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magic cactus

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.
Howdy everyone!

I'm kind of fascinated by dreams from a neurological perspective, especially more fringe/dream adjacent phenomena, stuff like sleep paralysis, out of body experiences/lucid dreaming, that kind of thing. This is a thread for that kind of stuff. You can post whatever you like as long as it's chill and dream-related. Serious discussion, excerpts from your dream journal (though if you post nightmares/unchill dreams maybe tag it NSFW or something so you don't harsh someone's chill if they don't want to read it) maybe questions about some cognitive science stuff (this isn't my specialty but it's in my wheel house, but please don't take my answers as gospel) dream interpretation (if you're interested. Just because I have a cognitive science background doesn't mean we can't all chill and chat about different aspects of dream experience) , music/art that makes you think of dreams (maybe even your own if you want to share), in general just a thread dedicated to what I view as the last/first frontier of the human mind.

Safe snoozin' through the land of dreams!

also yes the thread title is a reference to Lovecraft's Dreamlands because I'm a huge dork

magic cactus fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Oct 13, 2019

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Heather Papps

hello friend


okay so i have had a thematically re-occuring dream for my whole adult life. i need to see if i can find a video cause my fingies are kinda tired today.

i love the terror management theory of dreamstuff in that it allows us to experience extreme situations so when we are faced with them, we don't just deer/headlights style it

also tho that dreams are your brain sorting poo poo into long term memory is super interesting



thanks Dumb Sex-Parrot and deep dish peat moss for this winter bounty!

Goons Are Gifts

Alright so if you might already know from my ant crew thread at some point, I also work on human mind stuff and part of the reason for this, next to ants obviously, is because I've been a very active dreamer and doing lucid dreaming regularly since I was 13.

I've always been big at dreaming (and dreaming big if you know what I mean :heysexy:) and back then I saw some documentary or something about lucid dreaming and worked on doing it myself. Since then, mostly on purpose, I usually manage to do it several times a week and it's a vital part of my thought process and things I do by moving parts of me into this weird realm of what the gently caress. 90% of it is easy peasy I just do fun stuff or rebuild memories, but I did some of my most important decisions while sleeping, too, training myself for situations, learning new stuff, sorting my brain, it's a huge thing. I also can explore myself and find out what I think or feel when I'm unsure what to do, I experience the worst nightmares and let them happen if I can to find out what seems to bother me and then work on trying to fix it, both for real (if there is a connection at least) and in the dream. As a kid this kind of sometimes literal dialogue with myself scared the living poo poo out of me and I tried to literally hide from it, but I figured that it can be insanely useful to get to know yourself, as weird as that might sound.

Quite sure I could fill books of all the stories I do there, but let me tell you that sometimes I specifically dream about posting in byob and dreamposting is insanely chill.


Heather Papps

hello friend


Goons Are Ghouls posted:

sometimes I specifically dream about posting in byob and dreamposting is insanely chill.

country roads take me home



thanks Dumb Sex-Parrot and deep dish peat moss for this winter bounty!

magic cactus

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.

Heather Papps posted:

re-occuring dreams
This is the kind of dream I find fascinating since I've never (that I can recall) had a re-occurring dream. I wonder if it's possible to train yourself to notice the re-occuring and use it as a cue for dream lucidity. Do you have lucid dreams with any regularity when you have this re-occuring dream?

Heather Papps posted:

the terror management theory of dreamstuff
I'm not terribly sold on this theory, though I know it's certainly pretty hot in the current cognitive science of dreaming debate. My objection stems from personal experience (which as we all know is a terrible argumentative strategy, but I'll just set that aside for a quick second). I've had dreams that are incredibly mundane, I'm talking like "take a walk around the block and grab a slice of pizza"-type dreams. There was some of the tell tale dream weirdness (like a bunch of different locations stitched into one), but there was strictly speaking, no narrative, and certainly no antagonistic element. So I look kind of sideways here on the terror management as a theory of dreams full stop.

