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(Topic suggested in a comment by philosophe007, here. Feel free to comment with suggestions for more topics!)
5 minutes, 1 topic… get set: go!
Lucid Dreaming
I’ve tried lucid dreaming before, but I’ve always gotten locked into dreaming that I’m dreaming lucidly and should try and do one fo the cool things that can eb done in dreams, like fly, or be invisible, or something. But I always end up dreaming that I’ve become lucid, and then just dreaming that I can try and fly, without actually becoming conscious of whats going on… and then the dream shifts and it all changes.
There’re lots of questions I could ask about dreams: what if they’re really being awake, and being awake is asleep? What if dreams are another life we step into when we sleep? What if…? But none of these seem interesting to me anymore,* I’m rather more interested in how we dream. How is it that we build up these worlds so vividly, and can have coherent stories that we are completely immersed in, and yet they somehow have a different quality to them to waking life?
Technically I assume dreams are built up by the brain playing, but then why aren’t the images just random flashes of things, rather than actual narratives (albeit often fragmented)? Maybe because the impulses follow particular patterns through the brain, ok… but then why do dreams have a different quality to waking life, if its all just what happens when impulses fire?
Could it be that life actually is more than just impulses, that the quality is actually embodiment, say?
We are more than just neurons, and life is more than just what happens when impulses fire, more than the experiences we have because neurons have fired… life is embodied experience. (Perhaps.)
*Post-5-minute comment: these questions are less interesting to me now because I’ve spent several years in academic philosophy classes in which ‘we might all be dreaming’ is an all-to-often recurring thought experiment, and they don’t make sense. We not awake because ‘awake’ is classified as the bit we call being awake, ‘reality’ is the classification of the bit while we’re awake (although certain versions of ‘awake’ and ‘reality’ can be argued for other than the everyday ones) and we are, it seems to me, creatures that live and move and do, and part of that is being embodied. As we don’t take our bodies, which lie sleeping, into dreams with us (or do we?) then its only a part of us that go into that dream-life… so the interesting questions there, I suppose, are about what makes us us, whether that can be disembodied and if we are still the same people we are when embodied if disembodied, or instead are in part the same, but are different? I mean, don’t we experience the world as embodied beings? And if we’re experienceing the world differently, then how can we be the same kind of being, and thus the same person? Identity, identity… the question of dreams brings these issues up.
(And so I cheat and this becomes a 10 minute post!)
Halo Quin 
I some cultures there is the belief that when we die we lose our identity, the “I” or awareness is all that survives death and gets mingled with all the other “I” s. Thinking about what that means makes me think that even though that is life after death, the me who I pecieve me to be is dead. some say that when we die all the identites that “I” has before are remembered but then still that’s not me that’s loads of every one else(musings based on severe lack of background info :.P).
From haveing asked that quesion alot I’ve obseved that we define our identity with our culture/subculture mannerisms, clothes, lanuage, social connections,beliefs, opinions etc.
I suppose, when it comes to dreaming and it’s sense of reality could be seen as like a memory, at the time it seems real enough(iv’e had dreams where iv’e been stabbed, I expect in reality,it wouldn’t hurt(which it true) but the shock of it would be immense), but doesn’t the memory of an event & the memory of a dream have the same quality? I suppose the reality (or prception of)of either worlds is dependent on observation.
Funny thing I thought recently when thinking about some of my dreams,is when we dream of and interact with people, are we interacting with a part of that person? Are they in some way uncontiously aware of that interaction?
I’m none too sure about the answers.
But somewhere it there I sense it may be relevant that much our what we perceive as the passive receipt of information may actually be active and also conditioned by our expectations.
For example I read in a Newscientist article that the optical nerve simply could not send the amount of data to deliver the image that we think we see. This is coupled with the fact that the area of good quality image on the retina is quite small and could not actually deliver the image we think we see.
So what’s going on is
a) a lot of presuming that what we see is there
b) an unconscious act of moving the eye to check details the selection of which may be more or less conscious or unconscious
c) (b) is where the active element comes in – it’s where the mind makes choices
d) in the absence of this all that we would see in real time would be a massive blur with a tiny spotlight of detail (and this ignores the “bandwidth problem” of the optic nerve mentioned above.
The classic example that illustrates (if not proves) this:
a) show a film of people playing basket ball
b) ask subjects to do something like count the passes (I forget)
c) in the meanwhile the film shows a man in a gorilla costume stroll over the court
d) not many people actually notice this
e) cos their attentions, eye actions, mental processing are geared to the question
So maybe all that plays into the philosophical ideas of all being flux and maybe the distinction between embodied and disembodied consciousness simply isn’t relevant.
Wish I knew the answer!
ri
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