Thread: What makes us believe our dreams are real?

Good morning/day/evening!

I am a romanian psychology student, especially interested in the study of dreams and lucid dreams. As far as I know, here in Romania the subject of dream and sleep arises poor interest in the scientific area...

I am studying dream on my own, not very experimental and scientific, but enough as to see that my own findings have some resemblances with other well organized researches. And the most important thing, I think, is that they are true when it comes to my oneiric experience.

Now the questions I want to ask you:
What are those reasons for which people believe that their dreams are real, the moment they're dreaming?
And why do they realize they're sleeping and dreaming when having a lucid dream? What happens with their psyche, what happens in their brain? Due to what changes does that spark of consciousness arise in the middle of sleep?

I kept wondering and I think I came up with some possible explanation...

We people are "build" out of the body, psyche (in the psychological assumption) and soul or spirit. Every experience that we have is somehow related to our person, our body and our psyche.
We relate to the world in a specific manner, in fact, everyone of us has his/her own world in which he/she lives, accordingly to those filters used in sorting out the stimuli of the enviroment. So, the same object can be differently viewed, according to the persons'experience and his/her own (past) percepetions that define his/her way of interaction with the world.

But if the experiences can vary from second to second, there is an psychological instance that remains the same and picks up arround him/her those moments in time and makes the person feel as a whole, as a continuous entity in time and space.
That is called, I believe, the self (not in freudian or jungian view, generally speaking).

The self is the one who gives unity to the whole of life's acts and moments. It develops/stands out since age 3 (I think) and makes the person feel unique and in concordance with itself. Whatever we do, we relate the objective world to our subjective one, so everthing is linked to us. We cannot live something without playing a role in it, then it wouldn't be one of our memories or our experiences.

This fact makes me think that every bit of information in our brains it's specifically encoded
so that it contains information about ourself, like position, light, temperature etc., the condition in which that event took place, but related to us, the main and central character.
So, we find ourselves and we recognize some story as a part of our own experience if the specifications there present match the ones in our brains. If a friend would tell a story about us, but speaking of X and not of us, we would tell him at the end of the story: wait a minute, you're making fun of me, that was me in the story...

Likewise, supposedly we were drunk the night before and we don't remember what happend at the party we went with our friend. We'll ask him. But our memory is weak and if our friend makes up untrue stories about us, how could we say if he tells the true or not? We would think: was it possible that I did that thing, or not? If the story is not so exaggerate, and if it is close to our common behavior, we would tend to believe it, becuase we have no memories to rely upon.

When we dream, our state of consciousness changes.
We don't receive any (with the same intensity) stimuli from the enviroment (external or internal). Our body image disappears. Let's imagine a void dream. It would be only our psyche...
The dream (organic dream, as I call it) consists of (as I know and accept) a random activation of brain areas, triggered but some causes I don't know about...
Anyway, the activation of certain brain areas leads to some mental images (meaning not only visual)that make up the dream.

Now, why don't we recognize the dream as it is?
I believe that the "ego" or "self", the "dream self" ("us in the dream") does not correspond to the real self. They do not coexist.
I think that the dream ego is in fact derived from the information about the self I spoke about earlier. They are simple mental images, they cannot make the real ego do anything, because they are merely re-presentation of actual thing, they are bits of information.

So, I believe that the ego found in dreams is in fact an illusion, based upon the gathered information I mentioned. That's why we don't usually have any control over the dream... The ego is simply made up of the constant characteristic or those images, that being the information encoded in the brain about position and so on. So, the dream appears to us like a wave of impressions that grips on the dream ego and gets him arround...

But what about the real ego? Well, the real ego "sees" this images in front of him and recognize them as a part of his experience. So, he identifies with them and so it's caught in the "torment" of the dream. But why doesn't he realize they're not real? Because of the altered state of consciousness... Everything that gets to him in the dream state makes up a world that is believed to be real, because we learn through culture NOT to question the reality of things. So, the real ego has no choice...

