Thanks; it was tough to choose a subject to end the LJ portion of the project with.
Lovely memory. I never saw your old house but I can picture it, and you with the enormous red-ribboned teddy bear, ready to play.
It's fascinating how memory is transmuted - dreams and stories we're told can become real, even vivid, memories, while the memories of things we've actually done blend, shift, and tangle together.
It is fascinating, in a bunch of ways. Some -- I might even say most -- of my earliest memories are of dreams that are still very clear.
On the relationship between dream-memory and real-memory, I've also been mulling over the extent to which a dream event/memory "counts" as "real." One difference seems to be that dreams have short-term rather than long-term impact. But the example I've been thinking about is one of the more violent dreams I had a few years ago in which I cut a man's throat. I can still see and feel the rough stubble on his jaw and neck, his sweat-salty skin, the box-cutter I used, the tough ripping of the knife through the skin and artery on its way to the windpipe. None of it was real, but it was based on a combination of perceptions from real life. That might not be what it's like to slit a throat at all, yet I don't have to imagine what it would be like because I've done it, or done a version of it. So -- to what extent do I know what it's like to slit a throat?
That's a really good question. Sometimes I wake up with such a vivid sense that I've felt exactly what it's like to touch a particular person, or to be shot in the neck (a numb, cold seizing-up, like taking in a sudden breath you can't exhale), or to be lifted off the ground by the waves of heat streaming off a raging urban fire, that I wonder whether our subconscious minds don't have some strangely accurate way of taking scraps of sensation from our actual experience and assembling "new" sensory memories. It would make sense - you know what it feels like to touch someone's jawline, you know what it feels like to cut through something resistant, so the experience your mind manufactures is probably pretty accurate, because it's a blend of those remembered sensations. But then, since I've never ACTUALLY been shot in the neck (touch wood), I have no way of knowing whether my dream about it was accurate or only persuasively vivid.
By the way, your chillingly wonderful description of the dream reminded me of the most enthralling and horrible (in the way that makes you unable to look away) throat-cutting scene I've ever read in a book, which was in Wild Boy (which I really think you would like, incidentally; it's a fictionalised account of the true story of a child found in a village in France shortly after the Revolution. The boy had been living wild in the forests for somewhere between five and nine years. The book follows the young Revolutionary doctor who tries to teach him to speak, and the governess who cares for him. It's lushly written and touches on everything from politics to contemporary views of mental illness to the philosophy of human nature). What gets me about it is what gets me about your description, and about dreams: the sheer awful vividness, almost sensuality, of the act. It imprints on you, I find, and it's difficult to shake the sense of actually having DONE it once you've got that sensual memory fixed in your mind.
If Wild Boy is the same story they turned into the movie by Francois Truffaut, then we studied it in a Nature of Language class in high school. It was a fascinating case of the extent to which a person could acquire language that late in life. (It's hard to test something like that, since it requires isolating children from all forms of human language.) I would like to read the book some day.
And if our subconscious can recombine sensory memories to form new ones, as you've said, then what is the difference between a new dream-memory and a new real-memory other than the fact that one occurred only in our heads without our conscious control and another occurred in the external world? We could get philosophical here and go on to say that since all we know of the world is what we ourselves experience through our senses, that argument means that there is, in effect, no difference between the two (other than the people around us denying that the event happened). And then what would it mean if we were dreaming lucidly, in control of our own actions and the (dream)world around us? It's one thing to say you committed violence in a dream, because you couldn't make the choice not to -- but it's another to say you deliberately did it in this "safe" place, just to see what it was like.
And if our subconscious can recombine sensory memories to form new ones, as you've said, then what is the difference between a new dream-memory and a new real-memory other than the fact that one occurred only in our heads without our conscious control and another occurred in the external world? We could get philosophical here and go on to say that since all we know of the world is what we ourselves experience through our senses, that argument means that there is, in effect, no difference between the two (other than the people around us denying that the event happened).
And considering that the people around us in the dream confirmed the event (and also, in some way, denied or belied the existence of the "waking" world), you could say there really is no difference, except that we cannot believe both, and therefore choose to believe one reality over the other. I think the only way to really be sure that the waking world is more real than the dream world (and again, it sort of depends on your ideas of "real") is that, when we're in the waking world, we're aware of the dream world as something artificial, but in those dreams where we remember the waking world, we usually become aware of it as something real we can return to.
And then what would it mean if we were dreaming lucidly, in control of our own actions and the (dream)world around us? It's one thing to say you committed violence in a dream, because you couldn't make the choice not to -- but it's another to say you deliberately did it in this "safe" place, just to see what it was like.
