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Comment by stevev | Hacker News Reader

I’ve had dreams where I carry on actual conversations with people in my own life and or strangers.

Realizing that I’m dreaming, I ask questions and to my surprise their answers and reactions are not of my doing. I ask in the manner of only listening immediately (clear minded with no thinking) so as to not influence their response. The brain is truly mysterious.

I wonder if hidden personas are created and stored and revealed in our dreams?

Or that our brain is connected to a plane that actually exists outside of our reality.

Maybe one day I’ll experience what you have.

Thanks for sharing.

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"internal family systems" gives a useful framework for this ability of the brain to take on multiple more or less independent perspectives, almost personalities. our brain can hide different memories in them and getting free access and interaction and integration of them is seen as part of personal development by the IFS approach to the phenomenon. They leverage it without psychedelics, btw.

Yeah I think empathy under the hood is just a very good modeling engine that models other people's brains without our conscious awareness.

IFS, DMT, and other experiences can surface those models to the conscious layer and allow us to introspect them more directly.

In that vein I think sympathy is our intelligent/conscious level modeling of other people's emotional states, which is a higher level process that happens with conscious awareness. In some ways I think sympathy is actually harder, and I respect it more because it shows conscious effort put into modeling experiences you haven't already had / can't intuitively relate to without effort.

> Realizing that I’m dreaming, I ask questions and to my surprise their answers and reactions are not of my doing

The way I see it dreams are unconcious imagination running wild. Lucid dreaming is your lucid brain being put in reality created by your unconscious mind, so there is no real way for the lucid part to "know" the info beforehand, just like there is no way to predict what you will dream about this night

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