h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"I'd expect out-of-control dreams to have given us an evolutionary advantage, else we wouldn't have them"

Not necessarily. There's no evolutionary advantage to giving birth to single young who are helpless for the first few months of life yet we do it anyway!

We largely circumvented evolutionary dis/advantages when we learned to poke things to death with sharp sticks.

>>There's no evolutionary advantage to giving birth to single young who are helpless for the first few months of life yet we do it anyway!

Well, it's an advantage to evolve a big brain, and that means the babies effectively have to come out prematurely; so advantage is tied up somewhere. But I take your point, it could equally be an advantage to not dream for all I know. Perhaps we're all dreaming now? You know how to test it, try to read something, and if you're dreaming, it won't make any senvuiuf jfas fjisiaj

osjabb Sao then,snsjdiix...

Or you good pitch yourself!

It hurts!

I've no idea what dreams are for, or if they are even evolved for any purpose. They may be just a byproduct of something else going on in the brain. So it may not matter whether you have lucid or non-lucid.

Experiments on cats seem to suggest that cats deprived of dreams go slowly mad. But cats are different from humans, having two different types of sleep (normal and 'paradoxical') so that result doesn't necessarily apply to humans.

Paradoxical sleep is the type of sleep a cat does half sitting up, with his paws tucked in in front under his body.

Here's my quick guide to lucid dreaming for those that are interested. I would say that lucid dreams are 'better' than passive dreams only because I find them more 'fun'.

The first step is to just want to have lucid dreams and to think about that. We do tend to dream about things that are on our minds as we go to sleep. Watch a scary movie and your more likely to have a nightmare. A good exercise to increase the likelihood of becoming lucid in a dream is to ask yourself if you're dreaming during the day repeatedly. If you do this often during waking hours you'll probably do it while you're dreaming. To test yourself, try reading. As we've been discussing, it is very difficult to read with comprehension in a dream. I don't recommend looking at street signs as they do usually only have one short word on them. Better is to look at a newspaper, book, instruction manual, cereal box... anything that has a paragraph. Remember to do this during the day. When you find yourself doing it in a dream you will quickly realize that you can't make sense of more than a few words at a time and that trying to reread a sentence is futile as it will change. I have managed to retain a few phrases or names from dreams but never as much or more than a sentence.

Now, once you've found that you are indeed dreaming, that is the tricky part. As Douglas Adams described the art of flying lies in throwing yourself at the ground and missing and then to somehow avoid thinking about what you're doing, the same applies here. If you think too much in your dream you're likely to begin to wake up. You have to just accept it and cautiously begin to exercise control over it. I usually go for some flying. It may often start of with just very long swooping leaps low over the ground. But even that is a great way to travel distances quickly. Lucid dreaming can be a great tool to neutralize nightmares as well.

It is also a good idea to keep a dream journal. Write down everything you can remember upon wakening. The more you think about your dreams, the more control you can have over them and the more you'll retain.


As to the original post. When you're trying to fall asleep is a horrible time for cogitation. It will lead to insomnia. I find the whole point of falling asleep is to stop thinking. If I could find a comfortable pillow that would cool my brain to slow it down, I'd love it. Commute times are great for rumination though. During one long drive back to college I figured out how it would be possible to "walk uphill both ways". Just walk inside a large wheel on flat terrain.


Do some people find thinking not pleasurable? I mean the actual process, not the content or context of those thoughts. I suspect many do. [insert US congressional politics reference here]

Some very interesting postings here since my last!
Seems I'm not the only one who can read a bit in dreams.

Update:
I have slept twice since my last post.
The first time part of my dream involved standing
before a desk where someone was sitting, facing me,
and typing on a computer keyboard, their eyes were
focused on the screen and my impulse was to read what
they were typing. But of course I was 'behind' the screen.
And then, as happens in dreams I could see it but upside
down as it would appear looking down at someone's writing
at a desk. In real life I do have a capacity to read things
upside down, so it did not surprise me that I could read
the message which said (upside down) "I've moved north.."
Not recognising the typist I began to think about what the
message meant and began mulling it over in my head.
At that point I became aware that I was dreaming and had read
the words "I've moved north..." I repeated them, making a mental
note to remember and think about it later. I still retain the memory
but have no idea who the typist was or what the message means.

The second time was last night. I dreamed reading some longer
passage (possibly in a book) and enjoying the phrasing and the
sentiment of what I was reading when I suddenly became aware
that I was dreaming and ought to try and remember what it was.
When I 'felt' I had done that, I allowed myself to continue with
the pleasure I was getting from what I was reading but suddenly I
was awake and realised I no longer retained what I had seen. I have
been trying to reconstruct it all day long without success.

The differences between the two experiences are:
The first was short, enigmatic, upside down and I had begun
thinking about its meaning before becoming lucid.
The second was laid out before me as a page in a book and was
giving me an abstract sense of pleasure with no sense of mystery.
When I became lucid I deceived myself that I would retain a short
phrase from it but was so intent on recapturing the pleasure factor
that any critical analysis evaporated along with any sense of the
content or meaning of what I read. There was only a vague memory
of this pleasure sensation when I finally woke with no idea of what
it might have said. Because I do remember it was a long paragraph
well beyond my usual reading of signs, names, numbers, the sense of
loss is palpable.


~jwf~

>>"I've moved north..." /../ I have no idea /../what the message means.

Maybe reading it upside down engaged your sense of spatial awareness which manifested itself as a spatially-related phrase?

>> reading it upside down engaged your sense of spatial awareness <<

Yes! By Jove that's it.
I leaned forward over the back of the computer
and lowered my head like a giraffe (or Mr Fantastic
from the Fantastic 4) so that the screen appeared
to be upside down, with my POV being northerly.

Thank you. Yes it was a spatial relativity, the screen text
appearing as I moved, the typist, the 'other', fading,
moved out of the frame. The words were mine.

I'd been focusing on a possible significance of the
use of the contraction I've instead of I have. Best
I could figger was it pointed to a very subjective
'view' of a personal experience. Your theory answers
that question completely in a very satisfactory way
like a puzzle piece snapping into place.



~jwf~

Last night that wonderful feeling of reading
for pleasure came over me and seemed to last
a very long time. I was reading page after page
of h2g2 postings, they scrolled past in a slow
easy pace. When I saw one of my own I was made
aware of the content, remembering perhaps what
I had posted here earlier, and found myself on
the edge of awakening or becoming lucid, wanting
to remember what I was reading to share it here.

But the effort seemed counter-productive to the
intense sense of peace and pleasure I was enjoying
so I let it go and allowed the postings to scroll on
while I relaxed and enjoyed the spirit of the content
even if wasn't reading it or remembering it.

A sleep of heavenly peace.


~jwf~

Have you seen "Inception"?

Not yet.
But sooner or later it'll show up on telly
and I'll have it on in the background while
reading and typing at h2g2.


~jwf~

It's worth watching. And very relevant to the current topic of conversation. You see, there's this bloke...