Can you meet dream characters in real life?

[Mikesleepfallow]

Okay so, I had this dream recently. We were on this Island. All the sudden, I was in this car (it looked like The Patty Wagon from The Spongebob Movie) and I was with this blonde girl, and we were cracking jokes to eachother and stuff. We really did hit it off. I feel like I'm gonna meet this girl in school. (School hasn't started yet for me BTW) Now, I may just be out of my damn mind, but I have had friends who have seen characters in there dreams, in real life. So, Is this actually possible or is this just wishful thinking?

[Rodrodrod]

Oh it is definitely possible. It has happened to me 2 times so far, where I had a dream about someone I had never seen or met before only to see them in waking life the following day. In both cases, and in some other precognitive instances it followed that the dream seemed very significant and upon waking there was a feeling of it being of precognitive content. There are however a lot of times when we may wish that this were the case when it isn't. So, my advice is to just be open to it. If it happens you will know, and if it doesn't then you can still try to find the DC in the dream if you wish.

[Mikesleepfallow]

So, what you're basically saying is, not to get my hopes up? If so, My hopes aren't that high anyway.

[LouaiB]

The mind can't create new faces. Dream characters are people that you actually saw before in waking life, maybe in TV or anywhere, even if you don't remember them. So, these DCs are ones you personally met or saw before, and the chance has occurred that you met them again.

[Wolfdog]

Dream characters are people that you actually saw before in waking life, maybe in TV or anywhere, even if you don't remember them. Not necessarily true. The facial features we have seen throughout our lives can be tweaked/used to create a new face we have never seen before. For example, I'm sure everyone has drawn something at some point in their lives. Maybe we wanted to draw a whole different species, or perhaps a new character or person, etc. Whatever it may be, we most likely used features we have seen or experienced in life as a reference, but we know we can modify those set of features and arrange them in a way that makes for a completely new design constructed from within our own creative imagination. I could go out and create a face that has the lips of my mother, the hair of my best friend, the nose of my grandfather, and so on and so forth. The face that I will come up with won't necessarily be of someone I have already met before in waking physical reality. Not only that, I can go more specific and modify each and every facial feature I have added, maybe stretch the nose here, or make it bigger, or color the hair differently, add some wrinkles here and there, stretch the face, make it skinnier or fatter, etc. I can be even more creative and add a few more eyes to said face, or maybe add some wings to my character, some horns, different skin color, height, width, etc. There is no limit to what we can do. True inspiration is a more complex idea, for we always require something as a reference from which we can use to expand and devise something entirely different. Still, a DC I may see in my dream don't necessarily have to be someone I've met before in waking physical reality.

[LouaiB]

Not necessarily true. The facial features we have seen throughout our lives can be tweaked/used to create a new face we have never seen before. For example, I'm sure everyone has drawn something at some point in their lives. Maybe we wanted to draw a whole different species, or perhaps a new character or person, etc. Whatever it may be, we most likely used features we have seen or experienced in life as a reference, but we know we can modify those set of features and arrange them in a way that makes for a completely new design constructed from within our own creative imagination. I could go out and create a face that has the lips of my mother, the hair of my best friend, the nose of my grandfather, and so on and so forth. The face that I will come up with won't necessarily be of someone I have already met before in waking physical reality. Not only that, I can go more specific and modify each and every facial feature I have added, maybe stretch the nose here, or make it bigger, or color the hair differently, add some wrinkles here and there, stretch the face, make it skinnier or fatter, etc. I can be even more creative and add a few more eyes to said face, or maybe add some wings to my character, some horns, different skin color, height, width, etc. There is no limit to what we can do. True inspiration is a more complex idea, for we always require something as a reference from which we can use to expand and devise something entirely different. Still, a DC I may see in my dream don't necessarily have to be someone I've met before in waking physical reality. But I'd bet in this case were this DC showed up in reality was a person he saw before. The only other option is that the DC was created the same way that person is, and that person also is in the same place you would meet people usually. Seems very far fetched. I'd still bet this DC is real. Even though we might tweak and create new faces, I think the subconscious uses ones already seen... It's how the subconscious works in dreams, otherwise why would all the scientists say so?

