There’s this failure mode that my dreams occasionally fall into.
A dream starts out as an ordinary interesting dream wherein things are happening. At some point, something forces me half-awake; the two most common culprits are either having slept for long enough that I’m out of sleep debt, or getting overheated by a fever in the middle of the night, but it’s occasionally prompted by other things too. Instead of waking up the rest of the way, though, I keep on dreaming while half-awake, just with much less brainpower behind the dream’s creative processes.
At that point, a handful of major ideas and images from the dream up to that point get tossed together and looped: instead of things happening, I just get repeated scenes of those same few ideas and images, over and over with no interesting variation whatsoever. Eventually, subjectively after a pretty long time (but not necessarily really after so long, since that sort of half-awake state massively skews my perception of time), the experience becomes sufficiently unpleasantly boring that I muster the motivation to force myself more fully awake in order to avoid continuing to experience it, at which point it ends (as long as I don’t try to go back to sleep too soon afterwards, in which case it sometimes resumes).
Is this a thing that other people have any experience with? I don’t recall having ever heard someone else describe anything along these lines, but it’s an interesting (if somewhat unpleasant) brain-state that I’d be curious to learn about others’ experiences with if they do exist.
>>the two most common culprits are either having slept for long enough that I’m out of sleep debt, or getting overheated by a fever in the middle of the night<<
These two culprits have different results for me, neither of which are your result.
Half-awake and *not* feverish: pretty much like a normal dream except also aware of [the external-world senses that don’t require moving] (proprioception and sound definitely work, smell probably *would* work but I don’t think I’ve been in a position to try it). Lucid, because the above is an extremely obvious indicator of dreaming. *Not* sleep-paralysed, but if you move the dream ends. (This often leads to absent-mindedly adjusting position and then going “wait, no, dammit, I wanted to see what happens next”. On the bright side, if I *want* it to end I can easily arrange that.)
Half-awake and feverish: only sometimes lucid, since even an extremely obvious indicator of dreaming is not always enough when you’re delirious. Tossing and turning is not enough to end it, and even getting up to go to the bathroom will often just put it on hold. Has been known to cause voices instead of full worlds [link].
Tags:
#dreams #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #embarrassment squick? #reply via reblog
I do seem to have a lot of dreams where the dream is a book as well as a sequence of lived events, and I’m reading it at the same time or faster than I’m experiencing it. Do other people have this as a recurring dream feature?
Yes. Not just books: I once started a post with “So in my dream this morning I was playing a video game (it might have been a VR game, but the way my dreams work all media is VR media, so I’m not sure if it was *meant* to be VR)”
Occasionally I’ll still get the textual layer as well, but often it just goes full immersion with “book” as an abstract framing device.
Tags:
#dreams #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog
Just woke up from a scary dream where I went home but when I got there, there was another Me inside, so I was banging on the door like let me in PLEASE. And all my friends and my sister were like uuhhh?? But then the Other Me told them to hear me out, and I got inside, and we were like. We decided it didn’t matter. There could just be two of me now and that was fine.
I have this too, and like a bunch of the other people who say they have this in the notes have described: it’s like…less prophetic full fledged dreams and more like a 2second snapshot of you doing an activity with no context. Like cutting paper then looking up or opening your purse with specific scenery in the background. Then you wake up and you’re like “what was that pointless dream scene.” Then later (sometimes weeks or months later), when you’re doing The Thing you’re like “oh”
It’s never happened to me quite that way (although I did once have a dream that a lost checker was behind a desk, where I then found it the next morning), but my younger sisters both had these, one of them quite a bit. Brains are weird as fuck and we don’t understand them.
I once read an article about “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (here’s the article, and coincidentally enough it’s by the guy who was the subject of my previous post), in which the article-writer pointed out that it’s really quite simple to make an entity that remembers the future. All you have to do is take their subconscious guess as to what the future is going to be, and have their conscious mind remember this prediction as fact; then, quietly edit their memories of the *past* continuously/as-necessary, so that at any given time they *don’t remember ever having been wrong* about what the future was going to be.
My precognitive events–such as they are; it’s rather less than what the people upthread are describing–feel suspiciously like a weaker version of this, in which my brain doesn’t even bother to present me with a fabricated memory of having seen this in a dream a while back, just a vague sense that this dream occurred.
(…not that I would *prefer* it present me with fabricated memories)
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Most of my revelations regarding dreams are about realising what part(s) of the *past* they were referencing, or what puns they were making. In at least one case I didn’t notice the pun for *months*; I wonder how many I’m still missing.
Tags:
#dreams #amnesia cw #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #unreality cw?
Took a nap and had a dream that I’d gotten a hyperrealistic tattoo of a Band Aid, just so that I could cover it with a real Band Aid.
When people would ask what happened, I’d say, “It’s kind of weird. Are you sure you wanna’ see?” and then I’d dramatically rip the Band Aid off to reveal my tattoo of a Band Aid.
