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Post by Nachtkern on Jul 18, 2022 23:08:53 GMT 1
I was telling lentlsoup about my dreams the other day, and realized that between the two of us, we have different "POV characters" in our dreams, so to speak. I then asked around in my friend group, and as it turns out, we all had pretty varying experiences. Most of us were ourselves in our dreams, in particular ourselves as we are in real life. Some of us variably have or had dreams where we were another character/known person (like Ash Ketchum or Abraham Lincoln or an OC), and I was apparently in the minority, with being a different character in each dream, seemingly made up for the dream itself, and not based on any existing character or person. Most of us also had shifting POVs, even when there was just one "us" in the dream - for example experiencing the dream both in first and third person, or sometimes seeing ourself through the POV of another person in the dream. Now I'm curious about the rest of you, and how common certain experiences are! To explain the poll options in a bit more detail: - I'm myself!
There is a person in your dream who is clearly and specifically your real-life person, and represents you. They don't have to be 1:1 accurate to how you are in real life because it's still a dream - for example, you could have superpowers, a job you don't have irl, or your toes could melt off - but dream logic aside, this person is and looks like you.
- I'm myself, but not as I am irl (like a fursona or self-insert).
There's a person in your dream who is you and represents you, but as a sort of stand-in rather than resembling your real-life person. For example a fursona, a character that you consider yourself, or some sort of spiritual representation of yourself that looks or is different from your meatspace self - but either way is still directly you.
- I'm not myself, but different people or characters I know (friends, celebrities, Bugs Bunny, etc).
There's no person in your dream who is you directly, so the "you", or POV character in your dream, is someone else. During the dream, you may consider yourself this character, but when you wake up, you'll consider them someone other than yourself. You can compare it to a player character in a video game both being "you", but also a distinctly different person from yourself. This POV character is normally an existing character or person that you are familiar with outside of your dreams, for example people you know personally, celebrities or known persons, fictional characters, or even OCs.
- I'm not myself, but different people I don't know outside of my dream.
Similar to the above, except that the POV character seems to have been made up specifically for the dream, and after waking up, you can't identify this person as any existing person or character you know. Like an AI generated protagonist, except instead of an AI, they were generated by a very non-artificial intelligence, being your brains.
- Other (ex. no people in dreams, no "self" in dreams)
It's possible that you experience something else; maybe there is no "you" in your dreams, and you watch everything from an omnipresent POV like a movie playing out - or maybe your dreams don't even have people/characters in them at all, so the whole concept of a self or POV in your dream is moot. Maybe you experience something completely different from the above options, that I never even considered before now. I do think being some kind of person in your dreams is the most common experience, but there are all kinds of dreamers, I'm sure beyond my imagination.
- I don't know!
This probably doesn't need explaining, but if you don't know, you don't know. All people dream, but it's normal to not remember most, if not all of your dreams. It's also possible you remember your dreams, but can't identify who is who or what POV the dream was from.
That's about it! If you have any questions, ask them, and if you have anything to share about how you experience your dreams, I'd love to hear.
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dataglytch
Bud
Player pretending to know BBC code
Posts: 11
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Post by dataglytch on Jul 18, 2022 23:27:14 GMT 1
I only ever dream from the POV of my OCs (I was given a full reoccurring nightmare for Keirnan via a dream o___o) or option four. I also dream only very rarely, talking about one dream remembered per month. Maybe there’s a correlation between how often we dream and how we perceive ourselves in dream?
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Post by Nachtkern on Jul 18, 2022 23:40:52 GMT 1
I only ever dream from the POV of my OCs (I was given a full reoccurring nightmare for Keirnan via a dream o___o) or option four. I also dream only very rarely, talking about one dream remembered per month. Maybe there’s a correlation between how often we dream and how we perceive ourselves in dream? You almost definitely dream a lot more than once per month - normally, you dream every night, during a specific part of your sleep cycle, so the only way to not have dreams at all would be to never sleep for long enough consecutively to hit that part of the cycle (which I think would probably kill you in real life). And I've noticed that whether I remember my dreams depends a lot on how long I've slept for and at what point I wake up - I'm more likely to remember my dreams if I wake up in the middle of the night, or if I sleep much longer or shorter than is normal for me. It's normal and natural to not remember your dreams at all within seconds of waking up, too, even if you did wake up during or towards the end of a dream - they're not normally retained in the memories part of your brain, so you kind of have to consciously go over them after waking up to be able to remember them. I think both reasons are why we remember nightmares more often - they leave a stronger impression that causes you to recount it, and they're more likely to wake you up before they have passed.
That said, doesnt really rule out there being some kind of corrolation like that? Maybe if we're less conscious of our dreams (for example because we don't remember them or have them consciously), we're also less likely to expect to see ourselves in them, or something like that? An interesting thought.
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Post by mort on Jul 20, 2022 13:53:40 GMT 1
This is really interesting and I enjoy thinking about stuff like this. I love how you gave Bugs Bunny as one of the examples because I have, in fact, had dream(s) with Bugs Bunny in it - he wasn't the POV character though LOL. I was still myself in that dream. But he was There. XD
I've pretty much experienced all the options in the poll!
