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Interesting Post - etoven - 27th December 2006
This was posted at a forum I subcribe to where people go to dicuss their dreams:
I Tortured A Dream Character Into Talking
Dec 24<SUP>th</SUP>, 2006, 10:18pm
I've finally done what I've been trying to do for five months or so. (I got the idea from someone else in this forum.) However, I'm not sure of the importance or significance of it. During a lucid dream I've been trying to challenge dream characters to find out if they had self awareness.
I've been asking them if they knew that they were dream characters, and the usual result was they would do one of three things:
1. They would squirm, look away, and not answer the question.
2. They would run away.
3. They would disappear.
Last night I finally got one of them to answer me. He did give me a kind of strange answer.
The dream began as a non-lucid dream, and it wasn't a very pleasant dream, either.
At the point the dream became lucid, I asked the character if he was aware that he was a dream character. He didn't want to answer, but I was in control of the dream at this point. I said he was going to answer and I was going to help him, so I gave him an electric shock and sparks were circling his body. After I did that, I asked him if he was ready to talk, and he said he was.
I asked him if he knew he was a dream character, and he said "Yes, I'm aware that I'm a dream character." Then he went on to say "You are god to us dream characters. Some of us love you and some of us hate you, and some dream characters want to be left alone." Then he paused and he said "When you are awake, you are a dream character to God. You and everyone else are what God sees when he sleeps."
Posted By: XGM
Novice Dreamer
Interesting Post - Dark Jaguar - 28th December 2006
Wow, that's an "Interesting Ian" type of thing.
It was a DREAM.
Interesting Post - Great Rumbler - 28th December 2006
Strange things happen in dreams?! I am in SHOCK!!
Interesting Post - etoven - 28th December 2006
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Wow, that's an "Interesting Ian" type of thing.DJ, the day you can appreciate something bigger than your self, is the day my dorph cat poops out a fully grown adult cat, and then eats it.
It was a DREAM.
EDIT: I have a feeling that the wonders of lucent dreaming are falling upon death ears.
Interesting Post - Great Rumbler - 28th December 2006
The term is "deaf ears", by the way. And all dreams, even lucid ones, are merely the conjurations of our own subconscious minds and anything "knowledge" gleaned from it is nothing more than a representation of an idea that was already in our minds.
Interesting Post - Dark Jaguar - 28th December 2006
Look, some guy "tortured" a character he generated and got a response? What evidence is there that his mind actually generated an entire conciousness, or that the guy is even telling the truth?
And I can appreciate a LOT bigger than myself, like Earth, or Sol, or the whole Cosmos. Get over yourself. Stop being so egotistical as to think you are the sole owner of some secret knowledge.
I'm not even sure what you are trying to prove here.
Interesting Post - Dark Jaguar - 28th December 2006
By the way, for something we actually have evidence that it exists that'll show you just how small you are, try this on for size and see how it fits.
http://apod.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061228.html
<img src="http://apod.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0612/m31abtpmoon_c720.jpg">
Quote:Explanation: The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (aka M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness is so low, casual skygazers can't appreciate the galaxy's impressive extent in planet Earth's sky. This entertaining composite image compares the angular size of the nearby galaxy to a brighter, more familiar celestial sight. In it, a deep exposure of Andromeda, tracing beautiful blue star clusters in spiral arms far beyond the bright yellow core, is combined with a typical view of a nearly full Moon. Shown at the same angular scale, the Moon covers about 1/2 degree on the sky, while the galaxy is clearly several times that size. The deep Andromeda exposure also includes two bright satellite galaxies, M32 and M110 (bottom).
There's plenty of amazing awe inspiring stuff and incredible mysteries waiting to be solved we DO know about in the universe without needing to make up stuff about it.
Interesting Post - etoven - 29th December 2006
Great Rumbler Wrote:The term is "deaf ears", by the way. And all dreams, even lucid ones, are merely the conjurations of our own subconscious minds and anything "knowledge" gleaned from it is nothing more than a representation of an idea that was already in our minds.The point of the post is that dreams can teach us new things about ourselves especially lucent ones. Case in point....
You have no idea what it is like to be a flower.
You dream you are a flower.
You know know what it is like to be a flower.
You never had this knowledge until you had the dream.
Additionally there is a distinct separation between the conscious mind and the unconscious metaphysical mind. Until you dream, while in a dreaming state there is a distinct connection between the two, you could wind up learning things you never would have found out about yourself otherwise. Your conscience mind could be convinced you like your job but your unconchense mind could know you don't. They are only interconnected during REM sleep, that is the only time this previously unknown knowledge is accessible.
Interesting Post - Weltall - 29th December 2006
etoven Wrote:The point of the post is that dreams can teach us new things about ourselves especially lucent ones. Case in point....
You have no idea what it is like to be a flower.
You dream you are a flower.
You know know what it is like to be a flower.
You never had this knowledge until you had the dream.
Counterpoint:
You can't know what it's like to be a flower. Even if you dream it, the imagery of your dreams is a melange of memories and knowledge. If you dream you are a flower, your experience would be based solely upon whatever preconceptions you already have about it, and needless to say, different people would describe a vastly different experience.
Lucid dreaming is little more than your imagination working semi-independently of your conscious mind.
Interesting Post - etoven - 29th December 2006
You mind has the basic construct knowledge to make you an accurate flower.
You meta consconchience need only cast you in the role as a weed with petals and the result experinces would be the same as the real thing.
You both are short, have the threat of being trampled on, have roots in the dirt, and are pollinated by insects. These are real experiences of a flower that the metaphysical mind can transfer to the conscience mind. The sensations and feelings of the flower can be approximated with some degree of accuracy as well, your mind can approximate what it feels like to have petals pushed by the wind, based on past experiences from wind being inflected on other limbs.
Interesting Post - etoven - 29th December 2006
The true wonder of lucent dreaming is finding out that your metaphysical mind knows a lot more about the world and your inner feelings than it is allowing your conscience mind to realize.
Your brain is a computer made up of billions of multiprocessor chips (cells).
How do we know that your brain can't multitask conscienceness the same way windows XP can multitask two Word documents.
Interesting Post - Dark Jaguar - 29th December 2006
Problem is, there is no "experience of being a flower". You only learned what you dreamed being a flower is like, not the reality, since there is no reality of "what it is like to be a flower" to be had.
We've learned a lot about the brain, but if you are going to claim that we can "multi task" multiple concii, you better offer some evidence beforehand. That's how science works. It's fine to have this sort of hypothesis, but you better do some testing. It's up to you how to go about that.
By the way, the human mind has certain analogies to a computer, but modern computers still operate in many ways differently than the human brain.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. In other words, trying to force fit the human brain into your computer knowledge is a pretty poor idea.
<img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/hallucinations.png">
This is an interpretation of dreaming that is backed by the evidence at least. Anything more requires more evidence to support it.