The people in your dreams DC's

**Booney** · 11-22-2012 10:21 PM

I've been hearing and reading people say that the persons you meet in your dreams are people you have seen in real life.
And also that the brain isn't capable of creating "new" faces.
I was wondering if there is any info on this to back it up, since I've only heard people mention it and I can only find these things being mentioned in those lists of random facts.

So I guess I just want to know if it's true and if it is where can I read more about it.

**Dreamcatcher92** · 11-22-2012 11:53 PM

It's true. However, sometimes you see someone passing the street and the face of that someone goes right into your subconscious even if you won't remember them if you see them again in real life.
Plus, sometimes your subconscious uses for example your friends eyes, mixed with a stranger's nose/mouth and your teacher's ears and other facial features to form a new human being in your dream, which is possible.
You can read about this in most Lucid Dreaming books (I'm sure it's mentioned in "Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming" by Steven LaBerge)

**faceonmars** · 11-23-2012 05:20 AM

I think the human brain is very capable of creating new faces in dreams just as it is capable of creating new songs and new paintings in waking life. Also, I have never heard of this theory that the brain is locked into only seeing faces in dreams that we have seen in waking life.

**Michael** · 11-23-2012 05:39 AM

I would have to agree with the above post and say that your mind can surely create new faces, and other new things. If there is ANY evidence otherwise, please inform me.

**Arra** · 11-23-2012 12:16 PM

Did no one read the OP? This person wants to know if there's evidence to back it up. The only thing anyone's said so far is that it's been 'mentioned' in a book. Everything else has been an opinion which doesn't help at all.

I'm going to take an educated guess and say that the answer is that we don't know. It's one of those fun myths people like to make up and present as fact because it's a cool idea which sounds like it could be true, but we really have no idea. Here's why I think that. We do not know much about how the human brain works, especially something as subtle and complicated as whether we can make up faces in our dreams, so it's unlikely we could determine the answer through neurology. The only other way we might answer is through experimentation. But how would this experiment be designed? It couldn't. To determine whether or not even one face that a person dreams about is one he's seen in real life, the face he's dreaming about would need to be identified somehow, and there is no way to see what other people are dreaming (yet) so that would be impossible. Even if he had a photographic memory or something and drew it out, there'd need to be a list of all the faces the person has ever seen just to determine that the face wasn't one he's seen before, and that isn't reasonable.