Though my dreams, it's never quite as it seems

July 16, 2009 6:43 PM

In dreams ,are you actually talking to yourself when you have conversations with other people?

I realize that there is no one else other than yourself in your dreams, but the conversations you have with other people, is that your mind projecting what you want that person to say, think what that person would say, or your memory of what that person would say, or are you just talking to yourself?

Like in dreams, emotions are evoked, anger, sadness, happiness, and even surprise!, based on responses and actions of other people in your dream. How can something surprise you that you have full control over?

posted by edman to religion & philosophy (26 comments total)

Test: Grab someone who talks in their sleep. Put 'em to sleep. Record everything they say while sleeping, then upon waking, ask whose lines those were.
posted by Sys Rq at 6:46 PM on July 16

Like in dreams, emotions are evoked, anger, sadness, happiness, and even surprise!, based on responses and actions of other people in your dream. How can something surprise you that you have full control over?

I think what you're asking here is why we aren't always lucid dreaming. Of course what happens in a dream comes from your own mind in some sense, but whether your consciousness is aware of that at the time is a whole other matter, and that's (as I understand it) the dividing line between your average, run of the mill dreaming and lucid dreaming. Some people always lucid dream, some people can learn to lucid dream through certain mental exercises (you can find them online), and others never can.
posted by telegraph at 6:51 PM on July 16

I'm guessing ...no betting that EVERYONE who writes on here will not have any legitimate sleep studies under their belt.

When I'm conversing with other people in my dreams/nightmares, I think I'm just talking to another side of my self. For instance, if I find $100 on the floor, my first instinct will be to pocket it, but then my conscience will say "Hey wait a minute...". Thats another side.

How can something surprise you that you have full control over?

Because you haven't really come to terms with something you truly feel or believe.

God, I gotta drink a whiskey now. I feel like a total hippie.
posted by hal_c_on at 6:51 PM on July 16

The only problem with your test, Sys Rq, is that I rarely remember my dreams. Someone can say, "Oh man, you were saying [xyz]" and I won't remember a damn thing about [xyz] from my dream.
posted by piratebowling at 6:54 PM on July 16

your memory of what that person would say

This makes no sense. Your memory of what they would say?

How can something surprise you that you have full control over?

You're not really surprised. You're dreaming that you're surprised.

You're either overthinking this or underthinking it.

Were drugs somehow involved in your decision to post this question?
posted by The World Famous at 6:57 PM on July 16

Telegraph, I don't think the question is about lucid dreaming. I think the "control" part meant that it's all coming from you and that you are essentially in control of your dreams even if you aren't aware you are in a dream state.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 7:03 PM on July 16

How can something surprise you that you have full control over?

That which feels surprise is not that which has control.

"You" is an illusion that's more convincing during waking life than sleeping life.
posted by flabdablet at 7:04 PM on July 16 [6 favorites has favorites]

How can something surprise you that you have full control over?

Because the part of your mind that is being surprised is not the same part that is doing the surprising.
posted by bingo at 7:06 PM on July 16

You're talking to a simulation of that person that your brain is running.
posted by glider at 7:06 PM on July 16 [2 favorites has favorites]

MaryDellamorte, although lucid dreaming usually arises from being aware that one is dreaming, the end result of that is conscious control of the dream environment. The OP seems to be confused as to why he doesn't have that ability (therefore, why he can surprise himself) while dreaming.
posted by telegraph at 7:16 PM on July 16

How can something surprise you that you have full control over?

I don't know about you, but I don't typically have full control over a dream. I imagine people with turrets surprise themselves with ridiculous things coming out of someplace they can't control while awake.
posted by floam at 7:20 PM on July 16

You're talking to a simulation of that person that your brain is running.

I think there's meat behind this simple statement. You have a construct of everyone you've interacted with stored in your brain/memory that incorporates every notable thing they've done, said, and implied to you (as well as any actions or statements they may have made when you weren't around that were eventually made known to you somehow). The Alice you've known for 20 years, to you, is just a collection of memories. Sure, she's a person that's out there in the world (we're not solipsists here, after all) but she's also this creation/collection of traits and perspectives that you've amassed. You can access them consciously by thinking about Alice—what does she look like, what would she say in response to x, how does she feel about issues y and z, etc. The person as you know her is retained in your memory for local access in waking hours as well as in your dreams.

Think of your brain-Alice as a Question thread on AskMe that you've started, where Alice is the only person proffering answers. In the Question of Alice, her contributions are your interactions with her, and every time she responds your thread is lengthened by one comment and you come to an incrementally better understanding of the answer to your query. You mark some of her answers as 'best,' and these responses stand out among the rest. These responses are better than the rest because even when Alice isn't around to answer further queries definitively they can provide you with guiding principles to how Alice would answer were she there. Things go on in that fashion until the thread is closed, the relationship ended completely, but after that you still have a record of the answers to the question of Alice even if you don't have her there responding to you anymore. While the thread is open but she's not actively responding, you still have all her previous answers available to you to consult in any number of ways and in regards to any topic or aspect or anything really. Again, you can do this in a rational fashion when you're awake, and also in a perhaps-not-so-rational fashion while dreaming.

So I'd say, no, you're not conversing with others in your dreams; you are merely querying your Question of Alice or Question of Bob or Question of Carson and drawing your own conclusions (and thus providing yourself responses) based on what you've accumulated therein.
posted by carsonb at 7:44 PM on July 16 [6 favorites has favorites]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the term subconscious yet. That's kind of Dream Theory 101. Your dealing with parts of your brain you aren't aware of in your conscious, waking life. Thus the surprise.
posted by drjimmy11 at 7:59 PM on July 16

Radio Lab to the rescue!

