reply
- Feature
- Like
This is an interesting discussion. Personally my dreams are so powerful I feel like they actually happened. When I am awake my memory keeps bringing up the dreams then I have a moment where I have to consciously decide if those events being remembered are actual or dreamed. Also, I remember dreams from long ago this way, which freaks me out a little. The memories are frequent and intense.
reply
- Feature
- Like
here is my theory on how it all works... reality, for survival reasons is given a very strong emotional charge which allows things to be remembered analized and compared... the mundane and repetitive has less of a charge then the unusual, the novel and the painful... things that do not make sense, things that are incomplete and things that bother us or scare us generally leave what I call emotional hot spots in our memory web... if you think of memory emotional levels as a landscape.. the hot spots are like mountain peaks... when we sleep a cloud cover covers most of our memories and active perceptions leaving only the peaks poking up from the clouds... our internal computer that weaves the world we perceive takes those peaks and attempts to weave them into a coherent story world that we wander through as a dream. It will take other memories to fill in the gaps-- it seems that what we experience is an activation of our memory web no matter when and what we experience, so transient signals in that web can add things that dont seem to belong and dont generally show up while awake because their charges are small enough so that they dont get perceived as reality, only as thoughts... while awake the cloud cover is reversed, the landscape of emotions is visible in its full glory while thoughts and memories are ghostly behind the clouded vail.... but if we concentrate strongly enough on any idea it can take the appearence of reality... and if our brain is altered by chemicals or fever or other causes ideas can take on the qualities normally called real.
reply
- Feature
- Like
experiences are facts... your belief about them are not. we call some experiences "reality" others "dreams" and still others "memories" and yet they all seem to be unverifiable to anything but other experiences when you try to pin them down... you have never know reality directly only your own minds created experience of a source of data that for all you know may not be external reality at all... you have no actual means of telling the source.. which is why the MATRIX is remotely plausible... the world you call real is only called such because of its apparent consistencies and stabilities compared to what you call dreams... and yet... if your memories were manipulated to give you the impression of stability and consistency you would simply accept that because you would no means of challenging it... see the movie DARK CITY[i think?] where they injected people nightly to alter their entire existence.
reply
- Feature
- Like
Well technically the mind always creates images and sounds for us to perceive. Its just that when we are in a perceived state on consciousness we trust that these images are created by concrete stimuli aka reality. So what we perceive is always in our heads because information has to be processed first. Its when we are awake we trust our perceived environment because it is accepted to be real mostly due to a consensus with others that we share a similar form of experience and our mind functioning at a higher speed compared to sleeping so these images are much more memorable and detailed.
reply
Memory is something you access on purpose.
- Feature
- 1
- Like
Memory is something you access on purpose.
Dreams are something that happen when your mind drifts on it's own power.
reply
- Feature
- 1
- Like
I wonder if dreaming is akin to defragging the memory -- perhaps dredging up rarely-used files to see if they're still worth saving?
reply
I don't think the issue of brain function quite nails it...
- Feature
- 1
- Like
I don't think the issue of brain function quite nails it...
to me its all part of the mind - the difference is between conscious thinking - memory - and prompts from the sub conscious - that use memory in an unpredictable way.
my belief is that these serve a function of smoothing the wrinkles in our sense of self...
if you are kept awake long enough they say the mental breakdown that most often occurs is actually due to not being able to have the dreams you need. - some in this situation have hallucinations that are very much like a product of this essential need.
one needs to be able to differentiate in order to live a "sane life" so if we are dreaming 24/7 we are in a la-la land of delusion.
deja vu on the other hand is a synaptical error - one that sends incoming information instantaneously through the memory bank as well as the current perception synapses...
that is a brain glitch.
reply
- Feature
- 1
- Like
