Thread: Why do we not realize the randomness/weirdness of our dreams.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe it's because our conscious is cut off in our dreams. Our conscious is what tells us "That's weird" or "This isn't right." Your subconscious is what runs your dreams. When you become lucid, a little bit of conscious slips into your dream, you realize "I'm dreaming", and the rest of the iceberg is pulled in.

I'm sorry I can't give you a scientific explanation for your question, the most likely reason is that we are not comparing our dream to walking reality when we dream. I mean if our brain was to scrutinize every image that popped into your dream we would be lucid everyday.
I personally believe that our brain goes into this state of accepting reality because there is no point in questioning it. The brain is only processing the memories trying to see if they should be stored as memories however it is slightly more complex than that. It makes sense that our brain doesn't check if each thing is possible but it is also unusual how we rarely compare any of our waking expectations or memories to dreams as they happen.
Another reason is that we never question reality in walking life so we have no reason to do it in our dream.

You say that you feel that you cannot DEILD, I think you mean DILD. Dild is initiated in the dream while Deild is initiated by falling asleep consciously.
With practise and questioning your environment in real life that behaviour will pass on into your dreams, it reallly isn't much of a problem since youll get better at it.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

I'm sorry I can't give you a scientific explanation for your question, the most likely reason is that we are not comparing our dream to walking reality when we dream. I mean if our brain was to scrutinize every image that popped into your dream we would be lucid everyday.
I personally believe that our brain goes into this state of accepting reality because there is no point in questioning it. The brain is only processing the memories trying to see if they should be stored as memories however it is slightly more complex than that. It makes sense that our brain doesn't check if each thing is possible but it is also unusual how we rarely compare any of our waking expectations or memories to dreams as they happen.
Another reason is that we never question reality in walking life so we have no reason to do it in our dream.

You say that you feel that you cannot DEILD, I think you mean DILD. Dild is initiated in the dream while Deild is initiated by falling asleep consciously.
With practise and questioning your environment in real life that behaviour will pass on into your dreams, it reallly isn't much of a problem since youll get better at it.

I would listen to dutchraptor. I suggest looking at his guide on lucid dreaming as well. He's a champion at it. Just look at his LD count. I'm reading a book on a doctor that studied lucid dreaming, and he only managed a few LDs a month. I actually had a few of my first lucid dreams using his guide.

That actually makes alot of sense dutchraptor , why would I question the reality of a dream when in the waking life I have no reason to do so.

@Lahzo I am reading Stephen LaBerge's book on lucid dreaming the only problem I have at the moment is when I try to right in my dream journal
its just a couple of lines like "Went to space fought aliens" or "Drove a car talked to a friend" I cant seem to remember the dream in details >.>
just the very very basic events that occured.

+ I will read up on dutchraptors guide! I am trying to get all the knowledge I can about lucid dreaming ^_^!

I agree that we are not used to question our reality in waking life, we just accept it, and then we do the same in our dreams.

Adding some daytime awareness training, where you do question your reality should help. Throughout the day, you stop whenever you remember and do ask yourself how you got there, trace your path to that point, think backwards what did you do just a minute ago and just before that and so on.

You also look around you and you notice details of your surroundings. You ask yourself if everything looks like it should, or if there are any differences from last time you looked.

You ask yourself "wow, is this a dream?" and you genuinly consider, that it could be a dream and you don't know for sure, untill you do a few reality checks. After this I usually say a little mantra "next time I'm dreaming, I realize I'm dreaming." I used to say "Next time I'm dreaming, I look at my hands and realize I'm dreaming", which is a classic mantra+RC from Castanedas book.

This genuine belief that we could be in a dream is easier to do after you have already experienced some vivid lucid dream, but it may work on excitement, enthusiasm, and wondering alone, as it did for me with my first few DILDs.

It also helps to think, that our reality could be just another dream, as Aborigines of Australia believed, and I think budhists believe that, or at least some of them.

RE: dream recall
if you write in your DJ everything, even if it's just a sentence or a fragment, your mind will get the message that dreams and remembering them is important to you and will help you with recall.

WILD class for awareness
Dream yoga by Sivason
classic RC+awareness technique + DJ

Happy dreams

I don't think it's about "not questioning" the dream. It's because the non-lucid dream state is delusional. Like a schizophrenic, the dreamer has no constant reality. Dreams, and the consciousness you experience within dreams, are constantly shifting. There is no consistent "you" to "question" it.

