/pt/ – Petrarchan

Don't keep a journal because I barely remember mine at all and if I do usually not more than a few moments. I do think dream interpretation is the right level of potentially useful but mostly unfalsifiable bullshit that makes it a good candidate for using AI (as opposed to something like using it as your therapist, which I've seen people do).

>>2883

Don't keep a journal because I barely remember mine at all and if I do usually not more than a few moments. I do think dream interpretation is the right level of potentially useful but mostly unfalsifiable bullshit that makes it a good candidate for using AI (as opposed to something like using it as your therapist, which I've seen people do).

They say are journal can assist you in strengthening the "dream memory capability/capacity," i.e., if you keep a journal of what you can remember, you are slowly able to remember more. I found that to be true, but I'm not good at remembering to write things down in the first place, much less directly after awakening. Why do you think AI would be good for dream interpretation? Because dreams are full of different data, and a pattern recognizing device such as an LLM would be able to parse that better than an individual human? What makes bring up the falsification? I can see the rationality in that, but I also think it's trying to apply a rational interpretation to a sphere that eludes sense. Or are you saying that interpreting a dream is largely fruitless, similar to what interpretation an AI will spit out?

>>2901 Shakespeare was really interested in sleep and dreaming. Midsummer Night's Dream, for the most obvious instance. Dreams loosely remind me of madness, and maybe also foolishness/absurdity, which are also something Bill enjoys to use in his plays.

I had a crazy dream last night. I dreamed that I was back in undergrad hearing a guest lecturer discuss an esoteric monologue from a shakespeare play called "Eulogy for Max." The entire thing was in rhyming verse and it was typically read with a simple backing track of drums with various small props by English PhDs with endowed posts called "endowed readerships for the Eulogy." In my dream, the Eulogy was totally ubiquitous but rarely read in the normal course of ones life. There were like a dozen movies made about it, one by tim burton that bore stunning resemblance to "Alice in Wonderland" and most people were familiar with the general story - so it was part of the cultural mileu but sort of like the king-lear-meets-king-james-bible in that it was considered an intellectual feat to sit down and actually consume or memorize the thing. It described a boy hanging onto a broken steel bridge over a canyon in the himalayas. The boy wasn't strong enough to pull himself back onto the bridge, and the dad couldn't do anything to rescue him because he was out on a beam. The monologue - the part that the "readers" memorize - is ostensibly what the father said to his kid as the kid steadied himself and prepared for his strength to give way and fall off. I remember hanging back and speaking with the "don reince reader for the Eulogy" or whatever the fuck his post was called and he pulled out the rest of the play and read it together. Encapsulating the Eulogy was another story about an anthropologist and his research assistant who "discovered" the eulogy by interrogating an old man in a grass hut - the boy's grandfather - with some sort of neurofibromatosis that caused terrible overgrowth of skin. He was disabled and really poor and they just left the guy to seek out the canyon where shit went down. Eventually they come to the canyon and it's much larger than they anticipated and there's no evidence of a bridge anywhere. The research assistant steps out into the air and a lattice of beams shoot out from under his foot, running into the mist and crisscrossing everywhere like the ice from "Let it Go" in frozen when elsa's stomping around in her castle and shit. Pretty soon the entire valley is just covered by this blanket of metal. They walk out onto the metal and it flexes and bends. The research assistant turns to the anthropologist because the metal is buckling and asks "how much weight do you think this can support" and the anthropologist says "two pounds" and keeps walking for a while. Eventually the metal collapses and the assistant is left on an angled plane facing a hole in the metal. She's sliding down and she can't get back up and the anthropologist can't go out and get her because he would start sliding off too but she's moving slowly and so as she's slowly losing her grip and inching towards the edge of the abyss they start talking to each other and it's essentially the same thing as the Eulogy again. Crazy dream. Can't stop thinking about it.

