I would like to explore something I find interesting. Namely, the way dreams seem so unreal when you wake up. I don't really understand this. I've always been a regular lucid dreamer. Well, much less regular since I became a regular smoker. But anyways, I become aware that I am dreaming. And generally my conscious mind starts functioning in a way that's not much different than if I were awake. And I can really try to think about, and take in the implications, of what's going on. Wow, I am in a dream right now. And I am aware of it. And I can do literally anything that I want. And whatever it is that I do, it will seem exactly like it were real, I will perceive it as if totally real. And I'll have that experience. Of doing whatever I do, and having it seem totally real while I'm doing it. But then I wake up. And when I wake up, it doesn't seem real anymore. And I don't mean that rationally it seems like nonsense or unrealistic. I mean, it doesn't feel like a real experience, or a real memory. I can think about experiences from the previous day, and they seem real. But then I think about what I did in my lucid dream, and it doesn't feel that way at all. I can remember the experience, I can remember really thinking about and focusing on how real it seemed. And it did seem real. But now that I'm awake, it doesn't feel that way at all. Why is this? What I'm talking about is a feeling, more than a rationalization. First of all, I think this is something interesting for science to explore. I'm sure there's some things happening in the brain that are responsible for this(as a matter of speaking, ignoring my stance that correlation is not necessarily causation when it comes to brain activity and mental activity). It would be interesting, and probably illuminating, to discover what is going on in the brain that correlates to the 'feeling' of something being real or not. What causes what was perceived as an actual experience to no longer feel like an actual experience upon awakening. I do wonder if you could just train your mind to view your dreams a certain way while in them, you could make it seem like a real experience/memory after awaking. Now, something else interesting I want to try, that may perhaps yield interesting results. When in a lucid dream, try to remember events from my real life. Do those feel real while in a dream? Does your 'real life' feel unreal while dreaming, in the same way dreams feel unreal while awake?
Kind of freaky you posted this, moments ago i was pondering essentially the same thing, from a slightly different angle. It does seem rather arbitrary that we consider one real and the other imaginary. Is this because our brains tend to tune into one reality instead of the other? What if we were in dream state 18hrs and awake for 6? Have you ever had a fairly intense dream that you think may have prepared your awake state for a similar event? Say you got in a car accident in your dream, could that be viewed as an emotional exploration of the possibility of that event, which prepares you for such an event? I am not suggesting a deja vu type precognition, but rather a mental preperation for the possibility. Similar to how a violent movie may desensitize/emotionally prepare someone for such things.
What's real? Things feel real when they're happening to us in this moment, but are they real before or after? Nothing is real in an ultimate sense, even this waking world is just a dream. Seeing it for what it is will liberate you. The things that pull will no longer pull, the things that push will no longer push. You'll taste the 36 flavours and no flavours at all. So many paths, and it takes only a moment to snap awake. Then what's the use of terms like real or not real? Then what's the use of these words? How strange. How strange, how strange!
Didn't read the whole post but I think I get the gist of it. In more of half of my dreams I think whatever is going on is real life currently happening. And often I'll dream that I wake up from my dream but I'm not sure whether I'm awake or not, until something happens that makes me realize I'm still dreaming. The older I get the quicker I realize I'm awake in my post wakening dream, it comes from experience I suppose. Actually it happened last night. I dreamt a woman slapped me over my right eye (don't remember why). Then I woke up and wiped my eye but I was too tired to look at it so instead I wiped my hand on the wall in front of me so I wouldn't have to move my head, just open my eyes and look at the wall, and there was blood on the wall. At this point I thought to myself I must still be dreaming cause a slap on the eye doesn't make you bleed. This is my theory on dreams - the brain is still working but every other sense is shut off, so it starts compensating for the lack of information being picked up by instead using information it already has in the form of memories. I base this theory on a brain experiment, I'll post a picture bellow but I'm not sure if it'll work in the forum - So when you look in the middle, the empty space between the dots that is moving around looks colored. That's because your brain doesn't know what color the empty space is because you're only looking at it from your peripheral vision so it compensates by... simply telling you that there's a color. It's pretty much guessing. So I believe it's the same concept in the works. Your brain thinks you're awake but since there's no info being put in it compensates by using information it already has. We know so little about our brains that it makes me want to cry. It's very complex. Here's another theory; Deja vu. What is deja vu? I've heard some stupid theories about it being your past life or a ghost or whatever. I believe the deja vu feeling is what you get when you experience something in real life that resembles something you've experienced in your dream. You don't remember the dream itself... however it's being subconsciously remembered. Here's an interesting thing. I once read an article on lucid dreaming. It says that when you're not sure whether you're dreaming or not you should look in the mirror. If your reflection is blurry then you're surely dreaming. Or you can try to count your fingers, if you have more than ten then congratulations you're dreaming. One single time I got the opportunity to do this. I often lucid dream but I don't know I'm dreaming so I act as I do in real life. No making waves or ruffling feathers. But this time I had a suspicion I was dreaming. So first I tried looking in the mirror and it was completely blurry. But here's the thing. In real life I'm near sighted. So I took this as being a symptom of bad eye sight and started looking for my glasses - IN MY DREAM. Didn't find the damn things so I tried counting fingers instead and guess what - I had like a total of forty fingers. But my dumbass tried counting them except I couldn't concentrate so I kept losing track. So I decided the results were inconclusive and went on with my dream thinking it's real life. This is an example of how your brain just puts things together for it to simulate real life. After all your brain is there to serve you. If it doesn't make you dream during the REM stage then it would be letting you down. Scientists believe dreaming is a survival mechanism because dreaming about a distressing situation allows you to better deal with that situation in real life by causing you less anxiety since you've already gone through it.
Interesting. My experience is the opposite. The few lucid experiences I've had all felt very much like real experiences afterwards, in fact, my dreams generally do, those where I don't know they are dreams until afterwards, also feel like real experiences. I tend not to have strange, symbolic plays, but what could easily be other lives, populated with other people who seem to have a life of their own, and these dreams are often continued, revisited, where they have moved on, done things, just as if they were living real lives. Some say these experiences are real and happen on another plane, in another state of our being, where we have effectively let go of our physical life, our story, which is also a kind of dream, to be experiencing there just as real as here, only most don't see it that way. Hard to say why your dreams might feel unreal to you though. Perhaps it is the nature of them, or perhaps you have assumed something about them that makes them feel that way?
Strange this thread came up, every night for the last few days I've been having at least 4 dreams a night, but I usually have about one a week strange...