101–110 of 134 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve heard Stilton cheese has a similar effect. (Haven’t tried) Also whatever malaria drug I took was supposed to have intense dreams as a side effect. (Don’t remember any)
IIRC the cheese thing is basically a myth, any heavy food in your stomach when you sleep will cause you to sleep less deeply, wake more often, and consequently, remember more of your dreams.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you stopped to think for a second where science would be if every possible hypothesis was thrown out as soon as its inventor realized he couldn't conclusively prove it in a day? Also exactly the fact that it hasn't been fully proved out yet is why the nuance is missing. But now all the sudden you want them to be able to give you an explanation of the nuanced mechanism that prevents visual from taking over everyt…
1. If it's just a hypothesis, write it up in a journal, don't put it in Time magazine. 2. The hypothesis is as unprovable as they come: not only do we not have any idea on how this process of taking over other brain areas would work, if you knew how it worked, you couldn't build brains that lack this mechanism but are identical for the rest, and set up an experiment in which half of the brains (modified and original)…
I hear a lot about people struggling with sleep and so I recognize that it is probably a widespread problem, but I sleep like a rock most nights and have little to no stress about it.
On thing is for sure, if we can say to remember of the dreaming, we indeed did wake up.
In personal experience, I noticed a direct connection between physiological discomfort while sleeping and the related dreaming. That is a discomfort, say in my body positioning would generate dreams around the effect of it, not always literal but often it would either trigger a brief awakening or a change of the positioning.
One very stark experience was related to a case when previously frozen (and likely swollen at night) toes were constantly triggering a dream of sleeping next to a campfire and leading invariably to waking up with my knees bent and feet tucked underneath me. Toes healed, the dream was gone.
Another very much reliable trigger is airsupply. Say, by odd positioning the breathing is affected, sometimes an external factor can affect the air quality. Sure enough, there will be some dream leading to waking up just to be annoyed at dry/stuffy nose or some random smoke from an open window finding its way in. That I should feel probably grateful about, as it's like an internal smoke alarm... (though no substitute for proper detectors!!)
The point is, the dreaming might still be an extension of our survival mechanism. Kind of internal dashboard to check while asleep, no matter how oddly scripted.
> dreams are primarily visual precisely because ... This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted. In my experience, at least, dreams are not primarily visual. They have a visual component, but also a vague auditory component, a motor-experience (feeling of movement) component, etc., and all of those feel equally important. And most of all, there is a "felt experience" component that…
To me the most peculiar aspect of dreams is how vivid the universe you're in is. It feels as emotionally impactful as the best moments of your life. Super weird
Edit: Perhaps immersive psychedelics (LSD, ketamine) are similar actually. Speculatively, one could define "real" as our ability to doubt, "fantasy" as the suspension of doubt.
I see a lot of correlation here and very little causation, what if the visual dreaming is an effect of some other, more fundamental, mechanism?
> dreams are primarily visual precisely because ... This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted. In my experience, at least, dreams are not primarily visual. They have a visual component, but also a vague auditory component, a motor-experience (feeling of movement) component, etc., and all of those feel equally important. And most of all, there is a "felt experience" component that…
> dreams are primarily visual precisely because ... This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted. In my experience, at least, dreams are not primarily visual. They have a visual component, but also a vague auditory component, a motor-experience (feeling of movement) component, etc., and all of those feel equally important. And most of all, there is a "felt experience" component that…
To me the most peculiar aspect of dreams is how vivid the universe you're in is. It feels as emotionally impactful as the best moments of your life. Super weird
> dreams are primarily visual precisely because ... This is a central claim in the article that's just stated and taken for granted. In my experience, at least, dreams are not primarily visual. They have a visual component, but also a vague auditory component, a motor-experience (feeling of movement) component, etc., and all of those feel equally important. And most of all, there is a "felt experience" component that…
Like just yesterday I became aware that I was dreaming. In the dream I had somehow ended up in jail. The majority of the dream was me trying to escape in various ways, a bit like a reverse Ocean 11 thing.
As I was dreaming I could picture the places around me, I particularly recall the gate in the main corridor.
However even though my dreams are usually very visual in some sense, it's much closer to how I picture things in my mind when reading novels, rather than explicit images like when watching a movie.
I've always had a hard time with visualizations when reading novels. Like I'll read the page or two the author uses to describe some location, but most of the time the details don't really "sink in". Instead my mind seems to quickly grab hold of the high-level things, like it's an old apartment building, and the details are just generated based on that. Whatever detailed description the author makes usually doesn't affect the mental image I've already built.
I guess it's not that weird that the dream visuals feels more like that out of a book, both cases being generated by the imagination.