What were dreams like before television and film? Ask Sigmund Freud. The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899, before either one. EVERYTHING affects the content of dreams, because the content of our dreams is derived from the content of our minds which is derived from experience. This is so whether one thinks dreams are meaningful of meaningless. If a human were born and raised on Proxima VII among odd but benevolent aliens, one's dreams would include the aliens.

Dreams can be shaped and one's memory of dreams is improvable. Analysands--persons undergoing psychoanalysis--can greatly improve their dream recall.

The reason why one couldn't become a gymnast by sleep-practice is that one must learn real-world lessons about momentum, gravity, capacity, and so forth. Imagining that one will land in a certain way isn't the same as actually feeling one's body striking the mat and "sticking". That said, it seems to be true that mental practice can help improve real-world performance. Baseball pitchers who mentally practice techniques seem to improve real world performance. People who are nervous speaking before groups can reduce anxiety by imagining themselves giving a relaxed, competent presentation. Such exercises aren't silver bullets -- stage fright dogs some performers their whole lives. Thorough preparation helps. If you aren't quite sure of how the song goes, you have good reason to be nervous.

Incidentally I've actually read the interpretation of dreams. It was a funny one. Spoiler alert, everything is really dicks. He doesn't go into the formation or characteristics of dreams themselves, but rather only interprets their contents, as dicks.

The contents is all I too considered before, but I hadn't considered the forms they take, or their characteristics, until I read about the influences of video games and tv on this.

If one could accomplish physical maneuvers in their dreams that they couldn't in real life, then this at the very least man facilitate their accomplishment in RL. As the muscles, and body movements involved with the activity may only be able to be, at first, facilitated in dream, which actually in real life activates those muscles, and trains the neuropathways in this respect. I agree that it may be a stretch to think that one could learn it all in their sleep, and then wake up from a coma with master gynmast skills, but I could see how it may be helpful joined with real life practice.

Also, happy birthday BC!

From Psychology Today 10/28/10

Matthew Wilson and Kenway Louie of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have evidence that the brains of sleeping rats are functioning in a way that irresistibly suggests dreaming. Much of the dreaming that you do at night is associated with the activities that you engaged in that day. The same seems to be the case in rats. Thus if a rat ran a complex maze during the day he might be expected to dream about it at night. While a rat was awake and learning the maze, electrical recordings were taken from its hippocampus (an area of the brain associated with memory formation and storage). Researchers found that some of these electrical patterns were quite specific and identifiable depending upon what the rat was doing. Later, when the rats were asleep and their brain waves indicated that they had entered the stage where humans normally dream, these same patterns of brain waves appeared. In fact the patterns were so clear and specific that the researchers were able to tell where in the maze the rat would be if it were awake, and whether it would be moving or standing still. Wilson cautiously described the results, saying, "The animal is certainly recalling memories of those events as they occurred during the awake state, and it is doing so during dream sleep and that's just what people do when they dream."

Dream time seems to enable our memory to consolidate what it has experienced during the day.

If our experience of fiction, film or TV take an active role in our life, then a rehearsal of these experiences would not be surprising.

Happy B-Day BC!

Thank you for the birthday wishes. 69 candles on my virtual cake, every one of 'em a phallic symbol.

Sometimes a candle is just a candle... but most of the time it's a dick.

Are you all defining dreaming as a purely mental event?

Moving back away from dicks...There seem to be two clear themes here:

1) Dreams as changing in form according to sociocultural/historical context.
2) Dreams as a kind of virtual gym.

Both very interesting. My dreams vary a lot in terms of lucidity, realism, coherence and so on. And though I dream in color images and sound, others seem to be more limited. So, looks like there's a huge variation in contemporary dreamers' experiences maybe not leaving much more room for historical variation. But I don't know. I'd like to hear more on that. As a kind of aside, when I was younger, I was entranced by books that claimed they could teach you to lucid dream and do all kinds of amazing stuff on your night-time adventures. But now I reckon they were just in for a quick buck. Maybe I was wrong though and this leads on to the virtual gym idea. If you could control your dreams well enough for long enough maybe you could get similar effects to those that visualizations have been shown to produce on physical performance. Any dream ninjas here want to share their secrets?

Are you all defining dreaming as a purely mental event? — Monitor

I would. Is there another way to define it?

