Action and Dreams

[Occipitalred]

Hello all, In previous threads, I have been discussing the effect of thought and emotions in dreams. But because dreams happen in the mind, I was wondering if there is any relationship with actions at all. That is, I believe that a socially anxious people will have dreams in which the dream characters antagonize the dreamer and that working on self-confidence and a sense of belonging and safety with others in real life leads to dreams where the dream characters are supportive of the dreamer. Now, I'm wondering if there is any parallel at all with actions. For example, if you are a big procrastinator and then you work on being proactive, how does this affect dreams. Do we ever even feel lazy in dreams?

[JadeGreen]

Very much, yes. Now, I'm wondering if there is any parallel at all with actions. For example, if you are a big procrastinator and then you work on being proactive, how does this affect dreams. Do we ever even feel lazy in dreams? I am a big procrastinator when it comes to schoolwork. On the most basic level, this can manifest as a realistic dream of a false awakening, going to school and not being able to hand in the homework that was assigned. (Annoyingly this can happen even if the homework isn't due for a few more days. So like the homework could be due on Monday, but on the Friday night, I would still dream that I FA on Monday Morning and rush to class with incomplete homework to turn in.) Generally these dreams come and go with my rhythm. If I manage to keep ahead on schoolwork, then they go away entirely, and if I fall behind, they begin appearing again, and rather frequently. So I would say yes, dreams can reflect your actions. In essence, it's kind of a silly question to ask. A few things might change your reaction to situations, such as your awareness that you are just dreaming and there are no long term consequences might make you foolhardy when you would more often than not be reluctant to dive into a dangerous situation. Your awareness might make you apathetic to loss or death. Someone gets killed right in front of you and you don't care because it's just a dream character. If you're only partially lucid or non-lucid than any number of emotions or factors could influence your actions. I sometimes dream that I am a different character, sort of role-playing someone elses life more or less, and take on their personality, but this is always nonlucid. But if you're fully lucid then of course your dreaming actions and personality are going to be the same as that of your waking self. Isn't that kind of the point of LDing, to bring your waking consciousness into the dream? If you're lazy and unmotivated in waking life, then you will probably be lazy and unmotivated in the dream. If you're lustful for the opposite sex IWL, then you'll be lustful for the opposite sex in a dream in a dream. If you begin meditating or undertaking any course of action intent on altering your personality, then of course this will be reflected in the dream. I've had anger management issues since I was 12 or 13, mostly because I was bullied a lot and never made for a good student despite the amount of time I put into studying. Up until a few years ago I was pretty poor on controlling my anger and sometimes took it out on my dream characters and worlds in very violent and destructive outbursts. Mostly because I kept it bottled up inside me and had outbursts in waking life, too. But in the past few years I started venting my frustrations with athletic activities and directing my constant anger, putting it to good use getting me into better shape, and the amount of violent outbursts I had and antagonized dream characters in the dreamworld greatly diminished. After all, dreams are created by your mind, and therefore should be a reflection of your mental state.

[Occipitalred]

