Why is self imagery so hard...

**kevinmwhm** · 05-13-2013 05:04 PM

Why do you think self imagery is so hard...

i.e. Looking in a mirror, the perception of your hands being blurry or odd number of fingers. I haven't noticed but I would guess that your feet would probably be the same as your hands.

I've searched around but could not find any theories. I find it weird, especially the part about your hands, since all my DCs (most anyway) tend to accurately resemble their waking life counterpart without ongoing distortions.

All I could think of is that maybe your brain is trying to think and replicate itself at the same time as opposed to being awake and just observing yourself, like in a mirror.

-thoughts?

**realdealmagic** · 05-13-2013 05:26 PM

I don't think that it's a case that it's hard to do, we just don't do it well. Think about it, in waking life, we don't pay a lot of attention to our own hands. We don't place a lot of focus on them as we would our face or our body, so the brain doesn't think of their importance to our vision. We do, however, pay a lot of attention to other peoples' hands and everything else since they're an integral part of body movement and communication. They have a higher place in the pecking order of importance. I think that's why our hands always seem different than in waking life during dreams.

**Sivason** · 05-13-2013 06:47 PM

It is not really a problem specific to our 'self imagery' asmuch a limitations in the dreamers visual rendering capabilities. If you 'turn down' the resolution, so that the exact number of fingers never comes into question, the your brain does not render a full image of a hand. The hands of DCs are vague, but you just accept the rendering as it is. Hands are implied, but not taking processing power (forgive the expressions,,,). If you asked a DC to hold up his hand, and you then examined it,, it would be rendered just as clumsly as your own hands.

the truth is, you can learn to LD better. The brain will be able to build up visual rendering ability, basically leading to an up grade in 'your graphics card, lol'