I have an interesting question that I would like some imput on. If you see a person you know that is in your dreams how do you know if it is a Dream character or the real person? That question has made me think alot lately. I have always had people in my dreams before but I was wondering how you know which is which.
Dream Characters are supposed to be very robotic in theory, people who have gone lucid have asked them certain emotional questions with no reply the majority of DC’s just give a blank vague look. But then if you do get a out of the ordinary reply from them, I suppose you have to worry because that brings in the topic of “Is this really who I think it is?”
(I dont want to sound confusing)
It could be someone who you know who is not dreaming of you on that particular night but maybe on a different night in time, the night after, or many nights after their interacting with your dream from a different time in reality on a different night, if you get what I mean… (I hope so)
It’s a good question, Nice Dream! dreamboy isn’t wrong, as a lot of DC’s may look robotic. But sometimes, you can meet DC’s who are “conscious” and more clever than you are. For instance, you can meet DC’s who tell you that you are in a dream, whereas you didn’t know it. Or they can tell you clever things about your real life.
Pr Paul Tholey tried to verify if DC’s have a consciousness. But this question is rather stupid, as you can’t say if people in real life have consciousness. You know you are conscious, but how can you prove that the other are conscious? Moreover, the definition of consciousness isn’t clear in philosophy and cognitive sciences.
Hence, I think it’s not possible to know in a dream if DC’s you meet are real or fake (of course, if you don’t believe in telepathy, parapsychology or esoteric stuff, you’ll necessarily believe that they can’t be real and such a problem is a non-sense). But if you believe it’s possible, IMO the only way to verify is to ask the person if they have had the same dream, in the hope it was a shared dream.
You’ll ask me: and what about people that you don’t know? If you don’t know these people, the fact that they are DC’s or real people has no importance, as you’ll never meet them in real life. In this case, I think that believing that unknown DC’s are real people is a good way towards paranoia.
whistles 
Nah, just kidding. I may be paranoid, but I’m not [b]that[/b] bad. 
Interesting thoughts though. I’ll confess to having a slight paranoia when it comes to the DCs, but most of that is because of dream logic.
What do you mean, real person? Any character in your dream is a dream character. If you really believe in this dream sharing stuff, do me a favor.
Get together with your friend and try to have a shared dream. In the dream, tell them something really shocking, something they won’t forget. “I like to masturbate to Photoshopped pictures of Hitler having sex with chickens” ought to do the trick. Then ask them, upon awakening, what it was that you said. If they are accurate, and if you can reproduce the results of this experiment, you can make yourself an easy $1,000,000:
randi.org/research/index.html
In one of my dreams I saw a man that just stared at me, he didn’t seem very robotic. Maybe he was a dreamer.
If there is no possibility to tell if people have a consciousness in real live or in a dream, the consequence is you cannot rule out DC’s having a consciousness. Therefore you should think about how to treat them, since hurting them could rise similar effects to your consciousness as if you hurt a real live person.
The best way to prove if shared dreaming is actually possible is to merely put twins at test and see the results.
SD’ing has been something intriguing to scientists just as OBE’s and related stuff of the esotheric. I bet that, if sd’ing were to be possible then telekinesis,levitation could be possible aswell. But it’s something very limited on knowledge and information since all the individuals that apparerently have the ability want to retain their knowledge from sources.
Pretty much all my DC’s act realistically. I can have conversations with them and joke around with them.
I do get the occasional ‘robot’ DC. They’re boring though.
I have to agree with surreal. In most of my lucid dreams the DC’s act very real. If you look a my DJ I posted a dream where I had a very coherent conversation with a snake.
I think it depends on your level of lucidity. If you have a low level LD (or maybe non rem dream) then you might get those robotic DC’s that look at you with a blank expression or give incoherent responses.
My number one dream character is my cousin, she appears in approximately half of all my dreams. She’s always quite mystical and intelligent, and often seems to be more aware of the dreaming environment than I am (in non-lucid dreams).
Lately she has been spinning analogies about being devoted if I really want something… of course I didn’t know what she was talking about while in the dream, but on awakening I really slapped my forehead. 
It’s a shame I don’t become lucid when I see her, even though I do RC’s with her as my dreamsign (imagined) all day long.
If we all agree on how complex the brain is, should it not be difficult to conclude that the brain can create as realistic a character as it wants to?
Just because it’s realistic, doesn’t mean it’s real…?
Afterall, it’s the dreamer that really feeds expectations about the way DCs act, so the behaviour of a DC goes as far as how you expect it to (even if the expectation is not at the forefront of your thoughts)
It is not hard for the brain to create realistic dream characters because it can use your expectations. But to answer the original question, I have a perspective similar to Solanazehe.