Very interesting! I am a big procrastinator when it comes to schoolwork. On the most basic level, this can manifest as a realistic dream of a false awakening, going to school and not being able to hand in the homework that was assigned. (Annoyingly this can happen even if the homework isn't due for a few more days. So like the homework could be due on Monday, but on the Friday night, I would still dream that I FA on Monday Morning and rush to class with incomplete homework to turn in.) Generally these dreams come and go with my rhythm. If I manage to keep ahead on schoolwork, then they go away entirely, and if I fall behind, they begin appearing again, and rather frequently. So I would say yes, dreams can reflect your actions. Yes I agree. But the way I see it, it's more related to how you feel. This happens to me too. And I think it's because of the guilt I feel for not being on task. In the dream, I feel guilty for not having completed my homework or not studied frequently enough. But it's not because I didn't study in the dream. There was no action to perform in the dream that I failed to perform. In essence, it's kind of a silly question to ask. A few things might change your reaction to situations, such as your awareness that you are just dreaming and there are no long term consequences might make you foolhardy when you would more often than not be reluctant to dive into a dangerous situation. Your awareness might make you apathetic to loss or death. Someone gets killed right in front of you and you don't care because it's just a dream character. If you're only partially lucid or non-lucid than any number of emotions or factors could influence your actions. Yes, I also agree that lucidity can affect your behavior in dreams. You become aware of the techniques you have learned and all. I have distinct behaviors in dreams where I am slightly aware that I am dreaming compared to those I believe are real. For example, if I know at any level that I am dreaming, I will fly to avoid problems or banish the problem. So I guess the best way to remove these dreams, much like you pointed out yourself, is to be involved in life and complete our duties, so that we won't feel guilt and won't dream about it. I sometimes dream that I am a different character, sort of role-playing someone elses life more or less, and take on their personality, but this is always nonlucid. Same. Recently, I dreamed I was a squirrel. But if you're fully lucid then of course your dreaming actions and personality are going to be the same as that of your waking self. Isn't that kind of the point of LDing, to bring your waking consciousness into the dream? If you're lazy and unmotivated in waking life, then you will probably be lazy and unmotivated in the dream. If you're lustful for the opposite sex IWL, then you'll be lustful for the opposite sex in a dream in a dream. If you begin meditating or undertaking any course of action intent on altering your personality, then of course this will be reflected in the dream. Good point. I'm just wondering if I can call behaviour in dreams "action" or "behaviour" because none of it is actually being done. Rather, it's merely being perceived... But would you say that because there is a process (REM atonia) that specifically counters action, this is evidence that our actions in dreams are truly actions, just they are blocked by REM atonia? And also how is lazy and procrastinating really expressed in the behaviour of a lucid dreamer. Is it that they will easily be distracted, have trouble paying attention to the task at hand and easily lose lucidity? I just don't think that a dream about being lazy is the same as being lazy in a dream. When I haven't studied in a dream, it is not from laziness but because there never was the opportunity. I've had anger management issues since I was 12 or 13, mostly because I was bullied a lot and never made for a good student despite the amount of time I put into studying. Up until a few years ago I was pretty poor on controlling my anger and sometimes took it out on my dream characters and worlds in very violent and destructive outbursts. Mostly because I kept it bottled up inside me and had outbursts in waking life, too. But in the past few years I started venting my frustrations with athletic activities and directing my constant anger, putting it to good use getting me into better shape, and the amount of violent outbursts I had and antagonized dream characters in the dreamworld greatly diminished. Good job! I'm sure that's been a liberating quest. After all, dreams are created by your mind, and therefore should be a reflection of your mental state. Completely agree!

[snoop]

That is, I believe that a socially anxious people will have dreams in which the dream characters antagonize the dreamer and that working on self-confidence and a sense of belonging and safety with others in real life leads to dreams where the dream characters are supportive of the dreamer. I don't believe they will have specific types of dream as some sort of unconscious goal based behavior, but I do believe living with such an issue would have it crop up in dreams. I don't know if you could actually go as far as saying the purpose, assuming there even is one, is to help them get over their issues by antagonizing them. If the goal is to get better, there would be any number of subtler ways to go about it. I can only imagine dreams like that would be viewed as nightmares, or at least characterized as bad. After all, you're hyper emotional and hyper irrational in dreams. Unless your mind is planning to trick you and antagonize you then suddenly have people accept you at a critical moment in the dream to trigger some kind of catharsis that allows for emotional growth, I don't know if it could be seen as much more than a mild form of torture. In real life exposure therapy is important, but in dreams you don't think, act, or feel clearly or logically. I can only see that method making things worse a majority of the time. Then again I suppose I'm missing the point by going off on a tangent about a simple example you provided. To wrap things up, I think those types of dreams will definitely show up, but I'm highly skeptical if there could really be a set purpose or goal behind it. By the nature of that person's experiences and emotional pitfalls, they are bound to have dreams like that often enough, and they may in fact help them at some point too. Recovery would more or less be the result of semi-random chance. The ability for dreams to accomplish this may actually be remarkably effective though, for all anyone knows. Evolution occurred through non-random selection of randomly (or at least semi-randomly) acquired genetic traits. There doesn't need to be a purpose, goal, reason, or intention behind the execution of a helpful function or for a thing to "be". I'm not going to go as far as saying that it's the case (or even likely to be), but I'm open to the possibility. edit: Crap, I missed the point of the thread because I wasn't thinking about what I was doing, and I responded to the emotional thing rather than anything concerning action. I'll consider making a real contribution after sleeping.

