Mafoo

why do you think we dream? do you think it just serves a biological purpose, like allowing our neurons to "reset"? or maybe it serves a psychological purpose like giving us experiences with things that we are not getting from our waking lives? or maybe when we dream we connect to the oversoul or w/e term you want you use to describe the possibility of there being a collective subconcious or superconcious (however you want to look at it).

these questions come from my personal experiences with dreams. this year alone ive had 3-4 dreams about girls i know and had not seen for months/ years, only to run into them the following day or night. even one about a girl i had only met 1 time several years ago. i have alot of dreams about girls, but usually i dont get a sense of the girl in my dream being a specific real person from my life. its more like a compilation of alot of different girls that my brain somehow mixes together and makes into a somewhat ambiguous individual. the times when i dreamed about a specific girl, i knew exactly who it was in my dream, and then ran into them the following day.

i feel like on one hand, it could be random chance, but it seems to be happening with more frequency than ever before, which leads me to question if somehow we are all connected through some part of our concious or subconcious minds

what do you think?

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PLUR
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return

deadhead94

The function of dreaming is to allow your brain to sort through all of the sensory information it has taken in that day and store relevant parts. Dreaming is important to memory (which probably explains why you dream about past experiences as well as recent ones). Because of the chemical processes that bring about dreaming, our voluntary nervous system is generally paralyzed which probably also serves the purpose of facilitating repair and growth of tissues. It is thought that the "visual" aspects of dreaming are an effect of endogenous DMT (and analogues).

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The Rev

The purpose of dreaming is that it facilitates sexual encounters that you could never have in waking life. Dreaming is the great equalizer.



The Rev

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Mafoo

im aware of the thought-to-be biological purposes of dreaming. why do you think then that we are concious? wouldnt it be easier if we were like jelly fish, just responding to w/e chemical stimuli comes in to contact with our body? we could just take the whole thought process and memory out of the equation.. it would certainly save alot of precious resources for our bodies because our brains are very "hungry"(brain uses alot of energy).

what im trying to get at is, yes, science has ideas about dreaming, but no over arching explanation of dreaming and all its facets is even close to coming about. there are alot of gaps in our knowledge of perception and therefore about how we dream.

how would you explain dreaming about things that are not memories? like dreams you have as a child. i used to have some terrifying dreams that were like borderline delusions where it was as though i was awake, but i was in a place id never been, people around me were unfamiliar etc.

im not knocking science here, im a biology student ffs. but i know that a major error in science is to think that everything that is "known" to the scientific community now is actually an accurate description of reality. you must always question

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PLUR
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return

fenderbender

"Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled."

Ill come back to this thread later, but ill say this for now...

Lately i have been thinking that the dream universe is simply a reality that is less controlled or understood. Possibly a reality that gives more power to your conscious and less to your unconscious, or the other way around lol.

The most important factor to how the world seems to you is how you perceive that world. Your brain just puts the pieces together to make what you know to be true. It's said that since our eyes are pretty mediocre, our brains take the jumbled lights and colors and puts them together to form the most logical image that we already know of.

They also say that your brain acts in the same way when you imagine something and actually see it, as well as how your brain is even More active while dreaming than while awake.

I believe that in our waking life, your unconscious mind takes over many aspects of your perception. Or something like that...


I think that while dreaming you are still in the same "reality", you are just living without all the "rules" and "truths" of waking life, therefor you can perceive it differently.

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fenderbender

I'd also like to add how i just had my first Lucid dream yesterday!!!!

I had just begun to really think about lucid dreaming and learn more a couple days ago. I've been asking myself often in waking life "Am i dreaming right now?", trying to get myself used to asking this hoping id ask it in my dreams.

The dream only lasted a short period. I was just walking down some hallway, became lucid and aware that i was dreaming, then i tried to fuck with reality a bit by like throwing something without touching it or something like that, then i started thinking about since im dreaming i really am laying in my bed, i then felt like i was laying in bed witch then caused me to wake up lol.

