Im just wonder if you could ask a DC what like 2+2 is or any question would He or she get it right. And I’ve read up on that you can’t read in a lucid dream its just a bunch of random letters. Why not ask a DC to read whats on the paper for you? Would that make any difference maybe they know whats on the piece of paper. Also what would happen if you try to read a DC’s mind lol not sure if I asked this in another place. But would you really read there mind and hear what there thinking? Or are they thinking of nothing.
Well, they have no thoughts as such, it just what your mind thinks, because, of course, they are a creation of your mind. You would probably get a random result.
As for the other questions, you can try them out if you like, but don’t take it too seriously, I predict the results will be the same as they would with normal characters in a dream without lucidity.
The random has nothing to do with dream, darling (not aggressive just like a sir).
That may be true, but without the dream there would be nothing to be random. 
It absolutely does, in my opinion!
Dreams are a mess of situations thought up by our mind in order to process what happened during the day. Lucid dreams may be a little different, because we can actually alter what the mind processes, but everything still comes from our own imagination.
If you think you can predict the future via dreams, or in other words, that dreams are there to warn us of the future or reveal our destiny, that is only your opinion.
I don’t think we can… How dare you say that it’s my point ! It’s not. I just said that if dreams are for you just a “mess of situations” and that your imagination is a “random thing” it means that you criticize some jobs on the human psychology and you reduce the human species to one point “random”, that is only your opinion.
PS: your wrote “limitless” in your description.
I am not criticizing the human psychology, I don’t see what is wrong with processing stuff into the randomness of dreams, it is not something you do consciously.
We all have to take out the trash from time to time, that doesn’t make us a garbage species.
I am not saying dreams are trash, I’m just giving an example.
If dreams aren’t random experiences and they aren’t precognitive or significant for self improvement, what are they? What’s in between?
We can’t say why we dream but we can say that it’s what you said “significant for self improvement” (I won’t make some joke on what you said about the trash and the precognitive things because I’m more jackie chan (my brain !!) than an other guy on this) but it doesn’t mean it’s random.
I’m gonna tell you something secret something very important, ALL your dreams are based on your imagination (conscious and unconscious). I think that you know that but I will be more accurate and I will tell you that ALL your imagination is made by you and only you (influenced by the environment etc…). I think you know that too. Now I want you to combine those 2 concepts. And now what you have ? You discovered that the brain doesn’t stop to think it’s amazing ! I can’t believe it it’s impossible ! But wait it does mean that my thoughts don’t stop at any time… but when I dream I… OH YEAH I understand now … if I thought to water it’s because I want some or because I can’t drink some or because I am solving a problem very hard for me or because … etc etc
So next time you drop a coin on the floor (and you don’t know how to calculate the strength you have used for the release) and it falls on the face, you will be able to call that “random” (well it’s not really really a random fact but it’s metaphoric). But please I beg you on my knee ! the next time you dream, please when you will dream about your crush or yourself flying, please don’t call it “random”.
Well if you dream about something not very interesting and very repetitive it’s because at the moment you didn’t think about an interesting thing, and you thought about that in-interesting thing because you thought that and that etc… Well it’s because you didn’t remember what you were thinking that you say it’s random, On the contrary if you had remembered what you were thinking you will say :“it’s because I like more this thing than this thing” You can say it is randomly different from person to person but not just “random” I don’t think the same way you do and you are lucky to not think my way … and … that is why we disagree, because we are randomly different.
Glad you understand now the concept of thinking.
PS: I think it’s time to put the “precognitive” word in your trash. But, a debate at another time and another place.
just a friendly reminder, LD4all expects all it’s members to respect each other 
“Keep in mind that not everybody has English as a first language.” LD4all rules.
I’m not English at all so I am not responsible for the exaggerations of English words which don’t appear in French. Take consideration of the words in my culture and everything will be fine, I don’t want to be intentionally disrespectful.
People who do CALD create characters with different personalities than themselves and who seem to have a mind of their own.
Well, I thought you were disrespectful in your first post.
I still don’t understand how dreaming about your crush isn’t random.
I know dreams come from our imagination and that’s what I’ve been saying. We think of our crush a lot during the day, so when when we fall asleep, while processing that, we will dream of a random situation with our crush.
That’s why we dream about all that ridiculous things. Sheer randomness. And it’s helpful too; our brain needs to rest, if we were constantly thinking without pause, we wouldn’t last long.
I’m just asking you what you think dreams do then. How do they help us improve ourselves?
Actually, researcher Paul Tholey has wondered the same thing as you and has tested the matter with several lucid dreamers. The study was called CONSCIOUSNESS AND ABILITIES OF DREAM CHARACTERS OBSERVED DURING LUCID DREAMING, and it was conducted in 1989.
In a nutshell, what was found was that many dream characters can indeed perform simple mental math. Apparently, though, dream characters have trouble with sums over 20.
Also, they attempted to test the artistic abilities of dream characters and had fantastic results. Some dream characters could indeed draw things from their own perspective in the dream.
Other dream characters could “independently” come up with rhymes, and in one instance (in the study) a dream character told a dreamer a foreign word that the dreamer did not consciously know or remember that she knew.