[Mikesleepfallow]

Well, damn I have no hopes for seeing this girl now. .-.

[Darkmatters]

@Mikesleepfallow:I thought you had reached your conclusion already with this statement: Well, damn I have no hopes for seeing this girl now. .-. Since then we've been engaged in a side discussion (not really off topic, but peripheral to it). Personally, no, I don't believe you can see someone first in a dream and then in reality, which would require either precognition or inventing the character who then somehow becomes real. @Wolfdog: Nicely done. We should also keep in mind that many characters in dreams aren't seen in full resolution. I mean often there's just sort of a sense of a person being there, with no distinct features. This is especially true in crowds like your classroom example. Just like in movies, there are main characters and there are extras, and the extras aren't built as completely unless or until they step up into the metaphorical spotlight and become more important players. My suspicion is that dreams work very similarly to the way vision does, with a small focal area surrounded by a broad area with no detail - and when you turn your attention directly onto someone or something then the dream builds it up to full detail for your inspection. And when you turn your attention to something else then whatever you were just examining goes back to low res or even just a vague impression. I think this is why it's so easy for things to change when you're not looking, like text or a clock face or even the layout of the room you're in.

[Wolfdog]

It could be, just the same as it couldn't. I'm not saying it's not possible, it can happen and has happened before. Still, a couple of factors should be taken into account. First of all, the information we store in our memory isn't all packed in one piece and stored in one place. Our minds receive every piece of information we experience and stores it separately. What I mean by this is that, instead of storing the whole face in one memory, our minds store every bit of information received (hair type, skin color, eyes, mouth, voice, clothes, height, emotions, and just about everything that is happening at that precise moment) through a more wider process. Now, our ability to recall all this information from memory is influenced in some way by the attention that we give to what's happening at some point, the impact of the experience, repetition, and the associations that we might make towards a better retention and understanding of the information, as well as the connection between the different bits of information processed, so as to facilitate our ability to recall it. Chances are however, that most of the time we're not mindful of what's happening around us every instance of our lives, particularly because we don't consider everything that we experience important to us. For example, if I ask you to describe to me the last stranger you saw today, chances are the description you will come up with won't be close to the real representation of the stranger you saw. We also need to look at how context plays out in the development of the dream. I'm sure the dream is able to 'understand' to a level the context surrounding a particular situation when in a dream. That is to say that if I were to dream myself at a street (to give an example), the mind 'knows' it should populate it because we have seen from past experiences in waking life that streets are populated, and mostly it's with people we don't know at all. How our minds chose to populate the dream is beyond me, but it’s safe to say it doesn't give it much thought either, unless you were to specifically dictate what it is you wanted to see in the dream. Indeed, the people we normally or usually see in our lives are easier to bring into the dream because we have been with them for longer periods of time so as to easily recall them from memory. However, a stranger you haven't met before provides a considerable challenge for the mind to completely replicate. It's like if you suddenly ask the dream to bring out about ten people for you to see. Being 10 people, the probabilities might be that the mind decided to show people you actually know or are easy to recall. But, if you were to increase the number of people shown from 10 to 100 or all the way to a 1000, then you might find yourself with the possibility of seeing complete strangers. In addition, if we're not being specific, the mind will quickly run out of familiar faces and will in turn mesh a number of different traits all together to create completely new dream characters you've never met before in your life. The thing is, if we don't regulate the people that we see in our dreams, then how do we know whether the people that we're seeing in the dream are real or out of our own creative imagination?

[LouaiB]

I hope you're basing the mechanism of facial recognition, storage, and recall on proven facts. I'm not sure I can agree that what you said is really what happens, but if so, then you'll be right and there's a chance that we actually do experience new faces in our dreams. Where did you read all this?