Can't wait to practice more !!!

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fenderbender

alsooooooooooooooooo oooooo

Here is an idea ive been giving some thought, might as well drop it here.

When you heart stops beating, brain activity lasts for like another 10 seconds. (don't quote me on that but you get the point im making).

Now in dreamland, you know that time means absolutely nothing. You could have a dream that feels like it lasts for hours or even days, and wake up 10 minutes later.


Now im gonna answer your question mafoo...

Im starting to think that the reason we dream is mainly preparation for our deaths.

The universe gives you a lifetime to practice and gain control of that reality each night when you sleep, recharging your body's energy. When the time of your death comes, those 10 seconds of brain activity give you infinite time to explore and construct that reality. Construct a heaven or a hell.

A period to accept death maybe?

Then, when you choose so, Reincarnation.




So yeah, that is a current theory of mine on dreams/death.
Do you like that answer to your question mafoo?

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Mafoo

haha yes i really like that answer. the point of my questions was not for me to get an answer i like btw. just wanted to say that

your theory about death is intruiging to me, and i think it seems possible that we live an "eternal" 10 seconds when we die. that answer works well with what deadhead said about endogenous DMT. maybe this is why people have near death experiences where their whole life is played out before them or w/e they say happens.

i need to think more before asking a few more questions

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PLUR
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return

deadhead94

The brain itself can survive on average, about 10 minutes without oxygen. However, after 4 to 6 minutes severe and irreparable damage is likely to occur. With that major or total loss of cognitive abilities is highly probable. The more primitive involuntary functions (control of circulation and respiration) go shortly after. After 7 minutes or so 99% of people would be effectively brain dead with no chance of survival without mechanical aid.

And to Mafoo:

I don't believe in the soul connected to a collective consciousness BS. We are here because of a series of random events and catastrophes. We walk upright and have the ability to think in the abstract because of some more random events, mainly the arid savannah of Africa being created by the Great Rift Valley opening up. It took away our trees and replaced it with grasses, forcing us to walk upright and think in order to eat and not become food ourselves.

There is nothing inherently special about us. If there was, we would be out of the jungle. But we aren't. We still live there. Except now we have concrete huts and automatic weapons.


Dreaming is solely functional. It has no other purpose.

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Mafoo

id be happy to accept what youre saying, but youre reaching quite a ways from what is known about evolution and life, to saying that there is absolutely no such thing as a collective conciousness. you cant just rule things out because they havent been discovered yet. again, its probable and very possible that you are right, but its also possible that you are wrong.

why do i dream of people and then they turn up in my life the following day? how do i know for sure that i am not the only concious observer of this reality, and that everything/ everyone else is a fragment of my singular conciousness? how do you know that i, Mafoo- the random guy on a forum who wants to argue, am not just a portion of your subconcious mind that seeks to interact with your concious mind in this type of forum?

i realize you are scientifically inclined, but i think there is alot of philosophy that science cant and doesnt explain, thats what i want to know about.

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PLUR
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return

deadhead94

If there is such thing as a collective consciousness, it is something we have created in the information age as a side effect of technology.

It isn't intrinsic, otherwise ancient South American cultures would all have a catastrophic flood story too.

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fenderbender

deadhead believe what you want brah, there are tons of options to believe in, BUT it's pretty lame to act like you KNOW such things or such things have been proven by science.

If you were truly scientifically inclined then you would know how science proves the plausibility of many ways of thinking. The collective consciousness is possible as well as even the christian faith.

Science just opens up more possibilities, it does not give the answer.

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deadhead94

That doesn't make it seem very plausible.

I'd buy the collective consciousness before talking snakes and the idea that we came from 2 original specimens when science has shown that we need thousands of breeding pairs to realistically sustain the species. We aren't mice. We don't come out 15 at a time and get ready to reproduce on our own within a month.

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fenderbender

There are plenty of reasons they are plausible.

obviously adam and eve is retarded, BUT
christian faith = 13 year old girl with a badass futuristic Sims computer game. We are created among a digital universe already possibly.

