While looking through the forums I have noticed many things but one theme in particular has gotten my attention; people always seem to treat dream characters like lesser beings. Random acts of violence are apparantly the norm with most LDers, I’m not saying everyone is like this but yeah. My question to you the reader is this: Do you consider dream characters people? My opinion: they are people in every respect, They have a language, they (in some cases not but…) have a society, they even have great thinkers that rival or even possibly exceed the dreamers intelligence level! And so I present my case. What do you people think: should’nt these “characters” have at least some rights… discuss.
why should they have respect! they want it even get hurt because they are not real, you shouldn’t think a lot about them 
I’ve had DC’s ignore me and treat me like I was nothing. I’ve had DC’s play war games with me and unlike life the weapons aren’t made of rubber or plastic.
Are DC’s people? This topic could be rather philosophical, scientifically they aren’t. But who knows? They do often show inteligence and as you said, I’ve had DC’s speak perfect French and Italian. Now I did study French in school, but Italian I never studied. How can a DC speak something I don’t if they are indeed just creations of my mind?
Dc’s are not conscious beings. They are just a fragment of your imagination and does not even exist in the dream when you are not looking at them. They are no more real than for example a object in your dream and basically behave like you or your subconscious expects them to do. My dc’s even know that they are just a fragment of my dream and this is because i expect them to do so. They are basically just molded from your memories and expectations.
Did you recall the phrases upon awakening and then investigates if they really meant something? Just because it sound Italian to you, doesn’t mean that it really is. I myself know pretty much how Italian sounds, but i still cannot speak or understand more than a couple of words of it. If someone who knew the language heard the phrases, then it probably would not make much sense to them.
There’s no real way to prove if DCs are conscious or not or if they exist if we don’t look at them. It’s impossible. But I see no reason to assume anything more than what you can observe. I can feel compassion for DCs even more than a character in a book or movie. And I can think nothing of them also. It depends on the situation, Isn’t it like that with real people too?
I like treating my DC really nicely. They think, they feel , They can talk and most important help you out. I never treated my DC 's Badly so they really like me and act just like my friends . So are Dc people?
Maybe not but you never know 
I don’t exactly consider DCs “real people.” I consider them ideas, but I also take into consideration that that does not in any way make them less real than myself. Yes, I have had very one-dimensional characters who just said the same thing over and over and such. No, I do not feel the need to beat up my characters or mess with them, mostly because it is not part of my nature at all, and it upsets me, and in that respect yes, I do see my personal DCs as people. I think it’s really a choice for the dreamer.
I don’t think of DCs as people, they’re just made up by your mind after all. However, I do treat them well…no using my mind powers on them or fighting them 
The reason I’m not violent with them is because I think of them as something I’ve created, that’s a part of me, so I wouldn’t want to do anything bad to once, since I’d think of that as doing something bad to myself.
The Italian was real, yes. I had a friends BF translate it from the phonetics I’d written down.
I can’t speak for the Klingon or Welsh though. 
Hmm I believe I agree with this. I haven’t had many chances to really decide on what to do to my DCs, but I guess that destruction is pointless.
In fact, the only time I’ve actually destroyed DCs was when flying demons started to attack me. Also, on the same dream, I later protected the DC versions of my parents from similar demon DCs 
That is indeed very interesting.
I wonder if you’d have gotten different replies in the Beyond Dreaming forum… My personal opinion is that they are real people - perhaps other dreamers or maybe beings living in another dimension. I accept that shared dreams do occur, so the belief that dreams only happen in our brains is lacking (in my opinion). And of course, if shared dreams are real, that leads to all sorts of other questions… 
I don’t usually attack dream characters when lucid unless I’m provoked.
Then how can you explain that my DC’s acknowledges the fact that they are a figment of my imagination? And why can we control them if we want to?
Have you ever watched little kids play together? I mean imaginative play, like cowboys and indians… They assume roles and become absorbed in their characters - they are cowboys and they are indians. Maybe the people in your dreams are playing dreamer and figments-of-dreamer’s-imagination instead…
They may also be at a much lower level of intelligence than children… 
Or maybe there are some dream characters that are fragments of your own consciousness and some that are other dreamers. I don’t know, but I think shared dreaming is as real as lucid dreaming - it’s just at a point where few people take it seriously. But I think that’ll change quickly if we figure out how to do it… 
Maybe they can be controlled because they want to be controlled, they’re just playing along with you. Maybe nightmare characters are doing the same thing, they think you want to be scared 
and are simply playing along…
DC show complex behaviors and specific personalities. Whether they are saved characters representing people you know in real life, or they are created by your mind. DC, especially DC who are humans, show very complex made-up behaviors and personalities especially for DC you’ve never met, in which your mind created. Dream Characters could very well be made up from our memory.
I remember this one girl Jessi in my dream. She acted like no other girl I’ve met in real life. Her personality was very distinct and unique. She brought me on this train ride. I fell in love with her in my dream. She was funny, calm, spontanious, adventurious, and brilliantly smart. She had a compassion for her spiritual life. She had a passion for love. She appreciated beauty like no other.
She to me, she seemed like the perfect girl. Maybe my mind and heart’s desire for a girl like that made her up in my dreams. What mystery the mind makes or so it could not be the mind?
We don’t know. DC could be spirits, anything. Dream Characters could be anything. Even consider the possibility our dreams may be linked a parallel world. Not many people do believe that at all. Dreams and/or DC could be anything… We have theories, but no one really knows.
The saddest part was waking up and realizing I was already dating someone less like her. Jessi didn’t exist. She was just a DC…
She really sounds extremely cool !
Maybe she is your dream girl ?
I’d say DCs are little people within yourself—in a sense, they’re not actually people, but fragments of people that dwell in you—that make you you, even.
It is. At the very least it shows how powerful the mind is, it is always possible that the phrase was something I heard back in Junior school when I was around 11. (We had Italian exchange students) But that would be the only time I can think of where I would have heard Italian.
So whether DCs are real to some degree, or whether the mind is just amazingly powerful it’s self. It’s still quite impressive.
7Regrets, that is one of the strangest experiences. I’ve had that happen with a DC girl. I never knew her name. She was so different from any other DC I ever had before or since, but more than that I felt I knew her and had a strong feeling of love just thinking about her. In retrospect I could swear there was intelligence in her eyes, life if you will. DCs and dreams are more complex than I used to think.
great ideas, I think. My theory is that DCs are sort of like mini alternate personalities created for the dream, in the case of DCs being people you know the subconcious tries to copy the real persons personality and behaviour, but these mini personalities aren’t the best because they are not full personalities, which results in occasionaly odd behaviour. So DCs are people its just that they are sort of weakminded and most of the time have to follow the guidelines of the dream.