Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

Just woken up from a good 5 minute conversation with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen...

Anything that doesn't fit anywhere else.

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Re: Discussion on Cornel West

#181  Postby arugula2 » Aug 12, 2020 6:59 am

The_Piper wrote:Post #33 about my dream belongs in the rant thread, not this one. :whine: All I know about Brother West is him calling everyone brother. :lol:

No! This is perfect. Dreams belong wherever they want, not you.

(I wanted to comment yesterday, but I've had to work nonstop & barely any sleep.) The two superb details in your dream that conjured up the feeling of dreaming were the not-knowing-how to do something you're expected to know, and the mistaking Bernie for a coworker.

For some reason, the detail that's puzzling me is how you knew you'd "only been gone a few days". Is it a vivid thought that popped into your head during the dream? Is it something you saw, like a calendar, or an arrangement of objects that you can assign to a specific time period? Is it a thought that creeped into your mind as you were waking up, i.e. your waking mind filling in that detail?

Weird question, I know. But that's the part that nags me.

Added: (for thread relevance)

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"They cover every twitter" :lol: Stay clueless, Brother Cornel.
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#182  Postby arugula2 » Aug 12, 2020 1:24 pm

I’m telling you, The_Piper, it’s going where it wants to go... and now it’s multiplying.

This page is testament to the weirdness of dreams... especially if you read the subject lines of posts, like I do:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#183  Postby arugula2 » Aug 12, 2020 1:29 pm

Copy-pasta-ing my reply to the clone of your original post, posted in the second of three landing areas (and now the third):

......................transplanted message follows....................watch the rails............


arugula2 wrote:
The_Piper wrote:Post #33 about my dream belongs in the rant thread, not this one. :whine: All I know about Brother West is him calling everyone brother. :lol:

No! This is perfect. Dreams belong wherever they want, not you.

(I wanted to comment yesterday, but I've had to work nonstop & barely any sleep.) The two superb details in your dream that conjured up the feeling of dreaming were the not-knowing-how to do something you're expected to know, and the mistaking Bernie for a coworker.

For some reason, the detail that's puzzling me is how you knew you'd "only been gone a few days". Is it a vivid thought that popped into your head during the dream? Is it something you saw, like a calendar, or an arrangement of objects that you can assign to a specific time period? Is it a thought that creeped into your mind as you were waking up, i.e. your waking mind filling in that detail?

Weird question, I know. But that's the part that nags me.

Added: (for thread relevance)

Image

"They cover every twitter" :lol: Stay clueless, Brother Cornel.
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#184  Postby Blip » Aug 12, 2020 2:00 pm

arugula2 wrote:Copy-pasta-ing my reply to the clone of your original post, posted in the second of three landing areas (and now the third)



!
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I'm sorry; I missed your reply on the first pass but it's here now. If this sort of oversight should happen again, just report your orphaned post and it can be moved. :cheers:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#185  Postby arugula2 » Aug 12, 2020 2:06 pm

Oh nice, thank you for your service! :cheers:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#186  Postby arugula2 » Aug 12, 2020 2:09 pm

Oh yaaaaay, it looks zanier than I imagined! :excited: Dreams are so cool.
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#187  Postby The_Piper » Aug 12, 2020 4:27 pm

Thanks, this is the best place for my post. I didn't mean to make a big deal out of it, if it was. :)
arugula2 wrote:
The_Piper wrote:Post #33 about my dream belongs in the rant thread, not this one. :whine: All I know about Brother West is him calling everyone brother. :lol:

No! This is perfect. Dreams belong wherever they want, not you.

(I wanted to comment yesterday, but I've had to work nonstop & barely any sleep.) The two superb details in your dream that conjured up the feeling of dreaming were the not-knowing-how to do something you're expected to know, and the mistaking Bernie for a coworker.

For some reason, the detail that's puzzling me is how you knew you'd "only been gone a few days". Is it a vivid thought that popped into your head during the dream? Is it something you saw, like a calendar, or an arrangement of objects that you can assign to a specific time period? Is it a thought that creeped into your mind as you were waking up, i.e. your waking mind filling in that detail?

Weird question, I know. But that's the part that nags me.

