Wow! How did you do it? I’m also interested.
I thought of writing my dreams in a notebook – a diary, for example.
What do you mean by almost always without noticing the shift of course?
That the experience is unconscious?
If so, how do you know that you are a spectator and then an agent?
Don’t you want to go further in this one? 
Thanks!
It does have an air of paradox, doesn’t it? But I think it’s a genuine question, one I can relate to.
Let’s take the typical experience of remembering something, be it dream or an event from waking life. We all know what it’s like to do this: We call to mind (or have it called for us) something from the past, and we re-experience it, more or less vividly, depending, while at the same time asserting that this happened to us.
Now what if you ask me, “Can you also vouch that the experience happened in the present tense? In addition to your current experience of ‘having a memory,’ which places the experienced memory in the past tense, are you also claiming that the ‘original’ was experienced by you at that time, as a present-time (or tense) experience?”
With a memory from waking life, my answer is unequivocal: Yes, I know I underwent the experience in the present tense, when it happened. But with a memory of a dream . . . I’m not so sure. I think I did; I probably did; but I don’t find myself responding with the same certainty.
I’m guessing this is because a “present-time dream experience” is quite unlike a present-time waking experience. We can vouch for memories of both, but it’s harder (for me, at least) to be sure that I was around to do any experiencing of the original dream. As I say, I think I was – that is, I think I was “dream-conscious and aware” – but I’m not positive.
That said, I’m quite prepared to be told that all this is idiosyncratic to me, and that others don’t have the same doubts.
I agree.
One of the main issues with dreams is that they are not experienced vividly as we experience waking life. In most cases, we are aware that we had a dream afterwards. I mean, when we wake up and realize that we have had a dream or a nightmare. Thus, I understand why you claim that dreams should be understood as “a posteriori” experiences.
But, inside the world of dreams, there are some which our mind makes us experience more vividly. I even say to myself, “It looked very real”. Furthermore, I honestly thought everything was OK and was a “waking experience” until I opened my eyes laying on my bed.
It is hard to say to oneself that one is dreaming. However, my point is that there are some details or features of a dream that make us think that we are in a dream, because that is not possible in waking life. For example, remember my recurrent dream of my old childhood house? Sometimes, I felt that something was out of place because that was no longer my house. And I felt this sensation in the dream itself, not afterwards. It is true that I haven’t told myself “you are in a dream” while dreaming. It was just a hunch.
Yes, I started initially with a notebook, then after getting tired of trying to read my handwriting I made a basic windows app that lets me type in a description and assign various categories.
I’d be happy to share the code, but you’d be better off vibe-coding something…this app is very old at this point.
One feature that is very common to dreams is change blindness. Scenes can jump around a lot and generally you won’t notice. This applies even in dreams where you are otherwise behaving as you would in the real world.
So if, in one part of the dream I am viewing the dream as a spectator, then in another part I feel I am physically in that location, and even feel a sense of peril, say, I’m usually not going to notice that shift in perspective.
In terms of how I knew I was a spectator: I just did. This is an important feature of dreams too: that they aren’t just about (fake) sensory information, but your knowledge is part of the experience too.
So you might “just know” you’re in Spain, or that a woman is your girlfriend, or that the police are coming for you, without actually seeing or hearing anything that told you those things. If you’re going to record dreams, it’s important to recognize this, otherwise your awake mind is going to try to fill in the gaps to make a coherent narrative.
Lucid dreams aren’t the highlight for me, actually.
It’s a bit like in the movie Inception, where the dream “breaks” by someone not playing along.
It’s fun of course but also a pity because there won’t be any new locations or story elements from that point on (at least not in my lucid dreams).
They have a practical use for me though – I suffer from paralysis dreams, but I now can always make those lucid, and I have ways of dealing with them.
Yes, you’ve got me exactly. I love “a posteriori experiences”! Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that dreams should be understood this way. It’s a position I’ve seen articulated, and it makes partial sense to me for the reasons I described. But there’s room for a great deal more phenomenology.
Good. That comes up for me in the context of what I call “dream geographies,” recurring locations or landscapes that are distortions of the waking world peculiar to my dreams. When I recognize such a place in a dream, there’s an odd “I’m in a dream” feeling because that’s where I visit this place, just as your house is only “your house” in a dream.