You can explain many relgions main ideas scientifically these days.

Quantum consciousness theory makes sense of many religions, ESPECIALLY the collective consciousness types, but even explains the possibilities of a soul and if consciousness lasts after death.

These are just as plausible as what you believe my friend.


EDIT: Acting like you KNOW shit is what gives both Religion AND Science bad names

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fenderbender

And i was referring to how long the brain stays Active after blood flow/oxygen ceases.

It can come back to life, but im pretty sure activity ceases fairly quickly. (still a possible infinite length of time in dreamland though )

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deadhead94

I was referring to how long the brain stays active after blood flow and oxygen delivery cease. But OK.

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fenderbender

meh

you got the point i was trying to make lol

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Mescalito

Who says jellyfish don't dream? I met a few and they said they totally dream.

I reckon the reason we dream is the same reason we are 'awake. [Not that you can't be 'awake' in a dream]. Here for the experience yo.

Dreams just another way to experience the myriad of expressions of one. Drugs, music, sex, food, exercise.. all lead to a slight twist of the general experience.. a change in consciousness.. another way to experience the same ONE thing.. to more or less a degree. Sometimes its fun and other times its shitty. The world can seem chaotic.. but also at other times.. so very simple yet ingenious. End tangent/

So yeah.. dreams are fucking awesome. Maybe in evolutionary terms they are adaptive, in that they can let us extrapolate events to see any potential outcome.. possibilities.. and then use them in our 'waking' life to improve it, solve problems etc.

To a non dreamer or non drug user its generally as if all the experience under such a situation is somehow less real than our waking life and that any information attained during such existence is probably bat shit crazy or straight up wrong and useless to bring with you.

How much useful information (as in useful to 'bring to waking' life), do we process during other states of consciousness? I think we generally underestimate it. And I think it probably works both ways.. for example, if you are coming from a very logical, ordered and controlled lifestyle and you do some hardcore psychedelics.. there is a good chance of a bad trip if you don't take the right state of mind into the experience.

Many older cultures revered such states of consciousness for good reasons and I do too.

M

fenderbender

word

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Center

Why do I think we dream? Well, one could approach that answer from many perspectives, and most likely the perspective you've most recently been interested in. So, with that in mind...

I think it's clear that we wouldn't experience dreams in the way we do without living lives the way they are lived. So from that we could say that dreams are an extension of our day to day lives (clearly). But how so? Well, if our minds or brains are the result of a "systems" (us) needs (external environments), then our minds are "designed" to be taking in these external events (we can argue this later) and processing them for the best possible benefit to the system (within the context of what the system thinks is best for them).
So, dreams are almost a sort of byproduct of the conditioning our brains have undergone since birth. Therefore, the only sort of reality our brains can construct for our conscious minds is the sort of reality (dreams follow most of the patterns of waking life) were used to. So, when some of the same areas of the brain start "firing" a sort of "muscle memory" takes over and a kind of reality is built for our minds to participate in.

This kind of claim can be cashed out more quickly when you think about the fact that even during waking life our reality cannot be seperated completely from our own participation in it. We look at a thing but that thing only SEEMS to exist within a context of our minds paying some attention to it. If there was a chain in my closet my whole life but I never saw it or knew it, the reality my mind would be in the context of would be a context without a chain in the closet, although objectively it could be proven to be there. So our mind seems to always be involved in the actual "materializing" of things over and over since the day it first booted up. So, it doesn't know how else to "do" anything therefore even when we try to shut down the mind keeps trying to do the only thing it knows to do. Actualize realities for us.

Sorry if that's frustratingly hard to follow and for the fact that my terminology sucks
me2

edit 2 : does anyone else consistently regret making posts with claims about reality in an attempt to keep some traffic on this forum and then do research on the subject only to end up feeling slightly embarrassed about your claims?

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"As an organizer I start where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be." - Saul Alinsky