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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

This sounds similar to the much more common false awakening dreams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_awakening

I get these occasionally, sometimes with multiple nested dreams, and the sensation of waking is highly realistic. It can last a subjectively long time until some detail tips me off that it's not real (usually attempting to read and the text reading like Markov chain output). If I'm capable of generating all this highly believable imagery it seems only a minor change to also generate a model of my own body.

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It's interesting how you sometimes can't tell if you are awake or not, when you are sleeping, but you can ALWAYS tell if you're awake when you're awake. Looks like some faculties are working robustly when you are awake which aren't when you are asleep.

That said, I've had dreams where characters in my dream knew things I didn't, and even made fun of me. When I woke up, I realized that they were actually quite interesting, fully developed characters with their own personalities and knowledge! And they would develop over several months of dreaming. Sometimes I also awoke with a solution to a problem I had been thinking about the night before.

So... interesting!

I've had lucid dreams on and off for several years. I remember one particular dream where I was visiting a friend, and he showed me a project he was working on in his back room. It was a hand-cranked machine that looked like a mashup of an astronomical orrery and an automatic transmission with the case taken off. Before I woke up, I was able to examine it for some time, and as far as I can recall, I could see each piece, in motion and interacting with its adjacent parts, with perfect resolution.

Now, the problem is that there was never an image of that machine on my visual cortex, so it must have originated somewhere further up the stack in some kind of symbolic form, which got used to synthesize the image I thought I was looking at. IMHO, it's a little bit backwards for my brain to have to repaint memories on an imaginary canvas so the little man in my head can look at them and reparse them over and over. (But apparently it does, and it's damned good at it.)

I'm very much familiar with that stuff, so I without any real purpose followed the link, lazily reading what's in that article, and then I see

> A common false awakening is a "late for work" scenario

And it just suddenly strikes me how fucked up it is. I mean, think about it: common stressful scenario in your dreams isn't the flood, or fire, or someones death, not some real danger or actual bad thing, but being late for school or work, because you overslept. I understand why it is so, but it is kinda sad, if you actually think of it.

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