I couldn't tell you whether I dream in colour or not, probably the most vague of images at best, but most likely purely narrative (I'm fairly confident that if they cracked my head open, they'd find something wrong with the visual part of my brain). I might remember half a dozen dreams a year, but since I was reading about it today, I might remember one tonight, that is how it's supposed to work. People remember dreams because they're interested enough, and want to.

As for lucid dreaming, I have realized that I was dreaming in a dream before, but then I forgot about it right away. It would be cool to be able to lucid dream though, but I'm of the opinion that nothing can be taught, only learned, and people learn things because they're interested, look for the information, correlate, interpret, and incorporate information into their learning process, and become skilled at things in this way. So that if someone is a good lucid dreamer, They began with a talent for it, I think, and what worked for someone else may not work for you, and vice versa.

I didn't mean to limit the idea to physical disciplines, line a gym, I just thought I'd mention those for their physical components. I imagine that learning a new language, solving math problems, or whatever it is that you're doing and interested in would be the same.

Is there another way to define it? — Baden

No probably not. But If it were associated with a physical process then it's function would be to in some way help maintain some balance or equilibrium. As a mental event could it have a function other than dream practice? Do dreams help reinforce what we believe about ourselves? We can certainly project meaning on our dreams but not much and not reliably. Random white noise visuals that on occasion yield something we can use?

could one become a gymnast, or martial artist by studying technique while awake, but only physically practicing it while asleep? — Wosret

I'm not sure it makes sense to say one has become a gymnast or martial artist if the practice is only done while asleep. We would be reluctant to refer to a person as skilled in a discipline without a demonstration of the skill. There are also variables in dreams that would hinder a direct translation from dream practice to non-dream practice (e.g., gravity and the limits of one's muscles moving through space). If the dream world could be controlled to perfectly mimic non-dream practice, there might be a possibility of mastery through dream practice alone, but absent that I would say dreaming only makes improvements on skills already developed by real-world practice.

Do dreams help reinforce what we believe about ourselves? We can certainly project meaning on our dreams but not much and not reliably. Random white noise visuals that on occasion yield something we can use? — Monitor

Dreams provide me with characterizations/personifications of my emotional life with which my dream self can interact. And I find that interaction often cathartic as well as informative. So much more than random white noise. I guess it's a matter of coming up with plausible narratives that seem to go beyond just faces in clouds.

Dreams provide me with characterizations of my emotional life with which my dream self can interact. — Baden

But the dreams and the dream self are from the same source. If it's cathartic, is this providing the same function as your body sweating to regulate your temperature?

It's not a bad analogy. Dreams are a way of processing our emotional lives in a relatively safe manner. Or, maybe - to put it more boringly - just the experience of the brain re-calibrating the neural carriages of emotional energy during sleep.

So would you call this an involuntary process?

It depends on the level of description. The question of whether we have free will of any kind in dreams is an interesting one though.

I guess what I'm getting at is, are dreams just epiphenomenal clouds that we only consciously see a face or a story in or is there a process / mechanism that is trying to regulate your mental temperature? Who is this "brain" that is re-calibrating the neural carriages of emotional energy during sleep?

I don't have a good answer for that. It depends on where you draw the boundaries to the self. Sleep complicates things and not just in terms of dreams. When I know I have to wake up early in the morning, for example, I generally do - with or without an alarm clock. But who wakes me up? Similarly, if I sleep on a couch, I move around less than when I sleep in a bed and so don't fall off. Why not? Who controls my movements? Is it a part of my self or something purely mechanical and impersonal?

If I say it's "me" that does all this, I'm left with a concept of "me" that in these instances is purely unconscious, and that seems odd. Returning to dreams; when I dream and things get uncomfortable, I can wake myself up from within the dream. But is that my dream self waking me up or my "real" self? And how do they differ? The character of the brain that is in charge during sleep, the sleeping self, is just very difficult to pin down, and my tendency is to think of the self in general as something that cannot be clearly demarcated anyway.

