You can train yourself to remember dreams if you start writing down everything you remember.
You can also learn to recognize that you are in a dream and take control (look up lucid dreaming).
Or don’t, maybe we are supposed to forget them. For instance I do not want to remember my dreams as I have barely ever had a pleasant one. I’d rather wake up in blissful ignorance of whatever shit my broken brain threw together while it tries to suffocate me.
just wanted to point out that most people don’t have a lifetime of nightly nightmares, and your could be eased with some therapy, or at least mushrooms and puppies.
and if you LIKE nightmares and want more, slap on a nicotine patch right before you go to bed.
I used that stop smoking drug back in the day. Forgot the name, makes you ill if you use? Holy shit the dreams!
I’d have the most horrific nightmares, but they didn’t bother me in the slightest. I loved going to bed, it was like going to a new horror movie every night.
Now I have even a slighty spooky dream and sometimes have to turn the light on to shake it. Speaking of, there was a “dog thing” I dreamed the other night that’s going straight in my next horror short.
Champix?
Chantix, and yeah, that’s probably it. I had the most vivid dreams on it.
ok, so yeah. The only time i’ve ever had a sleep paralysis experience was when i went to bed with a nicotine patch on. I “woke up” (but not really) to some random blonde lady creepy-smiling while standing over me in my bed. I tired to scream and push her away, but i was totally frozen and couldn’t do anything. After a couple of seconds, though, I woke up for real and she obviously wasn’t there at all. The strangest part is that when i did wake up, it didn’t really feel like I had. It felt like i was awake the whole time and she just disappeared at exactly the same time i regained motor control. It was absolutely terrifying.
My brain literally doesn’t function properly when I sleep, it doesn’t send signals for my lungs to exhale so it probably is doing other things wrong as well.
Once I started on CPAP there was a huge drop in adrenaline shocks to my heart while I slept.
I subscribe to the idea that dreams are a byproduct of your brain defragmenting itself, or priming its neural-net with images trained during the daytime.
To remember the byproduct might undermine this process, in the same way that feeding a NN its own output might produce garbage output later.
The recent AI generated videos are such an accurate portrayal of dreams that there must be some parallels there
Being able to become lucid in your dreams means you can also have a certain level of control and face whatever it is that causes that fear, and get over it
I don’t have fear of my dreams, they are just incredibly disjointed and sometimes jarring if I do remember them. It isn’t stemming from abuse or psychological damage that I could go to therapy for, it is likely just because my brain doesn’t properly function during sleep.
Signals that should tell me to breathe don’t send so I get deprived of oxygen until other signals finally kick in and start my breathing again for a few seconds before the whole thing starts again, for every minute I’m asleep without a CPAP machine I am not breathing for 20 seconds or more.
Lots of adrenaline shocks through the night as my heart gets stressed and I’m sure the mix of stress hormones and neurochemicals mess with how my brain processes dreams. It is akin to the feeling people have described of a bad drug trip.
Every single dream I have is lucid. Nightly I live entire lifetimes and wake up and have to convince myself this is reality and I don’t have those friends and families. To this day there are times I have to ask my irl friends and family if a certain memory is real or not.
It’s interesting but also heartbreaking and exhausting.
This is anecdotal, but I read a story by someone who learned to lucid dream and regretted it. They said they never felt like they slept anymore, because they’re lucid all day and night.
No idea about that, it never interfered with my sleep but I also didn’t do it frequently. These days I don’t even remember my dreams the majority of the time and I’ve kind of lost interest in the whole thing, takes discipline to accomplish in the first place and I kinda lost interest TBH.
As with the above posters, any idea if regularly dream journaling (and potentially lucid dreaming) is actually healthy or not?
I say this as someone who gets pretty bad nightmares and has had numerous lucid dreams (even transitioning from nightmare to lucid dream)
I have no idea if further engaging with my dream state is healthy or not?
I have never heard of it being dangerous before, but if I had to speculate I’d say it probably depends on how you use it: You might be able to take command to end the nightmare but I’m not a doctor or psychiatrist but maybe in avoiding the nightmares altogether you’re denying yourself some sort of personal growth or insight?
The real answer is probably: More research needs to be done.
It’s probably safe. The very reason I started getting into lucid dreaming was to control my nightmares.
On rare occasion I’ve taken control of nightmares in a Lucid dream state - typically waiking up momentarily and then going back to sleep.
I’m just not sure if the psychic cost of having these types of intense dreams encoded in memory is healthier than just sleeping and not remembering.
A bit plagued by my dreams ( thereby my subconscious ) if I can remember them.
That was the question I guess, I hear the idea I should engage more to remember dreams, but not sure if that is healthy for people to do who have vivid and disturbing dreams regularly (eg. Under attack, people I love getting hurt ect…)
I’ve heard training for lucid dreaming can kinda fuck you up, because it becomes harder for you to distinguish between dream and reality.
You can always stop trying to distinguish between dreams and reality and just accept whatever you’re experiencing as a sort of superposition of both.