As a theory of nightmares though, that's a whole 'nother story. Here I think the theory is at least plausible. I mean the terror-management theory tracks as applied to nightmares, because nightmares do have a terror component to them. So playing out a nightmare as a simulation for a predator/prey type encounter makes sense. But I don't see this theory as applying cleanly across the board for dreams. I mean you can argue though by treating nightmares as separate from dreams I'm just moving the goal posts (heck maybe I am). The problem for me kind of gets pushed up to the level of ontology. Maybe nightmares should be classified as an ontologically distinct entity from dreams (call these non-nightmare dreams "mundane dreams"). By splitting classification across these lines you're now free to create a terror-theory of nightmares that doesn't put undo weight on your theory of mundane dreams. But this puts tension on the question of scientific explanation. If you do this, an already messy field of science becomes even messier because now the two halves of the theory need to come neatly together, and science likes parsimony, so they're liable to look at this idea as unnecessarily complex (which I mean it is). So yeah, I'm not sold on the terror theory completely, but I see its appeal.

Heather Papps posted:

dreams and memory consolidation

This is one I find really interesting, and it's probably the most-accepted theory in the literature. Again though, just based off of personal experience I have a hesitation with taking this fully on board. I sometimes have very vivid and intense dreams that don't (at least when I look back at my written reports) have even trace elements of a memory in it. It appears to be a narrative that emerged whole-cloth from this state. Granted that's a poor argument, but I think it points to two elements that proponents of this theory should consider. First is a question of vividness. Dreams have a vividness that memories don't appear to have, at least not as a gestalt the way dreams do. For instance, sitting here, I can remember vividly the perfume my grandmother used to wear as a child, but recalling a specific, entire scene involving that perfume is at best sort of murky. Whereas if I have a dream involving my grandmother's house, even with the (memory?) distortion of dreams, I still feel like I'm in that space. There's a... kind of one-to-one or depth of experience that simply recalling a memory doesn't appear to have. I'm willing to split the difference and grant that memory-consolidation might be part of the cognitive process underpinning dreaming, heck maybe even a large part, but I'm hesitant to just take it on board as a theory of dreams as a gestalt. (plus I have a weird theory about what memory actually is, so I'm just going to admit my bias straight up)

...

I promise I will post something fun to make up for this wall of text.



Thanks to Saoshyant for the amazing spring '23 sig!

magic cactus

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.

I'm not gonna lie, you're living the kind of dream-life I wish (dream?) I could have. I've tried to lucid dream for years without results. Occasionally I get spontaneously lucid, or I hit sleep paralysis coming out of a dream (boy howdy that's some of the craziest stuff I've ever seen in my life), but no reliable method of induction. I still try though! Gives me something to do. Please feel free to share any stories or experiences you're comfortable with, I love reading about this kind of stuff!



Thanks to Saoshyant for the amazing spring '23 sig!

magic cactus

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.
As promised, something a little more interesting than me dropping walls of text left and right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdJS5PU1Ztw&t=1106s

This is an album of people calling in and talking about their dreams, set to early ambient soundscapes generated by members of the BBC radiophonic workshop (best known for creating the Doctor Who theme). released in 1964.



Thanks to Saoshyant for the amazing spring '23 sig!

Stoner Sloth

I don't really get much dreaming done - sleep is so little that I don't get much in. on the bright side i have high resistance to Freddy Kreugers!!

I have noticed a couple of things from extreme sleep deprivation though - dreams or dream like quality to experiencing things tend to creep into your waking reality after more than three or four days with zero sleep. After about 5 -6 days i tend to start hallucinating - usually minor stuff at first but increasingly vivid and detailed as time without sleep increases.

Note these times are probably longer for me than most because part of my condition or adaption lets me get away with sleep deprivation longer than most.

Also i think dreams probably play a role in helping fine tune, house keep or debug(geris)ing your brain - things like helping you helpfully fine tune your filters that help cancel out extraneous and distracting sensory data. That's probably also true emotionally - like preparing your brain for trauma or fight or flight situations is probably a function of nightmarish dreams but also just emotions in general from more mundane dreams.

As part of that i also think they help secure learning or memories since they often involve stuff that you've done or thought about during the day.