I had one of those weird half awake half asleep thoughts the other night about dream service dogs that show up when you’re having a nightmare and show you the way back to a better dream. Had to draw them up!
I had the weirdest dream last night where it was about a next big meme trend, and it was basically another this vs that meme but it was “Lock screen vs Home screen” whereas the lock screen was depicted as something formal and relatively uninteresting like a businessman sitting at a desk while the home screen was always something chaotic and insane like gorillas fighting alligators and it. People would take sides online on which person they were more like, home screen or lock screen and it made absolutely no sense and I
Reality: The lock screen is full of high-contrast detail (currently a picture of me and the gf), the home screen is the lowest-contrast default background (currently a space pic) I can find so I can read app names.
I did not know until just now that it was possible to have the lock screen and home screen be different images, and I intend to change nothing about my phone now that I know.
(rolling waves on a body of water too large to see the edges, just as it has been for nearly five years [link])
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #high context jokes #effective altruism #dreams #reply via reblog #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #the more you know
Catching up on the prompts from this week. Kind of long.
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I have sex dreams, or at least, I have kink dreams. I tried to write an explanation, but I kept feeling like I was just recreating a bit from an email I wrote in August 2015. I might as well copy that here instead.
“My erotic dreams are about hive minds, mind-control magic, the occasional sedative, and, increasingly, mundane hypnosis (sometimes partnered, sometimes not). Genitals are rarely involved, and when they are they aren’t really the point. The dreams’ consent status tracks the stories I’ve been exposed to in waking life. When I was young and had only ever encountered non-con stories, I only ever had non-con dreams. Age 18 – 20, when I had a little bit of consensual stuff but mostly still had to resort to non-con, I had the occasional consensual dream but still mostly non-con. The past year, I’ve consumed mostly consensual stories, and had mostly consensual dreams. Some people are fundamentally disturbed by having rape dreams and worry what it says about them, but I’m not one of them. (Well, okay, I was at the *very* beginning, but I got over it quickly.) I prefer the consensual dreams for purely practical reasons: all else being equal, it is better to feel happy anticipation than terror at any given moment (even when I’ll be completely over the terror in twenty minutes), and when my response to figuring out what’s going to happen is to run away, about half the time I *succeed* in escaping. Wasted opportunities, those.
A few months back, I was curious how often I had erotic dreams, so I went through and counted how many were in my dream journal. I then divided this number by the number of days since I started keeping the dream journal, and came up with one day in 70. That’s the average over about 4.5 years.”
Since my libido varies with menstrual phase, I started wondering whether the frequency of erotic dreams also correlated with menstrual phase, and cross-referenced my dream journal with the menstruation marks on my calendar. Oddly, the main result was that I have erotic dreams during periods ~50% more often than I would if they were evenly distributed. (Menstruation is a “wildcard” time for me: my libido’s all over the place from period to period. I was expecting more dreams during ovulation, the consistently high-libido time, but it was only slightly higher than chance.)
Despite not “blooming”–my sexuality doesn’t seem to have changed all that much since my earliest memories, though I do understand it better now–I didn’t have my first erotic dream until I was 15. (It was about being assimilated by the Borg.)
When there are other people involved, they’re usually random NPCs, occasionally established fictional characters. (I don’t see their faces, but–being faceblind–there aren’t normally faces in my dreams anyway.) I don’t think I’ve ever had an erotic dream about real people. Sometimes I play myself, sometimes someone else.
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I can enjoy porn, but damn is it hard to find good porn when you’re turned off by intercourse. (For extra “fun”, I’ve found myself being turned off by non-con these days too. There is consensual hypnosis porn out there, but most of it is still non-con.) I usually have to skim bits even at the best of times.
Once in a blue moon I’ll enjoy a still image, but I almost always use text-based porn. This is probably an extension of preferring text-based media in general (even non-sexual videos get overstimulating, and audios to a lesser extent), plus it’s easier to skim the squicky bits with text, or pause, or go back and savour a particularly good bit.
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In subject matter, my fantasies are much like my dreams. I’d say their frequency and intensity varies with libido, but I pretty much *define* libido as the frequency and intensity of sexual fantasies, so that’s tautological. If I’m idly daydreaming in the background while I do other things, I won’t get turned on, but if I focus on it I usually will.
(Re: this post, I usually deal with the problem of getting bogged down in negotiation by having most or all of it happen offscreen. A lot of the problems you describe kind of sound like a mixture of not skipping over enough stuff and trying to have very visually detailed fantasies without having a detailed enough visual imagination to run them on. My visual imagination is towards the low-detail end, and I deal with this by just not having a lot of visual detail in my fantasies. There’s some visual aspects, but mostly I focus on verbal and touch/kinesthetic stuff.)
Okay, so the reason I couldn’t find that last paragraph for a context-link is because it was never on my blog at all. Fixing that.
(you’ve probably figured it out by the time you read this far, but I wrote the OP)
Tags:
#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #oh look an original post #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #dreams #nsfw text
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.”
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.
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…)
(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.
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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.
Brinens and Things 