Things that have been said to me in dreams: I thought I could escape from becoming Egon Schiele by knowing who Egon Schiele was, little did I know that's the fundamental paradox of the absurdity of ego. [Comically thick Scottish accent] I've scayed me pants, that's a director's first. I've soiled them, let's get hype [Aggressive African-American gangster] "Imma bust in my damn skirt" Analysis welcome.

I think and act differently in dreams than I do in waking life, but the underpinning awareness which contains the facets of personality and thinking is the same. I'm not a Buddhist but I can see where they're coming from with the whole reincarnation thing - my dream-self is not me, but at the same time, we share the same nameless awareness and without it neither of us would be. Occasionally I'll end up halfway between dreaming and waking, and my dream-self and my waking self will confuse each other for themselves.

The dreams I have, or at least the ones I can recall, are always particularly boring and makes me think I must not have a very exciting inner life. For example: I go for a walk, my shoe breaks, I repair the shoe when I get home, my door breaks, I repair the door, I go and lie down but I keep getting phone notifications which annoy me, etc. >>2915

>>2901 Shakespeare was really interested in sleep and dreaming. Midsummer Night's Dream, for the most obvious instance. Dreams loosely remind me of madness, and maybe also foolishness/absurdity, which are also something Bill enjoys to use in his plays.

+ Winter's Tale

Today in my dream I was told "Earth: a silent method to experience the clear light" (I was told that in English while I dream in Spanish) and I woke up and wrote it down, in dream it was refering to something put con our pizza to experience better a drug de had supposedly taken because we two were up our slices of pizza were a lot thinner than the ones given to two girls who didn't do anything. I searched the phrase after waking up but I got nothing relevant

>>3382

Today in my dream I was told "Earth: a silent method to experience the clear light" (I was told that in English while I dream in Spanish) and I woke up and wrote it down, in dream it was refering to something put con our pizza to experience better a drug de had supposedly taken because we two were up our slices of pizza were a lot thinner than the ones given to two girls who didn't do anything. I searched the phrase after waking up but I got nothing relevant

Earth: a silent method to experience if not even more the clear light* I forgot the if not even more

I saw a post by a guy who predicted this year’s plane crash in Washington and the Myanmar earthquake (he described it as “near Thailand”) because he saw them in a dream, and that was before they happened. I can’t find it now but it was interesting.

>>3079

I think and act differently in dreams than I do in waking life, but the underpinning awareness which contains the facets of personality and thinking is the same. I'm not a Buddhist but I can see where they're coming from with the whole reincarnation thing - my dream-self is not me, but at the same time, we share the same nameless awareness and without it neither of us would be. Occasionally I'll end up halfway between dreaming and waking, and my dream-self and my waking self will confuse each other for themselves.

Dreams are similar to psychedelic drugs for me: they simultaneously make me doubt and believe in the spiritual. Both occur through material means (brain synapses firings) and are somewhat absurd, unexplainable experiences which cannot be pinned down by a pure material explanation nor only a metaphysical one either.

I had a dream last night that an old internet friend killed himself and I was at his funeral. It was at night at a very high up level of a tall building that was quite futuristic. There was a big foyer or event type space with brass-colored carpet and huge windows with the nighttime stars visible. I used some sort of wall panel to check a social media feed because I didn't want to believe he was dead, but there were RIP comments on his 'profile'. It turned out he killed himself because the rent was too high and he hated the idea of having to pay too high rent. It sounds hilarious but in the dream I was devastated. I've never even met this guy in person, lol. I thought about contacting him as we have had a very limited internet 'friendship' a long time ago but decided against sending a 'hey I dreamed you killed yourself' email. I have had more than one dream that my pseudo-ex died as well with similar heartbreaking, very real-feeling terror that someone you knew had died and you won't have access to them anymore. In a way they are already somewhat dead to me as I don't have any contact with either of them and they may as well be dead for all I know. Sort of Schrodinger's friend type of deal.