[Occipitalred]

Hey Snoop, You misinterpreted my statement... very much. "I believe that a socially anxious people will have dreams in which the dream characters antagonize the dreamer and that working on self-confidence and a sense of belonging and safety with others in real life leads to dreams where the dream characters are supportive of the dreamer." I do not believe the dreams are the way they are to help a person improve. I think the dreams are this way simply because the person is this way. I am not talking of nightmares. I have only rare experiences of nightmares and they are mild, never had a night terror, so I don't talk about them. Here, I am just talking of experience. There's definitively something wrong with me, but only mildly really, and I have always felt as an outsider in every group I have ever been part of. Coincidentally, the dream characters in my dreams treated me as an outsider. Seeing this pattern in my waking life (How I perceived myself as an outsider) and in my dreams (How I was treated as an outsider) and other things, I realized I was not truly an outsider, I am a member of the groups I belong to. And so, I started making sure I felt that way every time, genuinely reminding myself I belonged. There was a dramatic change in how I feel in waking life then. And in my dreams, the dream characters became inclusive. The dreams simply reflected my mind. The dreams never fixed anything. I fixed things. And that's just one example. So I think we are in agreement. These topics I bring up are reflective of my waking quest to improve. On the subject of action, I am a hard working person and I am maybe going to be successful(?, we'll see how it goes) but I do struggle with procrastination. Writing this thread, I was mainly wondering how my dreams would change if I overcame my struggle in waking life. From JadeGreen's comment, I suppose that what would change would be less "I haven't done my work and I feel guilty" dreams. But this isn't what I am looking for because it seems more like day residue. If my life consists of baking cakes, then, it makes sense I would dream about baking times at a higher frequency than tasks I don't perform in daily life. That's day residue. If I often worry about deadlines, dreaming about deadlines is day residue. If I have trust issues but everyone is trustworthy in my life, yet in my dreams, the people betray me after every turn, that is not day residue, it is my brain wiring. Now, if I lack discipline, how does that show up in a dream, and I don't mean in the context of day residue, but rather in the context of brain wiring. What changes for a person with discipline in their dreams? Would it make sense to say they have better "dream control" because they also have better "mind/action control"? edit: Crap, I missed the point of the thread because I wasn't thinking about what I was doing, and I responded to the emotional thing rather than anything concerning action. I'll consider making a real contribution after sleeping. Looking forward to it.

[dolphin]

I believe that at any given time, our actions (including dreams) are caused by whatever is most important to us in our conscious and subconscious awareness. The most important thing that we are consciously aware may be less important than the most important thing we are subconsciously aware of. This is because we are not consciously aware of our subconscious awareness until we become conscious of it. The most important aspect of our conscious awareness plays a role in the creation of the dream, so we can make predictions off of this. However, this applies for our subconscious awareness as well and we can't make predictions based off of that until said awareness becomes consciously known. So, how your dreams would change if you overcame your struggle would depend on how overcoming said struggle changed whatever it was in your conscious and subconscious awareness that was most important to you. It would also depend on what exactly you consciously and subconsciously associate with whatever part of your conscious and subconscious awareness is most important to you. I think to get the best idea of how your dreams would change, you should ask yourself, "How would overcoming my struggle change what is most important to me?" For example, would the overcoming of the struggle itself and implications of this become most important to you, would a struggle replacing it become the most important thing to you, or would something else become most important to you? What would you associate with an overcoming your struggle? A party? A reward? Something else?

[snoop]

