Thread: 2D Symbols

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

What 2D symbols have you seen in dreams?

Off hand I can't think of any 2D symbols, excepting English and Spanish words, and rarely algebra. Usually I would hear that sort of thing instead of reading it, which I find difficult to do in dreams. I have on rare occasions dreamed of s geometric symbol which can not be embedded in a 2D surface or a 3D volume however. I will try to explain....

It seems to me that we see surfaces, which are 2D, and arrange these in 3D in imagination. The stereo effects from having two eyes, and having different color cones at different depths on the back of the eye, provide depth information, but the image field is still a lot of 2D surfaces sort of mashed together into a 3D story. So I would have a lot of trouble seeing a 3D symbol.

A mobius strip is a 2D object that can be embedded in 3D Euclidean space, but not in 2D Euclidean space. In other words, although its 2D, you can't flatten it out so that you can take a picture of it that shows the whole thing.

Although you can't embed a complete spherical shell in 2D Euclidean space either, technically you could poke a hole in it then stretch it out in 2D. Can you extend your visual field to a complete 360 degrees in a dream, wrapping all the way around the back of your head, without a gap or pinpoint hole? I can not.

A fractal is called a fractal because it doesn't have an integer dimensionality. A fractal curve is more than 1D and less than 2D. It can be embedded in 2D Euclidean space.

A 2D elliptic or hyperbolic geometry can be embedded in a 3D Euclidean space.

A Klien bottle is an example of a 2D surface which can not be embedded in 3D Euclidean space.

A few times I have dreamed of a geometric structure which seems to have dimension more than 2D, but which it seems can not be embedded in 3D Euclidean space. I found it to be very beautiful. Naturally, I have had a lot of trouble recalling it upon awaking, since no picture I can make of it in my mind seems adequate. This structure isn't a real thing like an object, its a representation of what reality is like from the standpoint of a demon/muse that inspired the dream. So you could say that its a geometric symbol, but not like a seal or something, such as I assume you had in mind. It is on the basis of this 'geometric structure' that I say that people do not have past lives in a simple, sequential sense.

Probably you (or anybody else reading this) can at least feel something of what this structure means, even if you can't picture it. So you could try asking about it internally and see what you get afterwards. In the same spirit, if you have something inspiring which you have seen, you could try offering it in your mind so that other people can see it in their dreams also. I think that almost all of what I have seen in dreams has been in other people's minds first.