Dream Logic

[Cognisant]

In the insane rationality of dreamland what are some "rules" you've noticed.

For example when reading a book in a dream (or anything written down for that matter) the text will change if you go back and read it again, this applies to the details of technical drawings too, unless the text/drawing is something you have specifically memorised to such an extent that any deviation from it would be blatantly conspicuous.

Guns in a dream only fire if you will them to or if you point them at what you want to shoot and yell "bang", pulling the trigger does nothing.

In dreamland imaginary games are serious business, if someone says the floor is lava it really is, if someplace is declared a safe zone then it will be, never play hide and seek that never goes well

You can only climb ladders with your arms however this is never a problem as in a dream you're always as strong as you need to be.

It's possible to make cars/planes even trains turn by leaning, indeed this is the only way to make them turn.

 

[Belak]

Gravity is nonexistent if you believe it not to be

Dream characters are manifestations of your subconscious that will try to distract you

You can breath underwater

 

[PmjPmj]

When someone / something gives chase, you suddenly gain the ability to run in ultra slow motion.

Flying is possible until you realise that you are in-flight, at which point you begin to rapidly descend; no amount of feverish arm flapping will see you gain altitude.

 

[nanook]

i like the shallow lucid dreams in the morning.

i can hallucinate music and zoom through hallucinated landcapes like a camera. no deep psychic content will appear. it's like entertained boredom.

i believe the frequency of this brainstate is close to 8hz, judging by the rhythm of the sounds.

imagery appears to have higher priority than sound in that imagery will evoke sounds that are resonating with the imagery. skateboaring through my town may create a stooges like sound, browsing the tundra (like a flying camera) will evoke acoustic instruments.

i can not mute the sound, but transmute it, for example focus on the beats and turn them into a constant drone and then allow for new patterns to evolve inside of the drone.

so for example while i'm browsing the tundra i can turn something that sounds like 'midnight oil' into a didgeridoo like (carnyx) sound and turn that it an african drumming choir.

 

[Perfectly Normal Beast]

annoying old women in armchairs occupy your yard and refuse to leave.

absurdity thinks you are stewie griffin.

various local beetles are embossed with strangely comprehensible hieroglyphics.

 

[Brontosaurie]

Dream characters are manifestations of your subconscious that will try to distract you

from confrontation with true self i.e. the revelation of dream state, i.e. waking up or going lucid

?

or what?

 

[Belak]

from confrontation with true self i.e. the revelation of dream state, i.e. waking up or going lucid

?

or what?

Some say they are aspects of your personality, figments of your mind
Others say that they are real spirits in different dimensions
Some would go to say that they are just random pieces of your day

I suppose it can be whatever you look at it as

 

[Direwolf]

Cant fall asleep in my dream.
Thats some inception stuff if i could, "a dream within a dream".

 

[nanook]

try taking drugs in your dream. works for me. (i would just ask myself in a lucid dream: what would happen now, if i had taken a particular entheogen and it would be 'coming on right now')

there are also classic paths to altered states of mind. a dream is not a dream. there are dream levels with different possibilities. you meet different parts of your psyche and interaction with those parts depends on their nature, so the freedoms of interaction are different too.

you can navigate to a different level through symbolic pathways.

find a hole in the ground, try to go under the earth somehow, find a tree and follow it's roots.

another possibility is to play the out of body exit routine and to leave the body through a particular chakra or direction. like navel or crown.


in flying dreams i have often tried to rise to above the atmosphere, but apparently my mind can't visualize how a land turns into a continent and so on. surprisingly. it can do so much, but not this? somehow i never pulled it off. i've been in outer space by different means. by getting abducted, lol.

 

[Brontosaurie]

Some say they are aspects of your personality, figments of your mind
Others say that they are real spirits in different dimensions
Some would go to say that they are just random pieces of your day

I suppose it can be whatever you look at it as

i meant to ask what these manifestations are trying to distract one from, not what they are.

 

[computerhxr]

The rules are what you make them. You can allow things to happen, or control them 100%. You can change the rules, and see how it affects everything in the arena.

Most times I setup the stage and the situation. Everything else fills itself in, and sometimes they interact with my dream.

I've died or have been killed many times and in many different ways.

When someone pisses me off, then I take it out on them in my dreams. This one guy stole a bunch of my stuff, threatened me, and a bunch of other crap. I find him in my dream, grab him by the shirt, and fly up into the clouds. I let him go and watch him fall for a few seconds and then I stick my fists out and superman into his belly and force his body into the earth. Then I end up flying around inside the dirt so I swim around like a dolphin; dipping in an out of the planet. The dirt doesn't flow around me, it flows between every part of my body, while I pass through it. There's a lot of drag and sound so it's not like flying or swimming.

Cant fall asleep in my dream.
Thats some inception stuff if i could, "a dream within a dream".

