Do you ever have dream replay of video games, movies or other pop-culture influences?

Much of what we dream is based on waking life experiences being consolidated into long-term memory during sleep known as an episodic, semantic, spatial and sensory replay. People who watch horror movies may experience nightmares, and people who play video games may find elements of their game replaying in their dreams. As we fall asleep memory consolidation starts and often people have REM Replay as they start to fall asleep where visual artifacts of late-night gaming, or movie watching may start to visually appear with the onset of sleep. Since 2008 there have been scientific studies of the influence of Video Games, VR on the content of dreaming. Here is a good resource that lists many of the studies: https://dreamingforgamers.com/the-sc...-and-dreaming/

If this happens to you, what were some of the most amazing ways that it influenced your dream content?

I think the most amazing one I've had in recent times was a game I've played that had grapple-hook tools. I've played a lot of games that had tools like that before, but for some reason, the ones in this game just felt good to use once you had decent ones and got used to them. It has created certain travel possibilities in my dreams that would never have happened before.

The nicest things are when creative capabilities manage to cross over into dreaming for me, such as being able to physically change the dream-world by means of some tool, though I do enjoy combat-related stuff crossing over into dreaming too.

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But as for auto-replay as we might consider it, as far as I know this process starts to happen regardless of sleep too and is simply part of the learning process (probably relevant and probably also relevant for this discussion overall).

Usually this only happens for me when I have done something new for the first few times, but not always either. When I get better at a particular thing that causes this and once it becomes second-nature, it eventually stops happening anyway. This is probably typical, I'd guess. It happened a lot over my learning process of playing Supreme Commander and similar strategy games, for example; during my first gameplay sessions I had to think a lot about what I was doing and I would often get these auto-replays of the battles later on, but typically at night, I suppose, just not necessarily as I went to sleep. A lot of game stuff I play that this has happened with has in fact not crossed over at all into my dreaming. Typically only the really high interest stuff has crossed over on some level.

This can happen for me with non-game related stuff too (as is mentioned in part of what I linked as well), though it is much rarer. I haven't really identified why yet, but part of my personal guess would be that screens just allow us to receive that much more information since we are directly receiving the information at a (comparatively) high signal level vs doing something in say a workshop environment; in addition to that, learning a new game is often a completely new experience, sometimes the only common thing between different games is the abstract notions or themes of interface usage, which can be abstracted on some level too. Learning to handle a new type of chisel, to me, hasn't felt particularly different from learning to use brushes, and learning to use brushes didn't feel particularly different from learning to use pens and so on.