Thread: Theories on Dreams

I think everyone has a little philosopher in them and that sharing your ideas on the workings of the universe/life should be primarily for fun. I ask that you share your theory on dreams. Why do we have them and so on? Mine is this which I will try to keep simple. My beliefs are wide and I wont go into them though I will state that I do believe in a sort of "rebirth".

1. Dreams are a sort of preview into the after life.
2. Through life we are given the chance at attaining lucidity and only through such an awarness may we see what awaits us and only through knowing this will our soul/astral form(i believe they are one in the same) leave the cycle of rebirth.
3. The afterlife is essentially the astral plane(theory in its own right). The difference between dreams and the afterlife is in the permanentness that a souls creations may attain through desire. (permanent dreams worlds are possible with ease and all lucid souls reside within this astral plane.
Have you mastered your dreamworld? Essentially I believe if you have then you will be granted an after life in place of the rebirth cycle. We are tempted by the limitations of reality to become lucid in our 'dreamality'. Don't make assumptions that I say life is pointless...i am just not covering that here...irrelevant.

Originally Posted by Cirvivor

1. Dreams are a sort of preview into the after life.

I had exactly the same theory in my mind. But do you mean we all have our own "afterlife world" or do we share it with each other?

One scientific theory I've heard is that we might dream to prepare ourselves. (learn how to fight animals without actually being in danger, and so on)

Originally Posted by Mikasan527

I had exactly the same theory in my mind. But do you mean we all have our own "afterlife world" or do we share it with each other?

And if it is a preview of the afterlife, will hell be your nightmares and will heaven be be those awesome dreams that we will never forget? will we have eternal and omnipotent powers at our disposal?

My theory is that it is God's way of communicating to us. There are many stories in the Bible which involve dreams. A couple of family members have also had divine experiences through dreams.

My theory on dreams is pretty straightforward. Our dreams are just a by product of our brain analyzing memories. I don't know how exactly we go through our memories, it probably isn't an extremely efficient method based on the randomness of our dreams. The reason dreams seem to have an apparent storyline is for our own good. For the purpose of survival we can't see what goes on in the unconscious mind, and I think our dreams are just a conscious interpretation of our subconscious mind's work. Obviously lucid dreams are a far more complex process and I don't really think they are part of the process.

Sure they can be used to practice things like JosephGrimm said but I don't really think they are, it doesn't seem to fit with the subject of most our dreams, although I do think they could be used to mentally harden ourselves I.e becoming used to death etc.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

Our dreams are just a by product of our brain analyzing memories.Obviously lucid dreams are a far more complex process and I don't really think they are part of the process.

Upon quick thinking it could perhaps be explained (in an interpretation) as mirrors and light sources in the brain. Light sources could represent brain activity i.e. Memory processing etc. and the light ray itself could represent many things, the dream itself and what happens which could explain the link between memories and dreams. The mirrors could be a result of our conscious mind turning these mirrors until a total internal reflection is achieved thus achieving Lucidity. Multiple mirrors may perform this event but not all which could represent vividness, or the quality of the light in general. Also the mirrors could be foggy or blocked, effectively stopping you from achieving the state of Lucid Dreaming or just remembering dreams all together

Just my brief thoughts on an analogy, does it work well?

Originally Posted by Superadam051

Upon quick thinking it could perhaps be explained (in an interpretation) as mirrors and light sources in the brain. Light sources could represent brain activity i.e. Memory processing etc. and the light ray itself could represent many things, the dream itself and what happens which could explain the link between memories and dreams. The mirrors could be a result of our conscious mind turning these mirrors until a total internal reflection is achieved thus achieving Lucidity. Multiple mirrors may perform this event but not all which could represent vividness, or the quality of the light in general. Also the mirrors could be foggy or blocked, effectively stopping you from achieving the state of Lucid Dreaming or just remembering dreams all together

Just my brief thoughts on an analogy, does it work well?

It's an interesting analogy but a quite hard one to understand. I don't really see how you are pulling lucidity into it, to me lucidity is quite separated from dreaming, infact I think lucidity is closer to being awake then it is to be asleep from a conscious point of view.

How I see it is that whether lucid or not our subconscious is doing the same, just analyzing memories. When we are sleeping our conscious brain is only partially awake, it interprets the information the subconscious is creating and tries to make sense of it. I think this is a natural process built into humans so that we don't just witness complete random images, we actually see a dream happening in front of us. When we turn lucid, our conscious fully awakens, our subconscious is tones it down a bit since it recognizes you are awake and only analyzes the memories you want just like when you are awake.