Probably also were helpful, at least initially, in keeping a minimum of activity going in the brain which might help with staying alive during the night if you have health problems or if there are predators or other danger around.

I think it's also possible that dreaming probably was just an initial quirk - a result of increasingly sophisticated brains for which a rest mode was useful but then at some point dreaming was probably taken advantage to the point that it's not healthy any more to go without dream sleep.

Anyways, those are some stoned thoughts about dreaming.







sigs by the awesome Manifisto, Vanisher, City of Glompton, Pot Smoke Phoenix, Nut, Heather Papps,Prof Crocodile, knuthgrush, Ohtori Akio, Teapot, Saosyhant, Dumb Sex Parrot, w4ddl3d33, and nesamdoom!! - ty friends!

Goons Are Gifts

magic cactus posted:

I'm not gonna lie, you're living the kind of dream-life I wish (dream?) I could have. I've tried to lucid dream for years without results. Occasionally I get spontaneously lucid, or I hit sleep paralysis coming out of a dream (boy howdy that's some of the craziest stuff I've ever seen in my life), but no reliable method of induction. I still try though! Gives me something to do. Please feel free to share any stories or experiences you're comfortable with, I love reading about this kind of stuff!

Well obviously I can't share the most personal things I do while dreaming, and most of it of course is extremely personal, but I'm happy to share general notes or tell you about some specific thing you're curious about!

In terms of induction I learned that I cannot really trust myself in doing them during the dream, but what did work for me when I was training for this was getting emotions into play, specifically in the form of colors. That's an easy task you can work on and for me it worked ever since, although I haven't needed a specific induction for years now, simply because I mostly dream lucidly or recognize the dream structure and realize it that way.
The method I used for this is that I took specific colors and gave them specific emotions, red for anger, blue for sadness, green for happiness or satisfaction, yellow for fear and so on. Then I took random items, or just colored paper at some point, and placed them throughout my daily life in which I might be able to experience that emotion, some were easy, like hiding some green sticker at a friend's house, some were harder, because you never know when you are getting scared unless you have a specific fear and can connect through that.

Either way, since dreams tend to be very emotional, this worked as at some point the emotions that came up in the dream, luckily mostly positive ones, appeared green and I remembered about me doing all of this during the dream and boom, lucid. At first this was extremely unstable, which is probably why you hardly read about this method in the usual literature, the dream tends to break apart when you realize it via emotions and then you wake up, but after a lot of patience and very colorful months I managed to stabilize it to a point where I then could introduce other, simpler methods of induction and in general gain control over the dreams.

No idea if that's anywhere close to reliable, everything related to this topic is extremely subjective and obviously it does have some downsides, too, because ever since certain colors tend to trigger a certain emotion for me (by now, this hardly matters, but as a teenager it certainly did). Not to say that emotions in dreams are either your biggest friend or your most hated enemies and loading them with something as simple as a visual effect can (and did for me) have some devastating effects on nightmares or general negative feelings, times of insecurity and stuff. Also, it's a door you open that can go both ways, and sometimes stuff you dream break into reality and vice versa.
However that goes for all of this stuff, don't try to lucid dream if you're feeling not well in general or are in an uncomfortably unstable situation in whatever kind, it usually doesn't end terribly well. Some sort of dream set and setting, basically.


Heather Papps

hello friend


magic cactus posted:

This is the kind of dream I find fascinating since I've never (that I can recall) had a re-occurring dream. I wonder if it's possible to train yourself to notice the re-occuring and use it as a cue for dream lucidity. Do you have lucid dreams with any regularity when you have this re-occuring dream?

okay

this re-occurring dream is occasionally different in specifics but the "dreaminess" and the underlying symbolism remain the same.

i am going to highschool/university/treeplanting.

upon arrival, i discover that i have failed to prepare in some incredibly basic way. for the highschool dreams it's like, didn't finish an assignment on time, for the university dreams it's frequently checking my exam schedule to find i am registered for a course i have never attended and cannot drop due to it being the end of the semester. in the treeplanting dreams i arrive and realize i forgot to pack anything, no tent, no clothes - nothing.