The whole point of lucid dreaming is to take control over your dream so you can do all the things that you can’t do in real life. So if you start to lose a sense of when you’re in reality you might end up trying to do things you’d only do in your dreams.
The more fantastical elements of lucid dreams are as clearly unreal as playing a videogame. You know you’re dreaming and can control it.
My problem has been more that I can’t remember if something mundane happened in a dream or reality. I’ve had and remembered entire conversations which turned out to be dreams when I referenced them to the person in question.
A lot of my dreams - lucid or not - are just me doing my daily stuff, fully in control of my actions but not the scenario I am in.
Yeah that’s the worst kind of dream for me: the mundane realistic ones. It’s usually some combination of plausible anxiety-inducing real world issues, and of course the false memories.
Livin’ the dream (literally)
Schrodinger consciousnesses
Lucid dreaming literally means you’re aware you’re in a dream.
Thanks, Sherlock.
IDK about that, but I’ve only done it a few times. Mostly I just used to to fly around my neighborhood like they’d do in old Kung Fu movies.
I’ve tried it when I was younger (20s). I don’t really remember my dreams now. It is something like a muscle you need to keep using. Write down sentences, draw pics, doodle anything that will help you remember when you wake up.
I didn’t have problems distinguishing from reality, but I did want to sleep a lot more.
HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM.
- Death of the Discworld
Terry Pratchett - G.N.U
More than relevant. Stolen from. This person just slightly reworded an XKCD comic into a tweet.
Yeah, that was my thought too, though it is possible they came up with it independently. Or forgot they read that xkcd which came out 18 years ago (fuck!).
It has happened to Randall himself before (see the header)
Sex is weird too. You undress and make your self vulnerable and expend a lot of energy and risk catching a disease and then fall asleep. Either we do it for fun or to create a parasite that we have to take are of.
To be fair, in comparison to living, it is a lot of fun.
And clothes are restrictive anyway
Most animals don’t have clothes to take off and don’t fuck at sleep time
Humans are odd, and I think our sleeping after sex is just that we’ve structured society to leave the best time for sex late
I never slept right after sex as a youth as the end of the educational day and when my parents would get home left only daylight hours with sufficiency privacy
check out the film “Dark City”
Just writing to confirm that I am typing this during the daytime, and it is in front of me, and I am not just some memory of a comment you saw on lemmy
Or the Trek episode Schisms
Fantastic flick
Every time I lucid dream, I end up waking myself up with something stupid like tripping as I step off a curb.
Just realizing I’m dreaming wakes me up every damn time. The only times I’ve gotten to have some fun is when I don’t question why the laws of physics suddenly changed and just go with it. The second I start going, “Wait a second, I think I’m drea-” boom, I wake up. It’s infuriating, I just want to fly around or explore the ocean depths or some shit.
Whenever I realize I’m dreaming I usually just get really excited and it accidentally wakes me up. I don’t get time to do cool stuff.
Human memories are stored in flesh
Flesh has to be replaced constantly
When you sleep your memories are being copied and reallocated to new flesh, the things you experience in dreams are just a series of incredibly losely related themes and concepts. In general human memory searching relies on association of concepts rather than any sorted lists or some other silly inorganic solution.
That sounds cool, but I don’t think it’s strictly true.
Memories that have many pathways won’t be lost due to a few broken pathways and are reinforced with further experience: learning or remembering.
Others are simply gone with neurons dying or the pathways getting severed.
Neurogenesis doesn’t happen as much in adults, they’re the longest living cells in our bodies - adult neurons last a lifetimeI boiled down the complex neurological system of organic memory in living beings down to a paragraph, of course there is room for a lot of nuance and sophistry.
I believe this to. Like ram being transfered to slower media but filtered, parsed, etc to keep the important parts.
I guess this goes here :
https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ?si=TXevA3dqx-9hyZ7u “They’re made of meat”Flesh has to be replaced constantly
That’s more than a tad inaccurate.
Some tissues live a lot longer than others but as a general statement it holds true.
EDIT: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0375-9.epdf
Almost everyone does it almost every day, it would be more strange if everyone was freaking out about it.
8 hours sounds nice. I usually manage about 4 or 5
Obligatory sleep hacks from a person who loves sleep:
- Clean bedsheets
- No phone in bed
- Same sleep time every day
- Same wake time every day
- Exercise during the day
- No lights in the room. No LEDs, no street lights
- White noise
If you do any one of these your sleep will improve. If it doesn’t, I give you full permission to flame me and my dog.
White noise is critical and underrated.
I have slept many nights, on average about once a day for many years. In my experience, it’s the routine that has the most effect. I know it’s super difficult to maintain but going to bed and waking up same time everyday is the key.
This concept is known as “sleep hygiene” if anyone wants to read further.
What does your poor dog have to do with this?
Ear plugs have been a life saver for me. I can’t sleep without them now, fortunately they sell them in huge containers so I only have to buy them like every year and half.
Do you put in a fresh pair every night?
No, I just keep them in a clean spot and they last about a week before they start looking dingy. Then I use a new pair.