I rarely dream about anything remotely close to my memories, and when I do it is something so fantastical and abstract that the relevance is more of a slight reference used to describe some greater realization which is beyond my ability to relate through invention alone. The dreams themselves become more potent than my memories and have a life of their own, far beyond any machinistic source. What they are influenced by is my lucid mind in the wake of this awesome reality, something happening in the moment. For example I've never become lucid because of remembering induction training I did while awake, it is always because I realize the great potential of the world I am and decide to make use of it, knowing I have the power to enable that potential.

That's my personal experience, I imagine different people will see different things. c:


P.S. instead of dreamality I have come to use the term "Drealm", really flows off the tounge and looks nifty.

-Superadam051

ok, so let's assume there is a physical equivalent to the basic functions associated with dreaming, if we build a machine to emulate these functions on a larger scale, what will be the result? Could we program the universe to make dreams a reality, in the same way the lucid mind can program it's imagination?

I've actually been working on this lately, I'll tell you all about it when I get home, atm I'm on vacation and I didn't pack my notes.

I think dreaming is simply a product of evolution. Its pretty much a virtual reality in which you are completely immersed (not counting lucid) in which you are faced with tasks and challenges.

Lets say you take two groups of cats, and you put them in two completely seperate, but otherwise natural environments. If you were able to somehow inhibit the dreams of one of the groups, I would be very willing to bet that the group that retains the ability to dream would do much better. They get to practice hunting and reinforcing skills an extra 3-5 hours a day (counting only REM, not deep sleep)

Besides, think about this... for the vast majority of people, dreams are stressful. People are haunted by nightmares for the longest time, in which they are beign chased, attacked, or otherwise challenged. Sure, the memory-based-dreams theory sound convincing at first, but if you look at studies, most people's dreams are related to some sort of challenge/obstacle/stress in which they must react with either Fight-or-Flight responses. Which makes sense in an evolutionary way.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

When we turn lucid, our conscious fully awakens...

I wouldn't say the conscious mind fully awakens during lucidity - if it did that then we'd be actually awake! There's just some particular part of the conscious apparatus that goes online during dreams that causes lucidity, without fully waking us up. We know that we can often become lucid for a moment just as we're waking up, but if we do fully wake up then of course the dream ends. So it seems like some kind of cheat or hack - making just the right part of conscious awareness kick in without fully activating it which would just wake us up.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I wouldn't say the conscious mind fully awakens during lucidity - if it did that then we'd be actually awake! There's just some particular part of the conscious apparatus that goes online during dreams that causes lucidity, without fully waking us up. We know that we can often become lucid for a moment just as we're waking up, but if we do fully wake up then of course the dream ends. So it seems like some kind of cheat or hack - making just the right part of conscious awareness kick in without fully activating it which would just wake us up.

Hmm I think I will read up on this because I don't think the conscious side of the brain has much to do with it. The dream is formed by only taking stimuli from our memories which is an unconscious action, as is interpreting external stimuli. I don't think that consciousness itself triggers any specific events. As I said I think I should look into it first, there is bound to be some articles or papers on the subject.

Edit
http://www.lucidity.com/SleepAndCognition.html
This is a very interesting read, it shows quite well how the division of either asleep or awake is quite wrong. I will try show how you really can be fully awake in a dream, pardon me if I don't bring it across very clearly

Imaginations and perceptions are normally distinguishable by the fact that images are usually much less vivid than perceptions. Normally, perceptions seem real and images seem -- imaginary. How real something appears depends mainly on its relative vividness and experienced vividness is probably a function of intensity of neural activation. Thus, we may conjecture that images usually involve a lesser degree of neural activation than the corresponding perceptions, and this results in a lesser degree of experiential reality for imagination. At least two factors contribute to this state of affairs: one is that while we are awake sensory input produces much higher levels of activation than imaginary input. Imagination interferes with perception in the same modality (Perky, 1910; Segal, 1971) and we may suppose the reverse is true as well. Another more speculative factor favoring perceptual processes over imagination in the waking state is the existence of a neural system to inhibit the activation (vividness) of memory images while perception is active. Evolutionary considerations make such a system likely; it would obviously be extremely maladaptive for an organism to mistake a current perceptual image of a predator for the memory of one (LaBerge, 1985). Mandell (1980) has implicated serotonergic neurons as part of a system that normally inhibits vivid images (hallucinations), but is itself inhibited in REM sleep, allowing dreamed perceptions (i.e., images) to appear as vividly real as perceptions. In REM, also, sensory input is actively suppressed preventing competition from perceptual processes.