This happened to me recently. I was about to go into OOBE, but I was tired so I struggled to get out of it. Long story short, OOBE is 6 levels deep and I was at level 5. I ended up snorting each time that I woke up. After 5 levels, I woke up for real and snorted again. My GF woke up and asked if I was okay (like she did in 4 levels of the dream). She said that I only snorted once. Yeah, it was just like inception.

My favorite thing to do while dreaming is to work on art projects. I hardly every have time to work on art because my work doesn't afford me time. I try to learn new skills, like I had trouble drawing the left eye so I kept practicing until I got it. These skills pass over into real life.

I also like to perform science experiments. Sometimes I reverse engineer things in my dreams to find out how they work. I can make them translucent and see how they work. I setup dominoes so that I can watch them fall.

I have a library that I've created in my mind. I am very specific about how I use this space. There is a desk in the middle of the stacks, with a bright light on it. This is where I do most of my art projects. I try to draw everything in my mind before I waste my time trying to draw it in real life.

There are a few things that I have trouble with... One is that I have trouble with first person view. I am first person for most of my art, but sometimes I'm in two places at once (first and third person). When I get like this, I have trouble taking over the first person, so it's easier to re-imagine the whole thing with me in first person.

Also, I have a lot of trouble rolling down a hill in a tire, face first, and in first person. It's a technique that I use to trigger OOBE sometimes. I just can't really do it very well. I created the situation because I would switch between sky and grass quickly so you need to remember where the clouds were, where the grass is, flowers, rocks, people, all of those things. And while you're rolling down the hill, you are moving so everything has to change around that. The stuff on the ground changes often, but the sky is nearly static. People out in the distance react to the situation because I'm barreling down the hill towards their picnics. After about 4 or 5 turns, I feel my brain twist and I pop-out into the OOBE.

 

[Pizzabeak]

Some say they are aspects of your personality, figments of your mind
Others say that they are real spirits in different dimensions
Some would go to say that they are just random pieces of your day

I suppose it can be whatever you look at it as

They've invaded my dreams! Nah, not really. Could be placebo, but I've been into what can be described as "mycology" lately, now that they've been generally more prominent with the weather. I've had some success identifying a few local species but am still just a lowly amateur. However, it's been moderately exciting to me as I've been able to conduct a few cheap tests but currently there's no room here for anything more extensive.

But the point is in this most recent dream there have been exotic looking mushrooms in places and my dream self was like, "Oh let's pick them and identify later!" but I was always preoccupied with some other vague thing. Right before I woke up we were playing baseball with some people (which actually was kind of fun; I was on 2nd base but then our batter struck out and we lost. Then we tried to get another game started) and there were weird mushrooms all around. I was like, "Well, after the game I'll take a look at them." Some of them were really big. I just glanced at them. Before (what seemed like the "1st" part of the dream) there was a solitary red mushroom that I planned on getting later and before I woke up there were some weird shaped fungi over there was a patch of metallic blue ones. I was pretty excited as I had never seen them before but of course was too busy playing baseball, and still planned on messing with them after the games were done. Also saw some shaggy inkcaps except they were all yellow instead of regular, so I was kind of curious about those too.

So I'm thinking these "people" I was playing baseball with kind of distracted me from that. The "1st" part had something to do with cops in a park/building thing in which some fungi were also present. I think it distracts one from experiencing a true lucidity within the dream, in which who knows what may be possible. I keep trying to remember to do this "next time" but it's hard to remember in dreams and stuff.

I also wanted to say something about "lucid" dreams or hypnogogia... Well, I'm not an expert on the different sleep cycles but a few prominent ones are right before waking up and right before falling asleep if one does it right. Again, not sure if a ceiling fan aids with this or not. But, it seems one can hear voices with a slightly different texture than thoughts. When I start to fall asleep in this way (and there might be different intensities of this) I may hear random noises, sometimes sounding like someone saying stuff but it isn't merely sound waves entering one's ear although it can sound like that. Just thought it remotely interesting how it could sound like that when they are just, presumably, generated by "the brain".

 

[EditorOne]

My dreams seem to have no logic, except for one thing. I can't dream what can't be experienced, at least beyond the point where it's even imaginable. So I haven't had any dreams of weightlessness, for instance, because I can't project what that would entail. Ditto dying: Occasionally I dream about falling from a great height, but the dream always shifts or ends before I hit.

Also, my dreams are rudderless, so far as I'm concerned. It's not like a boat with no helmsman; it's more like a boat with five helmsmen, none of them known to me.

Other than that all I've noticed is that some dreams involve some pretty darned odd blends that include traces of recent experiences, recent books I've read, recent shows I've watched. Those dreams seem to have some kind of random entertainment value for my mind, like a half-wit enjoying handsprings and jumping jacks.

