Thread: Why can dreams trick you into believing things that are untrue

Does anybody know why dreams have the power to make you feel or believe that an event has occurred, when in reality it hasn't and then once you've woken up you're either confused or angry that it really didn't happen.

for example you could be dreaming that someone you kow has died and you totally think it's real but when you wake up you're still trying to figure out what happened. Or when you're dreaming that you know something important, but then, to your dismay, you realize your mind just completely fooled you! That's been happening to me alot lately and I was just wondering why? Is like the logic part of you brain turned off, or is your brain just easier to influence in REM?

This reminds me of a discussion on DV from about 2004 . I think the discussion was about the difference between reality and dreams. To me, especially in vivid dreams, the structural make -up of dreams can indeed feel almost identical to reality. The other day I was watching a youtube video by Scott Stride, who was talking about lucid dream supplements. He was saying that when the serotonin levels of the brain are suppressed during REM sleep, there is a tendency to lose logical and believeable structure, but with adequate levels of serotonin available to the system, it is more likely that a dream will seem as if it could actually occur in real life.

In my view, if I remember something, it constitutes reality, whether in a dream or not. I say this because my brain is constantly processing stimuli during waking life to create what I perceive as reality, whereas the stimuli in dreams are almost completely internal. I just don't distinguish internal stimuli as being as separated from reality as some.

Originally Posted by The Moon

Is like the logic part of you brain turned off

Yep, ditto dizko.
Basically your right brain shuts off. Not totally though, which is why we can become lucid.

When you dream the logical part of your brain is shut off. I often think of weird things well drifting off, or zoning out too much. It is hard to explain, I will think that something could be a certain way and then become more aware and wonder why the heck I was thinking such weird thoughts.

On rare occasions I will actually wake up thinking briefly that something is a certain way and then be weirded out on how foolish I was.

Yeh I do that too. Although the other day I, for some inexplicable reason, thought of an idea for a perpetual motion machine, while drifting off I think. I don't have a lot of understanding about them but I'm pretty sure it would work if it could somehow have no friction. Which I think is actually the major problem with them but yeh. It was still pretty cool to think of it.

I think as you're going to sleep and waking up the left side just slowly shuts off and comes back, respectively, and that's why you think so much more creatively.

[QUOTE=The Moon;964324]Does anybody know why dreams have the power to make you feel or believe that an event has occurred, when in reality it hasn't and then once you've woken up you're either confused or angry that it really didn't happen.


I hate it when that happens

Your sympathic system keeps working in your sleep so you keep experiencing those emotions like sadness, fear, happiness, emberassment, regret, hate, love, confusion, hope etc. through changes in your blood-flow, heartbeat etc. It takes a while for these effects to die off so when you wake up chemical changes will still last leading you to think something actually happened. Because it's exactly the way you'd feel if it happened in real life.

Good theory there firat ^

(non sarcasm even though it sound like it lol)

I've also had dreams like that, and I was upset that I wasn't really living in that dream world. But I don't know what that's all about.

I have som memories wich i cant tell if they happend in my dreams or if they happend when awake.