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(Message started by: raven on May 2nd, 2004, 10:19pm)
Title: Dreaming
Post by raven on May 2nd, 2004, 10:19pm


Q? :: When I go to sleep, and dream, do I awaken to another world? Is it real? ::
{ if we imagine for a moment that it is real1... what are the possibilities? }



  • When I wake up to this world here, am I dreaming in that other world there?
  • Is this world REM sleep to that world?
  • Am I on the verge of lucid dreaming here:
  • Are narcoleptics here insomniacs there?
  • Is the perception of time the same?
  • How many hours of experience there can I fit into a nap here?
  • Can there and here cross over?
  • Are psychotics here, not fully awake here and still partially awake there?
  • Can I affect that world from here and/or this world from there?
  • Can I really fly when I’m there?
  • Can I actually fly here and not know it?
  • Is there more than one there, that I go to when I sleep here?
  • If I die there, do I reawaken here?
  • If I die here, do I reawaken there?
  • Did there and here used to be one place - experience?
  • Does this world and that world exist concurrently or consecutively, only when I’m conscious of it does one or either of them exist?
  • Are the boundaries, the veil, thinner at twilight? Making it easier to get from here to there and there to here.
  • Are they thinner at the twilight of consciousness? That moment right before we drift off to sleep.
  • Is “eating the apple from the garden” a metaphor for the separation of there and here? For being awake here? Ergo, is there the “garden of Eden”?
  • Is lucid dreaming (being conscious, lucid, awake in your dreams), having an out of body experience (O.B.E. a.k.a. astral projection), and/or Shamanic underworld journeying here, of there, what mystics talk/have talked about in so many writings?

Okay, I’ll stop here, for now, and hand this over to anyone that wants to comment on it.


[smiley=infty.gif]                            
[smiley=frakcr.gif] [smiley=fraka.gif] [smiley=frakv.gif] [smiley=frake.gif] [smiley=frakn.gif]                        


 

1 real:
[adj.]
1.
         a) Being or occurring in fact or actuality; having verifiable existence: real objects; a real illness.
         b) True and actual; not imaginary, alleged, or ideal: real people, not ghosts; a film based on real life.

2. Having substance or capable of being treated as fact; not imaginary; "the substantial world"; "a mere dream, neither substantial nor practical"; "most ponderous and substantial things" ~Shakespeare

3. Philosophy. Existing objectively in the world regardless of subjectivity or conventions of thought or language.

Synonyms:   actual, concrete, existent, factual, genuine, literal, material, substantial, tangible, true
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by towr on May 3rd, 2004, 3:45am

on 05/02/04 at 22:19:03, raven wrote:
Q? :: When I go to sleep, and dream, do I awaken to another world?
Yes and no. Generally you're not lucid when you are dreaming, so you can't really be said to be awake in that sense, nor can most people even when they're not sleeping. In another sense you do awake to another world, but that can also be said if you get a sudden insight into something, or if you have a good and active imagination.
And there are more ways to look at it..


Quote:
Is it real? ::
Again, yes and no. It is real, at least, in the sense that from our (waking) world we can measure/observe the occurrence/existence of dreams. Whether it is an actual independent world however is doubtful. You can influence people's dreams by interacting with them in the 'real world'.


Quote:
  • When I wake up to this world here, am I dreaming in that other world there?
Doubtful, on the occasions I was lucid while dreaming I was acutely aware that my surroundings weren't real, I did not in any way have the sense of having woken up from a dream. Also, most dreams don't start from 'waking up', but you're already busy doing something. Nor do they generally end by falling asleep.


Quote:
  • Is this world REM sleep to that world?
In my experience there isn't even just one 'that' world, but a large number of them. And the qualitative feel is very different.


Quote:
  • Am I on the verge of lucid dreaming here:
The qualitative feel of my thinking now is equal to the qualitative feel of my thing when I'm dreaming lucidly, so I would say that either I'm already lucidly dreaming 'here', or not dreaming and just lucid.


Quote:
  • Are narcoleptics here insomniacs there?
Narcoleptics fall asleep briefly at infrequent moments, insomniacs don't generally fall asleep briefly. You'd want to look for some condition where you're generally asleep, but wake up for brief moments, like sufferers from apnea can experience (though they're not generally asleep, just at normal times like us, and due to sleep deprivation they can also suffer narcolepsy).


