Pig

This post has no other purpose than to cheer up helenkacan:

Lucid Dreaming.

Today's Overcoming Bias post is, strangely, all about lucid dreaming. I find it interesting that they give a large range of things to test to tell if you're dreaming. Except for a handful of exceptional dreams over the years, I've found my dreams come in two varieties:

1. I'm dreaming and I never even consider the possibility that I may be asleep.
2. I simply know I'm dreaming.

So, I don't have much use for 'dream tests'. If I'm in a category 1 dream, I won't think to use them. If I'm in a category 2 dream, then I don't need them. As for the particular tests they propose to use:

• Looking at one's digital watch (remembering the time), looking away, and looking back. As with text, the time will probably have changed randomly and radically at the second glance or contain strange letters and characters. ...

I long-ago banished all clocks and watches from my dreams. That's because looking at any time-keeping device has always had the effect of me going: "OMG! I'm late for work! I have to wake up NOW!" And then I'm awake with a pounding heart and its 3:00 am and will take me a long time to get back to sleep. Certainly clocks never show random or meaningless times in my dreams.

• Flipping a light switch. Light levels rarely change as a result of the switch flipping in dreams.

I've never tried this one. I can't say that I have any memory of ever encountering a light switch in a dream. I may try this just for fun sometime.

• Looking into a mirror; in dreams, reflections from a mirror often appear to be blurred, distorted or incorrect.

Although I don't recall any mirror's per-se, I do remember seeing reflections in plate-glass windows and such and they seemed correct.

• Looking at the ground beneath one's feet or at one's hands. If one does this within a dream the difference in appearance of the ground or one's hands from the normal waking state is often enough to alert the conscious to the dream state.

Now, I KNOW that the ground beneath my feet looks normal and my hands look normal in dreams, since I can recall lucid dreams where I spent some time poking at the ground or looking at things to see how real they were. I know that I not only dream in colour, but with appropriate smells, tastes, textures and whatnot. In fact, in many ways my ability to imagine things clearly is much stronger while asleep than awake.

They also give a list of 'signs you might be dreaming':

1. Falling.
2. Flying.
3. Inability to move one's arms and/or legs.
4. Dream taking place in a movie, book or video game.
5. Clock faces, directional signs, books, etc., being unintelligible.
6. Mechanical or electrical devices failing to operate in a normal manner.
7. Gravity appearing to be stronger or weaker.
8. Being attacked/chased by a monster.
9. Being in a familiar area that doesn't have the same layout as it does in the real world. For example, being in Grand Central Station, except it has the interior layout of the Gare du Nord.
10. Having sex (see wet dream).
11. Being lost in a building (even in a building that you are familiar with in real life).
12. Familiar sights, such as the faces of others, or of one's own face in a mirror, appearing distorted.
13. Interacting with friends, relatives or family pets that are deceased in reality.
14. Being naked in public, and being the only one who seems to notice.
15. Being impervious to injury (i.e. feeling no pain), especially of the lethal variety (for example, being unharmed by an explosion or a gunshot)

Lets see. Where to start. First off, as to numbers 1 and 10, 11. All of these things, including having sex, have happened to me far more often in reality than in my dreams. (which can be seen either as an uplifting, or as a sad fact, depending on your perspective).

I have never encountered cases of numbers 3 through 6, or 12, so I don't think they're particularly good signs, at least for me. Especially as #5 is dead wrong for me. I often see intelligible signs and books and such in my dreams. More structured text can be very rare though. I was once lucid dreaming and encountered a bunch of folks role-playing using some unknown system and they asked me to join them. I readily agreed, because I wanted to see how the Dream Master was going to pull an entire gaming system out of thin air. (I should mention, as an aside, I often have an adversarial relationship to the unconscious processes that runs my dreams, the Dream Master, if you would. Quite often, when lucid dreaming, it feels like I am struggling against this unseen force to warp the dream into the track I want it to take.) Anyway, the dream punted by no one being able to find a blank character sheet for me to fill in for my character, so they never had to explain the rules.

I don't particularly remember item #8, but I'm sure its happened in dreams. Frankly, my nightmares tend to feature things a lot more nebulous than 'monsters'.

That leaves us 2, 7, 9, 13, 14, and 15 -- all common dream tropes for me. I suppose any of these could be taken as good reasons to assume one is dreaming -- if somehow I didn't know. I should point out though that just because something is impossible in reality, that may not be clear when dreaming. For example, I've often had dream explanations for how I could fly in the dream which (although gibberish) made perfect sense then. Similarly, although I was startled to discover that pinching yourself doesn't hurt in dreams, while dreaming I thought it did! So, no help there.

Frankly, I don't really see how any of these dream signs will help much, if one is already convinced that one is awake, and they're all redundant when one know that one is dreaming. I wonder how this differs for other folks on my f-list?