Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

You probably know what my answer is, a big fat no, but I had a dream last night that was so realistic plus there’s the fact I can remember practically all of it. Even when I woke up it felt like I was readjusting to the present, the world I’m used to. Some claim that dreams are a glimpse into a parallel universe. 

https://www.speakingtree.in/blog/scienti...-universes

Here’s a short description of my dream and I’ll try comparing it to the real world. 

Dream:I build a single car garage next to my house..... Reality: My house has an attached two car garage
Dream:I have enough room beside the garage I’ve built to install an above ground pool....Reality: I don’t have the room but my neighbor in adjacent property has above ground pool
Dream: I build the pool and add a deck..Reality: I have no urge to build a pool with deck
Dream: Kids in neighbourhood play in this pool. Reality: Very few kids in these parts and none have ever been in my yard to play anything.
Dream: I’m single and younger...Reality: Married and older 
Dream: I go to a restaurant in town...Reality: there is a place I like in small town near to me but closed for COVID last 14 months
Dream: Someone there says I should be thrown out ...Reality: Never been tossed from any establishment
Dream: Owner checks some kind of list and says I’m exempt*, from what I never find out. Reality: I always try to avoid trouble
Dream: Return home to find two large oval tubs have replaced my pool...Reality: I don’t have anything similar
Dream: There’s a woman climbing into one tub, once in I walk over and find her laying in the pool looking at me. I don’t recognize her and she is not pretty by any means. Reality: My wife uses our indoor Jacuzzi almost every day but she’s good looking.
Dream: I try to understand what’s happening and I actually start thinking I’m in an alternate reality. I ask a few folks where my pool went and they look at me as if I have two heads. I head back to the restaurant and once again I get told I’m exempt. I order two fried egg sandwiches. I look around and notice other patrons who are playing an electronic gambling game at their table. Reality: Many years ago I used to stop at a small restaurant on my way to work. It had juke box machines at each of the 5 booths in the shop. I ordered many fried egg sandwiches (favourite of mine) during the few years I frequented the eatery.

I wake up

https://www.speakingtree.in/blog/scienti...-universes

* I have a park model home on a resort in northern Ontario. I pay a fee for the location, amenities and utilities. I pay a govt tax for these services. Recently learned that the tax should not have been imposed and I’ve been reimbursed from govt and no longer have to pay the tax (now exempt from tax). I’m also heading there in a few days for the summer. I’m situated on a beautiful lake plus there are 3 beautiful outdoor pools and hot tub on this property. I think this may have instigated this weird but so realistic dream.

Then again I wouldn’t expect an alternate reality to have exactly same conditions as my present reality. The biggest difference between dream and reality seems to be that the one I’m used to when awake is more ordered and less confusing.

Though there might occasionally be a highly coherent dream, most are inconsistent. So with respect to a proposal of individual consciousness actually being distributed over a wide variety of alternate lives, we'd usually be constantly weaving in and out of scores of them (when dreaming), producing a garbled narrative in memory from the night or sleep before. There would be stretches of some linear coherence do to vacillating between lives that were quite similar, before vertically careening off into a radically different stretch of them.

Needless to say, the most fantastic ones (sporting even magic) would have to be simulated realities produced by technologies of advanced Earths (yeah, we'd even have alternate versions of ourselves in those). Which is to say, I doubt that some of the extraordinary stuff could be explained by rapidly shifting to a realm where a house is replaced by a park, or whatever.

Plus the problem of lucid dreams, where one has control of events, can levitate the body or make a can of corn fly across the room by thought alone. Instead of being aware that you were in a dream, it would be awareness of being in an alternate world. But could even simulated realities explain our control of their environments -- does the psychological conflation of two different versions of a person provide them with powers like Neo, that can subvert the regulating laws of the Matrix?

