Dreams

[labria]

All this osx86 stuff plus my WiFi security project is slowly killing me.

 

Yesterday, I was sleeping with a girl, and after waking up I realised that I was dreaming that she's a BIG WHITE PowerBook and I was a USB Wifi card, but she had no driver for me to be installed correctly. It was scary, really )))))

 

 

PS: Excuse me for flooding this nice forum with such {censored}, but I wanted to share it with someone understanding, and noone aroud me would really know what i'm talking about

[Colonel]

you think that's a bad dream. I once had a dream that my dad was Bill Gates. Now THAT'S a nightmare.

[lain]

OMG

Big White powerbooks aren't so sexy.. Maybe you was sleeping with the wrong girl!

[labria]

The girl was allright

[Swad]

Wow.

 

There is SO much wrong with that dream.

[Korrupted]

That is one messed dream, labria.

[quixos]

i had a dream with "OpenGL.framework" in it. geek is a four letter word!

[Ouch]

I wonder what freud would say?

[labria]

Freud would say that her not having drivers for me barely means that she's not my gf

[Korrupted]

LOL. That is probably true.

[Metrogirl]

If you want an authorative opinion ... well, my degree just happens to be in psychology and I studied dreams and their mechanisms quite extensively.

 

I subscribe to the concept that dreams are the conscious mind becoming aware of the normally-hidden process of transferring short-term memory from one part of the brain to longer-term storage in another. (The neocortex to the hippocampus if you want the technical terms.) There's a bunch of work by people such as Snyder and Stevens to support this theory and if you Google you can find more than you ever wished to know about it all.

 

In simple terms, the things you do today are only 'half-stored'. Tonight when you dream you will transfer the whole lot to longer-term storage. Normally as you are asleep you don't know this is going on. However at some points your sleep will be lighter than usual so your left hemisphere, which is concerned with logic and speech, partly switches on and 'catches' the thoughts in mid-transfer. This is particularly likely to happen when you've been asleep a long time, which is why we often remember dreams we had just before becoming fully awake. The logical half of the brain attempts to make sense of what it perceives as sensory input, as if the previous day's memories are actually happening, and it constructs a 'story' by filling in the missing pieces. The left-brain is always very keen to make sense of what's going on and it has an amazing capacity for filling in the blanks even when it has practically nothing to go on. Often it cooks up complete nonsense in its attempt to fill in more blanks than substance.

 

So if you see an attractive girl today, you work on a device driver, notice the wireless card in your laptop, and open an envelope, all those thoughts might be picked up by your half-conscious mind as they get processed during the night and you will build them all into your dream. That girl might be trying to put a wireless card in an envelope marked with a device driver name. Or connect to your laptop. Or anything. Think about it, you can nearly always identify every individual component in your dream as having roots in what you did the previous day.

 

What the brain also does, though, is to wrap those components up with other things that are going on in your life. So in our friend's example, if he was having some doubts about the girl with whom he was sleeping, that could affect the left brain's interpretation of the information and cause an uncomfortable aspect to the dream. Finding the 'colourations' that cause a dream to play one story rather than another is the life-blood of many psychotherapists.

 

Usually when you are fairly contented and there's nothing significant in your life your dreams will be harmless and amusing nonsense. If there's a lot going on, your dreams may have a more sinister tone. But it's all those basic previous-day thoughts going through, and your left-brain is doing all the story telling.

 

This is quite different from the 'dream' you get just as you're falling asleep, when your thoughts become more and more silly as the logic part of the brain switches off. Those dreams are actually fun to track back if you're woken in the first few minutes; it's incredible how crazy your thoughts get.

 

As with most aspects of psychology, there are other theories and some people may take issue with the view I've just given. But it makes the most sense to me and a whole bunch of other well-qualified people.

 

Oh, and I am NOT going to offer dream analysis in this forum, so don't ask! I've said all I want on the subject!

[Swad]

Wow, I feel a lot smarter after reading that Metrogirl.

[labria]

Wow. Thanks Metrogirl. It's really interesting...

And, considering some parts of the day before that I left outside of the story, somewhat explaining.

Thanks!

[Swad]

Wow. Thanks Metrogirl. It's really interesting...

And, considering some parts of the day before that I left outside of the story, somewhat explaining.

Thanks!

 

What? You can't just say that and not tell us what you're talking about.

 

Can you give us the family-friendly version?

[bofors]

I subscribe to the concept that dreams are the conscious mind becoming aware of the normally-hidden process of transferring short-term memory from one part of the brain to longer-term storage in another.

...

In simple terms, the things you do today are only 'half-stored'. Tonight when you dream you will transfer the whole lot to longer-term storage. Normally as you are asleep you don't know this is going on. However at some points your sleep will be lighter than usual so your left hemisphere, which is concerned with logic and speech, partly switches on and 'catches' the thoughts in mid-transfer. This is particularly likely to happen when you've been asleep a long time, which is why we often remember dreams we had just before becoming fully awake. The logical half of the brain attempts to make sense of what it perceives as sensory input, as if the previous day's memories are actually happening, and it constructs a 'story' by filling in the missing pieces. The left-brain is always very keen to make sense of what's going on and it has an amazing capacity for filling in the blanks even when it has practically nothing to go on. Often it cooks up complete nonsense in its attempt to fill in more blanks than substance.

...

 

While some of this might be true, I expect that we have evolved to have dreams which are "useful" to our survival. In particular, your theory does not seem to directly address "nightmares" nor "recurring" dreams.

