I would say that we self-project into that other plane when we dream. The pages on lucid dreaming suggest that our dream lives and worlds are really just extensions of our consciousness so it would follow, to some degree, that we build them out of our past experiences. But what about those dreams that feel real but are so bizarre and alien, taking place in a land we've never heard of or seen for that matter? Are those the extensions of a conscious that we have yet to experience or simply extrapolations of the things we have seen before? If I had to venture a guess, I would say the latter but, of course, I'm not sure.
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
On the Dreams We Create
My Chrome browser is full of tabs of stuff that I say I'll come back to but never do. Well, this time I actually remembered to read this one article that I thought had some correlation to dreams. It's called "Self-projection and the brain" and here's the link. Its a fascinating read on our ability to self-project ourselves into situations across time that feel real and the theory that this ability comes from a foundation of past experiences. I would highly recommend you check it out, but the main reason I brought it up was to speculate on how we create our dreamscapes. How do we architect the worlds we dream?
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I also find this to be such an interesting topic. Many think that the brain is only interpreting information as we dream, rather than creating new. Obviously this is really hard to substantiate since we know less about dreaming than we do about the brain. However, most congenitally blind people only have auditory and olfactory dreams, which helps lead to this conclusion. People in this school of thought I think would answer your question by saying that everything in that alien dreamscape you have experienced before while awake, but in the dream, it has associated things that were not together before, giving it an alien quality. For example, if your dream had mountains made of water, you know you have seen both mountains and water while awake, it is simply the odd association that makes it foreign.
ReplyDeleteSelf-projecting onto another plane is a really perplexing concept--I immediately thought of linear algebra when I read that. Perhaps dreams are just some sort of least-squares approximations to other worlds very different from ours? This is a much more exciting idea than our subconscious generating dreamscapes from prior experience, and until I read Amara's post I was more inclined to entertain it. But Amara brings up a very good point: perhaps it is only the unique associations that makes dreaming seem so strange. I agree with her, and would like to add one more point to that theory. Dreaming also warps temporal and spatial perspectives, making dreams very different from reality. So the combination of melding experiences and spatial warping makes dreamscapes seem new to us.
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