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  • Have them pop up, but they work extremely erratically. Mostly pop up in the context of reading a single text, which changes if I think to look at it again (rare).

    Buttons do whatever they feel like (mostly nothing or stuck keys producing garbage text), and I don't think I've made or received a phone call (can't say this for landlines when they show up).

    Idk man, dreams are weird.

  • My guess would be that, beyond basically a thin plastic brick that makes noises and you make noises into them, to talk to another person...

    Most of the functions of a modern smartphone rely on a high degree of lingusitic symbolic abstraction that only makes sense if it is stable and consistent.

    Dream logic and dream perception is notably... basically the exact opposite of that.

    You'll get very visceral feelings and sensations and visuals that... while yes, are abstractly tied to other things... my guess is that basically the part(s) of your brain that actually does interpretation of a complex system of symbols (writing)... basically, it isn't functioning coherently, the parts that all align to make that make sense when you are waking conscious, they're all being rerouted in a bunch of other ways while you're dreaming, to help produce other parts of the dream... or just... maybe defrag your memories and trauma?

    I think a dumbphone, an old thing plugged into a wall... that is 'simple' enough to remain a somewhat coherent 'dream concept'... but a smartphone, an entire computer and all the things it can possibly do....just too complex.

    My guess would be if people are dreaming of smartphones, the dream concieved smart phone is likely to be ... one or two uses cases, apps.

    Somewhat interestingly... you can kind of see this in how earlier AI still motion and video generators... have that wierd dream like ... morphing, flowing aspect to them, the details are never right if you look closely, they really struggle with generating like, coherent billboards or signage or the text on posters or in a book.

    It gets lost in the noise, ... and these models are basically oversimplified, rough models of neural networks... with way, way more amounts of processing power and a vastly more expansive data set thrown at them, to compensate for them being a crude approximation of the human brain, which is basically the most complex thing that is known to exist.

    Maybe you could say that a dream is roughly a low fidelity hallucination, compared to the high fidelity hallucination that our waking consciouness is.

    I wonder how synesthetics dream, how the deaf and the blind dream...

    I still remember one powerful, psychadlelic trip I once had ... I was aware of the difference between the 2D image projection component of my vision, and the 3D spatial approximation component... because they were now massively out of sync... either the 2D image was basically delayed, or the 3d spatial component was just basically broken, getting sizes of and distances to objects and their edges massively wrong, sort of warbling, frothing, kind of like in a video game where LODs are flickering between high and low detail models erroneously.

    ... But, anyway, this is all my barely informed spitball speculation, I could be completely wrong, my non expert, layman brain is just trying to do abstract pattern recognition.

    • Totally!

      I’m using my phone as an extension for hobbies, mostly as a map and fining things, and I’ve had it multiple times appear in my dreams.

      Then again, as a Kid the N64 often appeared in dreams. I was playing some dream-Diddy Kong Racing even.

      No, I am not schizophrenic. I do have hallucinations in the corner of my eye when tired, but they disappear once I look at them.

      • Its actually entirely normal for people to 'see things that aren't there' in the corners of your vision, especially in poor lighting conditions.

        Your eyes and brain are best at resolving detail of things you're looking directly at, and basically the brain does a best guess pattern match for things on the periphery... because sometimes, its just a bug or a leaf or just a weird trick of the light... but other times, its a fucking stealthy predator animal.

        As to video game ... entities appearing in dreams, or just... dreaming you are in a video game... yeah I've had that happen too.

        It seems to be easier for a dreaming brain to just either mix the virtual world and real world together, I guess like AR... or just throw you totally in to a simulated world... than it would be to dream of yourself as still being you, sitting in a chair, in front of a screen, and keep the clear distinction between the real world and the digital.

        Again I think the commonity here is that when a system of abstractions and symbols only makes any sense when it is stable and coherent... a dreaming brain does not really handle well a highly specific and complex rule set: it either blurs them together, simplifies them massively, or just doesn't include them.

        EDIT:

        But yeah, if you use a phone as mostly a map and compass... thats not too conceptually complicated, if you limit it to just that. Of course I'd be surprised if the... fidelity, the detail of the map and compass were high, but they probably don't need to be if most of the dream if like, you hiking around looking for geocaches or w/e.

        Theres a whole lot more visceral, more real elements to that experience that are probably gonna get more ... dream fidelity focus? on? The environment, the difficulty of moving through terrain, the beauty or terror, maybe the elation of finding the thing, the determination that keeps you going, the fear of running out of food or maybe having to shelter in place from a sudden onset storm...

  • It's because it's something constantly in flux. You don't have an unconscious model of "a phone", because you've changed out your handset so many times that you're not inherently comfortable with the sensation. And because they're information displays, they don't form an unconscious impression.

  • Linklater's Waking Life touches on this, describing digital clocks and such not working in dreams, iirc.

  • Dumb. Mine was in my dream last night. I remember teaching my son to set a PIN instead of using Apple Face. If I remember, in the dream, he spent a lot of time making funny faces at me.

  • Hmm, yea I'm on a computer the majority of most days probably but I can't remember ever really dreaming about that

  • I have tech of all kinds in my dreams, including smartphones, and that's clearly not rare since there are always many comments saying so every time this gets posted.

  • When I was a ~10 year old kid, I dreamed about having an iPod touch. It was so cool to take pictures, play games, and look up information. I would wake up and be disappointed for half a day that the iPod was no longer in my hand.

  • The screen is a mirror. But physics don't work in a dream other than what you observed and can replicate manually. Every experience of physics within the dream are generated manually, piece by piece.
    Some might say you don't walk or run, you float or float faster. Others would say you don't even do that, but rather the dream world moves around you.

    So when you look at the screen of a phone, it's like a dream within a dream. It has to be crafted and you get sent within the screen, turning that into the actual dream.

    If you've ever fired a gun in a dream, you'll note that it usually doesn't work. Or if it does, the targets drop without you "feeling" the entire process start to finish. And if you focus on the strangeness of this, then next time you fire a bullet, the knowledge you have of how that works gets added. So you see the bullet coming out of the gun, you follow along as it travels and you see it hit the target as you've seen it before in real life, whether it's actual practice, a game or a movie.
    However, everything else comes to a standstill. The you that shot the bullet is left behind or no longer there, the target being shot waits there quietly to receive the bullet or even actively cooperates and the background world no longer matters.

    The dream world isn't fixed, tightly bound by the rules of the real world. The dream world is what you focus on at that moment and everything else changes to fit. So if you don't see a cellphone in your dreams, it's because they're not relevant to you persistently as a cellphone and they instead become (the gateway of) what they show you as soon as you focus on that.

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