 

What? You can't just say that and not tell us what you're talking about.

 

Can you give us the family-friendly version?

 

Yes, and exactly how big was this girl?

[Metrogirl]

While some of this might be true, I expect that we have evolved to have dreams which are "useful" to our survival. In particular, your theory does not seem to directly address "nightmares" nor "recurring" dreams.

 

It's not my theory actually, it's a well-researched proposition to which I add my support. As the model goes, nightmares and recurring dreams are a factor of the logic circuits being pre-occupied with some real life issue and the nightly trundling of mundane everyday events through the system is seized upon and constructed into something which relates to the problems at hand. Those transient memories provide building blocks, but the left-brain is more than capable of throwing in some of its own.

 

As for dreams evolving into being useful for survival, I'm inclined to think that's a misconception. If dreams had a truly significant role, don't you think we'd have evolved to be able to remember them rather better than we can? When you dream of doing something outrageous and later think "Wow, that was a warning not to do whatever" I think that's probably your waking logic being a bit shocked at what you dreamed about. For example, I dreamed of making sexual advances to my boss and was horrified when I woke up. It could be argued that this was a 'dream for survival', telling me that enacting the dream would not be good for my future (or it might be, who can say) but I think in reality I'd built that dream up from the previous day's insignificant events (watched a film with some sexual content, had conversations with the boss, etc.) and that it wasn't anything more than a distortion of those. I do think that we have evolved to learn from experience and that recollection of dreams adds to our experience, but that it's this way round and not a case of the dreams being an evolutionary process to that end.

 

I have recurring dreams about travelling by rail. As a child I used to travel by train a lot, but I don't have any real interest in trains per se. Somewhere locked in my memory are all those trips and bingo, out they pop when my rather limited left-brain is stuck for something to cement all the transient day's ideas together.

 

But, you know, the problem with psychology is that it is all theory. It's this person's theories or that person's theories, and all we can do is try to make the theories stick with justification and explanation. We now think that some once-revered ideas are complete nonsense and other ideas come into fashion to replace them. Unlike a computer we cannot look at the circuit diagram of the brain with any confidence. We probably know less than 5% of what really happens in there. Pharmacological and electro-surgical techniques give us some insight but also conflicting information. You may be absolutely right - if you write a paper, there will be many people who will rush to your side and support 'Bofors' Dream Evolution Model'. More likely, it's a combination of 'my' theory, your theory, lots of other theories and a random element which makes one theory fit tonight's double feature and another explain tomorrow's. Whatever, it's one hell of a fascinating topic.

[labria]

What? You can't just say that and not tell us what you're talking about.

 

Can you give us the family-friendly version?

 

Heh.

You see Mash, i'm not really sure i wanna share my life with some 20k people i dont really know anything about...

I could tell it personally, or in a freindly chat, but right here...

And, this would be a really long story to really understand why i found this dream interesting and Metrogirl's explanation useful.

 

Yes, and exactly how big was this girl?

 

She's 24, one year older than me.

Why you ask that?

[bofors]

As for dreams evolving into being useful for survival, I'm inclined to think that's a misconception. If dreams had a truly significant role, don't you think we'd have evolved to be able to remember them rather better than we can?

That sounds like arguing that the subconscious is not "significant" simply because it is not conscious per se. So, no, I do not consider the fact that dreams are often not remembered to somehow trivialize their importance.

 

Now with respect to evolution, we should expect dreams and their mechanisms to have evolved just like every other aspect of ourselves. It is clear to me that at least at some level dreams are used to work out subconcious problems.

 

And in any case, those with "better" dreams will have an evolutionary advantage. For example, let's say that some people are driven insane by their dreams. They have "bad" dreams, chronically. That would impair their surviability.

 

While we are the subject of dreams, the movie Until the End of the World has to do with people becoming addicted to watching recording of their dreams and definitely worth watching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Until_the_End_of_the_World

 

 

Why you ask that?

 

I asked you how "big" she was (not how old), because you compared her to something "BIG" and "WHITE".

 

Perhaps this is not an issue in Russia, but us poor Americans have a serious problem with obesity. In fact, this is so bad here that there is an epidemic of Type II Diabetes that just resulted in manufacturers voluntarily removing soda pop from schools.

 

Personally, I do not find fat girls at all attractive and if I was shacking up with one, I am sure I would have some "BIG" and "WHITE" nightmares too. Hmm... yet another evolutionary argument for the value of dreams.

[Mr. Bond]

Heh.

You see Mash, i'm not really sure i wanna share my life with some 20k people i dont really know anything about...

I could tell it personally, or in a freindly chat, but right here...

And, this would be a really long story to really understand why i found this dream interesting and Metrogirl's explanation useful.

 

 

 

She's 24, one year older than me.

Why you ask that?

 

Pfft...you really think 20k+ people are going to read this thread? We're all friends here! It's not like we want a video, or play-by-play analysis (though either would be nice )

 

And on the subject of dreams...If I get a good night's sleep, I usually don't get weird ones like that. But when I do...they can be very weird. Example...after wacthing Die Hard one night, I had strange dream involving Bruce Willis, Elevator shafts, and catching Furby's he was throwing to me(remeber those?).

 

Analysis would be greatly appreciated Metrogirl.

 

Personally, I do not find fat girls at all attractive and if I was shacking up with one, I am sure I would have some "BIG" and "WHITE" nightmares too. Hmm... yet another evolutionary argument for the value of dreams.

 

[Blackice]

I haven't dreamed anything in years. Thank God.