No one cares about your dreams unless you’re a famous writer
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My dreams are generally pretty messy, make little sense, and are often embarrassing in some way so I don't particularly feel like sharing them.
OTOH my wife will happily spend 15 minutes telling me her latest dream every time she wakes up.
Turns out, according to TFA, I'm the odd one!
Sometimes I have incoherent thoughts while I sleep. So what? Sometimes I have them when I'm drunk or really tired or whatever too. Even when fully awake and conscious, most people (myself included) don't have the most exciting thoughts, certainly not enough to monologue about.
I don't get this mysticism around sleep and dreaming. Everyone does it, and it's not particularly magical. Or intimate, for that matter. Friends share details of their dreams way too often, and I wish they wouldn't... 99% of the time it just sounds like the mind "metabolizing", I don't need to know what happened, much less sit down with some silly book to randomly assign meanings and weights to every minute of it.
It's like some people believe the dreams are a portal to a higher consciousness. But frankly they just sound like noise.
However, I argue that that your first sentence frames things poorly. Nails growing, hairs falling, the body doing body things is fascinating. Are dreams exceptional compared to other behaviours of the body? No. Are they fascinating? Yes. Are many people disproportionately obsessed with them? Also yes.
Saying anything at all is "to deal with words". Discussing anything at all about your internal state is "to deal with... consciousness".
Yes, it is deeply human to put to words internal thoughts and share them with others (that's what I'm doing in this comment, after all). But there's nothing special about dreams in that regard.
And unlike most ideas we attempt to communicate, dreams are by their nature fragmentary and illogical (or perhaps "pre-logical" is better phrasing). While humans love imputing meaning and profundity to obscurant musings (whole academic careers have been built on that fact), that doesn't mean they are actually meaningful and/or profound.
It is an intellectual stance to try and filter what truly is profound from what merely appears to be or what merely elicits the same emotions. Unfortunately our current world is flooded with substance-less garbage that masquerades as something more. We are still in the age of gurus, of the blind leading the blind for profit, as we have always been since forming societies, but now we are in the epoch of web scalability, where the reach of any guru has been amplified to engulf the whole world.
Training oneself to be able to recognise whether a message actually contains any knowledge or whether it is word salad that produces the same emotions is more important than ever.
Not every text have to be deeply virtuous. It is OK for them to be just about figuring things our and manipulating own head.
Not liking something or not being interested and going into angry burst because the thing exists are two different categories.
No one cares, buddy.
>If you don't have anything to say, no one care if you're human, and no one should.
This sentence left me speechless. Do reflect on what you just said.
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Such a clickbaity article, what is it even doing on HN? A minimum-effort paragraph of introduction regurgitating the bloody trope that "no one likes to listen to other people describe their dreams", then a copy-paste-powered compilation of a bunch of... quotes from some writers describing their dreams? To think that someone probably got paid for this article, and here we are worrying about ChatGPT lol
Guess what, I couldn't bring myself to read any of that. But if an acquaintance of mine (or even you, @markdestouches) decided to tell me all about some dream they had the other night, I'd listen attentively, maybe play the game of ascribing meanings to it. Because why the fuck not?
Sure, most people's dreams are boring nonsense, but so are their lives. What is more "useful" to talk about anyway - salaries? All the things we hate about JavaScript? The food you ate last week? "The economy"? A dream, on the other hand, is a piece of someone's mental activity that is completely detached from real-time sensory input, and I find that kind of shit positively fascinating!
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I'm reminded of a somewhat dream-like real life story about dreams:
An ex-partner used to have these very long and vivid dreams that had more interesting imagery and symbolism than half of the sci-fi/fantasy films, books, all that genre fiction (of which I was an avid fan; and she much less so, but still somewhat immersed in that kind of media.) However, what I absolutely hated is that she always recounted her dream from last night in the evening as we went to bed. And, since they made for such nice bedtime stories, of course I would always drift off to sleep. Then she would ask, "are you sleeping?", and get really mad at me for dozing off while she was telling her dream. Which was obviously more important to her than letting her man get some rest at the end of the day.
Okay, I get it, I see how this kind of experience (even if it's in a milder form, but compounded with other interpersonal frustrations) can make someone compulsively unreceptive to others telling them their dreams. (Especially if they're the superficial kind of person that comes to HN for the cultural content and life advice lol) And yeah, she was an abusive kind of b...person the rest of the time, too - I'm really glad that the only way I can ever meet her any more is... in the occasional nightmare.
Now, here's the rub: I still remember the sheer vividness of her dreams. (It really was good stuff - could've worked as one of those abstract European movies; except it would probably take a bit more of a CGI budget than is par for the course.) But since it was >10 years ago, and she never bothered to write em down, I only remember their content very vaguely, as if in a dream: something something colors, something something a journey, etc.
That is, I remember someone else's dreams from 10 years ago with the same level of detail as my own half-forgotten dream from last night.
Inception, huh?
Seekers of forbidden techniques, take note - I think this is the kind of stuff yall show up to bother me about every once in a while? See how easy it is to get me to spill the beans if you just do the opposite and leave me well alone? (And no, I don't think it works without the acute negative reinforcement, but yall already do that kind of crap for no reason whatsoever, so that's on you. By all means try it on someone, it's not going to help you with the predicament but I'm developing quite the taste for watching it backfire.)
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Just remembered another "cute" story about listening to others' dreams, as recently recounted by a friend.
