Thread: Working with number in dreams

Anyone who's ever tried looking for numbers in dreams knows it's not all it's cracked up to be. They are unstable, and change without notice, which can make pinpointing specific numbers a real pain.

The heart of the problem is a stability issue. The more well defined something is, the more stable and reliable it is for use in a dream. Since numbers aren't actually real things, that makes them rather ethereal and hard to pin down. There is no definitive image of the number 12 for instance.

The solution then is to piggyback your numbers onto a more stable system, something which is less prone to change. I might summon the winning lottery numbers one at a time out of the ground in the form of giant stone statues. A museum might be a good place to work with large statue numbers in that way.

Numbers by themselves are unstable. Let your numbers express themselves in a more permanent medium.

I don't know if this would actually work, I once had an LD where I tried to send my father a message using a computer and even though I know the keyboard better than my own house almost it still is very unstable.

Yea mind just loves trolling you. I think the problem are not numbers themselves. The whole dream is very variable and it's more significant when you look at small things or more concrete things like letters or numbers.

I think the trouble with numbers lies more in memory than anything, though perhaps for the same reason -- their innate abstraction -- that you described in the OP, Cusp.

It isn't that the numbers are changing on us because of their material vagueness, I think, so much as it is that we have difficulty in dreams attaching usable metaphors to numbers of any kind of complexity. Come to think of it, we have the same problem in waking life, but at least in waking life we can "retain" our number generations by grabbing a piece of paper and a pencil. In dreams, writing them down tends to fail because memory doesn't supply enough information to our unconscious to hold the written stuff steady (though, oddly, if you forget about the meaning of the symbols on the paper, they will seem to remain unchanged for quite a while).

So I think that to retain numbers in dreams you need to produce a metaphor that your memory can both readily file and find files that relate to it. That Stonehenge-like image you use for lottery numbers is an excellent example of this, BTW.

^^Actually you could need just 10 digits to express any number right? 12 would be expressed in the metaphors of 1 and 2 or perhaps in the shape of an addition of two single digits. I don't think it could work good with large numbers to express complex sets. Could someone tell some examples when might it be useful?