Added: (for thread relevance)

Image

"They cover every twitter" :lol: Stay clueless, Brother Cornel.
My boss had mentioned that I hadn't been in since last week. Even though I was dreaming, that still didn't sound quite right to me, I knew that something was off about it. I didn't want to question it because I had the feeling I'd get in trouble. For not coming in since the Bush administration, I guess. :teef:

I miss that supervisor. He was simultaneously strict, but pleasant. Most importantly, I felt like he had our backs, so to speak, so in that respect he was a good one. I have some stories to tell about him. I'll just do one here, a funny one. I had a customer who was having a lot of stress early in the morning. I was being my usual courteous self but she snapped at me which for some reason made me take offense. I became wooden in my speech from that point. She didn't like that, she was literally shaking and had veins in her head becoming visible. I honestly felt bad for her, and still do, but I couldn't ignore the rudeness. She then threw her packages at me and yelled to see the supervisor. :tehe: He told me to go out back to have a word, and finished up the transaction. When he came back to talk to me his first word was HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH! at the top of his lungs. Then he started to tell me to ignore attitudes like that and just ...HAHAHAHAAHAHAH!! again. :lol: He couldn't even finish a sentence without belly laughing. That's when I became sure that he was a good person to work for. :lol: :lol:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#188  Postby arugula2 » Aug 13, 2020 2:54 am

Even though idk what he looks like, I played out the scene & it made me belly laugh along with him.

I pictured John Carroll Lynch, btw.

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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#189  Postby The_Piper » Aug 13, 2020 3:45 am

:lol: That's good, I worked for a guy who looked a bit like that too, only with more hair. He was a good guy to work for too, which I became sure of after a much zanier story. I'm glad you liked that story. I looked at hundreds of pics under the search term curly blonde man, and this was the best I could do. Only he was in his thirties or early forties at the time, and had naturally blonde curly hair and freckles. An Irish guy from Charlestown.
I guess this is a guy from One Direction :tehe:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#190  Postby Fallible » Aug 13, 2020 6:17 am

Niall, I do believe. I was told. Apparently.
She battled through in every kind of tribulation,
She revelled in adventure and imagination.
She never listened to no hater, liar,
Breaking boundaries and chasing fire.
Oh, my my! Oh my, she flies!
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#191  Postby The_Piper » Aug 13, 2020 7:49 am

:lol: :lol:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#192  Postby The_Piper » Feb 28, 2021 3:14 pm

Last night I had a dream that I was exploring a new part of the country. (new to me) I don't know where it was, but it was a place with beavers. It was a good dream that suddenly took a dark turn. I was at someone's garage across from a small park with a small pond, and a guy told me to go check out the beavers in the pond. I told him that beavers are aggressive, but he insisted these were used to people. So I did go, and watched them from a safe distance, but after around 15 seconds one got angry. It came out of the water and was running/waddling at me and I froze. When it got to me I jumped up and it continued running, directly under me. When I turned around and looked at it, it had a platypus beak. Then I woke up, in a virtual sweat. Like those dreams where you fall off a cliff and wake up a moment before hitting the ground. :lol: :lol: I dreamed that I was about to get mauled by a croco-beaver. :crazy:

I miss Fal's participation here.
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#193  Postby Spearthrower » Feb 28, 2021 6:38 pm

Dreams about hostile beavers with beaks? What would Freud say? :D
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#194  Postby The_Piper » Feb 28, 2021 7:54 pm

He'd probably start with his favorite cliche: "tell me about ze mother". :lol:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#195  Postby BlackBart » Feb 28, 2021 10:46 pm

Sometimes a Beaver is just a Beaver.
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#196  Postby The_Piper » Mar 01, 2021 3:56 pm

They're very fascinating creatures, even though they all seem to hate me for some reason. Even in my dreams now! :lol:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#197  Postby The_Piper » Mar 17, 2021 2:22 am

I had a dream that houses sprung up all around mine. A hiking trail went right by my house, a foot from the wall, and the woods were full of screaming drunk vacationing people and kids with soccer balls. Also screaming kids and drunk people with soccer balls. The one good part was my long departed kitty was in it, but was all scared and confused about the changes. That was when I woke up and thought thank The Ghost of Mr Woodchuckles and my old kitty that it was just a dream.
My kitty lived near Boston though, and used to follow me around town. It got so bad that I had to lock him on the porch when I went for walks. One time he followed me onto a main road and when we got to unfamiliar turf was so freaked out that he was walking through the postage-stamp-sized yards instead of the sidewalk, climbing fences and stuff. Then I had to carry him the rest of the way to a friend's house, where he hid behind a couch until we left. :heart:
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#198  Postby don't get me started » Jun 14, 2021 11:04 am