Imagine you were in you room one day... But any link with the enviroment is blocked, so that you are just a "point of consciousness". And then let's imagine someone projecting 3D room-sized past experiences of yours. What would you do? You would recognize them and, because of no connection with anything else, you will belive they are real and happening right then and there... So does the real ego, fooled by the information contain in the mental images...

But the images are random, so they change... Why doesn't the ego change? Why do we feel we're the same and not others in real life? Memory maybe is the one who makes us feel in concordance with ourselves... But in dream state it seems we don't have access to our memory, so we buy into the info that we've got... We don't have any comparison term, so we take what we have... If we were drunk, we could have access to all the other memories of us and our behavior, so we would decide wheter something had some chance of happening or not...

BUT WHAT HAPPENS IN LUCID DREAMS? Why do we realise we're actually dreaming? If it were for the mnemonic induction tehniques, it would be rather simple to explain from this perspective. They would induce different cognitive patterns of experience and so the real ego would have a point to grasp on... He would see the differences in the antagonic way of doubting reality...

But what are the explanations when lucid dreams simply occur??? What happens inside? Maybe the projection of the own body image outside, in the enviroment, that takes place in some dreams and some mental illnesses, is a possible tendency of the real ego to separate himself of the illusion of his reality.

This is only a theroy of mine.
I hope my writing was not some spare time killer; I can't wait for your opinions.

Thank you in advance!

Originally posted by Cridegnosis
But what are the explanations when lucid dreams simply occur??? What happens inside? Maybe the projection of the own body image outside, in the enviroment, that takes place in some dreams and some mental illnesses, is a possible tendency of the real ego to separate himself of the illusion of his reality.

OK 95% of what you said is WAY over me All I can contribute to this is that the 2 times I have had spontaneous lucid dreams (in fact the only times so far) It was kind of like: "Hey wait, this isn't right, things aren't adding up" That led me to figure it out. Note that those times I didn't nessecarily realize it was a dream. I realized I was "somewhere" where the laws of physics and reality as we know it certainly did not apply. I did have control over what I was doing and made various things occur and flew etc, basically exploring this "new world" but I didn't realize that it was a dream so to speak. Only after I woke up did I realize it. Why this happened I do not know. Perhaps you are right in that the ego wants to seperate itself sometimes. In my waking life I can recall during very stressful times having a feeling like "I want to be anywhere but here". Perhaps the spontaneous lucidity I experienced was a result of this wish. I don't know. Hope I was of some help

Long ass post, but I actually read it.

I believe that the dream self and the real self are the same. In a dream our self is suddenly placed into a totally different world that is 110% realistic looking/feeling. The transition is normally seemless, you would notice it only if you are skilled in the art of lucid dreaming. Therefore normally we follow the dream plot asssuming it is real life.

There's a question why we sometimes behave differently in dreams than in RL. Like having no fear, increased curiosity and so on... This may be cause some parts of our brain are asleep...

About spontatneous LDs - IMO they occur when one of suggestions, desires or whatever else from the weeks before suddenly surfaces.

Today I had an absolutely amazing experience that proves that the dream and the waking self are the same. Actually this is why I'm making this post. I was sitting in a classroom (a recurrent dream of mine) listening to the teacher and suddenly I just turned to the girl who was sitting next to me and became lucid. This transition from followin the dream to full lucidity was incredibly fast and smooth. I had hundreds of LDs, but never there was anything like that...

Thank you for the information.
Leixor, it seems my lucid dream triggers are quite the same, I tend to become lucid whenever I feel something is not really alright, alike in waking life reality.

Ev, you said spontaneous lucid dreams may occur when (past) desires or wishes come to the surface... Aren't all dreams made up of stuff like this? Probably it's your own way of becoming lucid... I, for example, I have a lot of desires and wishes and so on in my dreams but never did I become lucid on such ground. Maybe I'm not experienced enough...