A rule that might be strenuously extracted from Kant's CPR and the Prolegomena is that for every unusual experience we encounter that might be indicative of one of the possibilities of metaphysics, there will also be a scientific explanation convergent with it. Due to the "natural world" paradigm being what the "prior-in-rank to experience" cognitive faculties of the Understanding and the space-time representations of the Sensibility output. Any "intruder" will be anonymously converted to part of the natural order, which includes strings of coincidences and statistical possibilities (for extreme instances where nothing else suffices).

So that we can never confidently pierce the veil of appearances. A dual natural or "mundane" explanation will always be there as an anchor.

The best explanation of dreams I've ever heard is that they are just a funhouse of mirrors into whatever has been stirred up in the subconscious throughout the day. The baggage that needs to be exorcised while you sleep and leads to hallucinations under prolonged sleep deprivation. Sometimes they can include some elements of conscious thought, but the subconscious is just free associating.

Why is it when you’re dreaming that the brain doesn’t recognize it the same way it views a video/tv show when you’re awake? I’ve never had the feeling I’m looking at a staged, phoney or unreal scene while dreaming.

(May 4, 2021 12:43 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Why is it when you’re dreaming that the brain doesn’t recognize it the same way it views a video/tv show when you’re awake? I’ve never had the feeling I’m looking at a staged, phoney or unreal scene while dreaming.

I'd pose for the most part people have an adversarial brain caused by it being a neural network. Namely many potentially conflicting thoughts (and empathetically set philosophies) attempt to derive the empircal viewpoint of what you observe. (i.e. Ego) When you are asleep, your brain rests a number of areas that make up that collective, this leaves your brain prone to being susceptible to fall for logical fallacies while asleep. (Such as assuming a dreamt world is real)

That "Subliminal programming" state is whats often attempted to be used in Hypnosis, Meditation and of course Mind Control where there is no adversarial viewpoint to keep reality in check.

Personally in at least my case, I don't think "dreams" are a construct of the mind. (Ever since having a posed dream of a cold war eastern european film noire silhouette animation end with the film credits with "Direktor" in Cyrillic font and other entries with backwards R's) It's just a playground for state funded terrorists trying to punk people.

(May 4, 2021 12:43 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Why is it when you’re dreaming that the brain doesn’t recognize it the same way it views a video/tv show when you’re awake? I’ve never had the feeling I’m looking at a staged, phoney or unreal scene while dreaming.

The environment of the waking world is still there when watching a TV show or movie at the cinema. Whereas a dream totally immerses one, similar to the holodeck of post-60s Star Trek.

With respect to recalling the personal details of "real" life during a dream, the brain seems to selectively allow only memories that apply to identifying the immediate situation (no deep reflective thoughts about past life or future). It may even create false memories as rapidly as it improvises the surroundings, and revise or retcon them as they become inconsistent over time.

Some people (like me) are intermittently half-aware that they are dreaming or that something is not "quite right", but are indifferent reaction-wise to the vague realization. During bouts of lucid dreaming, of course, one becomes fully aware that everything is bogus, permitting manipulation of the "hallucination".

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(May 4, 2021 01:48 AM)stryder Wrote: [ -> ]

(May 4, 2021 12:43 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Why is it when you’re dreaming that the brain doesn’t recognize it the same way it views a video/tv show when you’re awake? I’ve never had the feeling I’m looking at a staged, phoney or unreal scene while dreaming.

I'd pose for the most part people have an adversarial brain caused by it being a neural network. Namely many potentially conflicting thoughts (and empathetically set philosophies) attempt to derive the empircal viewpoint of what you observe. (i.e. Ego) When you are asleep, your brain rests a number of areas that make up that collective, this leaves your brain prone to being susceptible to fall for logical fallacies while asleep. (Such as assuming a dreamt world is real)

That "Subliminal programming" state is whats often attempted to be used in Hypnosis, Meditation and of course Mind Control where there is no adversarial viewpoint to keep reality in check.