Lord Antares, or can I say my lord ?
You are right, I just put a name on it. How do they improve ourselves ?
It’s an interesting question because humans dream and don’t know why while in fact it’s one of the main door to access to the unconscious (it’s still you).
Now you can deduce with what dreamosis said (the art) that it’s a sort of expression of the quiet and discrete part of the brain (the one who looks everywhere and memorizes “everything”). And we can analyse dreams to understand human behaviour.
So I walked around in an LD this morning and tested dream characters with simple math. I first tried two young women on the street. I asked them both simple multiplication (with sums larger than 20, though–like “What’s 5x7?”). Neither of them answered correctly. I followed them to a party where I questioned two more people, a younger man and a middle-aged woman. Neither of them answered correctly. I felt like everyone at the party was probably hollow so I left it.
Outside again I came across a boy at a chain link fence outside of a ballpark. I asked the boy if he’d answer a few questions for me, but he wanted to know what was in it for him. I dug into my pants and, luckily, found my wallet. I opened to check it for money and found several bills, and a few receipts and wrappers. Without looking closely, I handed the boy a “bill.” He said, “Hey, this is a candy wrapper.” I looked down and it was a candy bar wrapper. So I dug into the wallet again and found a $20 bill. The boy was impressed and greedily took the $20.
I asked him three simple multiplication questions and he got them all correct. I remember one of the questions was “What’s 5x5?” Another was 7x6, and after supplying “42” he muttered a joke that I didn’t catch or can’t now remember, but I think was related to Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe.” After the third question, his friends arrived and they wanted to watch a baseball game together on top of the dugout. I climbed up there with them, eager to test the boy further. Despite the fact that I’d proven to myself that some characters fail these questions and some (or at least one so far) had gotten the questions right, I decided that multiplication answers (like 5x5) might be accessed with visual memory. That is, the boy may not be “doing math” at all, I thought, but simply using my visual memory of a multiplication table.
So, thinking that, on top of the dugout, I asked the boy a simple subtraction question. I asked him “What’s 42-11?” He answered, “511” (“five eleven”). I laughed and I took this to mean he meant “five feet, eleven inches.” I told him that 5’11" would equal 71 inches and the answer to the subtraction problem was 31.
At that point my girlfriend, IRL, shook me and I woke up.
**
Regardless of the consciousness and abilities of dream characters, I realize that I proved to myself that I’m quite capable of performing simple math in an LD. I spontaneously came up with multiplication questions with sums larger than 20 and I knew the answers as I asked them, and knew that dream characters had gotten them wrong.
Also, it might be tempted to say that the little boy only knew the correct answers because I knew them, but then how do I explain that four characters before him did not know the answers? I would describe my frame of mind when I began the test as excited. I wanted the dream characters to respond correctly. I wouldn’t say that I was disappointed after they failed; I would say I was curious and amused. They were so sure that their answers were right. For instance, I would ask “What’s 6x5?” and they would off-handedly say, “44.” Some answers they first four gave weren’t even close!
Curiously, in Tholey’s study one of the experimentee LDers also got correct answers from a child.
I’m impressed by the fact that I was able to do math in a dream so easily, and that I performed a multi-step operation. I didn’t automatically know that 5’11" was 71 inches. I had to think about it. I thought to myself, before correcting the boy, “Well, 5x12=60. Add 11 and you have 71.”
Last, I cannot help but wonder if the Expectation effect might have been at work in the subtraction question. Did the boy fail the question because I doubted his ability? (Yet, again, I wouldn’t say I doubted the others’ ability. I was merely open to what they said, I feel.) He could have gotten the multiplication questions right because of my visual memory of the answer, but why didn’t the others access my visual memory if that’s so? Subtraction could be more difficult because it requires an intermediate step; it requires memory. Yet in other contexts dream characters exhibit memory.
Curiouser and curiouser…
mystery of dreams … I can’t help you.
I would say that was exactly what happened; he accessed your memory and knew the answer only because you did.
As to why others didn’t, perhaps you weren’t thinking of the answer at the time of asking? Maybe you did with the boy. Maybe you had higher expectations with him because he was different, a boy, or maybe because he was alone?
Anyway, I think this would prove that DCs are nothing more than our imagination. It was a great thing you went out and tested it; if you had such great results and good memory, you might be an LD tester ^^
I was definitely thinking of the answer to each math question every time I asked a math question. I questioned the first two women together, but then questioned a man alone and another older woman alone. The older woman “looked smart.” So did the man.
A conundrum with LD testing is this: how do you bracket for your expectations? I wasn’t consciously aware of any expectations as I tested any of them. I wanted intelligent interaction. I was seeking a DC who could answer a math question correctly. Who wants to talk to hollow projections? I can say to myself, “Well, maybe you had higher expectations of the boy”–but how do I avoid fitting my experience to a presumption? Namely, the presumption that the Expectation effect is the main generator of experience within an LD. It’s obvious to me that the Expectation effect is real and powerful; but it isn’t obvious to me that it explains all my experiences (since I’m sometimes surprised and shocked by what happens in an LD).