Anyway, referring to the theroy of mine that the real ego and the dream ego are different but all the same at the same time (because the real one identifies the images in the dream as own experiences an so it merges with the dream ego which results form those dream images), have anyone heard of void or imageless dreams or lucid dreams? I am very curios if something like that really exists...

Now, to prop my theory...
How would you explain the differences in dreams between what the dream ego sees, let's say, and what he thinks it is the object he sees. For example, he sees an indefinite mass of something but he thinks to himselfs and acts like that is an elephant. Or there are times when he sees the image of a friend, let's call him Peter, but he acts and thinks that is Mary, not Peter... Or the times when there are two or many more dream egos: you feel and think in one of them, but see yourself acting in anotherone, and yet see another one taking on with your action from a certain point.

I am very very curious how other people explain to themselves this kind of things. I made up this theory, but it doesn't need to be true, at least for all. So thank for the feed-back, have a nice day!

I have a theory that might be similar to yours. When thinking, it's not relevant for the brain to ask if those thoughts are real or not, however abstract or different from the real world. Even if you imagine something illogical or contradictory, that doesn't make the thought unreal, just something you might be critical of or even permit for the sake of some purpose.

Take that normal thinking/day dreaming, and make a couple adjustments: remove the body's senses to the immediate environment and connect the ordinary thought/memories to the visual cortex. Now that restless pondering is creating images and impressions, though its status as thought hasn't changed, then despite mimmicking reality convincingly, the question of deciding whether it's real isn't much more relevant than questioning the realness of your awake thoughts. Without any stimulus interrupting your concentration, you'll proceed with curiousity in the dream as you would pursue an interesting line of thought.

I don't think a dream is pure subconcious. Like in awake life, there are details in a dream that come to attention, and other details that do not. Just like when we maybe lost in our heads while awake, but not every thought is being treated with focus. Only in a dream the subconcious is constantly sending data to parts of the mind normally used for perceiving stimuli. Our concious mind, whether lucid or not, interprets and reacts to what results. Then lucidity maybe analogous to conciousness of conciousness while awake.

I think this explains well the cases where we just suddenly know we're in a lucid. No doubts, just a matter of fact observation neglected up until that point. Lucids then can feel very similar to non-lucid dreams (yet be very vivid). What it doesn't explain to well is the case where the person is astonished with being lucid, since I made the case for the images and impressions being connected with the kind of thought where the realness is not a big question. Lucids I had that are the latter case tended to be more realistic, so maybe it's a point where information from sensory parts of the brain become too intrusive to be taken for granted.

Here's why I think our ideas are similar. When you get lost in your head, you lose awareness of yourself despite being quite concious. So this part of you is not the real ego, the part that is connected to the real world and questions whether something is real. The formation of the real ego requires your body to be continually stimulated from the environment.

Well, grayegg, thanks a lot. Indeed it seems our ideas are very similar. You're right, even in waking life we do not stop to question our state of being. We don't pay attention to insignifiant yet very meaningfull details. Rarely we stop and think why we done that and not the other, what is the purpose of our behavior, what is the origin of life and so on. And I think most of the inventions nowadays came either by mistake either by mistake from people who questioned what it was not suppoused to be questioned. Einstein said something like that, if I recall well... Our culture does not encourage a phylosophical mind.
The dream state replicates some/the condition of reality. So it might occur to us we're dreaming or not. But if we try to enhance the possibility of lucid dreaming, that means we are open to give more attention to some details we've learned that exists.

The case of astonishment when being lucid I think it correlates with excitement when discovering something important in real day life. We've struggled to get there and, suddenly, we find ourselves already there, something which takes us by surprise. But I think a lot of mental energy is lost that way, one major reason for which we can't keep ourselves lucid for a longer time. I believe if we were to keep cool and reasoning, after a well established pattern, we would "lucidly perform" longer and better.
You said our ego isn't much of a real ego when outerworld stimuli cease to exist. Well, I believe the ego we are used to is not itself anymore and can be easily disrrupted into whatever flow of thoughts.
Thanks one again, have a nice day!