There may have been a thread about this before but I wasn’t sure how to search for it so I decided to just start a new one and see whats been said.
My question is this… what is it in our heads that seems to want to prevent some of us from realizing that we’re dreaming and why does it do it? I have heard lots of testimonies about people beginning to realize that they’re dreaming and then having something happen that makes them accept the reality of the dream again. One common example of this is having a dream character tell you that you are, in fact, awake when you begin to suspect you are dreaming. Why do our brains do that? Why do we automatically accept the dream state as a reality when we are in it? Anyone have an answer for this?
damn annoying thing happened to me when i had a part lucid dream, i was selecting stuff for a car game, and i was thinking yeah im lucid since im not using a mouse or keyboard to select the stuff, only my eyes, i thought this isnt possible in real life.
then i was searching for a option that i had previously read, and didnt find it and was like haha, fuck yeah this is a dream, thats exactly what happens, then soon after that the dream changed, i thought i had woken up and was reading a comic book, i had infact lost my lucidity then,.
then moments later my alarm clock goes off and im like fuck i was dreaming the whole time.
Yeah… there is something working there to block most of us from easliy attaining lucidity and keeping it. I was just wondering if there were any theories out there as to why our brains do this.
Although I had this dream the other night where I became lucid and had all these things I wanted to try but I started to lose lucidity and hit on this girl and she said to me, “This is not what you SHOULD be doing.” And I was like Oh yeah… I was lucid and it kept me going. That was the one time I ever had a dream character work for me while lucid.
if dreams has evolved as the psyches way of maintaining mental balance, then it seems logical that a defens mekanisem against interference in the dream process would also evolve.
now the qustion is, why is this defence activated when you are
about to become lucid. i thinke that the anwser is that the subc
tryes to protect the dream against a conscious mind that dosnt
take dreams serious enough.
as an exampel of what I am saying, take a look at one of the last lines of lostboys first post.
“Why do we automatically accept the dream state as a reality”
to this his subc might say “but it is real, the dream world is based on your feelings and memorys, and are they not just as real to you as everything else”
a way to overcome the defence, could be to stop seeing the dreamworld
as less real than waking life, and start seeing it as another form of
realety (the realety based on feelings and memorys and the “realworld” as the realety based on input from the senses).
I would say that you should consider dreams as being real, but of course to a certain extent. when you dream, the dream characters are real to you for that period of time when you are perceiving them. same thing in waking life, they are real when you are perceiving them, why should it be any different?
I think that ‘real’ is a relative term, and depends on the point of view. how do you know you are not a DC in someone elses dream or imagination.
Sleeper, you are right of course… I guess I meant by saying “accept dreams as reality” that we take it to be a part of the rational waking world no matter what happens. If a fish talks to us it is perfectly ok for it to do so when otherwise we would freak out and wonder if we were dreaming or hallucinating.
I do believe that part of the way to recognize yourself during a dreamstate is to start questioning how real your “real” world is and how much it can feel just like a dream sometime. the buhddists believe that you have to live every day realizing that you are living, right now, in a dream, an illusion, just like the the dreams that you create during sleep… in order to begin to be awake in your dreams. They keep that belief and thought with them all day until real and dream is the same.
I hope my opinion doesn’t get discarded just coz I’m new
To me, this whole defence mechanism thing sounds pretty far fetched. I would think that we seem to lose lucidity because our brains are not acting in a logical way.
Just being in a dream means the creative part of your brain is still working, and if you have wierd and creative things floating around you when you notice you are dreaming it doesn’t mean you can be entirely logical in your dream. I would think that because of this creativity and the distractions from the dream that we just seem to forget. I can’t see why our brain would create a mechanism to defend itself from realising we are dreaming when defence meachnisms are more to do with avoiding fear.
I’m not sure I agree with the term ‘Defence Mechanism’.
Most people have been dreaming for in excess of 20 years before they deicde to give Lucidity a go. I’d say that would be plenty of time for the mind to accept and differientiate between a dream, and real life. What I’m basically saying is, why should your subconscious suddenly be on the lookout for anything strange when it’s been sitting there creating things of fantasy for years already?
Being able to control your dreams is (in my opinion) a matter of re-training the mind to do both the creation of the dream environment, and also allow the conscious mind to awaken and take control.
It’s not a quick and easy activity to change something your mind has gotten used to doing over the last 20 years…
That is actually something that I have been considering for the last couple of days. At first, the way the mind shuts down the idea that you are dreaming through dream characters denying the dreamstate or you merely just taking the fantasy as logic, seemed to be some sort of defense mechanism. But I began to think that for the most part its probably just the way your brain has formed its connections.
When we are very young are brains are firing electric impulses that are building the connections that make up our neural pathways. At the beginning we make new pathways and throw of older less effiecient ones with greater ease. Now that we are older it is harder for us to retrain our brains to accept the fact that we want to be able to dream in this different way. Perhaps those that have lucid experiences naturally, all the time, have them because, by chance, they had them as a child and those patterns were established in the brain while it was creating itself?
Nice theory you have there LostBoy It also explains why children often have much easier for learning LDing that grown-ups (read it on the lucidity.com website once)
Yup, I got a pretty good answer for that one . If you believe that dreams are a way for our subconcious to communicate to our conciousness, and coding our problems in symbols for us to dicipher in the waking life, then the answer seems pretty obvious to me.
When you realize the possibility that you might be dreaming, you’re subconcious tries in all ways to continue with your dream, because when you become lucid it will interupt the message your subconcious is trying to get to you. Does that make sense? Hmmm
That’s a pretty interesting theory. Personally, I don’t beleive that dreams are a way of our subconscious mind telling us anything, but it’s always nice to hear about other people’s interpretations of them.
LostBoy:
I agree entirely with that. Learning anything when you’re a child is the easiest way to get it imbedded in your mind, and dreaming would be no exception.
so I don’t know if I’m the authority on advice LOL.
. If you believe that dreams are a way for our subconcious to communicate to our conciousness, and coding our problems in symbols for us to dicipher in the waking life, then the answer seems pretty obvious to me.