This one involves another classic trope: that of a woman getting mad at a man because she had an unpleasant dream about him.
So they wake up, and she's really upset about the dream she's had and wants to know his opinion of what it all means.
He listens to all the heartbreaking things he's been up to in her dream, considers the matter, and has the following realization: "oh, that's a dream about how you would feel if I started treating you like you've been treating me."
This, paradoxically, calms her down. She is relieved to hear this. They take the matter no further. Soon after, they have a violent argument, and break up.
What practical thing did I learn from this story? Dreams can be helpful when you have difficulty bringing some information to the threshold of your awareness; or others'.
https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
>How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure
>Chip Morningstar, Electric Communities
>"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
>This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale.
[...]
>Contrary to the report given in the "Hype List" column of issue #1 of Wired ("Po-Mo Gets Tek-No", page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them.
[...]
https://www.wired.com/1993/01/hypelist-19/
>Wired Magazine: Jan, 1993: Hype List: 2. Po-Mo Gets Tek-No
>Look out, the post-modern crowd is invading computer science, leaving jargon and dazed academics in their wake. The recession woke up the post-modernists to the fact that technology, not comparative lit, is where the money is. So now we have Marc Poster writing on "Lyotard and Computer Science," and Kathy Acker talking about "the author as hacker." Although the hypertext field has already succumbed, some neo-nerds are trying to keep the po-mo forces at bay. At the last Cyberspace conference, the tech heads in the audience refused to be intimidated by quotes from Frenchmen, and heckled the po-mo's off the stage. Personally, I'd much rather have Foucalt quoted at computer conferences than Dijkstra. And hey, computer scientists need new jargon - I'm still hearing "paradigm" used in the Kuhn-ian (non) sense. (Dig that hip po-mo parentheses trick!)
A pity really - I still believe that actual, rigorous deconstruction of a text is technically feasible, and used to wonder why nobody is even trying.
Of course, a humanities scholar with the hacker rigor doesn't become a literary theorist or think tank talking head - they become a badass fiction writer that we probably haven't heard of.
I had a dream where I was speeding down the frozen highway on an electric scooter. The game was to get faster and dodge traffic. Each time I got hit and died, I'd restart from the beginng. This occurred several times before I woke up
This could lead into a conversation about internet fueled exceptionalism draining the joy out of the simple things in life, nothing is ever good enough in the shadow of the exceptional things constantly happening everywhere to everyone.
But I am like you, they almost never have any cogent meaning or structure. As Charlie Brooker put it once "Dreams are... weird"
But most of the time, I agree, my dreams are garbage that nobody needs to hear.
When you make the audience invested in the storyline only to completely yank it by saying "it never really happened," turns out they become aggitated.
http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/...
>The John Cocke Theory of Dreams was told to me, on the phone, late one night back in the early 1960’s. John’s complete description was contained in a very short conversation approximately as follows:
>“Hey Ed. You know about optimal encoding, right?”
>“Yup.”
>“Say the way we remember things is using a lossy optimal encoding scheme; you’d get efficient use of memory, huh?”
>“Uh huh.” “Well the decoding could take into account recent memories and sensory inputs, like sounds being heard, right?”
>“Sure!”
>“Well, if when you’re asleep, the decoder is decoding random bits (digital noise) mixed in with a few sensory inputs and taking into account recent memories and stuff like that, the output of the decoder would be a dream; huh?”
>I was stunned.
Ed Fredkin Talks About John Cocke - 4 May 1990: Theory of Dreams
Eg: “In my dream last night I was big and went around eating buildings. I was angry for some reason” - boring.
Vs: “I work in a supermarket and I hate it. Last night I dreamed I was Godzilla, and I went to the supermarket I work at and reached my hand down and ate the supermarket whole. I could feel my coworkers still screaming in my belly, but I was still hungry”. More engaging right? It’s engaging because there’s story in it. It has relationship. Point of view. Tension.
It’s got nothing to with being famous. It’s all to do with being interesting. Dreams usually need to be digested a bit before they make good stories. They come out too wild. Too raw for popular consumption. Taming that (just enough) is the essence of good storytelling.
Nobody would want to listen to made up stories? Nobody? Thousands of years of fiction would like a word.
Just a memory I had thinking about this article.
"I said recently to a passing interviewer, 'You know, I used to be a famous novelist.' And the interviewer said, 'Oh, well, you're still very well known. People read your books.' And so I said, 'I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about the category. 'Famous novelist'? The adjective is inappropriate to the noun. It's like being — 'I'm a famous ceramicist.' Well, you can be a good ceramicist. You can be a rich ceramicist. You can be much admired by other ceramicists. But you aren't famous. That's gone."Jaron Lanier grumbles about this. He's a musician from the hippie era, and pines for the day when being a musician was a Big Deal. Before the days of two million Myspace bands running on laptops.
As for recycling your dreams, you can always use them to provide clickbait copy for ad sites. Although GPT-4 is taking over that business.
I don’t know if I agree with the article in that somehow these creative minds have more special dreams either. I just know that layman’s dreams, including my own, almost always bore me to tears and aren’t the parable or allegory we might think they are, if even that
I might sound slightly bitter but I’ve had literally hundreds of conversations over my lifetime hearing people sharing their dreams and I can easily count on one hand the amount of times that a productive or interesting conversation has emerged as a result.
I always do dream interpretation too and it's fun to think of where those thoughts came from. It's just another way of thinking of dreams.