How do you tell the difference between dream and reality?
How do you tell the difference between dream and reality?
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Assuming you are talking about lucid dreaming, what you want is a "Dream Check".
In dreams, large areas of your brain are operating in alternative states. This makes things like reading difficult or impossible. Unfortunately it also makes remembering to try reading just as hard.
What do carry over well are habits. You need to do something, while awake, that won't do anything when awake, but will in a dream. If you do this habit when awake however, you will also do it in a dream. It working acts as a trigger, you become aware of the dream state.
My personal check is to reach into my back pocket for a bazooka, or other heavy weapon. I obviously never have one, and the action looks innocuous in real life. It also has the added advantage of being excellent for nightmares. Nothing ends a nightmare faster than turning to face whatever is chasing you, while dual wielding AK47s.
At that point, the trick is staying in the dream state. Too excited, and you wake up. Too relaxed, and you fall back into passive dreaming. It's often best to roll with the dream, and only alter small things. This lets you direct it, but not shatter it.
Happy dreaming.
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This makes things like reading difficult or impossible. Unfortunately it also makes remembering to try reading just as hard.
I must be weird, but I can read in my dreams (and tell time, etc.)
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Do you happen to have a photographic memory?
The main issue, I believe, is that we don't store memories of text well. We also don't have a pre-built system to go from text memory to text image. The pipeline is 1 way. Writing uses a different pathway in the brain.
A photographic memory would let your mind bypass this, and pull up real memories to fill the page.
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No. I do have aphantasia, but that's the only thing that jumps out to me as weird (in this situation; I'm plenty weird in other ways).
Maybe because I don't "see" images or have a mind's eye in the same way other people describe it, things work a bit differently. I still do dream vividly and visually, at least so far as I can tell.
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The "reaching for something" is something I'm gonna do. I've had so few lucid dreams, two or three, and they ended after I realized that I was dreaming... After trying to stabilize the dream I don't know why but I kept doing "random and uncontrolled" stuff.
Do you also say something when reaching out for a weapon?
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The trick is not to try and control the dream too strongly. The random and uncontrolled stuff is your brain's white noise being interpreted. By stabilising it, you are waking yourself up. Instead, be gentle. Accept the dream for what it is, at least initially. With practice, you'll learn to recognise when a change is about to happen, and inject your preferred interpretation/solution.
As for my dream check, it's silent. Externally, it's just me putting my hand in my back pocket for a second or so. A spoken method would work, but would really confuse people around you.
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90 comments