i recognized these dreams as all being about the same thing when, some amount of years ago, the tenor shifted.

where once my dreams would end with my curled in a ball somewhere crying, or struggling alone against impossible odds now what i dream of sometimes is this;
i get off the train with my friends, and we realize my stuff is gone. i didn't bring that much, and it got lost on the train somehow.
it's okay. my friends help me. some give me some clothes, a few let me share their tent while even more help me build a small cabin out of discarded raw lumber from the slash piles. i help my friends and my friends help me, and despite an immediate sense of panic the rest of the dream is filled with goofs and co-operation. sometimes the season ends, and we all leave. sometimes the season ends and i just stay in the forest. but these dreams are pleasent reminders of my actual reality. people care about me, for some reason. some people, completely unbelievably, love me. despite my desire for isolation and tranquility and extreme fear of human beings, i do care about my friends, and want them to know the same thing that i know deeply in my heart which is we are all in this together. if we work together we can make this a better world, and if we work against each other nothing good can come of it.


i have had some experience with lucid dreaming but i never trained the skill. i am an extremely light sleeper, (when i'm not sleepwalking), and there have been dreams where i saw the dreaminess, but just went with the flow cause when i grab the dream by the dream horns it immediately bucks me off into waking life.



thanks Dumb Sex-Parrot and deep dish peat moss for this winter bounty!

Slush Garbo

FALSE SLACK
is
BETTER
than
NO SLACK
last night i dreamt I was kind of at work, but the warehouse was an old brick building instead of modern. instead of boring dumb stuff we had a bunch of weird cool stuff like a kitschy antique/junk store. I found an old soap box derby car and rode it down the dock ramp (which was extra long in the dream so this was fun) on my break. the owner of the company arrived at work while I was racing the car, except he was richard branson. he was like, "..." and gave me a weird smile as he went into the offices

this is because at real work, the owner shows up around 10 and leaves at 2 so he almost always only ever sees me on break and I wonder if he thinks I'm always on break.

Slush Garbo

FALSE SLACK
is
BETTER
than
NO SLACK
weird dream function that happens to me: if I wake up earlier than I need to and go back to sleep, I often go back into the same dream I was having. but every time I do that before I actually get up, the dream gets less fun, more annoying, or more like a chore of some sort. I guess it's my brain telling me, "ok, you can sleep in a little longer but we're p.mucj over sleeping rn so your dream gets less cool now lol"

pixaal

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


I sometimes have what I call Rule Dreams where I can never remember what the rule was after fully waking but there is always some strange rule to the dream universe.

I wake up trying to figure out the solution still tired af then suddenly I realize the rule doesn't exist and it's a very simple problem like how to put on socks.

Does anyone else get these? They are extra frustrating because I feel like I didn't sleep at all so I'm tired and it was spend trying to figure out some really mundane thing.

Slush Garbo

FALSE SLACK
is
BETTER
than
NO SLACK
^^^ this but the reason for something happening or going on in the dream.

like, why I'm doing what I'm doing makes all the sense til I wake up and am all, "wth?"

pixaal

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


That's probably a better description. The rules of the dream universe are just different from our own. I don't think I've heard anyone else express that type of dream. Always so tired afterwards.

Heather Papps

hello friend


pixaal posted:

That's probably a better description. The rules of the dream universe are just different from our own. I don't think I've heard anyone else express that type of dream. Always so tired afterwards.

so i have not had these in a long time, but as a child i would dream i could fly, but only by flexing this specific muscle, and then in the dream i would realize i was doing it, not be able to keep doing it, and then fall fall fall to the ground.



thanks Dumb Sex-Parrot and deep dish peat moss for this winter bounty!

magic cactus

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.