The "Story of Me" section is particularly pertinent here, as it describes how Robert Lewis Stevenson actually let his dreams write his stories for him.
posted by martens at 8:01 PM on July 16

I'll also jump in and say that the psychedelic experience can be very, very surprising, and it, too, is all internal.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:01 PM on July 16

In some ways I have thought about this a lot. I even had one "person" in a dream who was on his way to work tell me that he was excited for me to wake up so he would no longer exist thereby avoid having to go to work. Strange dream.

Anyway, I think you should take a step back and ask what is a dream because it is coming from you. When you wake up from a dream, it is obvious that you were just thinking in a very peculiar way. What's happening when you are dreaming is that you are experiencing your thoughts as external to you. You mistake your thoughts as coming at you rather than from you. I should put "you" in quotes because the you in the dream is an illusion as well. When you wake up, you instantly perceive your mistake. Of course, from a purely subjective perspective, there is little evidence that you aren't making this mistake while awake either, and as flabdablet said above, the awake you is just more convincing.

You end your question by assuming that you are in control of your dream because it is coming from you. Well that's true in a way; they're part of your thoughts, but you can't even really control your own thoughts while awake. Haven't you ever had a surprising thought? Or a thought that came out of nowhere? If you want proof that you are not in perfect control of your mind try to think about the same thing for 30 seconds straight, and unless you are some super meditation dude, you will fail, probably in the first 5 seconds or quicker. My point is that you are constantly being surprised by your own thoughts.

I am about to start dreaming in a few minutes, so I am probably not making much sense, but I remember Borges discussed in an essay the strange fact that you can surprise yourself in a dream. He ended with more questions than answers, but it was an interesting investigation (it was Borges after all). You might want to track it down. It might be interesting reading for you.
posted by milarepa at 8:08 PM on July 16 [3 favorites has favorites]

Oops. Should be: "Anyway, I think you should take a step back and ask what is a dream because it is coming from you." Time to dream now.
posted by milarepa at 8:09 PM on July 16

"You" is an illusion that's more convincing during waking life than sleeping life.

In the "Epigrams and Interludes" section of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says, "When we are awake we also do what we do in our dreams: we invent and make up the person with whom we associate–and immediately forget it."
posted by nosila at 8:27 PM on July 16

Defining dreams as internal or external is probably impossible. Even if they are all rehashed internal memories, what says your subconscious isn't creating a dream from things you would never consciously connect, creating an organic surprising, horrifying, thought provoking experience?
posted by laptolain at 8:30 PM on July 16

Y'know, I'm not sure I loved Waking Life as a movie (it's been awhile...I'll give it another shot sometime), but it definitely captured the strange feeling I get when having conversations about dreams, which are hardly ever any more connected than this, a thread where people are mostly barely talking to each other.
posted by nosila at 8:34 PM on July 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

I like the "simulation" analogy. Embarrassing confession time: I sleep-argue, like sleepwalking except that I argue, out loud with the people in my dreams. Apparently it's highly amusing to anyone who happens around me because I speak quite coherently but don't make much logical sense, plus I get quite agitated. Hmm. Anyway, most of the time I can't remember anything, but I do recall a few times when I actually argued myself awake - on one particular occasion, I think I was arguing with dream-mum, when I suddenly thought, "Wait a minute, Mum would never say that - this must be a dream argument!"
posted by bettafish at 8:47 PM on July 16

I'm guessing ...no betting that EVERYONE who writes on here will not have any legitimate sleep studies under their belt.

Uh? I've been a research subject in two studies: one at the Columbia University Sleep Disorders Institute and another at the Sleep Disorders Institute at Clinilabs.

That said, a PubMed search on "sleep + dreaming + information processing" provides many hours of interesting reading.
posted by aquafortis at 8:48 PM on July 16

I have had lucid dreams but never one that included a conversation. It's usually more like "oh I'm going to fly now!" or "I need a hot guy to come around the corner right.... now."

Anyways, I have a lot of dreams with conversations. Let's say I've got something on my mind that I need to tell a friend and for whatever reason, it's going to be a few days before we can talk. If it's really pressing on my mind, one night the dream might be that they reply in the negative. The next night in the dream they react positively. It's my brain working out how I'd react/respond to each situation, I think.
posted by IndigoRain at 10:27 PM on July 16

Thanks for everybody's input, interesting food for thought, no doubt. Ever since i read that infamous lucid dreaming Omni magazine article in my early teens, Ive been fascinated with the impact of dreams in my/people's lives.

Other trains of thought related to the interactions and reactions in dreams is the ones that you don't remember when you wake. So that memory may be in your subconscious and affect your attitudes/feeling/perceptions of the said persons you interacted with in your dream, in real life without you fully realizing why you feel that way.

Powerful stuff, the random synapses that occur in your head when you dream.
posted by edman at 1:01 AM on July 17

I have sometimes talked in my sleep and I'm told that when I do, I'm only speaking one side of a conversation. So I tend to think that glider has it right above.

(However, the dreams I remember are usually all image/action and no dialogue, FWIW.)
posted by Kurichina at 8:14 AM on July 17

I think the answer is going to vary depending on the person. Some people have fantasy-type dreams where other people say generally what they want them to say, whereas some people (like me) have dreams where people typically say the sort of thing they'd probably say in real life, even -- and especially -- if I don't like it. Really, I think most people probably have a bit of all different kinds of dreams.
posted by Nattie at 7:04 PM on July 17