And how to describe the “hunch” you refer to? Right, there’s no self-conscious thought of “I’m dreaming.” That would, I suppose, turn the dream lucid. But there’s something that happens, something I experience in the present dream-tense . . . sensation, feeling, awareness, mental proprioception . . . I doubt we have the words in English to be more precise, but it’s fun to try.
In my experience of dreaming, dreams are meant to influence a certain reaction.
Dream content is objective.
I said previously that dreaming may be a strength of brain.
I read my dreams as a message on the surface.
It seems irrational that it would be just for pleasure, and means more than refreshment.
Dreams actually makes you focus on something, softly, in a passive way, and as a hard-turn, things you can possibly take from the scenes.
Lessons of the sleeping brain and body, perhaps.
Yes, absolutely. I appreciate your efforts in sharing your thoughts and ideas regarding this topic.
I was about to say that perhaps language might be important yesterday.
Exactly, it is difficult to express what we feel in those dreams, where what we see is recognizable but they are odd or “out of place” at the same time, because you were there once but not now and you feel strange.
As you also pointed out, I have never told myself “this is a dream, calm down.” But everything I feel in it is astonishing. I called it a “hunch” because I can’t find another word. It is just that I feel a bit odd when I dream of the living room of my old house. Even dreaming, I recognize that I was there once, but for reasons I can’t explain, I feel the need to leave the living room or the house because I feel that I no longer belong there. Sometimes it makes me feel anxious.
I agree. I couldn’t have explained it better. If you do not mind, I also tag @Jay because I’d like to know what he thinks about your point.
So, it is important to quickly write (or record) what I dreamt as much as I wake up, trying to avoid what my mind fills in the gaps.
Very interesting, indeed. I will try it. I will share my next dream here whenever I record one.
I like it. It’s another try at finding words to describe the state of consciousness that is peculiar to dreams. What do we “know”? Notice how @Mijin1 goes on:
This returns us to the idea of background info or beliefs. Dreams have this in common with waking life, so it’s probably not the fact of having this info or beliefs that distinguishes a dream. It may, however, contribute to what we’re calling the vividness of one dream as compared to another, where the number of background beliefs is scant and their content relatively unimportant. Sometimes, though, even a really simple, basic background belief can matter a lot, especially in a dream – “I am a child,” for example.
Glad that you liked what @Mijin1 shared with us.
I also liked your second paragraph a lot. Yes, the info and beliefs contribute to the vividness of a dream.
We are getting closer to the core of this mind activity.
There’s more to say about this, firstly you may or may not realise in the dream that you don’t anymore inhabit that room. So there may be something around that feeling you get when you wake up and can’t remember where you are, and have a disorientation about which location you’re in. Sometimes when this happens, I go through a sequence of locations that I ocassionally visit, or I’d visit in the past, thinking, Oh yes, I’m here and then a moment later realising that I’m not there, but here and then again two, or three times before I finally realise where I am and fully wake up in the bed I went to sleep in the night before.
Also there may be psychological, or emotional reasons for why being in a certain place in a dream feels a certain way. For example If I dream I’m in the house of someone who I’m estranged from, it feels awkward and I feel defensive. Or I’m up and watching TV later than I’m supposed to and that my dad might tell me off. This is like I have crossed a psychological, or emotional boundary and my mind is telling me that I have crossed a social, or family boundary.
Infact these boundaries play an important role in dreams.
I remembered while reading this thread of a kind of dream I used to have as a child. Of being asleep in another room, the sitting room, where my mother and father were, when actually I was asleep in my cot upstairs. It would have lucid quality, as though I was actually there lying on the rug before the fire, also there was a feeling of it being in the present moment, with them. But it was always in a state of sleep, I would never be in a waking state.
This kind of dream relates a lot to lucid dreams, where there is a feeling of being in a place, other than your bed, but not active as when actively experiencing a dream, but in a state of slumber. An awareness of the breeze, or smell of a place, a knowledge of actually being there, sleeping there. I think sleep walking might be like this.