Incidentally I've actually read the interpretation of dreams. It was a funny one. Spoiler alert, everything is really dicks. He doesn't go into the formation or characteristics of dreams themselves, but rather only interprets their contents, as dicks. — Wosret

Huh? That's not right. The 'dicks' is probably tongue-and-cheek (ba dum ch'), but it still reflects a misunderstanding to consider Freud's concern with dreams as only with their contents. While the distinction between the manifest image of the dream and the 'latent dream-thoughts' is important to their interpretation, he makes it clear that he is concerned with their particular form, and the fundamental question as to the essence of dreams is why they take this form and not any other. He is everywhere interested in the particular form of thinking that is involved in dreaming and the unconscious, including analysing why dreams become distorted for example (i.e., that there is a repressing/censoring function that inhibits repressed thoughts and drives from appearing too explicitly in the manifest image). But the main thing that he is concerned with in this regard is 'the dream-work':

many [critics] are guilty of another mistake, to which they adhere just as stubbornly. They look for the essence of the dream in this latent content, and thereby overlook the distinction between latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. The dream is fundamentally nothing more than a special form of our thinking, which is made possible by the conditions of the sleeping state. It is the dream-work which produces this form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming -- the only explanation of its singularity. I say this in order to correct the reader's judgment of the notorious `prospective tendency' of dreams. That the dream should concern itself with efforts to perform the tasks with which our psychic life is confronted is no more remarkable than that our conscious waking life should so concern itself, and I will only add that this work may be done also in the preconscious, a fact already familiar to us.
-The Interpretation of Dreams (bold mine)

The point of the book is to argue the thesis that dreams are interpretable as coded wish-fulfilment, not necessarily exposing a supposed latent sexual content behind all psychical phenomena. After all, many of his case examples do not involve sexual interpretations at all (including the famous 'Irma's injection'). Whatever you're dealing with in real life that is particularly traumatic for you to confront directly, and so repressed, will be expressed in the unconscious and in dreams where it is bound-up in a free-associative manner with other suppressed instincts like sexuality. While he thinks that a majority of dreams of adults deal with sexual latent contents, I don't think he believes that this is because the essence of dreams involves sexuality necessarily, but because the sexual instinct is the most suppressed of instincts (and arguably one of the most powerful at the same time). This leaves powerful unconscious wishes of a sexual nature to be fulfilled in dreams, according to Freud.

Thus, it seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong here, that Freud's emphasis on sexuality is due to the particular contextual nature of the society in which he finds himself, which abjects and represses sexuality, leaving no socially-acceptable public means for its expression. You may disagree with Freud on all of this (and I don't necessarily agree with him on everything), but let's at least get him clear before we shoot the gun.

1) Dreams as changing in form according to sociocultural/historical context.
2) Dreams as a kind of virtual gym. — Baden

While the scientific research on dreams mainly supporting the hypothesis that dreams are 'running through the day's activities' may be getting at a particular feature of dreams, I feel that this is only scratching the surface and belies a more fundamental question as to the phenomenological essence of dreaming, whatever that may be. What I mean by this is that it leaves the analysis of dreams wanting in a similar way that Heidegger finds the ontic questions posed in empirical sciences of anthropology and psychology wanting with regards to an ontological analysis of human (qua Dasein) modality.

What's more, is that my experience of dreams defeats these hypotheses. While obviously dream-contents derive from experience, I almost never dream about 'the day's events', and I rarely dream about some future prospect, say, exercising it as a 'test run' in a virtual gym.

Did Freud say anything to suggest that dreaming has an involuntary regulatory function for the mind analogous to the body sweating to regulate temperature? I've never really understood this. Does the physicalist reject any mental sovereignty? Does the idealist consider temperature regulation to be a concept?

You misunderstand what I mean by form, and characteristics. I don't recall him talking about sensory modalities, chronology, spacial, or physical characteristics. Talking about the form as in what particular symbols, and the forms they take in essence stand for, is talking about the content, and not the form in the sense that I mean in.

You definitely read too much into my quip about dreams all being about dicks, although I do think that dreams are not nearly as libidinally charged as Freud thought that they were, that his Platonic symbolic essentialism was malarkey, and there is no such thing as the unconscious, preconscious, or any of that.

Not that relevant, it was a passing comment, I probably misunderstood the whole book, and don't know anything about him, don't really care to discuss it in any case.