>>3842

>>3079 Dreams are similar to psychedelic drugs for me: they simultaneously make me doubt and believe in the spiritual. Both occur through material means (brain synapses firings) and are somewhat absurd, unexplainable experiences which cannot be pinned down by a pure material explanation nor only a metaphysical one either.

Dreams are potentially the skeleton key to blowing open the mysteries of consciousness itself. To start, a person blind from birth will not have visual dreams, and a person deaf from birth will not have auditory dreams. But if a person is not blind or deaf in waking life, there is a part of the brain which combines sights and sounds from our experience to a profoundly greater degree than any of us are consciously capable of, and we can call this "recombination". This is something we all accept. However, if you've had an incredibly potent dream or psychedelic experience before, something will sort of permanently shift in your mind towards how you view this stuff, and concepts like Plato's forms begin to make a whole hell of a lot more sense. While meditating, I have seen in my mind's eye richly detailed ancient temples and forms of life with absolutely no analogue to life on there. Before these visions, I found all the DMT talk of aliens and temples super trite and bland, because it seemed trivial to explain that away with recombination. However, when you have the experience yourself, there's a profound inner feeling that you're interacting with something independent of you, and you feel from the bottom of your core that the path towards producing these visions cannot possibly lie in you alone. Nothing in childhood, nothing in your memories, absolutely nothing you've ever experienced combined in any way (save for using the absolute -loosest- definition of combination) could produce that experience. This doesn't mean aliens. It does mean that animals, nature, faces, and supposedly even temples exist independently from both us and the material world. Psychologists will always have a material explanation for this, but you really have to see it for yourself.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8134940/ >Understanding of the evolved biological function of sleep has advanced considerably in the past decade. However, no equivalent understanding of dreams has emerged. Contemporary neuroscientific theories often view dreams as epiphenomena, and many of the proposals for their biological function are contradicted by the phenomenology of dreams themselves. Now, the recent advent of deep neural networks (DNNs) has finally provided the novel conceptual framework within which to understand the evolved function of dreams. Notably, all DNNs face the issue of overfitting as they learn, which is when performance on one dataset increases but the network's performance fails to generalize (often measured by the divergence of performance on training versus testing datasets). This ubiquitous problem in DNNs is often solved by modelers via “noise injections” in the form of noisy or corrupted inputs. The goal of this paper is to argue that the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain's overfitting during its daily learning. That is, dreams are a biological mechanism for increasing generalizability via the creation of corrupted sensory inputs from stochastic activity across the hierarchy of neural structures. Sleep loss, specifically dream loss, leads to an overfitted brain that can still memorize and learn but fails to generalize appropriately. Herein this ”overfitted brain hypothesis” is explicitly developed and then compared and contrasted with existing contemporary neuroscientific theories of dreams. Existing evidence for the hypothesis is surveyed within both neuroscience and deep learning, and a set of testable predictions is put forward that can be pursued both in vivo and in silico.

>>2843 (OP) I almost never dream. Am I retarded?

Do you smoke/drink? On any meds? How many hrs of sleep a night?

>>4191 Don't smoke nor drink or take meds. I sleep about 7hrs each night give or take.

>>4193

>>2843 (OP) I almost never dream. Am I retarded?

Everyone dreams, several different dreams a night. But nobody can remember their dreams unless they wake up in the middle of one. Notice how even those who do remember their dream only describe one dream (perhaps with many different things happening in it, but only one nonetheless)? I also thought I was not dreaming but when I changed my alarm clock, I was waking up about in REM and noticed I did remember my dreams. My dreams are exceptionally non-vivid and boringly like my daily life, though. I dream about doing usual activities like cleaning and nothing even happens. I am Nietzsche's last man!

>4198 I didn't know that. Now that I think about it, I'm normally half-awake before my alarm rings. I always suspected it was because my life is just incredibly boring. Not much material for my brain to play around with lol.

