Dream character numbers

[stevendoig]

I had a dream last night which involved literally dozens and dozens of (non speaking) DC's. A thought just occurred to me, is there a limit to how many DC's yer brain can conjure up? And on that note, say you're lucid and have a well populated dreamscape, has anyone ever went round all the DC's present to see if they are all different and if they can all talk etc? (DC's are the most fascinating part of dreaming for me btw, I've little interest in attempting to fly or transforming into monsters etc!)

[ParadoxOwl]

Well of course there's a limit, our brains are like a PC with a motherboard, CPU, GPU etc. And there's only a certain amount they can handle and our brains are the same, our brains are very powerful though, People have actually stress tested their dreaming capabilities and actually hit the limit of what their brain can process at any given moment. So yes there are definitely limits on how much processing power our brains have. And yes DC's are definitely fascinating and interesting.

[dolphin]

The limit to the amount of dcs your mind can create is the limit of how many you can imagine noticing. The amount of unique dcs is different though. There's usually a point where the subconscious will run out of ideas in a given time frame and start to create many clones. The subconscious is sneaky like that.

[LDleader]

All DCs in your dreams you have seen in RL at some point.

[ParadoxOwl]

All DCs in your dreams you have seen in RL at some point. Or a mixture of the people you have already seen, personalities, appearances.

[JadeGreen]

Well of course there's a limit, our brains are like a PC with a motherboard, CPU, GPU etc. And there's only a certain amount they can handle and our brains are the same, our brains are very powerful though, People have actually stress tested their dreaming capabilities and actually hit the limit of what their brain can process at any given moment. So yes there are definitely limits on how much processing power our brains have. And yes DC's are definitely fascinating and interesting. I would say that there is an inverse relationship between the number of DCs you can have and how intelligent/clear they are. For example, if I were in a dream with my dream guide (witch happens a lot) it will generally just be me and her, and I can see her very clearly. But the more DCs there are, the less clear each DC can become. So by the time you get to four or five, each one may start to lose a definitive personality and appearance, and by the time you get into the double digits, your brain basically 'renders' them as a single entity. The tricky part would be to increase your brain's 'processing power' to have more and more vivid dream characters.

[Sageous]

Well of course there's a limit, our brains are like a PC with a motherboard, CPU, GPU etc. And there's only a certain amount they can handle and our brains are the same, our brains are very powerful though, People have actually stress tested their dreaming capabilities and actually hit the limit of what their brain can process at any given moment. So yes there are definitely limits on how much processing power our brains have. I think there might be more to this. Yes, your brain has processing limits, but your perception's interpretation of that processing is fairly infinite. It isn't that you are seeing literally thousands of DC's in a dream, it is that you think you are seeing thousands of DC's. In other words, your dreaming mind has provided a schema that carries the idea of a multitude around you. Just as you don't need to see or identify each DC before you, your unconscious does not need to provide a multitude of specific DC's, just the impression of a multitude. This works for anything in a dream, and not just DC's: if you are floating around in space, your dreaming mind did not need to produce each of the millions of stars you see, just an impression of their numbers; your dreaming mind does not need to create a multitude of trees, and then every leaf on each of those trees, for you to perceive that you are walking through a forest. It isn't what is "physically" placed in your dream that matters, it is how you perceive that placement. So yes, you can certainly have dreams with thousands or tens of thousands of DC's (I sure have). On top of that, if you choose to talk to the DC's in order to make them more than just background noise, you will still find that the number that you talk to, that you attach meaning to, is also limitless: because you can only focus on one or two at a time, your dreaming mind will simply produce new DC's as you move from one to the next. letting the ones you already spoke to return to the background as you move on, thus preserving processing power. So yes, there are certainly limits to what a brain can produce in a dream, but there is no limit to how you perceive what you are given by your dreaming mind. We dreamers are experts, through imagination, in making quite a bit out of literally nothing at all.

[Avian]

The coolest part about dreaming is that it doesn't necessarily have to obey the laws of physics or even logic. Our brains are just so much more flexible than computers that it is astounding. I have a theory on time dilation that it is possible that has to do with this. Since inside a dream there is nothing that says an action that should take a minute has to take a minute, and not 5 seconds. So, I guess it could be possible that you wouldn't actually spend that much time in a dream but you would do said amount of time's actions in a dream. Like you wouldn't actually spend a year but you would do a year's worth of things, which is essentially the same thing.

[stevendoig]

Some really interesting replies - cheers!