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I hope this isn’t true. I’m in my 50s and I have never dreamed. By that I mean, I have never woken up from sleeping and remembered anything happening between the time I fell asleep and I awoke. It’s a complete blank. Maybe I do dream, but I have no proof or indication that I do. I never have. As a side note, it really bothers me when dreaming is used as a plot device in books. I can’t relate at all to the concept of…
I read a book about lucid dreaming a while back, and it said something like: the easiest way to tell you are in a dream is to look at something mechanical or complicated. The idea seemed to be: if you could get your dreaming mind to look at your hand and then turn it over to the other side, you didn't have the mental 'bandwidth' to imagine the opposite side correctly, and you'd realize you were dreaming. Equally, if…
I have even had some cases where it did occur to me, and I started lucid dreaming (which was very cool), but then I reverted to my default this-must-be-real dreaming state. That was very weird.
I read a book about lucid dreaming a while back, and it said something like: the easiest way to tell you are in a dream is to look at something mechanical or complicated. The idea seemed to be: if you could get your dreaming mind to look at your hand and then turn it over to the other side, you didn't have the mental 'bandwidth' to imagine the opposite side correctly, and you'd realize you were dreaming. Equally, if…
Most of the time when I'm dreaming it never even occurs to me that I might be in a dream until I wake up. I have even had some cases where it did occur to me, and I started lucid dreaming (which was very cool), but then I reverted to my default this-must-be-real dreaming state. That was very weird.
I read a book about lucid dreaming a while back, and it said something like: the easiest way to tell you are in a dream is to look at something mechanical or complicated. The idea seemed to be: if you could get your dreaming mind to look at your hand and then turn it over to the other side, you didn't have the mental 'bandwidth' to imagine the opposite side correctly, and you'd realize you were dreaming. Equally, if…
One thing I find fascinating about dreaming is that it seems that the dream wants to prevent you from staying lucid. When I become aware that I am dreaming I “wake up” and start going about my day, only to realise I am still dreaming, at which point I “wake up” again, and this cycle continues. This is a perceptual barrier that can be broken through, at which point you instantly gain hyper awareness awareness and control over you dream.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35516757
And what probably gives us awareness or consciousness is the multiple GPT like structures running in parallel. It really does make me wonder if we are really close to true AGI. It does feel like it.
Very exciting times! Just hope we don't end up doing a Terminator.
I hope this isn’t true. I’m in my 50s and I have never dreamed. By that I mean, I have never woken up from sleeping and remembered anything happening between the time I fell asleep and I awoke. It’s a complete blank. Maybe I do dream, but I have no proof or indication that I do. I never have. As a side note, it really bothers me when dreaming is used as a plot device in books. I can’t relate at all to the concept of…
If you have some combination of a life of habit and adequate rest, you'll less often fool yourself into thinking you dreamed. If you immediately start writing when you wake up, you'll fool yourself into thinking you have the most elaborate and profound dreams ever, although you'll code this as remembering.
Dreams are so insubstantial that we very recently believed that everybody dreamed in black and white, and that dreaming in color was a sign of mental illness. This is a belief that faded completely and quickly alongside the rise of color tv and film. The implications of this are pretty devastating. People themselves believed they only dreamed in black and white, and later largely forgot that this was their experience.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/health/02real.html
Why Did We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/DreamB&W.htm
Media Influences How We Recall Our Dreams -- Do We Dream In Black And White Or Technicolor?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/12/021224091445.h...
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edit: so I disagree with the OP. There are no dreams, only recollections of dreams. When you look at the "dreamlike" imagery of generative AI, you're looking at something similar to what awake people construct dreams from, not dreams themselves.
>When I am dreaming, I am receiving images/stories that are produced for me, not really by me This can really only be partially true for lucid dreaming, though, right? Maybe all dreaming is really just lucid dreaming. We're all usually just in some kind of split-brain patient situation where around half our brain is "lucidly" controlling a dream and the other half just goes along for the ride. A lot of dreams are jus…
I've had a lot of lucid dreams over the years (starting when I first was prescribed medication to help me sleep when I was a kid, where I'd have them several times a week, and gradually becoming less common over the years to maybe once a month). At least in my experience, being aware that I'm dreaming gives me the ability to choose how to act, the ability to force myself to wake up, and occasionally the ability to break minor "physics" rules (I pretty commonly find in lucid dreams that I can hover a few inches above ground and float around that way instead of walking), but I've never experienced the ability to change my environment, and the "people" in my dreams I interact with continue to act independently.
Obviously my dreams are entirely a creation of my own mind, so some part of my brain is in control of it, but being aware of that isn't sufficient to let me control it arbitrarily any more than I can stop myself from feeling physical pain or disliking the taste of some food in real life. Ultimately, we're not really in "full" control of how our mind and body react to real-life stimulus either; if we were, things like depression and phobias wouldn't exist.
I hope this isn’t true. I’m in my 50s and I have never dreamed. By that I mean, I have never woken up from sleeping and remembered anything happening between the time I fell asleep and I awoke. It’s a complete blank. Maybe I do dream, but I have no proof or indication that I do. I never have. As a side note, it really bothers me when dreaming is used as a plot device in books. I can’t relate at all to the concept of…
Interestingly enough, I could be considered the opposite. Having aphantasia, I've never had a mental image, but I have very vivid dreams. Talking to my dad, he only dreams in black and white. It's just awesome the variability we humans have.
> Go back a half-century, and television’s impact on our closed-eye experiences becomes even clearer. In the 1940s, studies showed that three-quarters of Americans, including college students, reported “rarely” or “never” seeing any color in their dreams. Now, those numbers are reversed.
I hope this isn’t true. I’m in my 50s and I have never dreamed. By that I mean, I have never woken up from sleeping and remembered anything happening between the time I fell asleep and I awoke. It’s a complete blank. Maybe I do dream, but I have no proof or indication that I do. I never have. As a side note, it really bothers me when dreaming is used as a plot device in books. I can’t relate at all to the concept of…