>>4198

>>4193 Everyone dreams, several different dreams a night. But nobody can remember their dreams unless they wake up in the middle of one. Notice how even those who do remember their dream only describe one dream (perhaps with many different things happening in it, but only one nonetheless)? I also thought I was not dreaming but when I changed my alarm clock, I was waking up about in REM and noticed I did remember my dreams. My dreams are exceptionally non-vivid and boringly like my daily life, though. I dream about doing usual activities like cleaning and nothing even happens. I am Nietzsche's last man!

I often remember multiple dreams when I wake up. What makes you so certain that it's impossible?

>>4203

>>4198 I often remember multiple dreams when I wake up. What makes you so certain that it's impossible?

I said 'perhaps with many different things happening in it' but I should have been clearer. You can only remember the dream/s of the REM phase you were in when you woke up. Dreaming in the REM phase is just one long continuous event and when we wake up we forget or half-forget different parts, so it seems like separate things happening. Probably, the most emotionally salient parts of the dream get recalled and the boring ones get lost. Also, memory is malfunctional *while* we are dreaming hence lack of coherence: hence why the hallucinated events happening often don't even make logical sense. You dream of rushing to get to work to do something, but get sidetracked on the way and go onto something else, work never coming up again in the dream

>>4202

>4198 I didn't know that. Now that I think about it, I'm normally half-awake before my alarm rings. I always suspected it was because my life is just incredibly boring. Not much material for my brain to play around with lol.

If you are somewhat awake before your alarm rings, becuase your body's trained to wake at that hour, you'll be waking up slowly hence not remembering dreams unless they are particularly odd, unusual or unpleasant (so as to shock you awake). I bet you will recall better if an alarm actually woke you up

>>4222

>>4203 I said 'perhaps with many different things happening in it' but I should have been clearer. You can only remember the dream/s of the REM phase you were in when you woke up. Dreaming in the REM phase is just one long continuous event and when we wake up we forget or half-forget different parts, so it seems like separate things happening. Probably, the most emotionally salient parts of the dream get recalled and the boring ones get lost. Also, memory is malfunctional *while* we are dreaming hence lack of coherence: hence why the hallucinated events happening often don't even make logical sense. You dream of rushing to get to work to do something, but get sidetracked on the way and go onto something else, work never coming up again in the dream

I suppose I don't understand the distinction you're making. Let's say you have a dream that starts with you swimming in the deep ocean as some sort of sea creature, and then at some point you crawl onto land, become human, and suddenly it turns into a dream about being late for work. If I follow, you're saying that's one dream because there's a continuous narrative (the connective tissue of which may be forgotten upon waking up) which corresponds to a single cycle of REM sleep. I guess that sounds like two dreams to me, in terms of substantive content. I often have these strange telescoping dreams in which a whole narrative plays out with one set of stakes, then I wake up from that dream into another dream with different stakes. In the second dream (although you would say it's the same dream), I sometimes remember the events of the first dream and try to puzzle out what it signifies, before a new set of events take place. Some of my dreams have many many of these layers, and while I don't usually remember the whole structure of them, it feels more appropriate to me to label this as multiple dreams strung together rather than one. As for remembering dreams, I find that I remember my dreams best when I actively think about the importance of remembering as I fall asleep and when it occurs to me that I have to hold on to that information as I wake up. As I'm sure everyone has experiences, the half-life of a remembered dream upon waking is very short! Only by keeping a dream journal by my bed have I been able to write any of them down in any detail. It seems depressing to me to have boring dreams-- sometimes after waking up I feel like I've just seen an incredible film with very deep significance, although once I go through the details I've reconstructed and written down, a lot of the magic is gone (maybe unsurprisingly). I wonder what it is about people that make them dream different things?

A half remembered dream from a long time ago-- some sort of long dramatic space opera story. There were several interconnected sub-plots, an intergalactic trade baron trying to break an embargo, a slave trying to stow away on a freighter to freedom, a high fashion district with bulbous golden outfits. Not sure if I was a character or just an observer. I remember feeling like I was more the author of the narrative than a participant. Some sort of climactic argument or revelation at the end between the stowaway slave and an older sage-like figure.

