Are dreams an alternative reality?

[Maia]

Many, perhaps most of my dreams, are set in places I've dreamt about before. A few are based on places in the real world, but most aren't. There are quite a lot of these different dream settings, but each one is familiar, and each time I'm there I learn something new about it. Surely this is significant in some way, whether or not they represent an alternative reality, or something else. I also, incidentally, tend to dream in cycles. I might gor for a few days with no dreams at all that I remember, followed by a few days of intense ones.

[surreptitious75]

Dreams are an extension of reality because everything is connected to everything else

[Urwrongx1000]

No, dreams are a manifestation of subconscious and suppressed, desires and fears.

Dreams are a distortion of reality.

[kowtaaia]

Dreaming is the continuity of thought when the body is asleep and the you and the me is the continuity of the dream when the body is awake.

[Artimas]

Dreams are the subconscious mind, the ideas regarding a dream can stem from fear, curiosity or simply the subconscious criticizing the conscious mind. Your subconscious is a fragment of the collective pool of consciousness. It is why ideas come to us and not us to them, it is why you may see other individuals in your dreams and cannot place a name and sometimes can't even place an image of what they look like. Knowledge is not new, it is merely forgotten. Consciousness of which you use to interact with reality is the ego, your identity. Dreams could very well be another instance of yourself and even if they are not, they are still valuable and should be regarded.

[Meno_]

"Consciousness of which you use to interact with reality is the ego, your identity. Dreams could very well be another instance of yourself and even if they are not, they are still valuable and should be regarded.[/quote]"


Their value depends on whether their source is real, imaginary, or symbolic.
And upon that determination rest their value.

In fact, been briefly conversing with Maia about two different kinds of people, one who has never seen, the other who would like to deny that sense.

[Antithesis]

No, this is the alternative reality.

[kowtaaia]

Each one is the continuity of the other.

[Carleas]

Dreaming seems to be the subjective experience of the brain's neural network pruning itself to make it more energy efficient. Slate Star Codex had a good article about neural networks and dreaming recently, and provides what I think is a plausible summary:

Hobson, Hong and Friston say that dreams are an attempt to refine model complexity separately from model accuracy. That is, a model is good insofar as it predicts true things (obviously) and is simple (this is just Occam’s Razor). All day long, your brain’s generative model is trying to predict true things, and in the process it snowballs in complexity; some studies suggest your synapses get 20% stronger over the course of the day, and this seems to have an effect on energy use as well – your brain runs literally hotter dealing with all the complicated calculations. At night, it switches to trying to make its model simpler, and this involves a lot of running the model without worrying about predictive accuracy. [...]

Some machine learning people I talked to took a slightly different approach to this, bringing up the wake-sleep algorithm and Boltzmann machines. These are neural net designs that naturally “dream” as part of their computations; ie in order to work, they need a step where they hallucinate some kind of random information, then forget that they did so. I don’t entirely understand these either, but they fit a pattern where there’s something psychiatrists have been puzzling about for centuries, people make up all sorts of theories involving childhood trauma and repressed sexuality, and then I mention it to a machine learning person and he says “Oh yeah, that’s [complicated-sounding math term], all our neural nets do that too.”

[Meno_]

I feel that , and something tells me to tread lightly here ( for fear of a short circuit and possible electrocution due to leak on the foundation), philosophycally , the former appears more sensible then the Boltzmann analysis. I'll just end here, for the above given reason, not that I have to fear any censure for a bias that appears mostly dreams
that have been adequately advertised bias within dreams. Such descriptions may not infringe within the scope that may not balance against opinion in general, in my opinion.

[Exuberant Teleportation]

There is a glass ceiling above our heads that has the planetary motions and infinite destiny of us all, written in the spell book of time, where we have a highest potential that we can realize, a conquering of all of our challenges at a perfect ending, but the difficulty of getting there is a lot like our fantasy sky dives when asleep. There could be a heavenly realm that we program, a symphony of perfectly played notes as our actions reflect the most pristine characters to enter into the schematics. There are certain totems or activation icons of divine natures that initiate events and chronicle the portals of eventuality. They may crash land from the god-grid into our field in dreams, give us revelations and secrets.

[Santiago]

The dream world is quite interesting. Some people don't dream hardly at all. Others have vague dreams that are highly symbolic and bizarre. And then there are those who have vivid dreams of a mythological and/or religious nature.

