What are dreams?
>>974312
The difference between a dream and your waking everyday perception is minimal. The only difference is that your waking perceptions bind to your sensory informaton, and are wholly correlated with it. Different wavelengths of light striking your retina stimulate different types of photoreceptors, which then transduce the signal down the optic nerve and cause your brain to see a certain color corresponding to that spectra.
The trick is, your brain already has that ability I see that color built into its circuitry. When you are awake, this capacity lies dormant until the appropriate stimulus triggers it (i.e the appropriate wavelength of light).
When you are dreaming, these capacities to visualize and experience become unbounded from sensory information, so your mind runs wild with vivid hallucinations of things you are not experiencing, but that feel like you are.
Why the brain does this is still mostly a mystery. One popular theory is that it helps you consolidate memories. It could be a way for your brain to "practice" having experience when you are not having it, so that you can better face the day.
t. neuroscience major
>>974357
This.
If you delve in the psychological side.
It allow you to realise hiden desires by the use of symbolism.
Freud didn't knew about the potential that dreams/sleep have to help memorisation but modern psychiatry recognise that living a symbolic fantasy isn't the "main" purpose of a dream.
is there anything I can do to influence my lucid dreaming?
>>977525
lucid dreaming is a bad meme
I have used dreams as a tool for handling stressful situations. I tend to worry and think about near future stuff, then when I sleep I dream about that subject. And even if the dreams are stressful, I always feel better in the morning. Some things just feel like they found their place.
>>978052
t. Dreaming amateur
I'm not saying the regular old dreams don't do it for me, but coming to the conclusion that you're dreaming and then actually controlling your dreams really makes for a better day.
Hell, at this point the regular and the lucid dreams have started becoming one. Tonight, I had a dream that I was hiding in a cellar somewhere with another person. A killer child lifted the cover that hid our position on a staircade and killed the other guy. I didn't have to think, I just thought to myself that I was invisible and the kid continued on without harming me.
>>974312
Basically your conscious soul transfered to an astral plane.
>>978052
>bad meme
>proved with the eye test
A few nights a go I had a really vivid dream about losing one of my teeth. I tasted the blood and felt the hole with my tongue.
What does it mean bros?
>>978133
I don't know, I have dreams about teeth often. In fact, I had another one of them today, except I woke up before they started falling out. My teeth did hurt after waking up, though.
>>978145
I wonder if it really "symbolises" something. If it does the message probably varies per person.
>>978153
From what I'm aware of, your teeth falling out is a sign you're selfconcious about yourself
>>978158
That's literally what everything in a dream means. Either
>going through a personal chance
>insecurity
>fear
>letting go
>doing something new
It's the perfect amount of abstraction, like astrology.
>>978161
*change
>>974357
This. I consciously decide what I need my dreams to be about during the day, so that it happens at night.
Think of it like a debug/practice run for the mind.
>>974312
Desires.
>>978161
Yeah, you're right. Go through any "dream guide" and it's someone making shit up about colours and symbols meaning different things.