The Logic Center of your brain is shut off when dreaming, so your brain won't go like "WTF" when dreaming.

Neuroscientist J. Allan Hobson has hypothesized that the realization that one is dreaming may occur in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is one of the few areas deactivated during REM sleep, and which is involved in working memory.

The logical part of the brain is turned off while you are dreaming. That is why you just accept weird things in your dreams until you trigger that part of the brain. I.E: With reality checks.

There are weird things that I regularly dream. I mean I keep on dreaming of the same things that has the same setting, the same everything. Like I dream about it once in a week. But I never had an idea what that is or what that mean? Does this has something to do with my life in reality? Is this kind of dream wanted to convey something?

Yeah i would think getting hit by a semi truck and walking away in my dream would make me go WTF and realize but nope lol

To understand this question better it is necessary to have a basic idea of the construct of dreams. The brain creates a model of the world around us from the information relayed to it from our senses. When we are asleep, our consciousness along with most of our perception is shut down so the brain uses already existing information (emotions, thoughts, ideas, concepts, expectations, fears, desires, fantasies etc) in our minds to create a simulation of the world. As our logical reasoning capabilities are hugely diminished while dreaming these things are assembled together randomly.

Essentially, to analyse this from a scientific point of view we have to look at the construct of dreams in more depth, the nature of human perception and how information is gathered and transmitted and the transition from jumbled information to the storylike nature of dreams.
I want to use my research paper on dreaming from the last school semester to explain this better, but I cannot find the document anywhere on this computer or USB...

Very good question by the way.

The DPC

http://www.dreamviews.com/f33/dreami...-cortex-94231/

Read somewhere that we become accustomed to the weirdness of dreams very early on in our childhood, which is why we don't question dream content as we get older.

Here's a good video on this subject (amongst many other subjects). It's long and rambly, and don't bother if you don't have an hour to listen to it, but this guy is a genius and well worth listening to:

Minecrafting and Free Association 1: Schizophrenia and Kings - YouTube

Thanks for all the replies! it is really nice to have a lot of people give their opinions on this , last night was the first night I didnt have a really weird dream, it was pretty normal infact I was in uni class finished
I went outside drove back home and poof I woke up.

I keep telling myself after I finish a dream to remember the dream "feeling" so I can somehow teach myself to sense that and become lucid!

Sorry but I have one more question, if in a dream the part of the brain that tells us whats logical and illogical is switched off, when we do a reality check in a dream whats to stop us
from thinking that "Oh thats meant to happen" ?

Originally Posted by Revoka

Sorry but I have one more question, if in a dream the part of the brain that tells us whats logical and illogical is switched off, when we do a reality check in a dream whats to stop us
from thinking that "Oh thats meant to happen" ?

It's never switched off it's just resting, we can definetely see this if we look at the differences between the visions you get during Sleep paralysis and a non-lucid dream. Supposedly we are closest to our subconscious during the hypnagogic state (I.e SP) and we notice that the images we get in this state are completely random and most of the time have little connection to anything but the emotion you have at the time.
However when you look at a dream we can see that many things are "fixed" by the conscious mind, the main one being is that it gives dreams the feeling that there was a story or a reason behind everything that jus happened. It's is not just complete random images being spewed out by your subconscious and the reason for this is because the conscious mind is quietly trying to make sense of it all.
So what we are aiming for when we want to become lucid is that at the same as doing a reality check you are questioning your surroundings, wondering how you got there, trying to use all of your senses. All these actions recquire you a large portion of your conscious mind, so as you perform the action you are bringing it back on power which should activate it enough for you to waken in the dream.

As you become lucid enough times you realize that it's a particulary distinct feeling, the feeling of awareness. While to many people the purpose of an RC might seem to be that by performing the action you realize that you are dreaming but I don't think that it's such a direct link. I think that the RC is only a startup, to wake us up, and that it doesn't actually necessarily involve questioning anything. Infact out of all the Dilds I've ever had I'd say only 5% where ever caused by doing an RC.

the realization that one is dreaming happends in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. this can also explain why theirs a spectrum of awarness when we lucid dream. even if you know full well that you are dreaming, that still doesn't mean that your not going to react to everythingor everyone as if they were merely a dream.