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
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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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Schrodinger consciousnesses
Livin’ the dream (literally)
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.
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.
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.
White noise is critical and underrated.
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.
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.
I have had only a few vivid, real feeling dreams that have stuck with me for years. Do I know what they mean, nope. Do I wish I had more of them… yes. Working on improving my sleep in the last year or so. I think my average sleep time actually got a few mins. shorter. Oops.
Anyone who says this doesn’t know what “coma” means. Or “lucid” for the matter
8 hours sleep? I wish… As I get older sleep become an elusive thing.
Look at the guy who sleeps 8 hours a night and also have dreams, I wish I would have that luxury
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
What more proof do you need that materialism is bullshit?
I don’t dream and when I do they are usually mundane like going to work. Which makes me sleep in as I think I am already heading to work
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)