[Wolfdog]

I learned this mostly through books on physiology, specifically neurophysiology in relation to the cerebral cortex and the intellectual functions of the brain, learning, and memory. You see, our brains have the capacity to ignore information that is irrelevant to us. The amount of information that our brain receives continuously is astronomical, and the mind has learned to sort out between the information that is important and the information that isn't. How our minds develop that capacity has much to do with the functioning of the limbic system. The reward and punishment areas of the limbic system, when excited by a sensory stimulus, provide the means to remember experiences that are meaningful to us. In conjunction with the hippocampi and other structures in the brain, the mind ‘takes’ the decision of which thoughts or experiences are to be remembered, based on how much the experience captured our attention. Experiences, whether good or bad, are best remembered when they manage to emotionally impact us in some way, while the rest is pretty much left ignored. That is unless you were to purposely set your mind to remember such an experience which in the beginning was of no interest to you, at least emotionally speaking (for example, studying for a test regarding a subject we don’t like.). The synaptic pathways of the information that is to be ignored are inhibited (‘habituation’). The synaptic pathways of the information that is to be remembered are facilitated through memory sensitization. About learning processes, note that through making associations we are, in a way, building new pathways in the brain, so to speak, that may facilitate our understanding or retention of the information we want to remember. You can verify this through direct experience. For example, if we were to remember the concept of an apple, one way we could do this would be through repetition of the word “apple” over and over again. Another way we can remember the concept of an apple is if we associate the word with its visual representation, like how the apple looks like, its shape and size, color, etc. Likewise, we can learn about it from direct experience either by touching an existing apple or tasting it, providing more and more information that the brain can use to form an ever increasing solid memory of an otherwise simple concept. Of course, this example is pretty straightforward but, the same applies whether it’s we want to learn and remember about apples or remembering faces and other people. What I'm trying to get at with this is that, unless a stranger particularly captures our attention (whether it's through repetition, association, emotional impact, or any other method), most of the day to day people we come in contact with will be easily ignored and thus forgotten in the mind. The contrary happens with people we know or have a connection with like family and friends, people that have had an emotional impact in us or ones we have continuously seen day after day. These people are more easily kept in memory than the rest of the population. We also don't take the time to remember every single individual that we come in contact with throughout the day. Now, is it really that hard to believe that we could have the capacity to create entirely new dream characters we’ve never met before in our waking lives? Think about it, we can do whatever it is we want in a dream, and we have at our disposal the creative potential of our subconscious. I’m sure you wouldn’t say every place we’ve visited in our dreams is a setting we have personally been before or seen back in waking reality. It’s pretty much safe for us to assume that many of these locations are entirely new to us and most likely created by the mind itself. That many are based or take place somewhere we have already visited before is also true, but the previous case is also possible. It’s like if I were to ask the dream to show me a bunch of houses that I like or I’m interested at. Well, I’m sure the mind has a vast amount of information regarding houses and what it is that I find interesting about them or that particularly capture my attention. A good amount of information would be taken from houses I’ve seen before in the past, information regarding colors, structures, styles, types, objects, materials, rooms, beds, couches, backyards, and so on and so forth. When the information is finally collected, the mind could just as easily recycle designs I’ve already seen before in the past. However, given the creative potential of the mind and more so that I’m not regulating whether I want to see something that already exists or something entirely new, then the mind can just as well chose from a wide variety of traits I like and combine them in a way that makes for a house I’ve never seen before in my life. The same could also apply when meeting dream characters in our dreams. BTW i'm in no way an expert in this topic. This is just my interpretation of all this based on the information that I've read and learned.

