• Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views




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    Nerefa

    1. Discovering The Essence of Happiness

      by , 12-10-2022 at 10:38 PM
      I had a dream last night that led to a mind-blowing discovery about happiness.

      I've been sad lately, don't get much joy out of the things I used to love. It feels like the light inside of me has gone out.
      I have plenty of "reasons" for why I'm sad, like depression and life struggles that are real and understandable.
      But that doesn't change anything. I'm still sad.

      Last night, I decided to try using my dreams as references for visual art. I wasn't trying to find the grand solution to my relentless despair, but I thought maybe I'll be happier if my drawing skills improve. Or maybe I'll make money off of my art if it looks better, and the money will make me happy.
      idk maybe it'll just pass the time, worst case scenario.

      My small, simple goal was to improve my anatomy skills, especially eyebrows. I have trouble visualizing eyebrows and putting them onto paper. I thought "Well, my dreams look just like real life. The human brain is incredible, capable of coming up with elaborate scenery and imagery that look just like real life. Perfect reference material, right? I can study anything I want in dreams."

      So I entered a lucid dream with WILD and started studying a simple painting of a woman facing to the side. I could study the curve of her chin and lips, the size of her forehead relative to her chin, the shape of her eyes and eyebrows. All of the shapes and proportions. It was as if I was looking at a real painting for reference.

      But this didn't help because I can already draw something like that from memory when awake. Side-views are easy for me. I've already memorized the curves and proportions. If I was going to improve, I needed references for more complex angles and expressions that I haven't memorized.

      So I stepped away from the painting and started to look around at everything in my environment, marveling at how vivid everything was. The grass, the trees, every grain of dirt on the ground. I leaned down to examine the petals of a purple flower.

      But again, I could draw a flower like that from memory. Neat, but not what I was looking for.

      I needed to look at things that I have trouble visualizing when awake, because I don't know the finer details of what they look like.

      So I found some people to study. I tried to examine the face of an older man who looked perfectly vivid and realistic at first, but upon close inspection, I couldn't wrap my mind around what his face was supposed to actually look like in finer detail. What's the exact curve of his eyebrow from every angle? Do all the hairs go in the same direction or do they curve out in separate directions? Where exactly on his skull do the eyebrows meet the orbital bone? I can't remember, I don't know these things, but I thought they would "magically" appear properly in my dream. For some reason, I thought my brain must've had this "secret highly detailed memory" storage that only dream-me could access. After all, my dreams are so vivid and realistic.

      Seems kind of obvious that I was wrong, now that I think about it.
      I couldn't make out his finer details in my dream any better than I could without a reference when awake. It wasn't even necessarily blurry, but it was like I was seeing the ambiguity of my mind failing to form an objectively correct visual. I was seeing all of the "possibilities" at the same time (not literally, but the illusion of my flawed perception was clearer than ever).

      This is also what happens when I try to visualize his face when awake.
      I still need a reference.

      But it's mind-blowing that I didn't even notice the illusion covering up these deficits until I started looking for them. My unaware mind had convinced me that everything looked normal, when it didn't. That makes way more sense than my old magical assumption that we could somehow dream in 4K but not access this massive underused capacity for detail any other time.

      So I can't use my dreams for art like I wanted, but this has even more incredible implications.

      First, awareness is a much bigger aspect of our sensory perceptions than I previously thought. Everything you see is filtered through your awareness of it. You're not getting the real thing. Visual artists are specifically skilled to increase their awareness of visuals and a lack of awareness of visuals is reflected through their drawings, but we otherwise may never notice the awareness we lack (whether an artist or not).

      We go about our whole life thinking we see things that we're not fully seeing. Our minds are filling in the blanks and we don't think twice about it.

      Secondly, this is a huge difference between waking life and dreams that I never noticed before. Removing the "filter" like I did in this dream could help you recognize the dreamstate by reflecting on your level of visual awareness.

      Third and more incredible to me is what this implies about happiness in general. I posted this on the Omnilucid discord, and a fellow dreamer pointed out how this happens with other things too (not just visuals) like when you dream of a funny joke, but wake up with the realization that it wasn't funny (your mind just thought it was). Or in waking life, the experience of a garden being extra beautiful knowing the labor and love that went into it VS just seeing a garden in a dream that was easily created on the spot.

      I've had countless dreams that replicated the experience of something, without having the actual experience.

      Like nightmares about things that aren't scary, or losing love for a person I've never met. It was just a trick of the mind, an illusion of having an experience I didn't even have... There's a pure essence to our experience of things that can't be seen, heard, touched etc. It doesn't seem to exist outside of our consciousness. It's invisible and intangible, but it's very real.

      I think I've been getting wrapped up in the illusions of "stuff" and have a better understanding of what that means now. I'm feeling much more hopeful. Maybe I can find happiness again now that I'm seeing past the filters.

      Updated 12-11-2022 at 06:58 AM by 99032

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