From this we can see that whether awake or asleep we are in an equally stable state, in both we are either almost wholly relying on external or internal stimuli but are still slightly immersed in the other one. There are actually four clear states between awake and dreaming
1) Fully conscious and awake 2) day dreaming 3) non lucid dreaming 4) lucid dreaming.
While these states may seem to be separated in the divisions 1,2 and 3,4 representing being awake and being asleep. The actual proper divisions of these states would be 1,4 and 2,3 representing high consciousness and low consciousness. It seems that consciousness can vary from none to full whether asleep or awake which to me shows that they are to a large extent unrelated.
It makes sense considering that the prominent conscious parts of the brain are fairly useless when doing primal actions such as eating or walking. Generally our consciousness seems to be only able to indirectly control the properties of our body and unconscious mind, and even then to a small extent. From my understanding our consciousness is only really useful for higher cognitive tasks like abstract reasoning, and as far as I know every single conscious task we can do can be achieved both in a dream and while awake.

I see dreams a lot like dutch, as memories being pulled through the brain, but it is a little different.

My whole theory:
When going to sleep you think a lot of weird things and if you keep track of your train of thought random weird things will be interjected, thoughts that I believe are just random thoughts from the day. At the end of that random thought process, you either lose consciousness or enter into a WILD. When you lose consciousness a dream is formed, generated by randomly selected thoughts. After it has formed from a thought or two (look up schema), it kind of just leaves you there. Sometimes the thoughts just keep going random and create a weird story, sometimes it is like you are literally just dropped in a new universe with different memories, and you just go from there.
Non Lucidity
(Version 1)
You just see it like a movie
(Version 2)
See and hear like a movie
(Version 3)
You are seeing, but kind of just from a random perceptive and can change things, but you don't have a body
(Version 4)
You are dropped in a random place, but you have no control, your body just goes around in circles, normally stuck with some weird goal that doesn't cross your mind
(Version 5)
You are dropped in a random place with fake memories and have full control of your body, when you think something is wrong your mind will give you a new fake memory to cover up for it sometimes.
(Version 6)
You are at any of the above versions and then realize that everything is not real, but it doesn't cross your mind it could be a dream
(Version 7)
You retain some consciousness, and are aware everything is fake, but it doesn't cross your mind that it is a dream

This is going from furthest away from lucidity to closer to it. There are tons of variations and things that can change it (Like playing third person video games or watching a lot of tv can change the third person part and you can be completely lucid in it)

Lucidity
(Version 1)
You keep track of these random thoughts, and before a dream appears you take control and create your own dreamscape. (WILD)
(Version 2)
You keep track of these random thoughts and after a dream has formed, you enter into the dreamscape. (WILD)
(Version 3)
You lose track of these random thoughts, but have decided on a dreamscape beforehand and when you enter it you become lucid (Dream incubation then DILD)
*(Version)
You lose track of thoughts and then snap back to them right before a dream appears, then you create your own dream (WILD)
*(Version)
You lose track of thoughts and then snap back to them right when a dream is appearing, then you enter the dream (WILD barely)
(Version 4)
You lose track of these random thoughts, and when a random dreamscape appears the thought comes to your head that you are dreaming because it was in the cycle of the random thoughts (DILD)
(Version 5)
You lose track of these random thoughts, and when a dream has formed you remember something from when you were in a dream before and it makes you lucid (This happens a lot more after more lucids, either a DC, place, feeling, object, confusion) (DILD)
(Version doesn't belong anywhere)
You lose track of everything but one thing throughout the whole day, and as soon as you enter a dream it alerts you that it is a dream (ADA, or Hukif)

* versions are the two ways I have entered WILDs that I have never seen anyone else enter. I completely lose track of what is happening, but then right before or right when a dream forms I snap back to it.

They are labeled from highest ability of keeping track of thoughts, to lowest. The last one is what I think makes people snowball lucids after they have about 100. They have a lot more memories of LDs that can be triggered. Thus making LDs easier the more you have them.

Hope this makes sense. :/ Sorry that the lucid and non lucid go the wrong way, it was the easiest way to write it.

