What is a dream?
-
- Posts: 290
- Joined: March 3rd, 2017, 1:49 pm
What is a dream?
There is also lucid dreaming - becoming conscious in a dream while we are sleeping. I have experienced this and it is powerful. Talk about going to the movies and/or virtual reality in your mind – this can be science fiction and pornography all rolled up into one. I remember a Buddhist or Hindu concept that all life is just a dream. Dreams are stories – maybe that’s all we have are stories. We are funny creatures – are we not?
So, why do we dream? Do you dream a lot or very little? Do you remember your dreams? I took a course once in how to record your dreams by keeping a journal and employing trigger techniques. I learned a lot about myself I did not know. Please tell us your dreams? What do dreams mean to you?
- Present awareness
- Posts: 1389
- Joined: February 3rd, 2014, 7:02 pm
Re: What is a dream?
- Burning ghost
- Posts: 3065
- Joined: February 27th, 2016, 3:10 am
Re: What is a dream?
Something we have discovered is that we "practice" in dreams. We play out and perfect certain tasks so when we wake again we've improved in our abilities. This has been shown quite conclusively. So dreaming in this way serves a purpose to help us improve motor functions.
-
- Posts: 1017
- Joined: November 27th, 2012, 2:11 am
Re: What is a dream?
As for the OP and the dream and message of his or her father, it is good not to discount that. For any number of reasons. Even the emotional benefit it can or may have provided in processing the emotional impact of losing for good on this earth your father.
I have had three unusually powerful dream experiences. Dreams per se. Or two of them dreams per se.
Two involved the supernatural. In each separate case I awoke I instantly knew each experience was not a dream. Yet the encounters took place through the means of dreaming.
The third one, which actually occurred first and by many years before the other two, was a dream, a nightmare, but upon instantly awakening I somehow knew and understood this unusual nightmare was a dream communicating something important I should know, I should be aware of, for whatever reason (which is lost to me). And that would be that I would live through nuclear war I had this dream as a teenager as I recall.
I've had a few other minor nightmares or uneasy dreams which where dreams but symbolically represented a real problem I would come to face. That being betrayal by someone close to me that I would never have thought would, and that someone I would not suspect would rescue me. It was only after real life events that I understood those recurring dreams had been telling me this would play out in real life.
-
- Posts: 290
- Joined: March 3rd, 2017, 1:49 pm
Re: What is a dream?
- BelieveNothing
- Posts: 109
- Joined: January 24th, 2013, 6:17 am
- Location: 2nd cloud from the right
- Contact:
Re: What is a dream?
I have personally experienced a limited awareness of distractions while dreaming through like for example a loud noise waking me up and then something happens in my dream to sort of 'explain away' where the noise came from. I suspect dreams are influenced by memories of real experience. My own dreams mostly consist of things I can't explain or even describe while 'awake'. Sometimes while dreaming I try to explore or influence the dream deliberately and almost witness areas that are 'under construction'. I often float, fly or swim underwater and sometimes try to change the 'rules'.
- Oranssi
- New Trial Member
- Posts: 5
- Joined: May 26th, 2017, 12:50 pm
Re: What is a dream?
"Now I do not know whether it was then I dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." - Zhuangzi
- Sy Borg
- Site Admin
- Posts: 15154
- Joined: December 16th, 2013, 9:05 pm
Re: What is a dream?
What of dreams in context with emerging VR? In my home ATM there's a few keen players of interactive online games. In a sense the players share a brief and limited experience in a directed dream world - a shared dream. As ever more realistic and satisfying VR is developed, the boundary between waking and dream states may be dissolved as interactions with avatars of others become more frequent and sophisticated.
It's not such a major step given how we all buy into (pardon pun) the myth of money - that these plastic notes and little coins are actually worth something. We buy into the fiction because it (at least for a while) improved our lives, and I expect increased forays will happen into VR for the same reasons. As the outdoors become increasingly polluted, congested and generally less hospitable for human biology, VR may become more attractive.
Then, after a day immersed in VR we'd probably dream of the VR at night, like a mirror reflecting another mirror.
-
- Posts: 290
- Joined: March 3rd, 2017, 1:49 pm
Re: What is a dream?
- Oranssi
- New Trial Member
- Posts: 5
- Joined: May 26th, 2017, 12:50 pm
Re: What is a dream?
But then days may pass, and we remember it. Even try to write it down in a diary or in a conversation to a friend and find out that the description can never convey the initially experience. And this is equally amazing. Because in the description of our memories and derivative feeling we create something completely different yet seemilar. We as gods actually may create a new universe in the consciousness of whoever listens. This is like Nature itself, like dreams, like VR, or a book, or a book about a book. As said already, mirrors reflecting mirrors
These are fractals that shine as different but are embedded in the same pattern of mystery. And what is mysterious is awe-inspiring. To be near the fountain of all one is never far, because the pattern is always near.
2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
2023 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023