Hey - i’ve got a random question for you LD spotting experts.
Yesterday I saw a documentary film on Ramanujan, the famous Indian mathematician from the beginning of the 20th century. This guy is considered as one of the brightest minds of all times, and he came up with /thousands/ of half-proven theorems which still puzzle many researchers today.
I was interested to learn in the documentary that, when questioned about how he could come up with so many amazing formulae, he said that a Hindu goddess would provide him with them in his sleep.
My first reaction was “hmm, interesting, could that be some sort of LD ?”. It’s hard for me to imagine doing maths in my sleep without it being lucid… what do you guys think ?
yes, from such a statement it is hard to tell if it is a LD or not. It can as well be a ND.
I lately hear and read a lot of stories where it is said that famous stories or big ideas came forth from dreams. I find that highly interesting! For example the story about that mouse-boy (what’s his name) came forth from a dream of the author.
I also recall the one that had a dream where he had a giant vacuum cleaner to suck up prairydogs. He built it IRL and has a thriving business ridding fields from prairydogs and then selling them to pet shops!
pasQuale : Lol, I find it amazing that the prairie dogs would still be alive after that ordeal !
Ok, he might not have needed to be lucid. But I still think you need a very good dream recall to do that. I tend to dream about scientific problems (i’m a physicist) but most of the times they don’t make sense and i seem to “forget” about obvious rules… So, when I wake up, if I hardly remember anything, I will think “oh that’s too bad, it would have been so simple that way !”.
I think it’s easier to do maths in a normal dream than in a lucid one. In a normal dream, you can have sort of illuminations, but in a LD, you generally think like IRL, or even worst…
For instance, I remember a normal dream in which there was a set of 12 infinite numbers and another one in which Einstein explained to me how there were very tiny dimensions which cannot be distinguished from the 4 known dimensions during normal conditions. He had a sort of 3D holographic board to show this, where it was possible to see that, under some special conditions, those tiny dimensions formed a small angle from the others and could be seen.
If I were a mathematician, I perhaps could have found good ideas from this…
Learning new stuff in dreams doesn’t seem logical to me (from a scientific point of view, which means i disregard any possibility of input from ‘up above’ in this conclusion). You don’t receive any form of input during your sleep (your senses turn themselfs down way low so you only receive input that can inform you of threatening circumstances) hence i dont think you can actually ‘learn something new’. What you can do however, is tap into your unconcious (not the Subconcious as is stated on this forum a lot, thats a different thing!) and process information from there. Bringing information from the unconcious to the concious makes you understand things that have been stored in your unconcious before.
Simply because it’s in your unconcious mind, you didn’t know you knew it until you knew.
Oh yes! There was a TV series called the “Fifth Dimension”. And a movie called “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension”. So I knew there were more than 4 dimensions in universe…