One of the most annoying things I hate about dreams is that I have so much trouble remembering the details I want to. Was taking a nap that ended up being formatted like a History Channel show on superstition (according to my DVR's listings, there was a show on about superstitions and rituals, and I did have the TV on History International). Had some woo apparently making a point along the lines of "because we're all superstitious, there must be something to it" as well as another point I can't remember. Don't know if it was actually in the show, but in my dream he deserved the stinging rebuttal and getting his face machine gun punched into the wall. (Normally in my dreams, I'm on the receiving end of violence when it happens.)If I remember what blog-worthy post I was going to put up in response, you'll see it, possibly as a Doggerel entry. For now, this is an open thread about dreams.
7 comments:
I know that technically I apparently have dreams every night, but in terms of my day to day life, I'm not aware of even HAVING dreams except every few months or so. For me dreams just don't really play into my life.
Basically when I found out some people actually have dreams they remember every single morning it surprised me.
How about this:
http://xkcd.com/430/
So true; so true.
That has happened to me several times. I have a dream that has a plot, action, drama, suspense, and a heroic final showdown, complete with hung-fu fights and amazing stunts... and then I forget the vast majority of it. All I can remember is that the plot "had something to do with the Real State business".
Recently I've done pretty well at remembering my dreams. I think part of it is that I tell my wife what I dreamed about each morning that I can remember. I once heard that keeping a dream journal can increase your recall of future dreams because you start to force yourself to recall details right away. But that is a claim that I have not investigated.
For those who care, in last night's dream I was at a marching band clinic with the University of Cincinnati and Ohio State marching band. Cristiano Ronaldo was OSU's lead trombone player. I was playing on it and he got pretty upset because I wasn't any good. When I got back to my trumpet it was in pieces, so I had to put it back together. At that point I had to catch up with everybody else so I started to run and surprisingly my plantar fasciitis did not act up. I met up with someone who was going to take me home, but we ended up walking and it started to rain, but that was ok. We got near my house but the person I was with didn't know what street I lived on, I didn't tell them. Eventually I went to someone else's house.
Then I woke up to use the bathroom and didn't stretch my foot, which made my plantar fasciitis hurt a bit.
I have a friend who claims to have no mind's eye; he says he understands the concept perfectly well but simply cannot in any way visualize something in his head in the way he understands others to do. You can tell him "Think of a purple elephant," and he can do it, and hold the idea in his head, but not the image in his head. As a consequence, he says, he never has dreams.
I'm not sure how this could happen or how far to trust him on this one. It did, however, allow for a great defense against one of Berkeley's more idiotic lines of logic on the "Observation creates reality" thing in a Philosophy class once. Essentially, the argument goes:
Berkeley: "Something can't exist unless it is being observed. You can't even conceptualize such a thing."
Person: "But it's perfectly possible to imagine something existing without any observers around it! I'm doing it right now! I am visualizing in my head a tree alone in a field with nobody looking at it!"
Berkeley: "Oh, you are, are you? Nobody there at all?"
Person: "Yes! Nobody is observing it and there it sits, existant."
Berkeley: "Ah HA! But aren't you observing it, in your mind's eye? You are the observer, and that's why it can exist! I win!"
Person: "You're a moron."
When the challenge was posed to us and that oh-so-clever twist ending applied, my dreamless friend just said "No. I'm not observing it. I'm conceptualizing the idea of a tree existing with nobody observing it, but I have no mind's eye, so I'm not actually observing it in my imagination, but I can understand the concept just fine. Fuck Berkeley."
It was pretty cool.
For me, a dream diary would only help if I remembered ANY details at all when I woke up. I only do that every few months, so that method really doesn't do much for me. I suppose for some people it's unusual to wake up with no memories of having dreamed, so I'll basically put it this way. It's basically just me waking up with no particular thoughts in mind, I just remember the stuff I did yesterday.
I definitely need to get into the habit of a dream diary, though the incident that prompted this post involved forgetting it by the time I woke up. I could remember several other chunks even now, but the one line that got me off on a tirade about woo hubris is a blank. About all I remember about it was that prompted me to accuse the woo in question of claiming infallibility.
From what I remember what I was told about the dream diary idea, the first dreams you record will have very few details, but after a while you will be able to recall many more details than you did at the beginning.
As for remembering your dreams I think waking up 15 minutes earlier could help. Another bit of hearsay I remember is that if you wake up during a dream you will remember it, but you won't remember if the dream ends before you wake up. All of this hearsay came from a high school psychology class by the way.
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