I don’t get a lot of earwax though so someone who’s ears make more will probably have to change them more frequently.
Don’t have children
no way. sleep is great but sleeping in is glorious.
The natural selection implications for dream amnesia are wild.
What do you mean, care to elaborate?
My 100% BS conjectures are:
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to save energy versus committing the dream to long term memory
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to facilitate childhood/adolescent development, as object permanence is learned you need the external world to be the consistent one. You can’t waste energy learning to adapt to the worlds in your dreams in later childhood.
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as adults dream amnesia can help avoid relived or newly generated trauma incurred as the begin processes your external experience.
Idk, there’s lots of possible benefits. In not about to do the research paper deep dive. But the wild part is that dreaming developed and the mechanism for not remembering the dreams also developed and there was a selective pressure for that to be the case.
Yeah it’s super interesting to think about, thanks for explaining!
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I used to be able to remember my dreams, or at the very least I would wake up with a sensation that I had had a dream, but anymore though I just feel like a blank slate, like nothing happened. If I dream anymore I’m completely losing them because I don’t even have the feeling that I’m forgetting anything, it’s just blank when I sleep now.
If you happen to smoke weed that can do it. I’ve barely dreamt (that I remember) in years
That’s one of my favorite parts of weed, I want to sleep, not have to watch some shitty movie I’m not able to control or interact with.
Right? I can’t fucking stand it when I do remember a dream now. They are all hyper realistic most of the time, and hard to distinguish from a vague memory
You hear people talking about the weird and out there dreams they have, where they’re like a humanoid watermelon flying though space to save the universe from an invasion of butter demons, then there’s my dreams, with me, being me, but dumber, weaker and mute.
Yes. It’s fucking terrible lmao
That’s a weird way to look at dreams. To me, they’re extra entertainment with stuff that I literally cannot and will not ever experience outside of them, like another day where I dreamed I was in a rock band’s show inside a garage/arcade, but both the band and the music I was “listening” to were wholly made up in my mind
That’s the problem. Mine are not stuff I can not do. It’s normal fucking shit I have to separate from real life in the morning
I’ve always heard that weed smokers have less dreams, but as someone who kinda started doing it more regularly within the last year, I haven’t experienced that? Honestly I think I tend to have more vivid and weird dreams when I’ve smoked before bed. Do some people not get the REM suppression?
I wouldn’t know, I haven’t looked into it to that degree. Not surprising for different people to experience different side effects. I’ve been an all day every day smoker for well over a decade
I used to smoke weed, but that was 20 years ago and I hadn’t ever been a big smoker.
Alcohol does it too. I’ve heard people say that’s what dts are. Your brain dreaming while you’re awake.
I’m not familiar with dts. What is that?
I’m a former alcoholic (always an alcoholic but not a sip in over a decade) so that checks out too
delirium tremens. -sober alcoholic who is a bad speller. I probably should have capitalized it like DTs maybe
I still wouldn’t have known, so thank you for telling me. I’ll have to look it up. I was extremely lucky and had a clean break from it
If I don’t smokadaweed before bed I do tend to remember them. One of the reasons I try not to smoke late in the evening.
I have the opposite issue. Really stressful, anxiety inducing, or nightmare dreams.
Weed fixes that problem for me by being an organic skip button for dreaming
My understanding is you get less rem tho and less rest as a side effect.
Double sided sword, or whatever
Yeah sadly weed is really bad for your sleep, akin to alcohol.
When I stop smoking for a few weeks, my dreams become dramatically more vivid and my sleep quality is much better.
Yeeeee I should hit a proper cleanse again… Hard to get through that first wave of bananas for dreams 😅
havent had 8 hours of “lucid coma” since before most of you were born
Yeah me either. In the last 24;hrs I got 2 hrs then a little later 40 mins then a number of hours later one more hour.
Wait do y’all actually dream every day? For the full time of sleeping?
I only dream after I’ve already slept way more than enough for the day and even then it’s like a less than 10% chance of having any dreams at all
Everyone dreams every night, but not everyone remembers their dreams in the morning. I don’t remember my dreams most of the time.
Everyone dreams every night
Really doesn’t seem to be the case for me, there’s a pretty noticeable difference between ‘I had a dream but quickly forget what it was about’ and not dreaming at all
You forgot about it before you woke up.
If you have a REM cycle, which you should have at least one every night, you are definitely dreaming.
REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement, and it’s because you’re looking around at things within your dreams. Unlike the rest of the body, the eyes are not typically affected by the natural process of sleep paralysis (the system your body uses to stay still so you’re not constantly acting out your dreams in bed.)
Fascinatingly, the brain/sub-conscious naturally purges dream memories as soon as it deems them ‘not-reality’. You can train your brain to rememember your dreams more if you write them down as soon as you wake up, this tells your sub-concious that those memories are actually worth remembering.
Capital won’t care about dreams until they can inject commercials, propaganda, etc.
Luckily the dream state is still one of the few remaining surrealist safe places to us humans.