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

Non Lucidity
(Version 1)
You just see it like a movie
(Version 2)
See and hear like a movie
(Version 3)
You are seeing, but kind of just from a random perceptive and can change things, but you don't have a body
(Version 4)
You are dropped in a random place, but you have no control, your body just goes around in circles, normally stuck with some weird goal that doesn't cross your mind
(Version 5)
You are dropped in a random place with fake memories and have full control of your body, when you think something is wrong your mind will give you a new fake memory to cover up for it sometimes.
(Version 6)
You are at any of the above versions and then realize that everything is not real, but it doesn't cross your mind it could be a dream
(Version 7)
You retain some consciousness, and are aware everything is fake, but it doesn't cross your mind that it is a dream

This is going from furthest away from lucidity to closer to it. There are tons of variations and things that can change it (Like playing third person video games or watching a lot of tv can change the third person part and you can be completely lucid in it)

Where would you put being aware of that everything is fake, and that you are dreaming, retaining small fragments of your consciousness but don't have full or any control of your body

Originally Posted by Superadam051

Where would you put being aware of that everything is fake, and that you are dreaming, retaining small fragments of your consciousness but don't have full or any control of your body

Sounds like something that could happen at any form of lucidity. If you are aware that yar dreaming then you are lucid, the rest of it sounds like an issue with control in your dream. If you don't have control over your body you can use a lot of ways to get out of it. Believing being the most useful. Believe you can move it, because it is fake and everything is under your control in your mind. OR jump out of your body and go to a different one. Be creative about it. It doesn't sound like a state of being, but a subconscious issue. Of course if it has only happened once or twice then ignore it! haha. Because that is just a random LD not a problem. LDs can be really weird sometimes, especially if yar not in full control.

It's the best results I've consistently got so far, it's happened twice. I'm watching from 1st or 3rd person and I know it's a dream but it's like I don't care or I don't fully understand what I'm saying.

Reading this entire thread made me wonder whether all or most of you could be right. What if the subject was why do we have arms, and one person suggested it was so that we could carry stuff, another person so that we can reach stuff, and a third so that we can hug oneanother, etc. They would all be right of course. Dreams may well serve many functions and be usable for many purposes including to prepare us to fight/survive/solve problems, to help prepare us for an afterlife, to help us relax/have fun/resolve issues and stress/wish fulfillment, to send us messages from the subconscious, to process memories, to allow random neurons in the brain to fire so that neural pathways benefit from it somehow, to reach enlightenment, and many other possible uses. Just as all of us do not use our arms in all possible ways, we do not all use dreams in all possible ways, but that is the beauty of such multi-purpose things like arms and dreams - they can serve different needs of different people in different circumstances. No wonder God gave us dreams and evolution ensured we retained them.

I'm often curious why daydreams are rarely considered on this site, they have an amazing potential that definitely deserves inclusion in the discussion of lucid dreams. I have written a thread on the topic, and I'm in the middle of a project that will showcase the abilities that come with mastering the LDD - Lucid Day Dream. here's the link

I think "dreaming" is an inate, undeveloped capability we all possess, and the possibilities of what could be developed is almost limitless. What is the purpose of outer space? Its there, and we can look up at the stars, or we can decide to build ships and go there. Why electricity? We can watch lightening bolts or figure out how to harness it and enter the information age. I think it is a God given ability that man has mostly ignored but now many are investigating and maybe we are on the edge of discovery.

Hope you guys like this one. I've been tring to figure out what exactly I think dreams are, lately. It's weird because I always thought that I knew, until a few days ago when I tried to explain to myself what dreams are. And I couldn't. I think about dreams so much that it didn't occure to me that I needed to form an opinion on what they actually are. I'd have to take what some would call a "Scientific" stance on how I think they work for the most part. Now, why we have them is a different story that I'm not addressing here, just so to not negate the possibility of spiritual meaning. But anyways, here it is.

How I think dreams are formed has to do with the fact that when we fall asleep, our mind recieves no more external stimulous to go over. Our eyes close, or hearing goes out, and all the things that sense the material world are silenced. So then, that leaves our still very existant, very alive senses to it's natural routine search for feedback. But it's search is no longer subject to the material logic of Earth.

It makes sense to me that we would then be subjected more to the functions that distort our thoughts even in waking life, emotions. Using this distortion as a very distinct means to an end. Emotions and feelings are the things the distract us from percieving the world in a cold, rock solid, highly literal point of view. They distort, and animate the stimulous we come across in our life. I noticed that just like vividness in waking life, dream vividness often has to do with the correct emotions that I put into the moment. Emotion has so much to do with dreaming I believe, especially in the sense that your emotions will direct the happenings of your dream like a compass. Always shifting to point at what your subconscious emotions have to offer. So maybe, because external stimulous is cut off from our senses, it fabricates it's own feedback with aid of our mind's capability to 'halluscinate' sensation. Then the mind uses our emotional functions, memory, and specific other functions to pin-point the focus of our minds eye in the feedback. Therefore manifesting the stimulous into what we discuss all the time on here. The things we call our "Dream senarios", "Dream stories", or dream experiences. The series of events that we are focused on throughout the night would be the mind's grasp for direction, when external stimulous will give none. Tah dah!