My experience proves to me that some dream characters can do math and some can’t. And, possibly, that some types of math are easier than others. Honestly, I’ll have to experiment more to know what I think. Maybe I’ll try especially holding the answer in my mind as I ask each character. There’s so much you could do.
I do recommend to everyone checking out that 1989 study by Tholey. They test dream characters by asking them to do math, to draw, and compose rhymes, and one woman asks a character to tell her a word she doesn’t know. The DC told her a foreign word that she indeed didn’t consciously know. She looked it up after she woke up and it was a real foreign word that she doesn’t know how she would have known.
If you’re committed to the belief that LDs only happen in our head, then you can explain away the woman’s story by saying she’s either a liar or that it’s an example of cryptomnesia (that somehow she learned the foreign word at some point but then forgot that she knew it, even after a DC reminded her of it). It’s tidy and satisfying to think.
Me? I don’t know! Right now I’m in a place where I don’t have a solid ontological explanation for these experiences one way or the other. I find the Expectation effect to be compelling, and widely explanatory, but I’m not ontologically tied to it. Both Ed Kellogg, and Ryan Hurd after him, have tried to bracket for expectation within LDs through the use of epoche–a kind of meditative suspension of judgment. It may be impossible to separate it completely from the dream, or from our minds at any moment, but their experiments suggest that there are ways to lessen it and account for it.
Hurd’s master’s thesis involved incubating a number of LDs where, after becoming lucid, he left the dream and entered a void. Once in the void he would do his best to clear out his mind and simply let new imagery emerge. It was often surprising and unrelated to what he had been thinking about, although sometimes related.
A really interesting experience would be asking a DC what you’re subconsciously expecting of them or the dream. Surely we can have conscious expectations and latent ones in a dream.
You could call all objects in your dreams as dream characters. Even a rock, you see on the floor. The difference between them is their capability. An example of this is asking your dream world to show you something beautiful, where you often get a response.
Dream characters are able to access your memory. I experienced this in a normal dream. My friend told me about all the games we used to play together. There are also some dream characters that seem more capable than you. These are usually dream guides.
I’m interested into asking inanimate objects questions, or to do complex things. These could be rocks, chairs, or the dream space. I’ve yet to read the study by thole, will do soon.
i’d like to hear more about this visual thing your talking about.
Wondering if you made a table of equations (subtracting, adding ect.) of a whole lot of different things and looked at them everyday for awhile IRL if your DCs are able to answer the equations in your LD.
hmmm
@pokeyokey1: What I was speculating about is whether the DC who answered my math questions correctly in my dream was really doing math or simply accessing my visual memory of a multiplication table. Most of us, in the US anyway, learn simple multiplication from a table. We practice and practice and, after a while, we don’t really have to do the math at all: we can simply “see” the answer in our mind’s eye, right? Or else we’ve been drilled so many times that we have memorized the answer, so it “comes up” in our minds automatically. I don’t have to think about the answer to “What’s 3x3?” I simply know it’s 9.
Well, the answers to math subtraction questions (especially with two or more digits) cannot be visually accessed in the same way. You have to carry numbers, and for that you need a “visual memory space” of sorts–like a blackboard in your mind. If subtracting 11 from 42, you think, “Okay 2-1=1,” and then you hold that partial answer to the right in your visual memory. Then you think, “4-1=3,” and then you join the 3 to the 1 you’ve been holding in your memory, getting the answer “31.”
That’s why I tried switching to subtraction after a DC answered the multiplication questions correctly–because I knew that multiplication like 6x7 doesn’t really require thinking. We know the answer automatically.
Yet, I don’t think I’ve proved anything yet. Again, why couldn’t the first four DCs answer the multiplication questions? If multiplication is so easy, and I was holding the answers in my mind (as I was), why couldn’t projections of myself answer correctly? Did the boy fail the subtraction question because it requires real thinking–or a visual memory space–or because I doubted him? Why couldn’t he pull the answer from my mind, if that’s what he did with the multiplication answers? I can’t prove that he accessed my visual memory, or “heard” the answer in my mind, I can only suppose that that’s a possibility.
After this test I’m beginning to appreciate how complicated subjective testing can be. How do we control for our own expectations? (Since we can have subconscious expectations.) How do we remove them from the test? Is that even possible?
I suspect it isn’t entirely possible to remove expectation (or the influence of your emotions, or your conscious or subconscious beliefs), but that there are ways to lessen the effect. We can, after all, suspend judgment in IRL. We can notice our prejudices and then choose to act in spite of them, to open ourselves up to an experience regardless, so why can’t we do the same in the dream?
Obviously, one way to control for both the visual memory possibility, and the “mind-reading” possibility, is to ask a DC a math question that you don’t know the answer to. It might work. I heard that DCs couldn’t answer math questions with sums greater than 20, but I proved to myself that that’s wrong. Of course, if a DC knew the answer to “What’s 32x45?” while you did not in IRL, it wouldn’t prove that the DC had consciousness, or was separate from you, either. Yet it would prove that DCs (your subconscious, let’s say) can perform math without accessing the dream ego’s visual memory or mind.
lol I have started a very interesting conversation. If only I could test these myself. Im a noob LDer.