I just thought of this. We sit through movies were people are clearly breaking the laws of physics, travelling in space, mutating, getting shot, and so on. I think the thing that keeps movies acceptable to our minds is the very same thing that keeps us from realising it’s a dream. Call it suspension of disbelief.
Whatever part of the psyche it is, it seems to much more active during sleep. You feel a movie is unrealistic much more often that you feel a dream is it.
Don’t really know if there’s a point to all this. Maybe we’d be better LDers if we complained movies were unrealistic all the time?
Suspension of disbelief is an important part of making movies work for the viewer. A good director will be succesful at it, thus being able to make the viewer believe anything and completely draw them in! The same thing indeed happens when dreaming. We accept the reality around us without question, just as we accept strange things happening in a movie because the things happening fit into the world.
That’s where RC’s and such come in. By being more critical of our surroundings, we’ll be more in disbelief and thus dreamsigns will be easier to pick up.
That’s exactly what makes it so hard for me to LD that way! I always believe stuff and get all caught up in movies… I’m not critical about my surroundings at all. On the contrary, I wish that anything could happen, I imagine things flying about and weird things happening IRL to drive away the boredom of commuting. Yeah, that’ll help the RC’s
It also depends on making a “beliveable” world in the movies. It is not just doing anything that you want, but making a few basic changes in reality, and then have everything work with these changes. With a good movie, you only have to suspend disbelief on a few basic facts, sometimes only on one.
When dreaming, we tend to suspend disbelief on anything that happens to make the dream move forward. At one point, we might walk through a wall, then stop someone from following us by closing a door.
I do think that the current movies do tend to make it harder to be critical about all the things that are going on in the dream because we have seen it in the movies.
The more critical you are when doing RC’s the better luck you will have. The problem is being critical in dreams, but not in the movies.
don
I know I complain all the time about the movies. Many people don’t like that kind of attitude.
It seems to me that most people enjoy an unrealistic action packed movie more than watching some movie that actually makes sense (these kind of movies always seem to be boring to a lot of average viewers)
That is probably very true! At times, the only credible explaination my subconscious had to offer me to explain the weird things going on around me, is that it was all a movie.
I agree that movies effects your ability to be objective in dreams. I’ve seen liots of movies, It seems I’m drawn in by mystery movies, shows and science fiction. Maybe this is why even when I am lucid I tend to follow the flow of the dream, kinda like a zombie with only a low level of lucidity.
Could we make this effect usefull by using tv to train awareness? like doing a rc every time something strikes us odd while watching tv on a big screen? (i’ve been doing this for some three weeks now, seems to work for me)