[Darkmatters]

Wow, very well presented Wolfdog!! Personally I'm curious as to where this persistent idea comes from that we can't dream about people unless we've seen them before. As many times as I've seen people repeat that, I don't recall anyone ever saying where they read it. Sorry if it's already been said in this thread, I haven't read the whole thing. And of course we also know that the dreaming mind builds environments by combining different places - for example I might find myself in a place where my bed and bedside table and rug are in the corner of a huge airplane hangar that also has attributes of a cave, and that if I look across to the other side I can see people milling about in what looks like the concourse of a mall. Why wouldn't characters or faces be built the same way? I once saw a character that was definitely based on 2 people, and at the time I knew what one of them looked like (don't remember if I had seen a picture of the other one yet or not), and it was also merged with the face of an owl. The DC would turn its head quickly in a birdlike motion every few seconds, and when it did the face would separate on a horizontal line that ran through the center of the large eyes, the top of the face turning first followed by the bottom half. Or maybe it was the other way round, I don't remember perfectly right now. So it's clear the brain does often use known things, but represented very loosely, and cobbles them together creatively to make something new. The purpose of this is often to represent different memories that it's putting together symbolically. One purpose of dreams is to consolidate memories apparently, and it does this by taking new experiences you had most likely that day or in the last few days and searching the memory banks for similar experiences from the past that can help to make sense of the new info. So the dream might contain certain elements representing your recent experience along with other elements from the earlier memories that were similar. It might show you a girl you talked to in class recently for instance and you're with her in your grandma's kitchen in the dream. Then on waking reflection you may remember something your grandma once told you about how to act when you meet a girl, and that's why it showed you her kitchen, just as a symbol of her that you associate with that talk from long ago. So I don't claim to know if the brain can actually invent new faces or people, but it definitely does some crazy things with remixes. I'm trying to remember if I've ever seen any creatures in dreams that I couldn't have ever seen anywhere IWL. Not coming up with anything yet.

[LouaiB]

This is very interesting. I do agree, but maybe faces are always stored in the long term memory, even without having much significance when met? I'm just speculating. You know, because faces are more important than most other things. Do you have an opinion on this specific point? But I'm skeptical just because I always hear that we can't invent new faces. I don't know why people say that or how they've come to that conclusion.

[Wolfdog]

This is very interesting. I do agree, but maybe faces are always stored in the long term memory, even without having much significance when met? I'm just speculating. You know, because faces are more important than most other things. Do you have an opinion on this specific point? But I'm skeptical just because I always hear that we can't invent new faces. I don't know why people say that or how they've come to that conclusion. You do bring an interesting point. A great extension of the cerebral cortex (medial undersides of the occipital lobes and along the medioventral surfaces of the temporal lobes) holds the facial recognition area of the brain. In addition, this area lies in close contact with the visual cortex and limbic systems of the brain. Such a very large area specifically designed for the sole purpose of recognizing faces is fascinating. I don't know much about this area or how it might work, its specific relation with the areas dedicated to memory, or the participation of the subconscious in the whole process. One could agree though, that the importance of this area given by the brain has much to do with how our lives are closely tied in with the communication with other people. Almost everything we do involves an interaction between groups of people. I think the concept of 'new' is rather ambiguous. We can always trace something portrayed as 'new' back to a similar or known source we have experienced before. So, maybe many of the characters that the dreaming mind creates are 'new' in the sense that the impression they give (in this case visually) is distinct or unique when leveled against the elements they were initially based from. The entire design may not be new in the sense that it's 100% original, but the specific arrangement of the attributes to form that particular character or face are 'new' because we have never seen that singular combination before. There may be a rather 'limited' number of elements or attributes from which the mind can use as a reference to create a new face or character, however large the number of said elements can get. Nonetheless, the amount of possible combinations between each and every attribute could reach immeasurable size, meaning that we would never run out of 'new' faces or characters to remember or envision. We should also take into consideration how such the slightest of changes to something can make the whole difference between 'new' and old.

[Darkmatters]

Yeah, I don't know how much I credit the idea that the subconscious stores absolutely everything in memory forever, and it's only consciously that we forget things. I don't recall seeing that from any credible sources, but I haven't really searched, so I don't know. It sounds bizarre to me. Might be true though. I don't like to buy into things I've just "heard somewhere" when it comes to the mind. There are way too many crazy ideas floating around. Like for instance that whole thing about "We only use 10% of the brain (whatever that's supposed to mean) - so therefore if we can learn to use more of it we can tap into all kinds of metaphysical powers (why would that follow even if the first part were somehow true?)". So if something sounds suspicious I usually don't credit it unless it's supported by evidence - like if I read it in a book written by actual researchers who don't seem crazy.