Personally in at least my case, I don't think "dreams" are a construct of the mind. (Ever since having a posed dream of a cold war eastern european film noire silhouette animation end with the film credits with "Direktor" in Cyrillic font and other entries with backwards R's) It's just a playground for state funded terrorists trying to punk people.

That might be the ultimate clincher. Encountering something in a dream that one could not possibly know, and then verifying it as accurate later. Of course, skeptics will have an answer for that, too. If the "robust materialist stance" can contend that consciousness is an illusion, then no debunking challenge is insurmountable. In fact, that actually disposes of us having dream experiences, too.

I often have magical powers of psychokinesis or pyrokinesis in my dreams, but it's not foolproof. Once I was exerting mind powers on a tennis court, and suddenly a giant rocket ship emerged from it and took off! Other times when I try to make things move, I find it doesn't go well.

I take a medication that is known to cause strange and vivid dreams. Sure enough since taking it my dreams are vivid and very detailed, often having as many as three in one night. They're like movies they are so intricate in their plots. One place I frequent in my dreams is a place in the countryside that's set up like an old western town and everybody there is living the life of the old west. There are saloons and hotels and restaurants with everybody dressed and acting like the old western days. I find these dreams very pleasurable for some reason. Maybe it hearkens back to a previous life of mine.

I personally think dreams are a way for our souls to grow and to process the information and experiences of the day. Dreams widen the range of our understanding and imagination, exposing sides of ourselves we don't express in our waking lives.

Have heard there are people who realize they are dreaming during the moment. It’s one thing I haven’t managed to do. I’ve told myself many times to try and recognize when I’m dreaming but to no avail. Yes there are times when I think to myself that I’m glad it was only a dream.

With that in mind, why do some people know when they are dreaming while others need to wait until waking up from one? Are either of the actions a clue to a person’s psychological well being?

(May 4, 2021 01:29 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: [ -> ]Have heard there are people who realize they are dreaming during the moment. It’s one thing I haven’t managed to do. I’ve told myself many times to try and recognize when I’m dreaming but to no avail. Yes there are times when I think to myself that I’m glad it was only a dream.

With that in mind, why do some people know when they are dreaming while others need to wait until waking up from one? Are either of the actions a clue to a person’s psychological well being?

In my case (as far as the half-awareness goes) it's due to being an extremely light sleeper. The slightest disturbance can wake me up. Whereas deep sleepers are cut-off from such a lingering, slight connection to the waking environment. Achieving a lucid dream may indeed be more complicated, though -- I have them much less now than during youth.

Many people can't remember their dreams at all, which leads them to conclude that they don't have them. There's just missing time.

In contrast, if I doze off for just a minute I can recall a brief excursion into dreamland. Which is why I doubted earlier claims that we exclusively dream during REM phases (which today has been revised to coincide with vivid mental image narratives rather than devouring all oneiric episodes).

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(May 4, 2021 07:30 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ][...] I take a medication that is known to cause strange and vivid dreams. Sure enough since taking it my dreams are vivid and very detailed, often having as many as three in one night. They're like movies they are so intricate in their plots. One place I frequent in my dreams is a place in the countryside that's set up like an old western town and everybody there is living the life of the old west. There are saloons and hotels and restaurants with everybody dressed and acting like the old western days. I find these dreams very pleasurable for some reason. Maybe it hearkens back to a previous life of mine...

The fact that even our limited in resources, quasi-arbitrary or irrational, and emotionally compromised human brains can assemble detailed simulated environments like that on the fly, that remain coherent enough through the process to conform to a theme...

... That is why I believe computer-outputted realities of the future, with their sophisticated strategies, will be very convincing. Without requiring [the impossibility of] literally maintaining an entire universe down to subatomic particles and up to distant interstellar systems and galaxies. Technological devices are vastly more suited to strictly adhering to (generative) regulating principles and statistical-based probabilities of what an immersed observer should be seeing, hearing, feeling, etc in particular _X_ situations.