re living out Inception; wake up.”
But then, that would just be ridiculous.
huh!
This is fascinating to me because, while I do (very rarely) sometimes consider in a dream whether or not I’m dreaming and come up with a “no”, when I do that while awake there is an experiential/intuitive factor present that makes the answer *super obvious* and that is consistently missing in dreams. (It’s just that in dreams I don’t always retain the information “hey, if you can’t feel The Thing That Means You’re Obviously Awake Right Now, you probably aren’t”.)
And like, MOST of the time, if I’m dreaming and it occurs to me to wonder whether I’m dreaming I can notice the absence of The Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake. Or if not that I can pick up on another blatant sign, such as having a super hard time visually focusing on objects, or the stubborn refusal of bathrooms to continue having walls when I’m in them, or my mother being alive.
Do you not have a thing like that, or what?
I definitely don’t have a Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake. (A fairly common experience for me is picking up on environmental/mood cues that correlate with being-in-a-dream, and going “oh shoot I am totally dreaming right now aren’t I? great, the jump scare is coming any second,” and then it turning out that I am in fact awake.)
I do have a good reliable check I can perform, though (like you) I often forget it exists in dreams: I don’t feel pain in dreams, so I’ll bite the side of my hand, and if it hurts a little I’m awake and if my teeth go straight through painlessly I’m asleep. (As a kid I assumed everyone had this and that was what the “pinch yourself to see if you’re dreaming” thing was about.)
Unfortunately, though, this really only works while I’m doing it, because (I don’t know if other people experience this?) dreams don’t just give me invented current-experiences, they often come with fictional memories. This can range from “ah yes I have been searching for this mystical artifact for years” to “I can remember clearly the day I learned to fly” to “oh yeah I’m definitely awake because I checked just a little while ago.” (I first consciously noticed this phenomenon after Inception came out; I tried the remember-how-you-got-here thing, and discovered that my brain was cheerfully willing to spin out vivid memories of how I got there.)
(“Try reading a book” used to also be a good check for me; in a dream, I was never able to. Then one time I tried to use it and my brain cheerfully generated pages of made-sense-at-the-time text, and I concluded I was awake, and was quite startled when I woke up. These days, my second-best check for dreaming is that I can never type in dreams, especially not dialing phone numbers; I constantly hit the wrong keys, and then backspace too far, and then hit the wrong keys again…)
Weeeeeeird. Brains, man!
(If I had to describe The Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake, I’d say it’s something like… a solidity and concreteness and embodiedness of experience? Dream experiences hit all or most of the right highlights, but fall down on the really minor stuff like ‘this table is at the exact same height every time I touch it’, and the framing stuff like ‘I have functioning vision, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception all of the time, but cannot ever see the events of my life from a third-person perspective’.)
I think I’m in between the two of you. One of my big differences in dream-vs-real experience is that my sense of touch (and related senses, like proprioception and nociception) keeps running in the background when I’m awake, but when I’m dreaming I only feel touch/pain/position-in-space if I’m paying attention to it.
This is similar to your experiential/intuitive factor of Obvious Awakeness, yet is almost completely useless for dream testing because of pink-elephant problems. If you try to actively determine whether your sense of touch keeps working when you’re not paying attention to it, well, now you’re paying attention to it.
(I suspect it might be the reason why I pretty much never get false *positives* on dream tests, though (with only one exception I can think of). If I’m seriously wondering whether I’m dreaming, I almost certainly am. But dream!me generally doesn’t find that line of reasoning convincing *enough* to bet on it (do things that will go badly if I turn out not to be dreaming), and I can’t say I blame her.)
I don’t currently have any tests that consistently or even near-consistently work, just some that work sometimes.
—
Somewhat tangential, but kind of related: after watching the Doctor Who episode “Extremis”, I found myself occasionally performing shadow tests in dreams and failing them. I thought it was weird while watching that episode that everyone leaps from “we’re part of a simulated reality” to “we must be a training ground for aliens preparing to conquer the alpha-reality Earth”, without considering other reasons you might be part of a simulated reality, and it seems my subconscious agrees.
I was dreaming once and decided to see if I was dreaming…by throwing myself down the stairs. I don’t recommend that test.
(see also)
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#(August 2017) #conversational aglets #dreams #unreality cw #embarrassment squick #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
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