Thread: Why are dreams like this?

When ever I have a regular dream I don't remember all of it and its weird because I had a dream last night were it was night time and we were fighting in a war and I can remember running through some woods and along a fence and other parts but not how exactly they connected together. And later in the dream it was daytime so it was obviously at least a few hours long but I only remember bits and pieces. Did I actually have the whole dream and just forget most of it or did i not even dream about the parts in between because I am starting to believe that my dreams are just in parts that last like 5-15 seconds each.

Yes, I think it is likely that your dreams contain disconnected short pieces, and that you do not dream all the part in between. Dreams are volatile and changing. They often follow associations of ideas, and ideas tend to jump around, like maybe you see a crocodile, and that makes you think of crocodile skin purse, so you get transported to a purse shop, but then your thought might go to how it is wrong to make purses of crocodile skin, and so that thought may lead to all of a sudden there being a bunch of environmentalist protesters outside the shop, and then you might think "I hope this protest stays peaceful", but that may lead to a fear of violence, so sure enough a rock gets hurled through the shop window, and the protesters storm the shop, and so maybe that reminds you of the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution, and that makes you think of Les Miserables the musical, so all of a sudden the protesters who stormed the purse shop will start singing in French ... And it's all because of that crocodile!

Of course, not all dreams are that disjointed. Sometimes in fact I marvel at how a dream might seem almost as if it got scripted, as if some part of my subconscious put all pieces together and understood things much better than my conscious self. And in fact the seemingly disjointed dream may actually be like a puzzle or riddle which once I think more of it from a different point of view may make more sense than it originally seemed.

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. However, if you start practicing All Day Awareness (ADA) or other mindfulness or self awareness techniques, you may be surprised by how many disconnected details there are if one truly pays attention to the moment, to all one's senses, and to all one's thoughts and emotions, which jump around. Dreams just make this phenomenon clearer, but it is present in waking life. Life is disjointed, complex, and weird in many ways.

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.

I have come to see this as "scene changes" much like in a movie. These transitions give the sense of a greater passage of time which I personally think makes the dreams more interesting.

It makes perfect sense that dreams jump around with little to no continuity (I mean chronological continuity) because that's exactly the way our thoughts are. Most people don't believe that, but if you ever just start paying attention to your stream of thoughts for a while (it's not easy, as soon as they derail you tend to forget you were supposed to be paying attention) you find thoughts jump around in exactly the way Joanna just described.

They (thoughts and dreams) operate according to something called Schema. She described it perfectly - your mind creates a scenario which proceeds along its course until your attention is diverted to one particular part of it, which then derails the schema and begins a new one.

Try paying attention to your thoughts for just one minute some time, and see how many times they just jump ship and switch tracks (I know, mixed metaphor, sorry).

This exactly parallels the early days of silent movies. At first they'd just set up a camera and film everything continuously without moving it, basically they'd film a stage play from the best seat in the house as the saying used to go. Or just film something on the street but without ever moving the camera. Then some director got the idea to start and stop the camera (at first it happened either by accident or because they were done with one movie and then shot another one right after it) and thus the edit was invented. At first though people were horrified and there was a lot of controversy - people would faint because they couldn't understand how the point of view could just suddenly be different.

And then somebody came up with the bright idea of moving the camera really close to film people's faces when they needed to get a reaction shot - eyes widening in terror or whatever. Well, the people who ran the theaters were adamant this was no good - they thought it would terrify people all over again, to suddenly see a gigantic head twenty times bigger than the same head was a moment ago.

But after a while people got used to it and now of course it's standard filmmaking grammar. I once got in an argument with somebody on another forum because he said that cuts and closeups shouldn't work because it's totally different from the way we actually experience life, which is a continuous smooth flow. After facepalming pretty hard I explained that's not actually true - I told him what I said above about thoughts, how they jump around constantly with no real rhyme or reason aside form the loose connections of schemas, and he scoffed at the idea. The very fact that he believes we experience life in a smooth continuous flow that makes perfect narrative sense is proof that people like to build the illusion of that smooth flow from the disparate flashes and images made by our thoughts.

In fact it's now a well-known fact that the reason people like narrative movies and stories so much is because they promote exactly that - the illusion that life is continuous and makes perfect sense and that there's always going to be a happy ending and you can easily tell the good guys from the bad guys etc. - this is also basically why people are constantly making a story of their lives and editing it on the fly.

Thought provoking stuff. I will read a few times to digest it all. Thanks JB and Darkmatters.

*Moved from General Lucid to General Dream

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

It makes perfect sense that dreams jump around with little to no continuity (I mean chronological continuity) because that's exactly the way our thoughts are. Most people don't believe that, but if you ever just start paying attention to your stream of thoughts for a while (it's not easy, as soon as they derail you tend to forget you were supposed to be paying attention) you find thoughts jump around in exactly the way Joanna just described.

They (thoughts and dreams) operate according to something called Schema. She described it perfectly - your mind creates a scenario which proceeds along its course until your attention is diverted to one particular part of it, which then derails the schema and begins a new one.

Try paying attention to your thoughts for just one minute some time, and see how many times they just jump ship and switch tracks (I know, mixed metaphor, sorry).

You can also take note of what you might do on the internet at midnight or so.

I don't know about you, But sometimes I was quite sleep-deprived from midnight to two AM and I'd start saying weird things in the Equestria Daily chat room or in Steam chat-boxes such as reciting lyrics from Morphine songs. And once, I was watching a short claymation re-enactment of "THE THING" with cats in place of people followed by (Or preceded by) Watching "Eraserhead in 60 Seconds".

Are you done processing that? POTATO! KALE! GOATS! PONY! EQUESTRIA! PURPLE! EAT YOUR OATMEAL?

Um... Did I just do something wrong?