One more dream I remember from childhood. A large battle between two forces wearing medieval (Japanese?) armor. I am the general of one army, looking down from a hill at the enemy forces. Some rousing of the troops and boosting of morale before the battle starts. I am riding on horseback at the front of my army. The first one to be killed is me. I think maybe a stray arrow hits me in the chest before the two sides clash, but almost immediately afterward I am cleanly beheaded by an enemy soldier. There is a small marshy grove with a shallow lake surrounded by reeds. A small (red?) curved bridge, wide enough for maybe 5 men to walk side by side is above the bridge. This is where I am beheaded. The view is from underneath the surface of the water. It is unusually clear water given how muddy the swamp around it is. I see my decapitated head falling into the water, and the cloudy red blood from my neck is drifting up and staining the water red. There are sounds of bloodshed from above and soon more bodies and dismembered limbs fall into the water as well. Bodies line both sides of the water. Even though my head is now resting on the bottom of the lake, I can still clearly see the expression of surprise on my face. I was probably 10 when I had this dream but it was totally clear to me in full detail when I woke up. I never wrote down any of the details, and have not thought about it in a long time, but the memory is still very vivid. Although it was sort of startling, I was not scared-- I wouldn't call it a nightmare. Writing about dreams just now summoned the memory from seemingly nowhere, funny the mind works.

>>4226

One more dream I remember from childhood. A large battle between two forces wearing medieval (Japanese?) armor. I am the general of one army, looking down from a hill at the enemy forces. Some rousing of the troops and boosting of morale before the battle starts. I am riding on horseback at the front of my army. The first one to be killed is me. I think maybe a stray arrow hits me in the chest before the two sides clash, but almost immediately afterward I am cleanly beheaded by an enemy soldier. There is a small marshy grove with a shallow lake surrounded by reeds. A small (red?) curved bridge, wide enough for maybe 5 men to walk side by side is above the bridge. This is where I am beheaded. The view is from underneath the surface of the water. It is unusually clear water given how muddy the swamp around it is. I see my decapitated head falling into the water, and the cloudy red blood from my neck is drifting up and staining the water red. There are sounds of bloodshed from above and soon more bodies and dismembered limbs fall into the water as well. Bodies line both sides of the water. Even though my head is now resting on the bottom of the lake, I can still clearly see the expression of surprise on my face. I was probably 10 when I had this dream but it was totally clear to me in full detail when I woke up. I never wrote down any of the details, and have not thought about it in a long time, but the memory is still very vivid. Although it was sort of startling, I was not scared-- I wouldn't call it a nightmare. Writing about dreams just now summoned the memory from seemingly nowhere, funny the mind works.

I had a dream that stuck with me from when I was 10 or so, too. Less so the plot, moreso that I was shot in the gut and killed. But the feeling of dying was so palpable, it felt like I was really sinking into the world around me and dissolving. And that was going to be it. And then I woke up. But I really thought about that dream a lot, as the feeling stuck with me. Now, I can only recall the feeling of the feeling, really.

Reading through Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy right now, and I found his point regarding the recognition of similarity between dreaming and reality as the differentiation between the philosophical and non philosophically minded to be interesting. And the more general point that art is, at its roots, a tapping into a dream realm. Throughout my own life, I've often considered the world illusory. Not necessarily fantastic, like dreams can often be, but just on the cusp of being popped like a bubble. Or that one day, I'll really wake up and realize it was all just a game, or a dream, or a big joke. That feeling is often different than how my own dreams often play out though, however.

>>4394

Reading through Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy right now, and I found his point regarding the recognition of similarity between dreaming and reality as the differentiation between the philosophical and non philosophically minded to be interesting. And the more general point that art is, at its roots, a tapping into a dream realm. Throughout my own life, I've often considered the world illusory. Not necessarily fantastic, like dreams can often be, but just on the cusp of being popped like a bubble. Or that one day, I'll really wake up and realize it was all just a game, or a dream, or a big joke. That feeling is often different than how my own dreams often play out though, however.

