That is an amazing dream! xD That actually sounds like an awesome bit of lore for world building. I'd ask to steal it, but it doesn't work with what I aleady have set up.
Now that I think about it, it reminds me of last week in creative writing, when we were told to make up a creation myth. At the time I chose to write a creation myth for the very first fanfiction, but the demons dream could definitely be applied to a creation myth about the seven days of the week.
So over the weekend I woke up screaming on three separate occasions. I don't even remember why except the last one, where I dreamed that the power socket next to the bed gave off a huge white/purple spark that filled my entire field of vision before (somehow) hitting me in the back of the head despite the fact that I was looking at the power socket??? I could still feel tingles against the back of my head all day yesterday even though nothing had happened. Makes me wonder what the other two dreams were like.
One of my favorite dreams is the one i refer to as library down. I was in a library and I found some stairs going down to a basement level, so I went down them and then kept going, exploring every few levels and it got more and more surreal until I woke up.
I don't know if I should make a new thread of revive this one with these questions, but I'll post here and see what the rest of the forum thinks. I noticed there was a dreams thread already for discussing dreams people are having, but I'm more curious behind the psychology of dreams. Like what do you all think are the purpose of dreams? Do you think it's just the brain firing off randomly or do you think that we enter some other dimension/realm parallel to this world? Are dreams processes of the brain or something more? Can dreams predict the future? Do dreams reveal our subconscious?
Hmm, my $0.02: Dreams are basically random images and sensations. They don't have an intrinsic meaning - they're a byproduct of the memory processing that goes on while you sleep, mixed with any noises or other sensations that don't quite wake you up. What makes them interesting is that the human brain understands and makes sense of things in terms of narratives. So while the bits of sensation don't mean anything in themselves, when someone remembers a dream, their brain forces the bits into a narrative framework. And that story sometimes does reflect the not-necessarily-conscious fears, doubts, or hopes of the dreamer. It's like characterizing a detector by measuring its response to white noise. I remember reading some interesting articles about this, maybe a couple years back? If I can find them, I'll edit the post.
I don't know a ton about PTSD and dreaming, but a quick look at some of the sources suggests that PTSD-related nightmares may be physiologically different from normal dreams (even normal nightmares). I'll poke around tonight and see if I can find anything. Most of the research articles concentrate on treatment, which makes sense but doesn't answer questions about why does this happen this way?
Boy oh boy is the literature on this subject (what I can find of it that isn't behind a paywall) a contradictory mess. As you'd expect when dealing with a largely subjective and self-reported phenomenon, I suppose. I also can't find the set of articles about remembering dreams that I was thinking of, which is going to drive me nuts. Serves me right for shooting off my mouth without having sources. :) Having done some additional reading, I can report that there is no general agreement on the purpose of dreams, or if they even have a purpose. The closest thing to a consensus is that they maybe have something to do with memory processing. Here is a grab bag of things we do know: Despite being generally associated with REM sleep, dreams can occur outside of REM sleep and not all time spent in REM sleep is spent dreaming. However, the weirdest dreams do seem to occur during REM sleep - dreams during NREM sleep seem to be less vivid and more pedestrian. Certain kinds of brain injury involving damage to the parietal lobe cause the injured person to be unable to dream. "Predictive dreams" seem to be mostly a result of confirmation bias and the malleability of human memory - when people record their dreams immediately upon waking, they don't predict the future any better than an educated guess. 95% or more of dreams are not remembered. Wikipedia says: "[...]people who report more bizarre experiences during the day, such as people high in schizotypy (psychosis proneness) have more frequent dream recall and also report more frequent nightmares." (source is paywalled) Re: PTSD dreams, here's what I've got. From the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine: So, PTSD-associated nightmares are similar to normal nightmares in some respects, but PTSD nightmares occur at different times, result in the patient waking more often, and are frequently associated with other disorders that screw up sleep even further. Severity of nightmares immediately after trauma can predict the development of PTSD. One of the medical interventions that seems to work to reduce PTSD nightmares is prazosin, which was originally marketed as a treatment for high blood pressure. Prazosin blocks the receptors for norepinephrine and often significantly reduces the repetitive PTSD nightmares and allows PTSD sufferers to return to normal dreaming. When the patients stop taking the drug, the nightmares come back. Or maybe not - the trials that have been done for this off-label use of prazosin are fairly small and not all of them show a clear effect. Another nifty thing I found in the course of poking around online: It's possible, by applying electrical stimulation at 25-40 Hz to the scalp during REM sleep, to induce lucid dreaming! Frequencies outside that range don't work. Sorry to hijack your question, Kitchenyou10sull, but thank you for the poke to do some reading about dreams and neuroscience! Even if I didn't actually find an answer.
My dreams tend to be weird things. I am very rarely myself. Normally I am one of like two or three people in the dreams plot. My dreams tend to be very...circular? Story wise. Like little loops of plot that get chained together. One person will do a thing and step into a room leading into the next person's next bit of story. And so on and so forth. I dream a lot about malls, schools, and Disneyland location wise. And big cities. The teeth dream is a common thing I have and it sucks. When I am aware I am dreaming in a dream I have no control over my dreams. Those tend to be nightmares. Awful nightmares. Most dreams I feel are just random brain things. Most. Others I believe to be messages from entities. Like a god tapping you on the shoulder and telling you a thing. Others I think might be the garbled half rememberings of past lives. Things you did and what not. But most are just dreams. Most recent dream I had was really shit. I was the Porrim of an AU of mine and tried to hang myself.