Many people have claimed to have received divine revelation through dreams. So, it is very conceivable that the dream world could be an alternative reality or dimension.

For most people, and unfortunately most people are rather banal and not spiritually minded, their dreams are vague, chaotic, and mostly meaningless; a reflection of their mundane and boring lifestyles, to be quite frank.

The more you decide to change your life and strive towards intellectual and moral nobility, reaching greater and ever greater heights, the more you will have vivid dreams of the gods conveying divine majesty to you. The muses will sing songs of such celestial beauty, encouraging you to continue striving for excellence.

The gods do speak to us through dreams.

[Exuberant Teleportation]

If we could split off from this continuum of circuitry, and fuse into a new weave of cosmic dimensions, we could enter into the buoyant ocean of higher splash. Dreams, kind of like ghosts of old dinosaurs, may walk through our rooms at night, teleport us to a scenic oasis of shine. Dreams mimic our inner sanctuaries of legends and outpouring, crashing into our meditation chambers with voice and soul.

There may be a mystical energy field at the center of the universe that blesses us with insight and prophecies, pointing the way towards the future, or to higher uprisings in universal awareness. If we seduce ourselves into the magic of life, then maybe, as a more farfetched proposition, this existential mind could spark emotions, wonder, awe, and appreciation for the infinite subtleties of the ties that run in the undertoe of understanding.

[Ierrellus]

Other than the task of taking out the garbage, dreams try to make sense of the lack of chemicals that support reason, maintaining an identity in a chemical storm. where basic logic is challenged. Dreams also appear to originate in the brain base (the reptillian brain).
I am not averse to the notion that dreams make an "alternate " reality"; however, all surreal phenomena contains known parts.

[Meno_]

Irrellus , could it also work the other day , reducing the chemical to biological markers, which create the chemical storm? If so, which is more 'causative' the productive effect or, the reductive process toward the genetic markers? Or even function in tandem with different genetic/effective levels changing variable markers? Can, do, dreams function as compensatory tools to slow down and even reverse cognitive dissonance in either way?

For instance the dream of falling may serve as some kind of warning that conscious behavior as cognitive , awaken progression :/values, etc.\ can become progressively disjointed ? From cohesion, stability , certainty
?

[Ierrellus]

Irrellus , could it also work the other day , reducing the chemical to biological markers, which create the chemical storm? If so, which is more 'causative' the productive effect or, the reductive process toward the genetic markers? Or even function in tandem with different genetic/effective levels changing variable markers? Can, do, dreams function as compensatory tools to slow down and even reverse cognitive dissonance in either way?

For instance the dream of falling may serve as some kind of warning that conscious behavior as cognitive , awaken progression :/values, etc.\ can become progressively disjointed ? From cohesion, stability , certainty
?

Yes. It probably works both ways.

[Ierrellus]

Brains function to achieve homeostasis among their physical and mental constituents. A warning dream may be proof of this. But it is ridiculous to find some mystic experience in any of the surreal phenomenon of dreams. There is, however, some credibility in dream experiencing of oneness with all that exists.

[Arcturus Descending]

....Dreams are a distortion of reality.

Could be. Yet, at the same time, our dreams also try to show us where in our conscious life we are the ones who distort reality. They say to us: "Look, you have this all wrong. Take a good look at what I am trying to say to you." Sometimes we are just too lazy to begin to figure it out. We give the greatest significance to what we want to believe is important and not to the smallest "thing" in the dream[s] which just might be what brings it all together.

Dreams are like puzzles to me. You have to slowly but surely add each piece of information to it and like puzzle pieces, they are all inter-connected, just as some of the dreams which came before and which come after are connected. The revelation comes within the inter-connectedness of these dreams or pieces - not one dream nor one piece. Hopefully, eventually, it all comes together for you and voila, a diamond of clarity is yours which you can peer into and see that part of your self which is trying to shine through.

[promethean75]

i had a fuckin weird dream the other night. i was standing on the handle of a giant, five story slot machine in some surreal casino, and i recall being constipated. i hadn't taken a #2 in days. anyway, i don't know why, but i had wings, so i leaped off the handle in a swan dive... and instead of taking flight, i fell straight down and hit the floor with a thud.

my psychoanalyst interpreted the dream for me, and said the message was: don't fly off the handle when you're full of shit.

buh dum tshhh!