While the scientific research on dreams mainly supporting the hypothesis that dreams are 'running through the day's activities' — Shevek

"Running through the day's activities" is poor phrasing. It makes it sound like some kind of playback mechanism. So, if that's the way the researchers you've read are putting it, they're putting it badly. I see it more as a processing of excess/latent/repressed emotional energy. The result doesn't have to look like the day's events at all. But it's often easy - for me at least - to link the nature of my dreams to events of emotional salience occurring during the day. There's a kind of symbolic grammar to dreams that's satisfying to untangle.

While obviously dream-contents derive from experience, I almost never dream about 'the day's events', — Shevek

As per the above, if by "dreaming about the days events", you mean having these events replay in your dreams, that wouldn't be surprising. But it is likely your dreams are based on the emotional impact of those events.

it leaves the analysis of dreams wanting — Shevek

We do need more philosophy of dreams, and of the imagination for that matter.

There's different kinds of dreams, mostly we focus on REM dreaming, because it's more interesting, but non-REM dreaming is way better described as recounting the days events -- but in REM dreams we can meet new people, the laws of physics don't apply, and we have a deja vu sense of familiarity with people and things, even though they're quite unfamiliar in how they're composed, situated, or how continuous they are throughout the dream.

Dealing with latent emotional content is far more persuasive of a suggestion than memory facilitation for REM dreaming, whereas non-REM dreaming seems to fall more in line with ideas of memory facilitation.

Thanks for that. Got any links to more info on NREM dreaming?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC534695/

That's a study that attempts to link memory consolidation to dreaming, and goes into the distinction. They also though, I think importantly, don't claim that dreams are all about memory consolidation, more than involve it. It also seems to endorse the position that there are mental contents during all stages of sleep, but REM is the one where brain states are closest to being awake, and recollection is highest. Also suggesting that based on reports, NREM sleep has more episodic content, about time, place, events and things, whereas REM has more to do with semantic, or symbolic content, which is rarely about actual things that have happened to us.

(Y)

@Baden I've had lucid dreams, been aware I've been dreaming and been able to control the outcome of the dream. It's a trippy experience and difficult to maintain/stay in control of. I got really excited about the fact that I was lucid dreaming and woke myself up. It can be done! You should get back into those lucid dreaming books...you've inspired me to take a look again now...

Thanks, Joy. Maybe you can send me some links on lucid dreaming by PM.

@Baden Will do. I'll find something good for ya.

You misunderstand what I mean by form, and characteristics. I don't recall him talking about sensory modalities, chronology, spacial, or physical characteristics. Talking about the form as in what particular symbols, and the forms they take in essence stand for, is talking about the content, and not the form in the sense that I mean in. — Wosret

I don't recall him focusing specifically on spacial or physical characteristics as a part of "form" either. But I suspect Freud would consider those aspects a part of the "manifest content" of the dream. What he considers the form of a dream is its ''dreamwork'', or the particular logic, composition, and ordering of specific images and thoughts. For example, he considers why dreams appear distorted, "condensation", or how seemingly disparate images and thoughts are combined into one, and ''displacement", or how the dream redirects subconscious thoughts or desires into seemingly unrelated contents.

You definitely read too much into my quip about dreams all being about dicks, although I do think that dreams are not nearly as libidinally charged as Freud thought that they were, that his Platonic symbolic essentialism was malarkey, and there is no such thing as the unconscious, preconscious, or any of that. — Wosret

I don't think they are as libidinally charged as he argues either, but that might come down to the particular repressions of an individual and society. Freud's social context was much more prudish. But I don't think you need to be committed to a 'pansexualism' to gather valuable ideas from Freud. Unfortunately, I think references to this are often used in unfair dismissals of Freud.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'Platonic symbolic essentialism'.

"Running through the day's activities" is poor phrasing. It makes it sound like some kind of playback mechanism. So, if that's the way the researchers you've read are putting it, they're putting it badly. I see it more as a processing of excess/latent/repressed emotional energy. The result doesn't have to look like the day's events at all. But it's often easy - for me at least - to link the nature of my dreams to events of emotional salience occurring during the day. There's a kind of symbolic grammar to dreams that's satisfying to untangle. — Baden

Fair enough. I agree that it's poor phrasing, and maybe I'm getting it from pop psych characterizations of the research. I'm by no means well-versed in this type of research, but I wonder how the processing of 'excess/latent/repressed emotional energy' could be formulated in the framework of empirical psychology to be tested.