I was just randomly reading some book reviews to see what might be next on my list (it's not as if i don't have a number of unread books staring at me from the shelves - but that's another story.)
Anyways, I came across this by the author of a book on neuroscience.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/12/david-eagleman-the-working-of-the-brain-resembles-drug-dealers-in-albuquerque

The author suggests that dreams have a function in resisting brain plasticity.
The metaphor of the brain as a computer has had a good run, but as we learn more about how the brain works, it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is a rather poor metaphor.
The author points out that different parts of the brain can take over other parts if needs arise.

From the text:

"One of the great mysteries of the brain is the purpose of dreams. And you propose a kind of defensive theory about how the brain responds to darkness.

One of the big surprises of neuroscience was to understand how rapidly these takeovers can happen. If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. So what I realised is, because the planet rotates into darkness, the visual system alone is at a disadvantage, which is to say, you can still smell and hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you can’t see any more. I realised this puts the visual system in danger of getting taken over every night. And dreams are the brain’s way of defending that territory. About every 90 minutes a great deal of random activity is smashed into the visual system. And because that’s our visual system, we experience it as a dream, we experience it visually. Evolutionarily, this is our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness."

I thought this was very interesting. The nature of visual thought is a fascinating subject and I have also read a fair amount on the nature and function of verbal thought. These two modalities - the visual and the auditory/linguistic seem to be the primary ways in which we experience 'thinking'. As Plato said: 'thinking is the soul's dialogue with itself'. If the brain is constantly prone to re-wiring, as Eagleman suggests, then silent, dialogic thought and dreaming could be similarly functional in keeping radical re-wiring at bay.
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#199  Postby Coastal » Jun 21, 2021 12:12 pm

don't get me started wrote:I was just randomly reading some book reviews to see what might be next on my list (it's not as if i don't have a number of unread books staring at me from the shelves - but that's another story.)
Anyways, I came across this by the author of a book on neuroscience.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/12/david-eagleman-the-working-of-the-brain-resembles-drug-dealers-in-albuquerque

The author suggests that dreams have a function in resisting brain plasticity.
The metaphor of the brain as a computer has had a good run, but as we learn more about how the brain works, it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is a rather poor metaphor.
The author points out that different parts of the brain can take over other parts if needs arise.

From the text:

"One of the great mysteries of the brain is the purpose of dreams. And you propose a kind of defensive theory about how the brain responds to darkness.

One of the big surprises of neuroscience was to understand how rapidly these takeovers can happen. If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. So what I realised is, because the planet rotates into darkness, the visual system alone is at a disadvantage, which is to say, you can still smell and hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you can’t see any more. I realised this puts the visual system in danger of getting taken over every night. And dreams are the brain’s way of defending that territory. About every 90 minutes a great deal of random activity is smashed into the visual system. And because that’s our visual system, we experience it as a dream, we experience it visually. Evolutionarily, this is our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness."

I thought this was very interesting. The nature of visual thought is a fascinating subject and I have also read a fair amount on the nature and function of verbal thought. These two modalities - the visual and the auditory/linguistic seem to be the primary ways in which we experience 'thinking'. As Plato said: 'thinking is the soul's dialogue with itself'. If the brain is constantly prone to re-wiring, as Eagleman suggests, then silent, dialogic thought and dreaming could be similarly functional in keeping radical re-wiring at bay.


Very interesting thoughts, but I've heard some people say they have no internal monologue or voice. I think that being able to report on such a subjective experiences could perhaps suffer from a difficulty in defining what you experience, but it seems to be legit from what people have told me and from what I was able to subsequently read up on it.

Having done some mindfulness meditation, this is not strange to me though. This mediation aims to enable you to "step back" from your consciousness, which includes thoughts, but not all thoughts, as it's impossible to stop your brain from thinking, but rather what we would think of as "vocal thoughts". So, if someone like me (with a monologue) is able to enter this state at will, then I am not surprised that some people might just "be" there always.
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Re: Okay, seriously!? Where does the mind come up with dreams?

