Thread: A couple of questions about dreams

1. There are theories. The most reasonable one it seems (for me) that it's because when we dream we possess a rather different neuro-chemical balance compared to when we are awake. That "neuro-soup" is regulated to ordinary levels once we awake (playing some part in the famous sleep inertia), and makes it hard for us to recall dreams.

2. Dream characteristics vary from person to person. I had experiences where I had no body, but atm I can't recall of a 3rd person experience. I'd say it's uncommon, but not that rare.

1. I would speculate that some memories may be lost, but some are stored in subconscious. There are times when we do not remember a dream right after waking up, but then later in the day remember it. Also, Stephen LaBerge I think mentioned a story of a woman who was trying to pick a name for her unborn child in her lucid dreams, picked a good one, told it to a dream character, but upon waking had forgotten it. but then in her next lucid dream, she contacted that dream character again, and found out what the name she had picked in her previous dream had been. I do believe that some memories forgotten by our conscious mind are still there, but I don't think all memories are stored, and one cannot consciously control what is remembered and what is forgotten. In fact I keep being surprised by what useless stuff my mind chose to remember such as the lyrics of a song I learned on the playground in elementary school, and yet so many useful things are gone. I think if you have the lucid dream soon, the chances that the memories of that dream will still be there are higher than if a long time passes. On the other hand if your subconscious mind took a fancy to it, it may store that dream forever and restore it perfectly in your old age. On a third hand, your mind could fool you into presenting completely new content to you, and claiming it to be memories from that forgotten dream, and you would never know that it fooled you, because there is no evidence to contradict it.

2. I have dreams in which I am not there, watching like a movie, and sometimes I am there for only part of the dream. I also sometimes dream I am someone else: different gender, different age, different life situation, different personality, but those dreams are very different from the watching a movie with me not there type dreams. Oh, but in most of my dreams I think I am there and myself more or less. I think though that in the watching a movie type dreams, it is harder to become lucid because one is not even aware of self. Just to contradict myself though: my only successful WILD thus far I saw that I had a pm on DV and I opened it, but with my mind. I was not there in this dream: no sense of self, of my eyes, of my fingers, just my consciousness watching DV, and I am wondering whether that is more common for a WILD than for a DILD.

EDIT:

An example of a dream of mine where I was there for only a small fraction of the dream but most of it was like a movie: http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/joan...-sister-46052/

example of a dream where I was not myself: http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/joan...-legacy-45849/