Hey Snoop, You misinterpreted my statement... very much. Sorry, seeing people claim the subconscious is trying to directly communicate with you or solve problems for you and that dreams inherently have meaning is something I commonly see around here. I didn't necessarily think you thought that, but I was clarifying my stance on the matter in case you were, or so that anybody that thought that might see my reasoning and think it makes sense. Deriving meaning from things without any is a very human quality that often gets taken to extremes. Attributing meaning to something through interpretation while recognizing the meaning you come up with is entirely fabricated (but does have meaning if it means something to you), on the other hand, has practical applications. Regarding the latter, I'm referring to dream interpretation almost specifically, but the statement applies everywhere else too. I think about action in relation to dream content the same as I do thought, emotion, or any other mental phenomena that affect perception (well, thinking is an action, and you can cause yourself to feel different emotions by thinking, meaning emotion at least potential links to actions via some sort of interaction). Individually it doesn't appear to do much without mistakenly misattributing the cause directly to that thing when the process is more nuanced than that. To say emotions or thoughts (like was discussed in the last topic) don't affect perception, in my mind, is patently false. My reasoning here being that the cortical circuit crucial to forming perceptual reality disseminates information at different rates to several areas of the brain in a relatively set path between brain structures. These brain structures interpret sensory information, modify it, and perform cross talk between local structures surrounding them, and through specialized pathways with neurons that can send the information to more distant structures. This cortical loop is subject to feedback that can lead to some signals becoming more excited or outright inhibited. On top of always receiving new information that's been processed and modified at different rates allows for the potential interruption and changing of one's perception from most major structures. Emotions, thoughts, actions, sensory experience, etc. are all part of a greater integrated whole of consciousness that allows enough forms of influence over itself that specific components of perception can drastically affect the integrated whole. With a constant barrage of sensory and perceptual input, it's impossible to narrow the cause of the system's overall behavior to a single source (as Dolphin was doing in the previous thread with the rather vague usage of the term "perception" that excluded phenomena like emotion or thought as being entirely reactive or dependent by an initial perception that precedes their existence). There's never a single instance of time you actually experience, the brain delays the perception of reality by ~0.6-0.8ms on average to compensate for the limitations of nerve conduction and provide a final, linear sensory experience generated from the non-linear collection and processing of the sensory input initially signaled. It's possible the delay isn't so much as intentional as has been described (that I've read, anyway), but is merely a manifestation of the limits inherent to the eternal gathering of sensory data from several sources with different pathways that make their way past some brain structures before others (for instance, tactile sensation all travels through the spinal cord, brain steam, and the cortical circuit, but the optic nerves travel through and reverse in the mid brain and actually provide raw sensory input to areas like the amygdala that allows for a quick emotional response to possible danger) and the integration of it all into a more or less "single" final perception. For all we know the delay could just so happen to be the time it takes for information from the different pathways the information has to travel through before making its way to the part of the brain that integrates the experience (actually, that sounds far more likely, and saying the brain itself delays perception is more like the layman's version of what happens). Given all that, I believe actions have potential to affect change just like emotions do, but it's not easy to gauge to what degree it might affect said change, as it's largely dependent on the person and the situation. The actions we're talking about are a result of habitual behavior, which is inextricably linked to emotional state, thought patterns, the way you choose to interpret reality, your past experiences, etc. Actions themselves are more like a catalyst for a greater change that occurs through the natural interaction of neurons/cortical circuits/feedback loops/etc. I'm not too keen on reducing things specifically to one thing though, just the approximation that thing represents. The rabbit hole of reductionism takes you into physics and whatnot on top of neurobiology, and I think making definitive statements about exactly what causes and what merely reacts to information only serves to make the discussion all the more confusing. Unless you keep in mind that any ideas that try and reduce the perception as a phenomenon to something we can neatly dissect, parse, categorize, and discuss aren't actually possible, you're operating under a faulty premise. Suffice it to say, I readily believe that the actions you take, whether on a regular basis or not, have significant enough potential to affect dream content that it's likely able to. The effects learning a new skill, working in a stressful environment (and how you handle it), and performing repetitive tasks for several hours have well documented effects in hypnagogia. Given hypnagogia is an altered state leading directly up to sleep, it wouldn't strain belief that the underlying phenomena can affect dream content as well, given what you experience during these states is related to how suggestible you are during them. I think anything you can feel, do, or experience can impact dream content, probably, at times, in ways you wouldn't naturally expect. Again, how much you can specifically attribute the dream content to something specific like an action is certainly difficult given actions necessarily mean experiencing everything else you can and do as a result of that action. That, and the actions, thoughts, and feelings preceding the decision to act also play a role. But, saying action therefore has no role is like admitting nothing beyond coming into existence in the first place has a role. It's too deterministic for my taste, as spells a dead end for discussion on the topic (even if that dead end was predeterimined, lol). Just like we don't talk about a car having no part in an accident when it was the driver who controlled it (and what compelled or controlled the person to drive, along with the person and the other car they hit), you can't say emotions, thoughts, sensory experience, or actions have no part in affecting dream content. With some degree of certainty we can assign responsibility to action's potential in relation to dream content, because as a part of you it's intrinsically linked to the process. How much responsibility to assign it, or rather a method for doing so would require a lot of thought, but there are ways to narrow the inaccuracies of our eventual approximations. That's why I love science.

[Occipitalred]

@dolphin You say our actions and dreams are the expression of our innermost desires, conscious or subconscious. I don't know to which extent I can agree with this. Is it that we always act in accordance with what we strive for? @snoop Understood and agreed!

[dolphin]

Yes, that is what I believe. If we are not consciously acting towards what we strive for, then we are subconsciously acting towards what we strive for. We might have a conscious priority to strive for something, but if there's a different and greater subconscious priority to strive for something, then we will tend to that priority before our conscious priority.

[Occipitalred]

I can get behind that.