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Post by Nachtkern on Jul 20, 2022 15:44:02 GMT 1
This is really interesting and I enjoy thinking about stuff like this. I love how you gave Bugs Bunny as one of the examples because I have, in fact, had dream(s) with Bugs Bunny in it - he wasn't the POV character though LOL. I was still myself in that dream. But he was There. XD I've pretty much experienced all the options in the poll! I've read somewhere once that all the "extras" in your dreams supposedly have the faces of people you've seen before, even people you don't consciously know, because your brain isn't able to invent new faces? Now, I don't actually think *that* is true - for one thing, I don't think there's a concrete way to test that (like how would you know if you've subconsciously seen faces you don't know before?), and for another thing, I'm pretty sure you can combine things in your dreams (like you could invent a character that looks like Marilyn Monroe and Frankie Stein at the same time), and I don't imagine there is a hard limit on that. You see all sorts of people in day life, so I think the extras in your dreams could be subconscious mashups of the many, many human features you've seen in life, as easily as they could be complete faces you've seen before.
But I do think it's true you tend to borrow from things you know in real life in your dreams rather than inventing things, normally. Especially well-known figures or persons you are more closely familiar with, because your brain can call a direct concept of those. So your family and friends are more likely to appear in your dreams than strangers, but so are say, youtubers you watch, cartoon characters you've seen a lot, celebrities you know, famous painters... There's probably a lot of us who have had a dream with Bugs Bunny in it at some point, hehe.
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Post by mort on Jul 21, 2022 13:19:14 GMT 1
This is really interesting and I enjoy thinking about stuff like this. I love how you gave Bugs Bunny as one of the examples because I have, in fact, had dream(s) with Bugs Bunny in it - he wasn't the POV character though LOL. I was still myself in that dream. But he was There. XD I've pretty much experienced all the options in the poll! I've read somewhere once that all the "extras" in your dreams supposedly have the faces of people you've seen before, even people you don't consciously know, because your brain isn't able to invent new faces? Now, I don't actually think *that* is true - for one thing, I don't think there's a concrete way to test that (like how would you know if you've subconsciously seen faces you don't know before?), and for another thing, I'm pretty sure you can combine things in your dreams (like you could invent a character that looks like Marilyn Monroe and Frankie Stein at the same time), and I don't imagine there is a hard limit on that. You see all sorts of people in day life, so I think the extras in your dreams could be subconscious mashups of the many, many human features you've seen in life, as easily as they could be complete faces you've seen before.
But I do think it's true you tend to borrow from things you know in real life in your dreams rather than inventing things, normally. Especially well-known figures or persons you are more closely familiar with, because your brain can call a direct concept of those. So your family and friends are more likely to appear in your dreams than strangers, but so are say, youtubers you watch, cartoon characters you've seen a lot, celebrities you know, famous painters... There's probably a lot of us who have had a dream with Bugs Bunny in it at some point, hehe.
To highlight this bit here in particular: "But I do think it's true you tend to borrow from things you know in real life in your dreams rather than inventing things, normally." Yep!! 100%. We draw upon what we know. People who are blind do not have visual dreams, people who used to have vision and became blind later in life gradually have less and less visual dreams, apparently. Because if they've gradually gotten to the point where they are blind in day-to-day life, it filters over into their dreams. I would imagine that because they primarily navigate their day to day through other senses, e.g. their hearing, then sound would become the predominant factor in their dreams. Hope that makes sense. And even people who aren't blind can have dreams without visual components, of course. Other senses can become paramount instead. |
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Post by Nachtkern on Jul 23, 2022 0:05:31 GMT 1
To highlight this bit here in particular: "But I do think it's true you tend to borrow from things you know in real life in your dreams rather than inventing things, normally." Yep!! 100%. We draw upon what we know. People who are blind do not have visual dreams, people who used to have vision and became blind later in life gradually have less and less visual dreams, apparently. Because if they've gradually gotten to the point where they are blind in day-to-day life, it filters over into their dreams. I would imagine that because they primarily navigate their day to day through other senses, e.g. their hearing, then sound would become the predominant factor in their dreams. Hope that makes sense. And even people who aren't blind can have dreams without visual components, of course. Other senses can become paramount instead. Mhm! My mother isn't able to visualize things in her head even though she's sighted, and relatedly, apparently dreams in text. I imagine that's a relatively unique experience and the last part probably has to do with her reading nearly constantly when she was younger, but it's really interesting what brains are capable of. Blind people, even those who have been blind since birth, use the "visual" part of their brains too while thinking and dreaming - they are able to perceive and understand information which is visual to us, in pretty much every way except for the actual visual aspect of it. To give an example, blind people are able to map their surroundings and grasp distance, catagorize elements and parts of things - stuff that we would quite literally envision, even though that isnt a requisite of conceptualizing it.
It does make sense that blind people rely much more on their other senses to experience the world around them, but I wonder how much it really affects dreams. Even if I can see in my dreams, I wouldn't say my senses really play a big role in my dreams - I can rarely describe the visual components of the dreams in much detail, nor the smells, sounds, etc. And since actual visuals seem to be completely optional even to "envisioning" things - maybe the other senses don't really need to play that much of a role in it either, at least not in dreams.
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