#200  Postby don't get me started » Jun 22, 2021 6:21 am

Coastal wrote:
don't get me started wrote:I was just randomly reading some book reviews to see what might be next on my list (it's not as if i don't have a number of unread books staring at me from the shelves - but that's another story.)
Anyways, I came across this by the author of a book on neuroscience.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/12/david-eagleman-the-working-of-the-brain-resembles-drug-dealers-in-albuquerque

The author suggests that dreams have a function in resisting brain plasticity.
The metaphor of the brain as a computer has had a good run, but as we learn more about how the brain works, it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is a rather poor metaphor.
The author points out that different parts of the brain can take over other parts if needs arise.

From the text:

"One of the great mysteries of the brain is the purpose of dreams. And you propose a kind of defensive theory about how the brain responds to darkness.

One of the big surprises of neuroscience was to understand how rapidly these takeovers can happen. If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. So what I realised is, because the planet rotates into darkness, the visual system alone is at a disadvantage, which is to say, you can still smell and hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you can’t see any more. I realised this puts the visual system in danger of getting taken over every night. And dreams are the brain’s way of defending that territory. About every 90 minutes a great deal of random activity is smashed into the visual system. And because that’s our visual system, we experience it as a dream, we experience it visually. Evolutionarily, this is our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness."

I thought this was very interesting. The nature of visual thought is a fascinating subject and I have also read a fair amount on the nature and function of verbal thought. These two modalities - the visual and the auditory/linguistic seem to be the primary ways in which we experience 'thinking'. As Plato said: 'thinking is the soul's dialogue with itself'. If the brain is constantly prone to re-wiring, as Eagleman suggests, then silent, dialogic thought and dreaming could be similarly functional in keeping radical re-wiring at bay.


Very interesting thoughts, but I've heard some people say they have no internal monologue or voice. I think that being able to report on such a subjective experiences could perhaps suffer from a difficulty in defining what you experience, but it seems to be legit from what people have told me and from what I was able to subsequently read up on it.

Having done some mindfulness meditation, this is not strange to me though. This mediation aims to enable you to "step back" from your consciousness, which includes thoughts, but not all thoughts, as it's impossible to stop your brain from thinking, but rather what we would think of as "vocal thoughts". So, if someone like me (with a monologue) is able to enter this state at will, then I am not surprised that some people might just "be" there always.


Yes, the question of inner speech is one fraught with difficulties. No amount of electrodes or MRI scanning will be able to reveal what it is like to experience verbal thought. We only have the subject's account for what he or she is experiencing.
In my case I can report that I have a near constant inner dialogue (and it is dialogue, not monologue.) It is mostly in what would be recognizable as English but occasionally in Japanese or German.

I've done a fair amount of reading on inner speech and it has fascinated philosophers from Plato, through St Augustine and into the modern era with people like Vygotsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky
and Bakhtin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin describing the ways language and thought are interrelated.

There is also the related phenomenon of 'self-talk'. I talk to myself quite a lot when I am alone, and in the field of conversation analysis the data often includes turns at talk which contain utterances that are clearly addressed at the self rather than the interlocutor. It happens more often than you would imagine.

One book I found interesting was:
The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves by Charles Fernyhough

Image

As you mention, there are some individuals who report not experiencing verbal thought and Fernyhough investigates these outliers as well as other cases such as people with psychiatric disorders who hear voices in their heads. A close friend who is a practicing clinical psychologist was telling me that in some of his patients they seem to have lost the ability to distinguish between the inner thought that most people experience everyday and externally produced speech. That is, they think that the voices they 'hear' internally are produced by some person other than the self...which can cause all kinds of reactions.

The practice you mention of meditation that seeks to quiet the mental voice(s) and exist is a state of here and now awareness is something I have heard people talk about. A Japanese friend and practicing Buddhist told me that the term in Japanese is 無(mu), which is a state of absence and clarity. I don't have any negative feelings towards those who practice this, but it is not for me. I really enjoy my mental chats with myself. Sometimes the process of dialoging internally leads to some of my best insights, and seeing things in a new way.
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