Quote:
  • Is the perception of time the same?
Not in my experience, but some research says it is. Perhaps it's a bit like watching a kettle of water on the fire. (Watches are a disaster in dreams anyway. I've had clocks in my dreams that drove me nuts, I woke up in the morning had to go to school, looked at the clock, an hour left, ate a bit which took like ten minutes, I look at the clock and I'm half an hour late allready..)


Quote:
  • How many hours of experience there can I fit into a nap here?
I dunno. I've had very brief naps of a minute or two, while thinking I was out longer. More annoyingly I dreamed of the same place I actually was, and I couldn't distinguish the two so I thought things happened that didn't.. (that's the trouble with not dreaming lucidly, not being too lucid irl, and dreaming plausibly)


Quote:
  • Can there and here cross over?
Only in the sense you can forget which is which. At least, I never could bring any goodies back from there to here.. And I tried.. A lot.. (when I was still young) Occasionally I thought I succeeded, but that was because I was actually still dreaming. Nothing more annoying than 'waking up' from a lucid dream into a non-lucid dream :P (Or maybe I was just dreaming that I was dreaming lucidly, but not actually doing so..)


Quote:
  • Are psychotics here, not fully awake here and still partially awake there?
Perhaps, it would depend on the psychotic though. Not every psychotic is so in the same way.


Quote:
  • Can I affect that world from here and/or this world from there?
Yes and yes. Though one would be hard pressed to directly effect ones dreamworld when awake.. (Your waking experience do get used though). Occasionally I incorporate sounds and such from 'the real world' into my dreams.
As for affecting the real world from your dreams, there's sleepwalking (or more generally sleep-acting). And of course one can hook you up to an EEG machine and have the computer do things based on your brain signals when they exhibit a dream state.


Quote:
  • Can I really fly when Im there?
'Really' in that world, but not in this.. It can differ from floating to levitating to jumping to flying though..
It's most annoying to fly, and then suddenly forget how to, and plummet from the sky.. I think generally I levitate, willing myself to stay in the air (or moving through it), and it's easy to loose concentration then.


Quote:
  • Can I actually fly here and not know it?
It's not a logical contradiction, so it 'can' be so in that sense.
In particular it doesn't matter as long as you can delude yourself without limit, in so much that even while plummeting to your death you are still convinced you're actually flying and not plummeting to your death. Most people don't get to the ground level before giving up their delusion..
If you can delude yourself into thinking the world is a certain way, then for all intents and purposes it is, to you, as long as you can hold on to that delusion. (Of course if you die, by some action of which you thought you wouldn't, you can hardly think you're not dead or think at all, unless there's an afterlife)


Quote:
  • Is there more than one there, that I go to when I sleep here?
In my experience there is. Lot's of different world with a different qualitative feel to it. Some allow magic, some not, some superheroics, some not. In some time is perpetually your enemy, in others it doesn't play any role. In some you're yourself, in others you are other people, not necessarily the same one for the duration, you might even just be an incorporeal onlooker.


Quote:
  • If I die there, do I reawaken here?
I do. In my childhood it was a particularly good way of escaping from nasty dreams. As was spinning around at ludicrous speed (though sometimes that just displaced my to another dreamworld)


Quote:
  • If I die here, do I reawaken there?
I wouldn't count on it.


Quote:
  • Did there and here used to be one place - experience?
If they were, they still are. You experience both, and experiencing is all we know of any world, but the interpretation we give our experience differs for the two.


Quote:
  • Does this world and that world exist concurrently or consecutively, only when Im conscious of it does one or either of them exist?
If we can trust the people around us, we have to conclude the real world exists even while we dream. Whether our dream world exists while we are awake is hard to find out. Repeat dreams would suggest not, at least they don't continue.
Whether anything exists at all if we don't observe/experience it is a difficult philosophical question.. (like sound of the unheard falling forest tree)


Quote:
  • Are the boundaries, the veil, thinner at twilight? Making it easier to get from here to there and there to here.
Well.. yes, in a way. People can find sleep easier when it's dusk, and tend to want to wake up at dawn. There's a whole biological explanation for that, but I doubt that's what you're getting at ::)


Quote:
  • Are they thinner at the twilight of consciousness? That moment right before we drift off to sleep.
In the same sense as above.


Quote:
  • Is eating the apple from the garden a metaphor for the separation of there and here? For being awake here? Ergo, is there the garden of Eden?
Yes, no, maybe.. Some dream worlds are idyllic, whether any of them is the original garden of Eden is doubtful though. One might have been the inspiration for it. The garden of Eden might never have existed in the first place.
What 'eating the fruit' is a metaphor for has been a great source of speculation, and ranges from stories of aliens to sex and probably weirder things.