This relates to another interesting quality of dreams, their “in medias res” quality. Not always, but more often than not, my dreams seems to begin in the middle, with all kinds of back-story and info. But isn’t this how it is in waking life too? We just don’t remark on it because it’s so obvious. When I “enter” a dream, I may find I have lots of facts at the ready. When I “enter” waking life, perhaps when I get up in the morning, it’s the same. I don’t stop to become aware, “Oh yeah, I live here, it’s summer” – but such facts are absolutely part of the texture of experience. So perhaps a dream becomes more vivid if we have to enumerate those key facts, such as when I do begin a dream at the beginning. It’s kind of like the omniscient narrator of a story laying out the setting and easing the reader into the narrative, as used to be very common.
From what I’ve gathered about all my dreams throughout my life, they’re to do with ‘places’.
We always dream of a place.
Perhaps they’re about brain simulating places.
Fascinating topic.
As a child I dreamt a fair amount, at least I remembered my dreams better. There were a couple recurring dreams, and a very dramatic one, where I’m sure I tapped into my mother’s lived experiences, as John J Audubon elementary school (Chicago) was under attack with bombs, shooting, and blown up kids and waking in a living terror of the moment being palpable, as I woke sweat soaked. (This was early, before we had TV and my parents shielded us from violent movies - so it wasn’t movie related.)
In later life stressful conditions lead to stressful dreams, but that tapered off as stresses have leveled out, and understanding increased. Now my dreams are wisps of memories that evaporate as soon as I look at them.
Recently, I took to wearing an Oura ring and it’s incredible how much variation in sleep levels every night holds. And I wonder what it means to have a consistently low ‘deep sleep’ amount. I wonder if anyone knows about that stuff?
Okay so not much to add to this discussion but I do have a hot tip for those who want to look into the scientific understanding of dreams a little deeper.
Check out the talks by Mark Solms a pioneer and expert on dreaming
I think that what we usually mean by “feelings” is rather more than ‘feeling’ pain, yes? Colloquially, “feelings” refer to emotions, not to sensation, as ‘feeling’ pain does.
Let’s say we experience pain.
The point is that if I dream I burn myself with a candle and I actually feel/sense pain, I could be entitled to conclude that we have consciousness while dreaming.
Yes, back story and context are all present, along with emotional and psychological constraints, or boundaries.
Also, as you say facts are there and accepted, just like we accept the facts about our world when we wake up every morning. There is continuity, this is my house, the sun will rise, my family members and friends are known, all as they were yesterday, before I went to sleep. Likewise it is the same in my dream, it’s like I just step into a narrative, that I know, that makes up my world, already.
But the actual events that happen in the dream are like a weird caricature, or cartoon. With weird, or fantastical things seeming entirely normal and accepted as real. For example, the other night I had a dream which continued after waking up and going back to sleep, in which I was looking after a Polar bear in my house and I kept having to make sure it didn’t eat me in the process. It had free run of the house and I just had to make sure we weren’t in the same room at the same time.
I hate it when that happens.
Right, how do we figure that into “dream consciousness”? In a dream, our store of background info evidently includes stuff about a world unknown to us when awake, a world where the bizarre is ordinary, and I “know” things about myself and others that would terrify me if I was awake. I seem to be aware and conscious of these grotesqueries to the exact same degree as I am of the mundane, “I’m in my childhood home” facts.
I have come to recognise some of these themes and their significance in dreams. A predatory animal which can do you significant damage generally signifies something in your current everyday life, which is hazardous emotionally, or psychologically. If you are interacting with it in your dream, this signifies that you are having to negotiate, or live with, this hazard in waking life.
As for why the particular scenario in the dream is so weird, or exaggerated. I think this is because in our formative years, our young childhood we were emotionally undeveloped and would experience hazards as terrifying, mystifying, unexplainable. Also there would have been scary creatures, or situations presented to us at this time, which were, to us, overwhelmingly terrifying, dangerous, or powerful. These things would inevitably manifest in our dreams, resulting in nightmares. This amplification, of exaggeration would then continue into dreams in adulthood.
For me my worst recurring nightmare as a child was being chased by a pack of wolves and hiding in secret places in houses. But also the scariest creatures in my dreams, do resemble some of the scariest creatures in sci-fi, or horror movies, that I watched as a child.
But it’s not all scary, there are really nice things that happen in dreams and for me, at least, transcendent experiences.
I think dreams are ‘eyes-on-the-day-ahead’. To help with the future. Rather than constructions of the day prior.
I think dreams are foresight, using imagery to express a helpful word.
With all the talk on determinism, and the truth of that discussion, shows support for this.