[LouaiB]

Lol yeah I've heard this one about the 10% before! Actually I meant exclusively faces. Like they are special, all of them get stored forever. Just speculating. I doubt it myself.

[Darkmatters]

Hmmm… my first instinct is to say why would faces be different from anything else, but then they are, aren't they? They're so important that we have all kinds of special programming and circuitry designed for facial recognition and to be able to read even the most subtle facial expressions. So maybe faces are handled differently than other stuff? I don't know. Ok, here are a few related thoughts… As an artist I am very well aware - in spite of the fact that most non-artists like to say otherwise - that the human mind is actually very limited in its creativity and tends to only put together things to make hybrid things and call that creative. Just look at all the various ideas we've come up with for what alien creatures might look like. They're all different kinds of familiar animals stuck together, usually with very human bodies and facial characteristics (almost always with bilateral symmetry). In fact when people try to draw stuff directly from the unaided imagination, what they come up with is extremely limited, it's when you actually draw from nature, by looking at something and drawing what you see, that you start to break out of your own small pre-conceptions. It's amazing when you see what something actually looks like - it's always far more complex and subtle than anything you can come up with in your head. So I'm gonna lean toward the idea that the dreaming mind works that way too - rather than inventing entirely new things it probably just does the police sketch thing, where you have the transparent overlays, one for a nose, one for the eyes, one for the chin etc, and you build faces from those. That can be done very rapidly by selecting from memory, but I suspect it would take an immense amount of computing power and time to really invent something actually new. Nature does tend to conserve energy that way - why constantly invent completely new things, when you've already got a vast store of memory to draw from and the ability to cobble things together? We also know dreams are often populated by very familiar people, places and things. Your family, friends, and celebrities. Not always, but frequently. I also know that memory consolidation is one of the primary functions of dreams, and also that it uses memories to help make sense of new experiences. This all leans in favor of the mind, even the unconscious, relying more on memory than invention. But it's not conclusive of course.

[Hukif]

Have you guys considered the way humans create faces and recognize them? I know this is wiki, but I believe they did a very good job on this one: Face perception - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Remember an old paper that said some sociopaths people were thought to have a very low ability to recognize facial expressions, making it easy to understand how they could be so expresionless at their victims. I will need to dig onto that... because I don't have it anymore. I mean, does it make sense that the brain can generate entire landscapes, enviroments, creatures, machines like its nothing but is incapable of working a face? I think it makes little sense given the recent evidence that the part of the brain that recognizes a face also is working when discriminating between other objects that the subject is well versed at.

[Darkmatters]

^ Yes, but the question is, are these landscapes etc actually invented from the whole cloth? Or are they cobbled together from bits and pieces of things you've seen before, even if it's just science fiction paintings or some special effect from a movie? We do know after people see an exciting movie they tend to dream about it - like flying like Iron Man for example. This suggests the brain building from a known store.

[Hukif]

I don't think we can actually invent full new ideas, not unless you are some kind of genius. We could argue that airplane=copy of birds, car = copy of horse and so on. Is the fact that it is a construct based on known things something that should give it the label "known" instead of "unknown"? For example, I once created a specie of my own as my child in a dream. Based the facial features off a cat and the rest off the location I was in at the time, so does that make it an ugly cat or a dream creature? I think this is more about perspective, what would one consider as new? That imo is the real question, and depending on each ones individual answer we will have the answer. Either that or make a consensus; but that could make a lot of paintings/music/etc boring since they are copies of the world depending on what is agreed upon <.<

[Darkmatters]

Oh, I understand exactly where you're coming from. I'm just trying to get specific - the original question was can we invent new faces in dreams - I'm saying I'm already sure we can compile hybrid faces from spare parts, but I don't know if we can go beyond that and literally create something entirely new. But of course that brings up the question - how original could it actually be? Assuming it's just a normal human face and not some kind of hybrid cat-person or something ()? There are only so many different kinds of noses for instance - any face you create, even if it isn't cobbled together from ones you've already seen, is going to be made of parts exactly like ones you've seen. It's a tricky question, and I'm not even sure there would be any way too measure it. Unless there's some part of the brain that lights up when you're inventing new stuff.

