Thread: (Prove Me Wrong) No One Has Literally Ever Talked to Their Subconscious. Ever.

The basic difference between our views, dutchraptor, is that you discard what is called the threat simulation theory (TST) of dreams.
Could be my post comes across too aggressive - that is not my aim - it's just that I really disagree.
I even don't see, where you are going with it all - do you say, we should restrict LDing, because of otherwise impairing memory-management?

Why do you think, that mere memory consolidation and pruning would require to have a virtual theatre in your head in the first place?
Why have a point of view, even if dim view, and why do we do things in our dreams, make experiences?
Also dream-content doesn't point in that direction. Why should animals dream, if it was not for practising behaviour? What does get consolidated in dreams is procedural/spatial memory - like running, throwing - such things. This is something you got to do in dreams - works the same in LDs - see the findings, that regions that control the motoric of running light up when lucid running.
Latest findings point towards other memory consolidation actually taking place in non-REM:

Originally Posted by from Wikipedia

Cognitive neuroscience of dreams - Memory-related theories

According to one theory, certain memories are consolidated during REM sleep. Numerous studies have suggested that REM sleep is important for consolidation of procedural memory and spatial memory.
(Slow-wave sleep, part of non-REM sleep, appears to be important for declarative memory.)
A recent study shows that artificial enhancement of the non-REM sleep improves the next-day recall of memorized pairs of words.
Tucker et al. demonstrated that a daytime nap containing solely non-REM sleep enhances declarative memory but not procedural memory. Monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants can suppress REM sleep and these drugs show no evidence of impairing memory.
Some studies show MAO inhibitors improve memory. Moreover, one case study of an individual who had little or no REM sleep due to a shrapnel injury to the brainstem did not find the individual's memory to be impaired.

So that makes it quite doubtful, that dreams are specifically and only responsible for memory management.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

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.

While it is true, that with any arousal norepinephrine levels will rise - it does not play a distinct or special role in memory formation. It has been shown to be associated with memory retrieval:

A distinct role for norepinephrine in memory retrieval. [Cell. 2004] - PubMed - NCBI

A role for norepinephrine in learning and memory has been elusive and controversial.
A longstanding hypothesis states that the adrenergic nervous system mediates enhanced memory consolidation of emotional events.
We tested this hypothesis in several learning tasks using mutant mice conditionally lacking norepinephrine and epinephrine, as well as control mice and rats treated with adrenergic receptor agonists and antagonists.
We find that adrenergic signaling is critical for the retrieval of intermediate-term contextual and spatial memories, but is not necessary for the retrieval or consolidation of emotional memories in general. The role of norepinephrine in retrieval requires signaling through the beta(1)-adrenergic receptor in the hippocampus. The results demonstrate that mechanisms of memory retrieval can vary over time and can be different from those required for acquisition or consolidation. These findings may be relevant to symptoms in several neuropsychiatric disorders as well as the treatment of cardiac failure with beta blockers.

This is no cherry picking - check NA and memory and the above is what you get primarily.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

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.

Well - this is now a semantic question.
A completely forgotten experience is something for example coming about with amnesic drugs - being given midazolam causes an anterograde amnesia - meaning you can't lay down memories for what follows.
It's done for example for a colonoscopy, where it's not justified to do a narcosis, because of it's dangers - but the aim of the midazolam is, that you don't have the memory of the suffering - mainly to be willing to have it done again. Usually they don't say that - but I did have a strong memory not of the pain, but of having said directly afterwards that never in my life would I forget that. But I did.

It feels like not having had the experience, but you obviously did, while it happened.
So there is a difference.

But normal dreams are another thing again, I think.
First of all - you say yourself, that memories of them get stored in a cache. And nobody would doubt that they can be potentially and also generally assessed consciously after awakening. And that is exactly what memories are - something initially only intermediately stored and retrievable.

It depends on the attention and intention to remember them, if they are to become more permanent. But they are stored in intermediate caches and such are experiences as well as memorized experiences. One can train and come to remember (almost) all of one's dreams.
If they are impressive - it's easy to remember dreams also just like that.
So I don't understand, how you come to generalize, and say the following about non-lucids:

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

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.

Well - either something is a mere possibility - or it is indisputable - an indisputable possibility, hm.
If you mean, that one can remember LDs much better - surely - not only possible.
But it goes for waking life as well - if I spend time on autopilot, doing whatever without self-awareness - I won't remember it well.
I very much doubt that memories "never even get to that point" in normal dreams, though. If I understand correctly, what you actually want to mean by that.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

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.