Goons Are Ghouls posted:

Dreams and emotions

This is very interesting. I'm curious why you picked emotions as your key phenomena. Was it a kind of trial and error process or did you kind of intuitively settle on them? It's also interesting that you view dreams as very emotive/having emotion-laden content. My dreams, as I mentioned, fall into either very mundane or very vivid experiences. In very mundane cases, I'm more focused on having conversations/experiencing the stuff in front of me. My emotional thoughts appear to be almost non-existent, but perhaps it's better just to say I'm not paying attention to them. In the very vivid cases it's almost like I become a character in the dream, as opposed to the star of the show. Here there is no mental processing whatsoever that I am aware of. Certainly though, my dreams do have emotional content, at least when I look back at it. But your methodology of Lucid Dreaming is very interesting. I wonder if it's possible to key lucidity induction to some other cognitive phenomena?



Thanks to Saoshyant for the amazing spring '23 sig!

magic cactus

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.

Stoner Sloth posted:

some stoned thoughts about dreaming.

When I was in undergrad, in the interests of further understanding my brain and body, I conducted some experiments. One of those was seeing how long I could go without sleep. I made it about three days before my brain took a nose-dive in terms of cognitive functioning and I was basically a zombie. I also had some mild hallucinations, chiefly auditory, of voices saying words I couldn't quite catch. Additionally I struggle with insomnia, and I've noticed that if I've been awake for a day or two when I go to sleep the following day I have mild open-eye hallucinations, like say seeing cathedral spires or weird little winamp visualizer type patterns. Of course, if I focus on them or move, the hallucination disappears. I find this really interesting because (from what I've been able to ascertain) I have almost no closed-eye hypnagogia. The most I get is blobs of grey or sometimes purple, but it never coheres beyond vague shapes.

Hugh Malone posted:

weird dream function that happens to me: if I wake up earlier than I need to and go back to sleep, I often go back into the same dream I was having. but every time I do that before I actually get up, the dream gets less fun, more annoying, or more like a chore of some sort. I guess it's my brain telling me, "ok, you can sleep in a little longer but we're p.mucj over sleeping rn so your dream gets less cool now lol"

See it's weird but I've never had a dream that continues when I wake up and go back to sleep. It's always a fresh narrative. Again though, maybe I'm just not paying enough attention to my dream content or something.

pixaal posted:

Rule Dreams

These sound equal parts stressful and fascinating. So is the idea that you're given a rule in the dream world that's codified in the dream and THEN you wake up and think something like "wait a minute the people in my dream struggled to put on their socks" or is straight up told to you during the dream itself and you wake up thinking "that was a dumb rule" or something to that effect?


Heather Papps posted:

i recognized these dreams as all being about the same thing when, some amount of years ago, the tenor shifted.

First off reading this warmed my heart. You're good people. Second do you think the "tenor" so-to-speak of the dream changed because you had grown emotionally as a person? I mean, if I can look back on some of the stuff I did and realize that I'm not that person anymore in waking life, why not in dreams?



Thanks to Saoshyant for the amazing spring '23 sig!

LethalGeek

Weed killed my dreams that mostly consisted of dreams bordering on nightmares about having to go back to HS or college to do some poo poo I apparently missed.

I don't miss my dumb dreams.

Also used to have one a lot about pulling onto the freeway in my underwear.

Heather Papps

hello friend


magic cactus posted:

First off reading this warmed my heart. You're good people. Second do you think the "tenor" so-to-speak of the dream changed because you had grown emotionally as a person? I mean, if I can look back on some of the stuff I did and realize that I'm not that person anymore in waking life, why not in dreams?

it was a combination of therapy, self reflection, directed growth and in all honestly the change was so subtle it wasn't until i awoke with a smile on my face that i understood something deep inside my heart had changed direction.

i believe my dreams at least to be generally highly symbolized versions of my thoughts and feelings. i have a very distinct memory of a dream i had around puberty, of myself being in an observation room, kinda like where professor x sat watching the danger room stuff from safety.

my father was inside this large grid lined room, and was wearing a bee costume, running in circles. i noticed a gigantic black forest style cuckoo clock on one of the walls, and as it ticked closer to midnight my fathers movements became more frantic. eventually the clock rang, and the door opened and a giant mechanical frog emerged from the clock and devoured my father whole, and returned to the clock.

eventually i came to feel that this dream was pretty simply about how my father was trapped in a box, working working working, never noticing that time was running out, or even that he was trapped in a box of math and man made time and dogmas. he had put on the mantle of labor, but not for his own benefit, but for the benefit of some horrible mechanical beast that had no concern for him or those who loved him.



thanks Dumb Sex-Parrot and deep dish peat moss for this winter bounty!