[Sageous]

^^ Though what you guys are discussing is very interesting, the original question was more along the precog lines, asking whether you can dream of a person you've never met, yet, and then meet that person in waking life. That said, I do have a feeling that the supercomputers even the dullest of us have whirring between our ears are more than capable of cobbling together unique DC's (or what we might percieve of as unique in the context of a dream, anyway); it might even be easier for your brain to create a DC than it is to remember every person you've ever seen, file that information, and then choose it and correctly reproduce it when needed in a dream. Also, I believe that the brain researchers have known for quite some time that we do indeed use pretty much 100% of our brains pretty much all the time; that 10% concept has been little more than Hollywood cliche (and barroom/homeroom philosophizing) for years.

[LouaiB]

Creating completely new things is possible. Think of it this way: A thing is a piece of matter that has shape, color and texture. We as humans can manipulate virtually any one of these aspects, create them in any form we want. So yes, we CAN imagine virtually anything at all. I'm not saying it would look good, but we can do it. I like to imagine it as this 3D formation app that I can grab to any pixel I want and diform the object. I can create virtually all possible shapes ever existing. Same as color, and texture.

[LouaiB]

The thing is, we probably can create (either hybrid or with distinct specific changes) new faces, but the question might be if our subconscious actually does it. What if it can, but it doesn't? It's just programmed to use former faces from the memory. Us remembering every face we ever saw (if so) would explain why we meet faces we don't consciously remember. Of course I'm just pointing out the possibilities. I still stand with both sides of the argument.

[Wolfdog]

Well that depends, is the dreaming mind purposely regulating whatever it's we experience in the dream, meaning that it specifically chooses what to bring to the dream world, or is everything done through a much more 'random' process? I say it would take a bigger challenge for the mind to remember each and every individual that we come in contact with in our lives, store the information, and then replicate it perfectly in the dream environment. Of course, things that are more consolidated in memory (like family and friends) are much more easier to recall than strangers, due to many of the factors participating in memory consolidation as explained previously. Then again, that's the case when recalling information and bringing it to conscious awareness. I think everything we see in our dreams isn't directly regulated by the mind. This we can see dream after dream we find ourselves in. Clearly, experiences that are fresh in the mind or that capture the attention of it make their way more consistently to the dream world (family, friends, etc.) than anything else. Still, that might just happen because that information is the first that 'comes to mind' when creating the dream. For example, many of my dreams share a common setting like a classroom or a school. Almost always, the classroom is populated by friends or people I know of, like my family. Again, we can see how some context plays out in the development of the dream. There's a classroom, and the mind knows it should populate it. People I know so well (family and friends), and people that managed to capture my attention or stand out are easily chosen to take part in the dream. However, I can note how the populating of the classroom was done randomly and not with careful thought of what to put there. Sometimes, the doctor giving the class is someone I haven't seen before; sometimes it is. Just the same, my family and some of my friends don't belong in the classroom because we're not all taking the same classes or are even in the same school, or go to school for that matter. Furthermore, the people that I know can only fill a limited number of seats in said class, while the rest is almost always filled with people I can catalog as "unknown." If the classroom had been filled with the correct classmates, making it so that it completely mirrors one in waking reality, then we would be talking about a whole different story. But, it didn't happen. Much of it has to do because I didn't specified beforehand what it is I wanted to see. So, the mind, unregulated, was left to freely populate the dream however it saw fit. If the populating of the dream mostly goes through a random process, then what makes us think the 'how' the populating is being made a much more regulated thing? The mind is unregulated, it's free to do whatever it's it wants and however it wants in order to satisfy some given condition. It could use people it has recorded in memory just the same as it can create 'new' characters because we're not limiting the populating process of the dream environment.