Thread: Accuracy of lucid dreams?

Dreams are not supposed to be accurate, even though they could be. Anything can happen in dreams which is why your house is meshed together with other places. From personal experience, when i have a normal dream about my house, it is usually prety innacurate. Though when i have a false awakening using a WILD or DEILD technique, they are usually MUCH more accurate. Hope this helped!

I've had false awakenings where the room I think I have woken up in looks exactly like a real-life room of my house. It's rare though.

I don't think its rare. It's called a false awakening and happens to me every time i try a WILD, DEILD, or FILD. They are quite fun though

I just meant it's rare for me. It might be common for others.

Yeah i guess it varies for every person, love your avatar by the way!

Two of my LD's started in my house and I didn't really see anything wrong with it. That is mostly because I didn't really look around I just went straight downstairs and out the door.

A great thing about dreams is that your feelings can be simulated to an extent, so you can see this house that does not look anything like your home in real life, but your vrain is telling you that it is. Sometimes this can lead to confusion were you thought you an accurate portrayal of your house in you dream but if you really think back it might have been completely different.

The worse nightmare I had, was a FA which was at least 95% accurate. The only difference was the rack in the corner of my room. I had to think a lot in order to find out the god damn difference once I woke up for real.

What was so scary about the false awakening that made it your worst nightmare? Was it the stunning similarities it had with your real room? I can see how it can be a bit frightening, but i love to explore my dream house and hunt for differences xD

Originally Posted by jblb2424

What was so scary/.../Was it the stunning similarities it had with your real room?/...

It was what I brought from the previous dream, which took place in the same building, and this amnesia-like feeling, if you know what I mean. The sequence was even worse when I woke up for real "a couple of hours later" with the same amnesia-like feeling of not knowing what you've done in the middle.

Every now and then I hear someone claiming they had a dream that mirrored reality in every way. But I don't buy it. I think they only took a superficial inventory of the dream scape. The closer you look, the more differences you will find. Sure your desk may be in the same place in the dream as in real life, but try opening the drawers to see what's inside. Try rereading the same page of a book twice. Explore a bit. The differences are always there.

Originally Posted by Hwen

normally, if I dream that I'm in my house, it's usually something that looks sort of like my house but all mashed together with other places I've been to.

Nope. The brain doesn't store linear data like a computer. It's a neural network that stores patterns, clusters of associations. You gave a perfect example there of the shape these clusters take.

Home and school are the two most common examples of how this works, because we've almost all lived in different places in our lives and gone to different schools. In your brain, every house you've lived in and everything in it has has a connection to the concept of home. It's these connections that allow you to have a spontaneous childhood memory when you come across an old toy.

In a dream, the concept of home or school can draw upon any association you have with them to use as building blocks. The more places you've lived and gone to school, the more options you have to build with in the dream, thus a greater chance for pieces that don't belong together in RL to end up mashed up together in a dream.

If you've only lived in one house your whole life, then the dream geography of your house should be more consistent.

Originally Posted by The Cusp

.../I think they only took a superficial inventory of the dream scape/...

You're right, by the time I had that nightmare, I didn't even know those were called FA's in the first place. I was visiting my Uncle's house, so I didn't actually know too much about that apartment and my mind was easily fooled by the dreamscape. On the other hand, as the main subject of that dream was something else which I brought from the previous dream, I didn't pay much attention on the apartment itself. So, I think that could be the only way a dreamscape could be that accurate, when you don't pay attention to it but to something else.

My first lucid was an instable few second thing. I went to sleep at my dad's house.. and when i became lucid... i found myself standing in the middle of that room where i went to sleep. I remember thinking that "that's odd... i dont remember dreams being this accurate". I glanced at the small paintings as they were almost the same like in waking life... but they had swapped places. The room was so dark i could only see blackness trough the doorway, then the dream collapsed.