Slush Garbo

FALSE SLACK
is
BETTER
than
NO SLACK

LethalGeek posted:

Weed killed my dreams that mostly consisted of dreams bordering on nightmares about having to go back to HS or college to do some poo poo I apparently missed.

I don't miss my dumb dreams.

Also used to have one a lot about pulling onto the freeway in my underwear.

I quit the weede a few weeks ago and my dreams became way more frequent and weirder/cooler... or maybe I can just remember having them now lol, not sure


also, when I was quitting the cigarettes, nicotine patches gave me mondo bizarro dreams

fortunately I haven't had nightmares on a long time and they weren't ever a huge problem for me. sometimes I have work dreams that aren't cool or weird, just about work, which feels like a rip-off! I didn't even get paid!

pixaal

All ice cream is now for all beings, no matter how many legs.


magic cactus posted:

These sound equal parts stressful and fascinating. So is the idea that you're given a rule in the dream world that's codified in the dream and THEN you wake up and think something like "wait a minute the people in my dream struggled to put on their socks" or is straight up told to you during the dream itself and you wake up thinking "that was a dumb rule" or something to that effect?

You just kind of know the rule when you are in the dream. These dreams are also generally first person and not a floating camera in the sky of other people. I always forget the rule. So I might go why was I having problems putting socks on just use your hands holy gently caress. Wait I don't have a sock I don't taste sock there's no sock in my mouth wait why the gently caress was I using my mouth to put a sock on? Oh right because... because... well poo poo there was a really stupid reason and I forget it.

During the day my thought process is generally monologue and based on your question I have a feeling you might be a monologue thinker too. There are other ways of thinking, I occasionally get them during the day and it's always extremely hard to communicate these data rich thought with other people because they formed wordless. I often have to do it then I can explain it to someone else. I don't dream in monologue and as I've better understood these wordless thoughts I've been able to better understand my dreams because I dream without the monologue. If you are only paying attention to your monologue pay attention to feeling like you suddenly know the answer even if you don't actually know it. Figure out why you feel like you just solved it, because whenever this happens I just did, my brain didn't turn it into words. Anyway that's getting a bit off topic and into the actual thought process but that is how I know the rule of the dream universe and I don't know how to put it into words. I'm very bad at explaining wordless thoughts because I don't have a lot of practice with it. Maybe someone with a background in psych has a word for all this.



sig by owlhawk911

Goons Are Gifts

magic cactus posted:

This is very interesting. I'm curious why you picked emotions as your key phenomena. Was it a kind of trial and error process or did you kind of intuitively settle on them? It's also interesting that you view dreams as very emotive/having emotion-laden content. My dreams, as I mentioned, fall into either very mundane or very vivid experiences. In very mundane cases, I'm more focused on having conversations/experiencing the stuff in front of me. My emotional thoughts appear to be almost non-existent, but perhaps it's better just to say I'm not paying attention to them. In the very vivid cases it's almost like I become a character in the dream, as opposed to the star of the show. Here there is no mental processing whatsoever that I am aware of. Certainly though, my dreams do have emotional content, at least when I look back at it. But your methodology of Lucid Dreaming is very interesting. I wonder if it's possible to key lucidity induction to some other cognitive phenomena?
As weird as it sounds, I'd sometimes like to have more mundane, civil, non-emotionally based dreams and just think do stuff, especially when I'm not lucid. What you describe seems to be the more common thing, given that usually people only focus dreams as extremely emotional when they begin to turn into nightmares. For me, that isn't really the case. All of my non-lucid dreams are very emotional and focused on what I feel, not really what I experience in them. Some of the most boring, weirdest and unexciting dream experiences have been overloaded with various emotions up to a point where I woke up over it and felt the backlash of a really intense emotional situation. My regular non-lucid dreams also are entirely focused on emotions, which doesn't mean they are this intense or special or exciting for me, it's just that everything focuses on what I feel and the usually weird dream situation hardly matters compared to what I feel due to it. That's fascinating, because usually I am not really an emotional person while I'm awake, in fact most people experience me as very calm and non-impulsive and I hardly decide things based on emotions. Apparently my brain uses my intense connection I have to my dreams as an outlet to experiment on emotions and give them space to be, sometimes quite literally.