Quote:
  • Is lucid dreaming (being conscious, lucid, awake in your dreams), having an out of body experience (O.B.E. a.k.a. astral projection), and/or Shamanic underworld journeying here, of there, what mystics talk/have talked about in so many writings?
Only if you have the experience of not being in your body in your dream ;)
O.B.E isn't equal to astral projection though. Astral projection is a form of O.B.E., just as N.D.E (near death experience) can be. One has to wonder how lucid the people claiming these things are though ::)
Generally O.B.E. concerns being out of your body, but still in '(objective) reality' (i.e. not just in your mind, i.e. dreams/imagination). So unless you're also dreaming while outside your body I don't think lucid dreaming can overlap with O.B.E. Of course that might also have something to do with me not believing in O.B.E. being real (I'm sure some people experience it, but people experience all sorts of things that aren't real.)
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by Three Hands on May 4th, 2004, 2:36pm
This discussion, so far, has negated the general possibility of dreams being related in some way to your experience in this world. Certainly, I tend to find that dreams I have tend to be linked through some means other than myself to this world - either people that I meet there (who may or may not be asleep at the time, and similarly may or may not have a similar encounter with me during this period of sleep). Freud also suggests that dreams are basically the subconscious' way of sorting through certain experiences you have had recently, but in a way that is harder to comprehend - hence, if you remember the dream afterwards, you can interpret them as to what they were triggered by.

However, I'm definitely intrigued by the idea of some other, although almost certainly closely linked, world (or worlds) which we experience while asleep. I would suggest that these worlds are more likely to exist in a kind of parallel way, but with time offset so that waking hours in one are generally sleeping hours in others - as towr already alluded to:

Doubtful, on the occasions I was lucid while dreaming I was acutely aware that my surroundings weren't real, I did not in any way have the sense of having woken up from a dream. Also, most dreams don't start from 'waking up', but you're already busy doing something. Nor do they generally end by falling asleep.

I would guess that we are aware of these other worlds through our dreams, but living in them constantly (with some portion of the 90% of our inactive brain, perhaps) - however, we are able to heighten our actions within one during lucid dreaming, when we feel our consciousness taking control of the situation, and potentially altering what is happening in the dream. The problems with this, however, is that it seems to suggest we are only aware of 10% of ourselves (using the figure above as a guess) - and it does seem to be a more boring 10% compared to some of the other worlds in our dreams - and also that, at least in my experience, lucid dreaming tends to "destroy" the dream, in that I tend to wake up very shortly afterwards, after having manipulated the "laws" in the dreams to suit myself, and essentially play God in that dream. Hence, I'm not entirely convinced that such dreams are actually real worlds.

That said, I'm certainly not aware of having many dreams, so I certainly can't call upon vast amounts of experience. Also, dreams seem coherent while having them, but then strange when recalling them while awake, which would suggest that, if they are real worlds, then we cannot fully understand their "scientific laws" in our world, and so couldn't really say that it is impossible for them to exist in a reality, since we are unable to understand that reality.

Another interesting thought, though, is that I certainly recall having predictive dreams which came true - in that I dreamt about situations which later came to pass. I also know that some of my friends have also experienced this - one of them even claims to owe his life to having had one of them. Given this has occured, I wonder what this might imply about the nature of such dreams - and also the "dreamworlds" concept - and also what would happen if you changed the outcome of the prediction (something I have not been able to do)?
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by towr on May 4th, 2004, 2:54pm

on 05/04/04 at 14:36:49, Three Hands wrote:
(with some portion of the 90% of our inactive brain, perhaps)
The 'people only use 10% of their brain' thing is a myth, it's not in any way substantiated by science (quite the contrary).

As for predictive dreams. If you dream enough plausible things, inevitably some will come true. Furthermore, you'll probably only recall ones similar to what has happened. It's likely you've had many other dreams that could have been predictions, but since the 'predictions' never happened you never thought of them again.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by Three Hands on May 4th, 2004, 3:59pm
True, that's the usual explanation for predictive dreams. Just thought some people might like to speculate a bit, that's all... And I apologise for my lack of scientific knowledge - I'm only a humble philosophy student, trying to use what limited information I have  ::)

OK - that's laying it on a bit thick...
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by Icarus on May 4th, 2004, 7:11pm
All I can say, I am far more powerful in that world than this! For I can and occasionally do consciously reshape that world to fit my desires!  8)

On the other hand, that world brings out the worst in me! As some things I do over there are horrifying or disgusting to me here (and there).  :'( Fortunately these are rare. Far more often, the things I do there are highly embarassing. :-[

People in this other world are also amazing obtuse. The most obvious things happen, yet no one other than I ever notice.