If you are not religious and hypothesize that consciously is purely a cognitive phenomenon, then you should respect those kind of DC to the same degree you would respect a real person. Regardless of the arguments on shared dreams and other spiritual realms, there are at least three types of dream characters:
[size=100]1) Scenary DCs - These are the ‘robotic’ DCs, they are created by the brain to substantiate a dream scene. They are like the temporary actors that the director would hire so that there are people walking around in the background.
2) Symbolic DCs - These DCs are not there to fill up the scene, but to deliever meanings. These DCs usually have references in reallife, such as family members or friends. Although sometimes they just fill up the scene, Symbolic DCs exist because the brain is presenting something about them. Symbolic DCs are usually realistic and conversations with them are coherent. Symbolic DCs are reflectively persistent. They reflect what you know about the people they represent.
3) Avatars - Avatars are characters with physical, cognitive roots. They are like interfaces to your body personified as dream characters. Avatars can sound intelligent and aware, but they aren’t necessarily conscious about their identities. For example, avatars have the ability to report hidden illnesses and respond to subliminal messages. Avatars also have the abilities to channel emotions, and direct growth and healing. Avatars exist in dreams not to act out meanings, but to solve/communicate actual emotional or physical problems through the personified cognitive interface. Avatars are intrinsically persistent and evolving. The more you interact with them, the more they develop into effective agents. Given enough time and/or interactions, these avatars combine and evolve into the next thing:
4) Conscious Avatars - These are avatars that know their identities–the fact that each of them is a personification of your subconscious. They know everything you know, plus those that you do not understand. The fact that you are not insane also implies that they have a very high level understanding of faith, dedication, service, and morality.[/size]
So in my view Dream Characters aren’t toys even though they have no telepathic connections to other people. When you suspect that you have a class 4 dream character (typically your subconscious), you begin to realized that your dream space is really her home, and she emotion is no more different from an actual person, if not infinitely more intimate.
Exactly. I don’t need to treat my dream characters with kindness and respect any more than I need to treat characters in a video game with kindness and respect, or characters in my daydreams. I do most of the time anyways, because I’m a kind person, but I don’t feel the same moral obligation that I do for actual people.
The mind is capable of coming up with realistic people for one simple reason: we are social creatures and spend a lot of time learning how people behave. It would be very odd if all our dream characters were robotic and inhuman, since everybody knows more or less how real people act, and our fertile imaginations are able to come up with good simulations of them. Sure, it seems realistic, but I thought people would have learned by now that dreams aren’t reality, but rather our purely mental depictions of reality. When somebody, anybody, can provide me with any kind of concrete, reproducible evidence that any kind of telepathy exists anywhere, maybe I’ll take this “shared dreaming” stuff seriously. But I’ve yet to be shown that.
You respect the DCs not because they look realistic, but because the one that controls them is practically what you are–minus the access to the motor cortex, but plus the access to many other low-level systems.
When you have a Concsious Avatar or a CA in developed, your dream space becomes her home, and your Dream Characters are her way to express and communicate. Disrespecting the robotic DCs is like snatching your CA’s drawing board away from her hands when all she wanted was to talk to you.
So when you have a CA you end up respecting all DCs. For the same reason that you won’t go into someone’s room and rearranging everything just because you like it better that way.
What’s the difference between realistic and real? To define this difference, you’d need to give an objective definition of reality. See the difficulty?
I completely agree Solanazehelf, DC’s should be treated with kindness and respect. 
There was a conversation between LaBerge and Tholey(I think it’s here: https://www.futurehi.net/docs/Laberge_Tholey.html) where they discussed the issue of sentience and awareness in dream characters. The conclusion of their discussion was that DC’s may utilise parts of the brain that are not, at that point, accessable to the ego or being accessed by the ego. Isn’t this in one form or another, consciousness?
This may or may not be the case, but I think we need to keep the possibility open and avoid dismissing DC’s as robotic automatons of the conscious or subconscious mind.
Oh , so I shall stop teasing DCs ?
Some people have hurt lots of DC’s and it seems it didn’t create any problem. Anyway, I agree with Snape’s idea that we could “keep the possibility open and avoid dismissing DC’s as robotic automatons”.
what about in NDs where DCs are hurt? I am sure many people dream about their DCs being hurt all the time, and obviously nothing really major happens as a result of this. So how could it be different for LDs? (but either way I wouldnt feel good about going around killing my DCs)
No more than you need to stop beating up on yourself