As such, using this method was very intuitive. The regular methods of inductions didn't work at all for me, so I just read through my dream diary that I used to train myself to remember dreams and realized that emotions are the only constant factor, so using it as a stepping stone for induction was an obvious choice that I was able to get started on easily as a teenager, even.

When I'm lucid dreaming, this setup somewhat changes and the dreams become a lot more cognitive based, as I then experience my emotions as an external being and I can engage with them (literally, too, I had some insane discussions with my rage and learned about what makes me angry that way), even though that doesn't mean I wouldn't feel anything myself while doing so, as paradoxical as that sounds.
Really interesting though is the limits I perceive while I'm lucid dreaming, because I lose some very basic abilities in my dreams and so far have been entirely unable to fix that. For example, doing basic math becomes an insane problem and, most fascinatingly, music is non-existent. That's interesting because usually I hear a lot of music over the day and am quite connected to it and noise in general, but my dreams are usually very quiet up to a depressing degree of silence and I never hear any music at all, also I am entirely unable to sing or otherwise (re)create music, no matter how hard I try or how I try to weasel my way around it. Given that music also tends to be a quite emotional thing, this gets even more fascinating and I am really curious how this comes to be. Various literature mentions these hard limits inside of dreams, but how to overcome them or how they come to be seems to be an unsolvable riddle currently.
That kinda sucks, because I heard from people learning to play an instrument via dreams and train themselves for it and I could never do that.

In general, it seems like my dreams are some sort of twisted version of what my mind does while I'm awake and I seem to be unable to change that despite being fully aware of the dream and (by now) incredibly powerful in it, too. I'm able to break basic laws of physics without any problem, I can talk to my emotions and mirrors of people I meet, learn about what I feel or think about people or situations that way and explore myself from a very easy, surface level down to the scary corners where I can hardly find the courage to go into, but either way I'm unable to understand the limits my brain places me into.


magic cactus

We lied. We are not at war. There is no enemy. This is a rescue operation.
My dream last night: I met some dude through an online forum (it wasn't SA, or if it was it wasn't off of dream-BYOB.) and we became roommates. One night we throw a party in our tiny apartment and the neighbors get mad and threaten to call the cops. We say we'll keep it down and the party wraps up. Next thing I know, dude is telling me about this huge mansion for sale. It seems awesome, but I don't have the money for that kind of place. He says not to worry, he's got ways to get the money, all I have to do is sign a loan. Anyway the loan goes through and we throw a huge party. The cops come and bust it up and my friend disappears. I am interrogated by a cop as to my friends whereabouts, which is when I learn that on paper I am apparently a single mother, despite the fact that from what I can tell I'm me in the dream. The last thought I have before waking up is that is that I have no desire to be in jail, and that this will absolutely WRECK my credit score.

...

Curiously, after reading GaG's posts concerning emotional content in dreams again last night (not with any intention of getting lucid, just to try and pay a little more attention to my thoughts.) I told myself to try and pay more attention to the emotive content of my dream. In this instance I could recognize an emotion (say anxiety over not going to jail for housing fraud) but it felt very muted and detached, and I wonder why that is. I'm not hyper-emotional in waking life or anything, so it's not some spillover mechanism, but it is a little weird.

Anyway, dreams: not even once.



Thanks to Saoshyant for the amazing spring '23 sig!

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Heather Papps

hello friend


Heather Papps posted:

wearing a bee costume, running in circles.

holy loving poo poo how have i never seen this


i



holy poo poo. i became a beekeeper in rejection of the world system and the seed was a boyhood dream what the everloving gently caress.



thanks Dumb Sex-Parrot and deep dish peat moss for this winter bounty!

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