But most of all, this other world is evidently highly forgettable, for it seldom lingers long in my memory.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by towr on May 5th, 2004, 1:19am
You can train in remembering dreams, writing them down the moment you wake up seems to help most people.
Of course, there's porbably a reason you forget, as we are finite beings our memory is finite as well. Best not to remember everything, and indeed we forget most about the real world as well.
Dreaming has been suggested as a process for culling out the herd of memories of the day, consolidating important memories and discarding the trivial. And it has been shown that when you study something your memory of it is better after you have slept (so don't pull all nighters studying, you'll likely perform worse).
But it's not just factual memory that improves, even skills get honed in dreams. If f.i. you're trying to learn how to ski, and trained a bit during the day, you'll wake up having improved considerable.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by rmsgrey on May 5th, 2004, 8:01am
I recently had a dream in which (among many other more confusing details) I was being taught to distinguish Chinese characters. I haven't been exposed to any chinese text since, so I have no idea how much of the character differentiation I retain, but if it has stuck, then I've come away from a dream with an entirely new skill...
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by Icarus on May 6th, 2004, 7:34pm
I have heard as much about training before, but have never found enough of value in the dreams I do remember to see the worth in bothering. Besides which, when I say they don't linger long, I really mean it. I usually wake up with at best a vague impression of what I was dreaming about, which is completely gone by the time I am awake enough to start moving. All I can tell you is that most often I remember pontificating on some subject to someone ::) (I'm sure this comes as a complete surprise to all of you!)
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by paterpan on Dec 28th, 2011, 6:51am
Hi........  ;)
It is all that true. When i go to sleep i am in a beautiful world. It is such a good world and we far away from real world. I forgot that our real life.
But it is no real it is just Dream............... :(
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by fizyka on Dec 30th, 2011, 3:16pm
I think You smoke too much :P
Nothing special in dreaming BUT YOU CAN TURN YOUR LIFE INTO DREAM if You want to of course :)
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by iatkrox on Jul 2nd, 2012, 1:21am
Dreaming is a good thing,Because most of guys got new ideas in dreaming.So dream well and think new.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by paulstrahann on Jan 24th, 2013, 11:32pm
I am amazed to read your outstanding content. Your imagination is quite fantastic and you are dreaming about life's worth things. Everybody have them own dreaming life where they do precious things. So, positive dreaming can be best for anybody.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by new_world on Mar 20th, 2013, 1:21pm
Am I the only one who thought about Inception movie while reading this thread ?  ;D
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by towr on Mar 20th, 2013, 2:05pm

on 03/20/13 at 13:21:31, new_world wrote:
Am I the only one who thought about Inception movie while reading this thread ?  ;D
Quite possibly, since most posts (and views) were from before it came out.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by alien2 on Jul 21st, 2013, 4:46am
Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by Grimbal on Jul 22nd, 2013, 6:37am
The butterfly's top spins forever.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by alien2 on Jan 1st, 2014, 11:27am
About two decades ago, I tried to fall asleep with my eyes open after reading The Eagle's Gift by Castaneda. And I succeeded. At first, I didn't even realize it, even though there was something unusual about the window curtains. And then, I saw a black chair at my feet. At that moment, I felt extreme fear. I was never more scared in my entire life. The chair was levitating in the air and approaching me slowly. I was aware that I was dreaming. I tried to move, but I couldn't move an eyelid. I was completely paralyzed and helpless, while the chair was slowly approaching me. But because I was so scared, I soon managed to scream and so I stopped dreaming. Now I regret for waking up so quickly. Who knows where the chair would take me? If I weren't so scared, I recon it would have been an interesting experience.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by EdwardSmith on Jul 7th, 2014, 2:49pm
I had a dream that I was eating a pillowcase.
When I awoke I found that my giant marshmallow was missing.
Title: Re: Dreaming
Post by anglia on Aug 15th, 2015, 12:56am
I f you want to turn your dream into reality then you have to wake up and hard work. Having a dream while sleeping doesn't convert your dreams into reality.


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