Yes, that is a pretty uncomfortable thought. It seems somehow worse than dwelling on the violent act, or even writing it, while you're awake. That said, I've never dreamt lucidly enough to be able to control what was going on in the dream, only occasionally enough to make myself wake up. It would take a hell of a lot of awareness in a dream to be able not only to choose to slit someone's throat, but to do it KNOWING that this is a dream and deciding to "experiment" with the violence anyway - I'm not sure that the mind could combine that level of conscious control with a dream's level of sensory intensity.
I think the only way to really be sure that the waking world is more real than the dream world is that, when we're in the waking world, we're aware of the dream world as something artificial
And yet the lucid-dreaming self-help sites will tell you that we spend much of our waking lives in a semi-conscious state. We "know" we're awake but most of the time we're not actively confirming it, which is why usually in dreams we don't question that we're conscious -- even though there we're really not. They say the key to achieving a conscious dream-state involves recognizing this sort of slipping in and out of awareness of consciousness; they recommend making an effort to confirm one's consciousness regularly during the day, arguing (with success stories to support them) that the habit will carry over to dreamlife, at which point when you perform the check you will discover that you're dreaming. So if you train yourself to confirm that you're awake every, say, 15 minutes, by whatever method you've chosen (asking yourself how you got to be where you are, or staring at text and trying to make the letters change, etc.), then chances are in a dream you'll perform the same behavior, things won't happen the way you expect, et voila: lucidity. Then you get into the various techniques people use to keep from waking up at that point or slipping back into regular dreaming.
Yes, that is a pretty uncomfortable thought. It seems somehow worse than dwelling on the violent act, or even writing it, while you're awake.
The question is how responsible we should hold ourselves for what we dream. In one sense (disregarding lucidity) we have no control over our dreamscapes or actions and shouldn't be held accountable for what we do in them. In another sense everything that happens comes from us, our experiences, our emotions, our memories, our desires. Unlike reality, a dream is pure self.
It would take a hell of a lot of awareness in a dream to be able not only to choose to slit someone's throat, but to do it KNOWING that this is a dream and deciding to "experiment" with the violence anyway - I'm not sure that the mind could combine that level of conscious control with a dream's level of sensory intensity.
I don't know how conscious a conscious dream is either, but I remember reading that one way to prevent yourself from waking up upon achieving lucidity is to rub your hands together, clap or spin around, because the brain can't handle two sensory inputs at once (the dream-input and the body-in-bed input) and often chooses to stay with the signals coming from within the dream.
That's quite fascinating about the techniques of lucid dreaming; do you have a link to any of those sites kicking about? The methods of confirming consciousness sound almost like very basic versions of Zen exercises (like moving the letters in a word around, or picturing an object and a word that means something else at the same time, or trying to visualise the word "red" in blue letters).
When I was little I could wake myself up from a dream, but since then my only attempt to interact with my dreams has been to try and jot them down. I'd be really intrigued to try conscious dreaming.
I did some research on it for a science fair in high school (silver medal, baby!) and came pretty close to achieving sustained lucidity when I tried it while preparing the project. Let me see if any of those sites are still around that I remember...
There's lucidity.com, which seems to have undergone a much-needed redesign. Stephen LaBerge is the big name in the field. Wikipedia has some links as well.
Lovely memory. I never saw your old house but I can picture it, and you with the enormous red-ribboned teddy bear, ready to play.
It's fascinating how memory is transmuted - dreams and stories we're told can become real, even vivid, memories, while the memories of things we've actually done blend, shift, and tangle together.
It is fascinating, in a bunch of ways. Some -- I might even say most -- of my earliest memories are of dreams that are still very clear.
On the relationship between dream-memory and real-memory, I've also been mulling over the extent to which a dream event/memory "counts" as "real." One difference seems to be that dreams have short-term rather than long-term impact. But the example I've been thinking about is one of the more violent dreams I had a few years ago in which I cut a man's throat. I can still see and feel the rough stubble on his jaw and neck, his sweat-salty skin, the box-cutter I used, the tough ripping of the knife through the skin and artery on its way to the windpipe. None of it was real, but it was based on a combination of perceptions from real life. That might not be what it's like to slit a throat at all, yet I don't have to imagine what it would be like because I've done it, or done a version of it. So -- to what extent do I know what it's like to slit a throat?