I experience something similar. It's as if any moment, the curtain will be pulled back and it will be revealed that this was all one big, silly play, and everyone else would be surprised, but I'd just stand there calmly because I've known this is how it works for years. Life is basically one long, realistic dream.

>>4396

>>4394 I experience something similar. It's as if any moment, the curtain will be pulled back and it will be revealed that this was all one big, silly play, and everyone else would be surprised, but I'd just stand there calmly because I've known this is how it works for years. Life is basically one long, realistic dream.

Sometimes I am worried it's a premonition of my latent genetic propensity for schizophrenia, but I figure that might happen no matter what. And if it was going to, all the drugs probably would've kickstarted it. Evidently, I spent a lot of time trying to find out the cause and reason for this feeling (is it me, is it reality?). As I get older, I find myself less inquisitive. I don't know if it's because I'm becoming more boring, or rather, if I were to find out that "all the world's a stage," I would shrug and say of course it is.

>>4398

>>4396 Sometimes I am worried it's a premonition of my latent genetic propensity for schizophrenia, but I figure that might happen no matter what. And if it was going to, all the drugs probably would've kickstarted it. Evidently, I spent a lot of time trying to find out the cause and reason for this feeling (is it me, is it reality?). As I get older, I find myself less inquisitive. I don't know if it's because I'm becoming more boring, or rather, if I were to find out that "all the world's a stage," I would shrug and say of course it is.

>Evidently, I spent a lot of time trying to find out the cause and reason for this feeling (is it me, is it reality?). It's actually not hard to explain. Plato and Kant are more or less correct. When we pet a dog for example, there's something undeniably real corresponding to the dog, but all the things we perceive about him like his size, shape, smell, etc. don't actually belong to him -- they're projected onto the dog during the act of perception. Not only this, but the brain clearly has organized and structured "paths" with complicated hierarchies to decipher the reality-stuff (we can call it noumena) that it encounters. This is an enormous claim, but I've had some experiences while meditating that led me to this conclusion. Like psychedelic drug users, I've encountered my own ancient temples and bizarre aliens while exploring my mind. However, the mindfuck part of this all is that there's a very deep, profound gut feeling that what you're encountering could not have emerged from your own mind. It's just *WAY* too detailed, too complex, too far removed from anything you *ever* think about, from anything you've ever seen. It's a little disturbing and fucked up really. All the stuff you believe actually makes up reality exists inside your head, or in some weird spiritual plane, whereas what you formerly believed to be "reality" is really more like code for the program called perception to run. Dreaming/drugs/meditation are basically like different codes. This info will probably be useful someday, but IMO right now it's just really creepy.

My dreams are usually about driving a car on a highway or walking through a barren concrete landscape. Sometimes I dream about exploring a fictitious European capital (always the same one, I could probably draw a map). Last time I even got to visit a church with a mahogany rood screen and that's probably the most interesting dream I've had lately. If I see people in my dreams they are almost always slim white women with dark hair. They never say anything to me. I'm jealous of people who have dreams with a coherent narrative or can use their dreams as inspiration for their creative work.

>>4407

My dreams are usually about driving a car on a highway or walking through a barren concrete landscape. Sometimes I dream about exploring a fictitious European capital (always the same one, I could probably draw a map). Last time I even got to visit a church with a mahogany rood screen and that's probably the most interesting dream I've had lately. If I see people in my dreams they are almost always slim white women with dark hair. They never say anything to me. I'm jealous of people who have dreams with a coherent narrative or can use their dreams as inspiration for their creative work.

You should sketch out a map, I would be interested. Dreamscapes are always fascinating. Maybe it will match up to somewhere you've been irl?

https://archive.org/details/lovelysweetdream/File001.jpg

>>4412

https://archive.org/details/lovelysweetdream/File001.jpg

I always meant to try out that game. Nice little journal.