Quote Originally Posted by StephL View Post
Great exchange dutchraptor and Sageous!
I just want to say one thing to you dutchraptor - don't overlook the fact, that we are by no means unconscious in our normal dreams - we just lack proper self-reflective capabilities and memory access. But we could just have nREM all the time, if it really was a disturbing factor to have actual experiences during sleep - which always means new memories, if we hold on to them or not. Lucid or not - we do live out time in a virtual reality in our dreams - so I can't see the harm in doing it lucidly. It seems really rather like an update to me - same as our self-reflective waking capabilities are an update to animal-consciousness.
Thanks
But I never implied (I hope I didn't) that experiences impede memory strengthening. My posts explored the possibilities that since activating higher functions results in increased norepinephrine production (which causes enhanced memory formation) it makes sense why dreams would try limit them.

And you could be very wrong on the part where you say that experience equates to memories. A memory must be stored to be labelled as a memory, and an experience in a dream that we do not remember is not stored as a memory precisely because the lack of neurotransmitters. It cannot be regarded as a memory, it never reaches that stage and is never even stored outside of a very temporary cache like memory. Evidence points towards lucid dreams being radically different than normal dreams, and on that same note an experience where memories are stored is going to be different to an experience where memories never even get to that point.

This possibility can absolutely not be disputed at this point in time.

The further you go down our ancestors, the lower self awareness goes you will notice that there is more and more reason for the dreams to occur in a largely unconscious fashion. It is beneficial for a primitive animal to dream in this state, because otherwise the confusion between dreams and reality could lead to life threatening behavior.
In humans, children until the age of 4 actually have a very hard time differentiating between the two. And if higher functions where common within a dream then we probably couldn't survive very long without the knowledge of what a dream is.
This all leads back to the argument that perhaps it is beneficial for the brain to limit our higher functions.
We've only had a few thousand years of actually living in circumstances where confusing a dream for reality is likely to not be a great disadvantage to the human.

So as I said earlier, while it feels intuitively wrong for you to believe, there is in fact a very large base of evidence backing the possibility, and the true reality of the situation is that we can't say for sure until we get more evidence. There really is no need to pick a side.