Is Dreaming an Encryption Procedure?

[Michael McMahon]

A way of paraphrasing my point on closed timelike curves is that our short-term memory is first moved to medium-term memory after which the short-term memory storage is formatted. The erased memory frees up space to allow us to rerun the flow of time the next day.

[Michael McMahon]

Ever notice how some dreams repeat themselves? False awakenings are an example of this where the dreamer wakes up again and again in a dream. Although there are also other instances of this where a person might be fleeing from someone and falling only to be chased again. Themes can reoccur in several dreams. A way of describing it could be that the same dream is being replayed to see if you can spot hidden clues and mistakes.

[Michael McMahon]

I was out recently out camping and it was one of those tents with a see-through section. It was my first night camping by myself and before I went to sleep I wondered how strange it’d be if I saw someone outside. That night I’d a dream where I was trying to escape somehow. I don’t who I was moving away from. The sensation repeated and on one episode I thought I’d hide by saying I’ll be invisible because it’s a dream. That thought clicked a bit of self-awareness. I tried to wake up and was back in my tent. I saw a flashlight outside and rushed to get my phone. What happened next is that my thoughts appeared to freeze. I felt this feeling of exhaustion that made me intensely focus on my vision until the scene faded away. I was eventually fully awake in my tent. I can only speak for myself but it’s lucid dreams like this that convince me the dreaming plot can sometimes be outside of our control. It’s influenced by our previous thoughts but in an indirect way.

[Michael McMahon]

“Occasionalism can be considered as parallelism with divine intervention, because if God did not mediate between the mind and body, there would not be any interaction between the two.”

It might be tempting to say God gives us free will. Someone can say that about the beginning of time or why a possible God may have chosen this universe. That’s a common refrain in the problem of evil. But God cannot make our free decisions for us as that would be a contradiction in terms. In that case we’d paradoxically be freely doing what God commanded us to do. So if God actively connects our minds with our bodies then that would worsen the problem of evil because God would have to translate the evil thoughts of bad people to the physical world in real time.

[Michael McMahon]

Occasionalism would also necessitate God constantly reading your mind and not just during prayer. Although it could be useful in a metaphorical or spiritual way; that God or a supernatural agent gives us the mechanism for free will but not how we use it to create our own unique free will.

[Michael McMahon]

Sometimes I forget my dreams when I wake up and I’ve to slowly think back of what happened. Recalling one scene means that I can begin to relate it to another forgotten scene. After a few minutes of this I can remember a bits and pieces of the content. I rarely think of another dream in the evening that I didn’t remember that same morning. Although this could be happening subconsciously where a latent dream is momentarily visualised before making a decision during the day. Then our decisions throughout the day would less deterministic and not just in the morning.

[Michael McMahon]

“Another possible explanation for the phenomenon of déjà vu is the occurrence of "cryptomnesia", which is where information learned is forgotten but nevertheless stored in the brain, and similar occurrences invoke the contained knowledge, leading to a feeling of familiarity because the event or experience being experienced has already been experienced in the past, known as "déjà vu".”

A dream we never once remembered but stored in the unconscious might theoretically cause déjà vu if it’s similar to real-life situation thereby making us remember it. In that case it wouldn’t be your current situation that’s creepy but rather an erased memory that interrupts a continuous sense of self.

[Michael McMahon]

Some dreams lack structure and a few unconventional movies even do this deliberately. Some movies lack a clear conclusion because they want the audience to come to their own conclusions. This subjectivity can help people engage with the story so that they can form a resolution of their own. This would depend on how they interpreted the characters so far.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoEnding

[Michael McMahon]

Lucid dreaming might not be everyone’s cup of tea. One or two lucid dreams could be so chaotic as to resemble brain surgery by someone using a DIY manual! How the mind impacts the brain to produce a bit of free will could be an intense operation!

[Michael McMahon]

If everything is determined then we could interpret that religiously (God determines your behaviour eg predestination), spiritually (your actions have been inevitable since the Big Bang and therefore we’re connected to time, space and its origins), mystically (being determined by an unknowable or infinite physical world) or materialistically (we’re conscious robots). Determinism itself is multifaceted. It’s even possible for the randomness of free will to have less spiritual connotations than certain versions of determinism.

[Belindi]

If your remembered dreams contain symbols that have meaning for you or for someone to whom you relate your dream then the dream is interesting as an interpretation of whatever.

However encryptions are intentional symbolic systems whereas dreaming is usually involuntary. In cases where dreamers have claimed to intend to dream about some theme and succeeded, the dream is sort of voluntary and there can be little doubt these dreams as with all dreams correlate with brain events especially neurochemical activities that control waking awareness and dreaming awareness.

Anyone who can abstract symbolic meanings from literature can do so from interestingly- narrated dreams. Some literature is intended by the author to be symbolism. Interpreting dreams is much the same activity as interpreting any expressive literature.

[Michael McMahon]

However encryptions are intentional symbolic systems whereas dreaming is usually involuntary. In cases where dreamers have claimed to intend to dream about some theme and succeeded, the dream is sort of voluntary and there can be little doubt these dreams as with all dreams correlate with brain events especially neurochemical activities that control waking awareness and dreaming awareness.

Well in commerce the encryption algorithm was first consciously made by the designer and then sold to others as you say to automatically encrypt their data. From this point of view dreams are partially encrypted by ourselves and of course the brain is also involved somehow. Dreams are correlated with brain neurochemicals but then again our waking state is also correlated with such patterns. Therefore being associated with brain waves doesn’t make the experience less valid than the waking self.

Anyone who can abstract symbolic meanings from literature can do so from interestingly- narrated dreams. Some literature is intended by the author to be symbolism. Interpreting dreams is much the same activity as interpreting any expressive literature.

I think dream interpretation is subjective. It’s optional the way in which you want to perceive a dream you had. This doesn’t mean you can’t be guided by others in how you want to describe the oneiric imagery. Analysing your dreams could help self-motivation, independent thinking, taking the initiative and enhancing self-control. There are two aspects of the dreams we remember: sense perception and narrative. What were you seeing, hearing or touching in the dream? What were the thoughts you had during the dream? What was your immediate reaction to the dream when you awoke? Dream interpretation could then help you reconcile that new information acquired in the dream with all of your previous knowledge. It could suss out its relevance to update your pre-existing self-awareness by either accepting, rejecting, exaggerating or minimising the importance of whatever messages were contained in the specific dream.

[Michael McMahon]

Anyone who can abstract symbolic meanings from literature can do so from interestingly- narrated dreams. Some literature is intended by the author to be symbolism. Interpreting dreams is much the same activity as interpreting any expressive literature.

When we write about a poem in school there tends to be a standardised analysis. We are given marks for the concise point we are making with quotes from the text to back us up and our explanation or elaboration. We’ve to follow shared guidelines on how to comment on themes, tones, imagery and so on. We get a few marks for our own perspective on the piece of literature but a lot of the marks goes towards the structure and presentation of our answer or essay. In a test we are technically free to disagree with the question and write a scathing review of Shakespeare but this tends not to happen! Interpreting dreams differ from this because more emphasis is placed on our individual response to the scene rather than the way we structure it to describe to others.

[Michael McMahon]

My English teacher once asked us to write an essay about Lady Macbeth. I can’t recall the exact question but I took a different approach and slightly disagreed with the question. I ended up writing 8 pages. We were the first two to hand it up and afterwards people laughed thats I got 68% for writing a thesis rejecting the question while my classmate got 70% for somehow writing too casually.

[Michael McMahon]

We’re free to disagree with a dream or to kind of agree with it in a casual way!