Nerq your response is very interestingly pro-thinking contra-emotion biased, so that I bet in the Meyers Briggs test result your third letter is a T. (EDIT: After re-reading your reply I realized that I may have inserted a bias into it by reading it from my own biased viewpoint - if my claim about your bias is inaccurate, I appologize). My third letter is an F meaning that my personality is such that I trust emotions over thoughts. You say that emotions distract us from the rock solidness of thinking. I say for some of us emotions have such great value that we cannot say they distract: thoughts without emotions are sterile and dangerous, a fully thinking non-emoting person is In my opinion more likely going to be a sociopath and not a desirably "objective" person. Rather than stearing us away from truth, emotions help ensure that our truth is human and not like that of a robot. To me love and compassion and tolerance have way higher value than reason. A person with a pure heart but with limited intelligence can still be a wonderful person, whereas a genius without emotion is likely to not know right from wrong and likely to do things that most of us would consider evil.

I agree with you that dreams are steared by emotions, but unlike you I do not believe that means they are distorted. Looking at it from the other point of view I would say that waking life may be distorted by overly rational thinking. Dreams may in fact be better at showing us truth because our society has placed so much value on reason that at times in waking life natural emotionality of humans may be unnaturally suppressed. We strive toward the unnatural goal of being objective in waking life, whereas we are not limited by this bias in dreams: our emotions are given free reign, and at times this allows us to come closer to the truth in dreams.

I have a unifying theory.

One, the future exist along side the past and present in information. E.g., This DID happen, this CAN happen. In mathematical Platonism (a form of philosophy), numbers (and therefore information & data) exist outside of space and time as "abstract objects".
As humans, all we do is process information. This is fact - photons hit our eyes, they send signals (electrical signals, actually) through neurons as encoded data and this reaches our consciousness, Vibrational pressure waves (a fancy way of saying "sound") hits our ears and small hairlike cells on our eardrum process it again through electrical signals and neurons, touch is the same way.

Since all of our reality is merely information, in a way, the past and the future (as probability, e.g. "this CAN happen") exist alongside our own as information, and are just a valid as what we perceive currently. Since the universe is fundamentally probabilistic, 2 more forms of information exist: Possible past, and probable future. As in, things that COULD have happen can still be described as information, and since the future isn't set, there exists a writhing pool of probability ahead in time - things that can happen.

How this relates to dreaming:
When we sleep, various parts of our brain are still active (though not consciously). This creates quite a bit of "noise" or "static", if you will. Our conscious mind tries its best to process this, and we get dreams - this is why dreams are very, very illogical. Since all we are doing is processing random information, in a way, we're seeing into the very future, or sometimes, the past. Maybe not our future, maybe not our past, but from the viewpoint of Platonism, this reality is just as valid as our own.
This also explains precognitive dreams, because you just got lucky seeing our future


If this seems hard to understand to anyone, just ask and i'll try to explain it better.

Non-lucid dreams are an accidental conduit to the ocean of knowledge, experience, and spiritual surprise that is our unconscious minds, our true selves, our souls. Lucid dreams are are an opportunity to dive into this ocean, fully self-aware, to learn, explore, and unite with our complete selves.

OR....

Dreams are nothing more than synapses with no current waking duties firing randomly, activating our perceptions to no real purpose with no real content. Dreams carry zero real meaning until after you're awake and interpreting what you dreamed. Lucid dreaming is a fantastic way to play the random images, nothing more.


Could go either way...

I've been reading over a few more of other people's ideas. Dutchraptor, it's not like I have any solid data to back my theory but I was wondering if you had any information about how our brain would access memory during sleep? It's an interesting idea. Also I think it would line up pretty well as another facet of where I'm coming from.

JoannaB, I understand what you were getting at and I think you might have misstaken the meanings I intended for those words. When I said distorted, I wasn't implying any negative distortion. I was looking for more of a literal meaning, the word distortion itself does seem to have a negative tent to it. The meaning I more wanted to bring out, is how emotions animate our logic based thought. Rock solid in the sense that it would be unwavering instinctual thought, but not in the sense where it would be more complete. I agree with you that emotions are very necissary. If we didn't have them, we would behave like wild animals.

Oh, and I read a book about the Myers Briggs test a while back. You were right. My personality type came out as INTP.