Thread: Why are dreams like this?

Originally Posted by JoannaB

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Another thing to consider is that even our waking lives are not nearly as consistent and continuous stories as we make them appear to be. We like continuous stories, so we edit our perception of reality, and only notice some stuff and remember things that fit a continuous storyline.

That sounds very interesting to me. Would you be able to expand on that a bit or send me a PM about it or start a new thread? It sounds interesting but I would like to hear a bit more about it so I can get a handle on it.

Originally Posted by Bobblehat

That sounds very interesting to me. Would you be able to expand on that a bit or send me a PM about it or start a new thread? It sounds interesting but I would like to hear a bit more about it so I can get a handle on it.

I can expand a little and I think it fits with this thread (if Nick25 disagrees feel free to ask an admin move this conversation part to a new thread).

I noticed this when I was taking a walk and using ADA: As I was walking, I would pass people in mid conversation and try to make sense of disjointed conversation snippets. I would smell stuff: a cigarette, the smell coming out from a restaurant, the smell of exhaust fumes from passing cars. I passed a group of people speaking in French. That reminded me of my mother so my thoughts went to my mother. I saw a couple of women dressed alike who looked like a mother and daughter maybe. I passed a mother dealing with a toddler's tantrum. I practiced smiling at passersby and catching their eye contact and watching their reaction which usually was either a smile back or oblivious lack of attention like lost in their own thoughts. I passed a yard of a store where a woman who seemed very competent was directing a group of laborers in planting flowers. I saw a woman parked awkwardly and then noticed an elderly man fumbling with his keys nearby, so I figured she was waiting for him. There was more, but hopefully you get what my walk was like.

However, if I had not been paying attention and had not been practicing ADA during this walk, and then someone asked me about it, I likely would have told it as a more continuous story like "Oh, I walked from church to the university. The weather was great, so there were a lot of people out and about. The sidewalk was thus more crowded, and it took me longer to get there. But I did not mind since the weather was so good, that I enjoyed the longer walk." See, both of these are descriptions of the same walk, but one of them is edited to form a more coherent story. The same would happen when describing my day at work, for example.

Edit: Oh, and when I say the story is edited to form a more continuous story, this does not mean we are consciously editing. If I had not been paying attention I only would have noticed certain things, then I would have remembered only some of those, and when telling the story to someone else I would have only chosen those memories that fit whatever story I was trying to tell (nice weather and crowd and pleasant walk). However, all that is going on subconsciously, and our conscious mind really believes that our waking life is a more continuous story than it is because we perceive and remember it that way.