@WithAnH -- wow thanks for all that info!! I knew some of that stuff but I was curious what others have found in research as well. Looks like not much progress has been made since I started researching this years ago. I'm actually on prazosin for my ptsd nightmares but I'm stilling having frequent nightmares. And I do notice that I wake up a lot during the night. Ugh.
That's actually pretty interesting! Lucid dreaming is a particular interest of mine, and I've had a fair few lucid dreams. I've had more than a few dreams where I realized I was dreaming mid-dream, and then tried to manipulate the dream with varying degrees of success (my dreaming mind usually goes for sex or flying whenever lucid dreams is involved). More interesting, though, are the lucid dreams where - to my perception - I begin the dream lucid, that is, the dream begins and I immediately know that I am dreaming, may even remember that I have just fallen asleep. Interestingly, I have only ever experienced this second kind of lucid dream in the mornings where I wake up and go back to sleep. Once or twice I even perceived that I could feel the sensation of sliding directly from being awake into dreaming, though that too may have been part of the dream. Also, apparently frequent gaming (as in playing videogames) can be associated with an increased likelihood of lucid dreaming. If so, that might help explain my predilection for lucid dreaming, perhaps combined with my long-held fascination with dreams for years (I used to regularly keep a dream journal, and now I usually don't because it's kind of become a Thing I have to Do for me and I kind of avoid those.)
Help me out, life sciences people. In the astrophysics world, if you want to find papers, you go to the Harvard ADS and either do a subject search or follow citation links from a promising paper. Even if the paper is in a paywalled journal, you can usually get the full text as an arxiv e-print. Is there a similar trick for neuroscience literature?
Do you live near a university? Usually big university and some colleges will let you use their computers and access online articles that the school has paid for subscriptions. As someone who graduated with a degree in psychology, I remember using resources for personal research into psychology/neuroscience and anthropology at a prominent university that I was not a student of. I also found out that the college I was attending offered free articles to the public as long as it was accessed on campus. Otherwise, from home, I use google scholar and that usually works pretty well. But yes, that is the trick. When you find a good article, follow the bread crumbs.
Part of my dream, my roommates and I were heading outside to go somewhere. Two of them noticed a hole in the porch (there are no holes in it in reality), and this really amused them somehow. So they started stepping down as hard as they could, putting more holes in it wherever the porch was flimsy. This freaked me out. Not because I thought they would get hurt doing it, )because dream logic and they were perfectly safe since they were doing it on purpose) but because THOSE HOLES WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THERE. I was sure I would forget about them, and trip in one, and hurt myself, and it would be their fault for putting them there, and I would get so angry I would do something bad. So I started complaining at them, trying to show them my emotional distress so they would stop long enough for me to put it in proper words. They just dismissed my feelings, told me I was trying too hard to control everything around me, and that that was a spectrum trait I really needed to control (ha) by focusing on what I have the power to do. Like look where I walk. I got angrier, thinking to myself "I already do so much watching and forcing myself to notice things others don't, this is fucking exhausting, no, and we rent! Stop breaking things!" So I bit one of them. They stopped putting holes in the porch because they were so dumbfounded and outraged by the was I escalated that situation. The bit roomie complained that they had a job interview later! How were they supposed to explain this!!! I suggested they claim a kitten scratched them, since the bite really didn't look like human teeth, but they weren'f looking for an answer, they were looking for me to wilt, making a placating contrition display at them, saying sorry even though I wasn't, so they would feel better. And I refused, and the anxiety, the buzzing pressure to display apology before they retaliated at me kept building til I woke up. In retrospect, it was inspired by a conflict with me and my sibling a few years back.
I had a dream last night where, for whatever reason, my brother divorced his husband and proposed to me, and everyone in my family thought it was such a cool idea. Now, admittedly, when I say he's my brother, we're not blood related-- it's a long story but it boils down to the fact that my stepdad adopted me, making him my real dad and all of my siblings real siblings (at least in my mind???). And in the logic of my dream no one thought this was fucked up and I went along with it and I was actually kind of excited for whatever reason even though my brother is, IRL, a kind of threatening and overbearing and violent person who has really strange opinions and is kind of super uncomfortable for me to be around. And though I was so excited when I said yes, almost immediately after I did it I was like whatthefuckhaveIdone.png and it was... Unpleasant. And yet, still I went along with it. Anyway, my mum and some friends were with me and for some reason it was my decision to handle all of the details like where the wedding was going to take place and so we went to this botanical garden nearby where we were scoping out a bunch of locations but I had my heart set on this Victorian sort of garden that was like, a bunch of canals and sort of swampy and there were willow trees and rosebushes everywhere [I feel at this point I should interject and mention that this is a location I've dreamed about before, I HAVE DREAM CROSSOVERS A LOT], but then we went to the gift shop and there was this lady who was like 'Oh, we removed this location a long time ago' and it blew my mind and I was sad about it and on the verge of calling the wedding off. I know this thread hasn't been active for a while but this one has had me fucked up literally all day and I needed to talk about it. And the usual people I'd talk to (like my mom, lmao), about my weird dreams definitely aren't being told it for obvious reasons, so here you go.