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By the way, your chillingly wonderful description of the dream reminded me of the most enthralling and horrible (in the way that makes you unable to look away) throat-cutting scene I've ever read in a book, which was in Wild Boy (which I really think you would like, incidentally; it's a fictionalised account of the true story of a child found in a village in France shortly after the Revolution. The boy had been living wild in the forests for somewhere between five and nine years. The book follows the young Revolutionary doctor who tries to teach him to speak, and the governess who cares for him. It's lushly written and touches on everything from politics to contemporary views of mental illness to the philosophy of human nature). What gets me about it is what gets me about your description, and about dreams: the sheer awful vividness, almost sensuality, of the act. It imprints on you, I find, and it's difficult to shake the sense of actually having DONE it once you've got that sensual memory fixed in your mind.
Reply
And if our subconscious can recombine sensory memories to form new ones, as you've said, then what is the difference between a new dream-memory and a new real-memory other than the fact that one occurred only in our heads without our conscious control and another occurred in the external world? We could get philosophical here and go on to say that since all we know of the world is what we ourselves experience through our senses, that argument means that there is, in effect, no difference between the two (other than the people around us denying that the event happened). And then what would it mean if we were dreaming lucidly, in control of our own actions and the (dream)world around us? It's one thing to say you committed violence in a dream, because you couldn't make the choice not to -- but it's another to say you deliberately did it in this "safe" place, just to see what it was like.
Reply
And considering that the people around us in the dream confirmed the event (and also, in some way, denied or belied the existence of the "waking" world), you could say there really is no difference, except that we cannot believe both, and therefore choose to believe one reality over the other. I think the only way to really be sure that the waking world is more real than the dream world (and again, it sort of depends on your ideas of "real") is that, when we're in the waking world, we're aware of the dream world as something artificial, but in those dreams where we remember the waking world, we usually become aware of it as something real we can return to.
And then what would it mean if we were dreaming lucidly, in control of our own actions and the (dream)world around us? It's one thing to say you committed violence in a dream, because you couldn't make the choice not to -- but it's another to say you deliberately did it in this "safe" place, just to see what it was like.
Yes, that is a pretty uncomfortable thought. It seems somehow worse than dwelling on the violent act, or even writing it, while you're awake. That said, I've never dreamt lucidly enough to be able to control what was going on in the dream, only occasionally enough to make myself wake up. It would take a hell of a lot of awareness in a dream to be able not only to choose to slit someone's throat, but to do it KNOWING that this is a dream and deciding to "experiment" with the violence anyway - I'm not sure that the mind could combine that level of conscious control with a dream's level of sensory intensity.
Reply
And yet the lucid-dreaming self-help sites will tell you that we spend much of our waking lives in a semi-conscious state. We "know" we're awake but most of the time we're not actively confirming it, which is why usually in dreams we don't question that we're conscious -- even though there we're really not. They say the key to achieving a conscious dream-state involves recognizing this sort of slipping in and out of awareness of consciousness; they recommend making an effort to confirm one's consciousness regularly during the day, arguing (with success stories to support them) that the habit will carry over to dreamlife, at which point when you perform the check you will discover that you're dreaming. So if you train yourself to confirm that you're awake every, say, 15 minutes, by whatever method you've chosen (asking yourself how you got to be where you are, or staring at text and trying to make the letters change, etc.), then chances are in a dream you'll perform the same behavior, things won't happen the way you expect, et voila: lucidity. Then you get into the various techniques people use to keep from waking up at that point or slipping back into regular dreaming.
Yes, that is a pretty uncomfortable thought. It seems somehow worse than dwelling on the violent act, or even writing it, while you're awake.
The question is how responsible we should hold ourselves for what we dream. In one sense (disregarding lucidity) we have no control over our dreamscapes or actions and shouldn't be held accountable for what we do in them. In another sense everything that happens comes from us, our experiences, our emotions, our memories, our desires. Unlike reality, a dream is pure self.
It would take a hell of a lot of awareness in a dream to be able not only to choose to slit someone's throat, but to do it KNOWING that this is a dream and deciding to "experiment" with the violence anyway - I'm not sure that the mind could combine that level of conscious control with a dream's level of sensory intensity.
I don't know how conscious a conscious dream is either, but I remember reading that one way to prevent yourself from waking up upon achieving lucidity is to rub your hands together, clap or spin around, because the brain can't handle two sensory inputs at once (the dream-input and the body-in-bed input) and often chooses to stay with the signals coming from within the dream.
Reply
When I was little I could wake myself up from a dream, but since then my only attempt to interact with my dreams has been to try and jot them down. I'd be really intrigued to try conscious dreaming.
Reply
There's lucidity.com, which seems to have undergone a much-needed redesign. Stephen LaBerge is the big name in the field. Wikipedia has some links as well.
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