No - I don't notice anything the like. Our ancestors just didn't have meta-consciousness like we do - and so animals of course dream without it. Why would you think, it is beneficial to an animal to dream at all?
And why would it be a problem for it, if it thought, that it's dreams are real? Where is the danger in that? I am pretty sure, they can't differentiate.
There is only a hypothetical danger of this for humans - we are the ones, who define themselves and decide things on the basis of our past experiences, which could get problematic, when memories are mixed with dream-memories.
But we learn the difference while growing up. And we discard dreams as irrelevant mostly - and cease to remember them like kids do.

It's almost as if it were fashionable to accuse higher mental faculties of being harmful, I think sometimes.
Like with claiming that consciousness and sapience would have been evolutionary mishaps. That is so ridiculous in a way - how did we get to survive better than all the other (higher) critters, who competed with us, ever? Except maybe bacteria - but there are different ways to world-domination - ours looks quite effective, if not necessarily sustainable. Maybe - hopefully - we are even clever enough to do something about this.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

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.

See above - quite the contrary is true, if you want to follow that thought by all means.
If you dream of having signed a contract, and think it really happened, and then make some business decisions based on that - good luck, I'd say.
We know the difference - and we know, what a lucid dream is even more - at least that's the normal state of affairs with mainly dreaming non-lucidly. But I agree with you, sort of, in that LDing is only really useful - not harmless - since some thousands of years.
Again for practising life in simulation.

Since having meta-consciousness irl - we should practise with it for maximal effect of the nightly practice sessions, but evolution of dream-consciousness might lag a bit behind. Now that's just my thinking, but why shouldn't it make sense? LDing is not in the TST, but should be!

If we have easy and total access to LDing all REM-night, we will face the danger of addiction to it, I fear, and trying to escape reality to an unbecoming degree.

Originally Posted by dutchraptor

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.

It is not only my intuition - there is also evidence backing my ideas up. And I didn't say, I know, what is really the matter - I just say I follow another theory than you do - said threat simulation theory.
You will always be right, when posing that there are other possibilities as well, until we know much, much more about consciousness and dreaming and lucid dreaming. But it is not correct to say, my beliefs spring only from intuition, as opposed to yours being backed up by evidence.
The TST actually warrants a thread of it's own.



Some anecdotal stuff of mine around dreaming and memories:

Last night - the first dream has me throwing my bag with my camera in it out of a window.
I didn't wake up in between, and then dreamt the following:
I was telling people, that I would have dreamt of throwing my bag out of a window last night. A friend of mine goes - yes!! I have dreamt of this as well - how stupid - out of the 23rd story-window and your camera was in it - and she knew more details.
Then it dawned on me - that sounds as if we had a shared dream!! Oh damn - how can I explain that rationally??

Another dream was me dreaming something, I had exactly so dreamt before - conclusion in-dream upon remembering that - that must have been a precognitive dream! rolleyes.gif

I'll copy paste more from my workbooks and DJ in the spoiler:

Spoiler for more examples dream-to-dream memories:

I just wanted to mention, that in a dream last night, I justified hearing something about flying trains with the memory of that other dream, which featured a flying train.

Originally Posted by spd

Interesting StephL I can only recall a similar experience once I had a dream there was a blue goat that was getting chased by a bigger blue creature and later on that night I was telling someone about that exact scene and I even had a flashback in the dream repeating the scene. They are unusual experiences

They are spd - thanks for sharing!
I believe by thinking about such instances, one might be able to gain a bit of insight into the workings of dreaming-mind memory.
What I have quite often, is that certain features of my dream-sceneries stays more or less the same over many dreams.
Something derived from actual reality, but with distinct features, which are missing irl.
Like for example a little wooden house, I had built in a dream to have something to sleep in, when visiting the place I grew up, since my mother moved away. It's rather a small shack - and I have dreamt of it at least three times. I don't have overly good recall, so it might have been much more often.
And many more things - a flat with similar to identical layout, which is completely dream-generated, not a memory.
Funnily for a while, I had often dreamt of our old house still standing and me staying there. So I used it as dream-sign - incubated it. But after getting lucid twice from realizing, it has been ripped down irl - the stupid thing doesn't show up any more...