A New Test for an Old Theory About Dreams | Hacker News Reader

A New Test for an Old Theory About Dreams

theatlantic.com

36 pointsHooke22 comments

Not all dreams are memories that are just regurgitated. On two occasions this year I saw images in a dream that I had never seen before but on the internet several months later I discovered them on random seeming occasions. The images were so stark I don't think I would not remember them if I had seen them in catalogs or old searches from long ago. The two dreams were of architecture I had not seen before. One of the "architectures" of the most recent dream had no recognizable purpose at the time. But now that I found it and understand what it was for, it gives me pause.

It was this

https://www.pexels.com/photo/drone-shot-of-fort-alexander-89...

https://www.pexels.com/photo/the-fort-alexander-on-an-artifi...

Consider that memory is not read-only. Later experiences cause us to reinterpret old and faded memories. We experience such reinterpretations as recall, but they are in fact rewrites. Which is all to say, the vague and unspecific memories of your dream were likely made concrete when images you later observed while awake evoked a similar feeling. At that point it felt like you had seen the place before in a dream, but at any point in time prior if were asked to draw the place from your dream you would have produced something different.

I believe rem sleep can be either increasing entropy in symbols if your mind is on over drive without access to a mediator such as myself without a certain medicine I take nightly. But if the mind and body are ready to rest rem sleep lets your mind experiment with experience as symbols so that tomorrow, those symbols can be unraveled into an outlook for a period of time in the future. This helps with the natural flow from day to day. There is always rem sleep but not always long enough or strong enough to make you consider drastic changes.

After rem sleep the symbols that did not get integrated into a series get trashed. The memory behind the symbol is still there but the symbol reference is removed to free up the mind. This is where the feeling of mental rest comes from. Finally the actionable symbols are muted. Waking up feeling like you just got out of a fight of some kind is definitely a heedable warning.

For that there is prayer.

Suddenly matching current reality to what you saw in an old dream is a peculiar feeling—perhaps as peculiar as a déjà vu. My pet theory is that they are more or less the same thing.

In case of a DV, one explanation (the one I’ll be sticking to here) is that a brief lag[0] in the perception of the current moment by a part of your mind results in a feeling that this moment had been perceived before.

I believe that to self-repair, so to speak, your mind would scramble to look up a matching past experience. However, the lag takes place at a pretty low level, and what your mind has no access to is that this previous experience was microseconds ago, not months or years; it is not in your long-term memory and there is no match.

If a dream that shares enough characteristics with the moment is readily recalled (e.g., it is especially memorable because of some circumstances in your life at the time), that dream may easily end up being adjusted (partly rewritten) to fit.

If that fails, you would have a vanilla DV.

[0] Not coincidentally, this seems more common during times of mental exhaustion.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia

You might have seen this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Boyard_(fortification)

It was, and is, used as the setting of popular TV shows (airing since 1990), and is featured in the intro and incidental shots.

Interesing possibility but I didn't watch much tv since 1994 until I used cable tv in Nelsonvile from 2002-2003. Since then I only watch tv in corporate breakrooms.

I was flying with my Dad in the dream and we were above what looked like a river. We had a discussion and then thought it would be fun to drop in to the river and walk through it. Before we dropped in during the dream there were these strange fortifications through out the river that looked like image links I shared but does not look like the images in the wiki. They weren't as tall and they were not as bright looking.

There was no context for the dream. But the interesting thing was how memorable it was. Only about 6 dreams per year are memorable for me.

You seem to be avoiding directly claiming to have had a prophetic dream, or be capable of remote viewing in your sleep, but this is what your claims imply. Did you really want to be claiming this? If you did, why is this a more reasonable explanation than you simply having seen the architectural structure before, and have since forgotten about it?

Never saw it before.

You answered none of my questions, and continue to vaguely claim being capable of remote viewing, or similar supernatural ability. If you don’t intend to engage in honest dialogue, please don’t post.

You've seen buildings and water before. Your dream was of a building and water.

A lot of my dreams are totally fictional. Hotel in countries I've never visited, with detail up to the carpets. It's mind blowing because they're vibrant and full fledged resolution, it's if it was a long forgotten home.

I am always amazed by how realistic dreams can be. I have this thought that the brain simply could make us believe that they are realistic. I mean something similar when the ,giraffe-elephant hybrid in the tuxedo reading book, in dreams seems normal. Wouldn't it be possible for the brain to just fool us about the realism of our dreams?

On the other hand, the brain generates everything that we perceive in real life what prevents it from achieving the same level of realism in dreams?

The recall of a dream may be realistic, but that does not imply that the actual dream was realistic. If the actual dream is not realistic, if could be possible, that the conscious recall process is realistifying it more or less.

A lot of mine are fictional and events that cannot possibly have happened, or ever happen. Ranging from being in an airplane landing on a bridge, to outright Sci-Fi…

https://archive.ph/gbPvx

Linking REM-sleep eye movements to dream gaze has been tested before, I don't know how the research behind this article could miss this?

http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/

In short: Pre-arranged eye patterns have been successfully executed while in a lucid dream state.

Study Conclusion: Mouse brains track eye direction during REM sleep.

The authors claim this correlation is likely caused by the mouse paying attention to its dreams, while skeptics say no such conclusion can be made. One skeptic (Blumberg) is pursuing a hypothesis in which, in REM sleep, the brain is test-driving the body.

The article was quite vague about what signals the head direction neurons normally respond to, but this paper [1] seems to suggest that they respond to head-rotation information from the horizontal semicircular canals - in transgenic mice which lack functional horizontal canals, "the neural network for the head direction signal remains intact in these mice, but that the absence of normal horizontal canals results in an inability to control the network properly and brings about an unstable head direction signal."

As we know that the head-direction signals in sleeping mice are not caused by head movement, one of the first questions I would have is whether we can figure out what, if anything, they are responding to - or whether they are like the unstable signals of the transgenic mice. Unfortunately, one cannot ask a mouse to imagine that it is rotating its head and see whether that triggers the head direction cells, but in a setup where the mouse's body and its visual field can be rotated independently, it might be possible to figure out the causal chains (For all I know, this is already well-understood.) If the head direction signals are the unstable output of a network disconnected from its when-awake inputs, and the eye movements are in response to that, they may have nothing to do with dreams.

If Blumberg is right, could dreams be the result of conscious minds trying to make sense of the sort of test signals he proposes?

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26791205/

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All it takes for a dream to become an alternate reality/dimension is for someone else to share the experience with you. Wild.

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