You can train yourself to remember dreams if you start writing down everything you remember.
You can also learn to recognize that you are in a dream and take control (look up lucid dreaming).
As with the above posters, any idea if regularly dream journaling (and potentially lucid dreaming) is actually healthy or not?
I say this as someone who gets pretty bad nightmares and has had numerous lucid dreams (even transitioning from nightmare to lucid dream)
I have no idea if further engaging with my dream state is healthy or not?
It’s probably safe. The very reason I started getting into lucid dreaming was to control my nightmares.
I have never heard of it being dangerous before, but if I had to speculate I’d say it probably depends on how you use it: You might be able to take command to end the nightmare but I’m not a doctor or psychiatrist but maybe in avoiding the nightmares altogether you’re denying yourself some sort of personal growth or insight?
The real answer is probably: More research needs to be done.
On rare occasion I’ve taken control of nightmares in a Lucid dream state - typically waiking up momentarily and then going back to sleep.
I’m just not sure if the psychic cost of having these types of intense dreams encoded in memory is healthier than just sleeping and not remembering.
A bit plagued by my dreams ( thereby my subconscious ) if I can remember them.
That was the question I guess, I hear the idea I should engage more to remember dreams, but not sure if that is healthy for people to do who have vivid and disturbing dreams regularly (eg. Under attack, people I love getting hurt ect…)
HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM.
- Death of the Discworld
Terry Pratchett - G.N.U
More than relevant. Stolen from. This person just slightly reworded an XKCD comic into a tweet.
Yeah, that was my thought too, though it is possible they came up with it independently. Or forgot they read that xkcd which came out 18 years ago (fuck!).
It has happened to Randall himself before (see the header)
If I don’t smokadaweed before bed I do tend to remember them. One of the reasons I try not to smoke late in the evening.
I have the opposite issue. Really stressful, anxiety inducing, or nightmare dreams.
Weed fixes that problem for me by being an organic skip button for dreaming
Sex is weird too. You undress and make your self vulnerable and expend a lot of energy and risk catching a disease and then fall asleep. Either we do it for fun or to create a parasite that we have to take are of.
To be fair, in comparison to living, it is a lot of fun.
And clothes are restrictive anyway
Human memories are stored in flesh
Flesh has to be replaced constantly
When you sleep your memories are being copied and reallocated to new flesh, the things you experience in dreams are just a series of incredibly losely related themes and concepts. In general human memory searching relies on association of concepts rather than any sorted lists or some other silly inorganic solution.
I used to be able to remember my dreams, or at the very least I would wake up with a sensation that I had had a dream, but anymore though I just feel like a blank slate, like nothing happened. If I dream anymore I’m completely losing them because I don’t even have the feeling that I’m forgetting anything, it’s just blank when I sleep now.
If you happen to smoke weed that can do it. I’ve barely dreamt (that I remember) in years
I’ve always heard that weed smokers have less dreams, but as someone who kinda started doing it more regularly within the last year, I haven’t experienced that? Honestly I think I tend to have more vivid and weird dreams when I’ve smoked before bed. Do some people not get the REM suppression?
I wouldn’t know, I haven’t looked into it to that degree. Not surprising for different people to experience different side effects. I’ve been an all day every day smoker for well over a decade
Alcohol does it too. I’ve heard people say that’s what dts are. Your brain dreaming while you’re awake.
I’m not familiar with dts. What is that?
I’m a former alcoholic (always an alcoholic but not a sip in over a decade) so that checks out too
delirium tremens. -sober alcoholic who is a bad speller. I probably should have capitalized it like DTs maybe
I still wouldn’t have known, so thank you for telling me. I’ll have to look it up. I was extremely lucky and had a clean break from it
I used to smoke weed, but that was 20 years ago and I hadn’t ever been a big smoker.
havent had 8 hours of “lucid coma” since before most of you were born
Yeah me either. In the last 24;hrs I got 2 hrs then a little later 40 mins then a number of hours later one more hour.
8 hours sounds nice. I usually manage about 4 or 5
Obligatory sleep hacks from a person who loves sleep:
- Clean bedsheets
- No phone in bed
- Same sleep time every day
- Same wake time every day
- Exercise during the day
- No lights in the room. No LEDs, no street lights
- White noise
If you do any one of these your sleep will improve. If it doesn’t, I give you full permission to flame me and my dog.
White noise is critical and underrated.
I have had only a few vivid, real feeling dreams that have stuck with me for years. Do I know what they mean, nope. Do I wish I had more of them… yes. Working on improving my sleep in the last year or so. I think my average sleep time actually got a few mins. shorter. Oops.
The natural selection implications for dream amnesia are wild.
We slip through the veil of reality, do we.
It helps having an idea of what causes the phenomenon, certainly. I get a lot calmer about basically everything when I know just what the hell is going on.
I mean sure we accept it, but we do put dreams to a high regard. Hence why you can say something is dreamy, or a dream come true.
Maybe we don’t know enough about dreams yet?
We know a ton about dreams, we just don’t know why exactly sleep “recharges” the brain which I find fascinating.
This guy assumes people write off dreaming but when I was 17 I was utterly fascinated with the subject and researched lucid dreaming for many years, even teaching myself how to do it. That rabbit hole is absolutely wild.
If anyone is interested in the subject, check out the book “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” by Stephen LaBerge, or watch the film Waking Life.
I think the commonly accepted theory is that your brain is sorting through the day, through problems, through life. Even just playing. This makes sense seeing as how quickly humans fall apart without sleep.
I was so tired once, that all I could hear was The Spice Girls Wannabe, and just the chorus because I never actually listened to their music, just the repetition of:
YO, I’ᒪᒪ TEᒪᒪ YOᑌ ᗯᕼᗩT I ᗯᗩᑎT ᗯᕼᗩT I ᖇEᗩᒪᒪY, ᖇEᗩᒪᒪY ᗯᗩᑎT
SO TEᒪᒪ ᗰE ᗯᕼᗩT YOᑌ ᗯᗩᑎT, ᗯᕼᗩT YOᑌ ᖇEᗩᒪᒪY, ᖇEᗩᒪᒪY ᗯᗩᑎT
Yeah not all of us get the amnesia unfortunately.
I’ve only had a couple dreams that were legit traumatizing. How bad could it be to remember 100x more of them!? That’s like only one or two truly life altering traumatizing dreams per night!