Very occasionally a dream will serve some purpose, like reminding me to get the frick up because the alarm didn't go off. When I was a teenager I dreamed of a train wreck and it woke me up. That morning the 6:32 a.m. passenger train that ran past our house didn't sound its horn; the absence of that, which was my usual wake-up call, apparently triggered a dream of a train wreck.

 

[nanook]

if you record your dreams onto a voice recorder, the record will be lost, after you wake up. hate that one

 

[Pizzabeak]

Dreams seem to incorporate distorted versions of stuff that may have recently occurred, as well as stuff that may have not recently occurred.

I hate when this happens: there was this one dream where we were about to receive a new videogame, but then I woke up and it was just a dream

 

[Pizzabeak]

I think what I meant to say was that sometimes it seems too fabricated, like I'm just thinking and conjuring up scenarios really intensely rather than lucid dreaming; sometimes it seems like I don't want to wake up just yet.

Edit: I mean, and that the intensely fabricated conjuring and thinking is conveniently accompanied by imagery and, yes, perceived dream sounds.


Is there sound in dreams? Or is one merely fabricating and filling in the blanks?

 

[nanook]

dreams are the fabrication of the same mind, that is fabricating your waking state interpretation of sensory data. your dream-character is as fabricated as your waking self. the sounds in your dream are made out of brain-waves, just like the sounds you hear at daytime.

(of course brain-waves are just a concept, it's essentially consciousness, which is another concept, bummer, language can't touch IT)

the value of lucidity is not control of dreams but a gradual transcendence of the levels of information that make up your dreams OR your daytime thoughts. control is just what the ego does. more ego, less interesting dreams. more ego, less valuable daytime thinking.

of course the word ego is difficult to define, i hope my intended meaning is implied i the context.

practicing ego can still help with transcendence.

 

[computerhxr]

Is there sound in dreams? Or is one merely fabricating and filling in the blanks?

Does sound really even exist? Some vibrations are imperceptible, is that sound?

You are recalling and recreating sounds in your head. I don't believe that this uses the eardrums very often while dreaming. However, it's possible for muscles to flex, and blood to flow around the area and create a vibration.

Probably doesn't answer your question.

 

[StevenM]

Sometimes, I 'lightly' observed my cognitive process when I gradually enter the first phase of sleep, and then bring myself back to consciousness again.

I've noticed that at first, I think about the day, and question and ponder about the problems I faced during the day, and daydream about stuff as well. At first, this is all under complete conscious control, and is somewhat linear as far as normal thoughts go.

As I start drifting into sleep, I noticed that I gradually surrender the control of my thoughts, (which still continue), but are less effected by my conscious. They start taking a life of their own, and I start just merely becoming an observer. They also quickly go off tangent, and the topic of thought becomes very dynamic, steering farther from what I was originally thinking about. The thoughts become less linear, it seems now that they start branching out into many different ideas all at once.

The moment I come back to wakefullness (I guess this is when I realized that I was 'drifting off', and decided to wake up), the things that I was observing being once quite clear in my mind start gradually fading into amnesia, until I can no longer recall the details. I just know it was completely off-base to my original thoughts.

 

[nanook]

what i have learned about lucid dreaming is that you can't really learn it, rather you learn how to use the potential that you already have, if you have some. the potential of lucidity is developing whether you use it or not. if you have potential for lucidity, but make no use of it, you have "unconscious" lucid dreams. you always know that a dream is a dream, while you are dreaming, in the same way that you know that you have a body or that gravity exits, in the physical waking state. it's like understanding waking state reality but making no effort to live an interesting life, just watching television all day. you may have boring lucid dreams. you may also have eventful psychic lucid dreams but make no reflective use of your understanding of the dream. it's like when you are in an argument with someone and you know that you are wrong and you are projecting but you can't be bothered to stop and change your ways. knowing that a dream is a dream is like knowing that the earth is not flat and that you have to die one day. it's a potential. but does not make you use your time in human and rational ways automatically. so there is something deeper in you, that decides whether you can use that potential or not and it's rather literally a "complex". and it's dynamic, moody and evolving. it can't be described by an adjective, by a property, a trait, like lucidity is one. becoming lucid is like going to school and learning about geography and history. an easy practice. but how do we bring our soul into a better shape? i'm afraid we don't. it's just unfolding.

oh, im contradicting myself, i started out saying you can't learn it, you can't implement levels of lucidity at will, it just develops naturally and then i compare it to going to school and practicing. it's paradox, like school, you have to be old enough to get it.

 

[computerhxr]

Nanook, I think I know what you're getting at.

If you try to find ways to control dreams, then you are taking a difficult approach. Instead try to day dream, or setup the dream before you fall asleep. The problem is that that part of your brain is not used consciously during the day, so it's not used consciously at night either. It's like a muscle and you have to work it out.