Influencing your own dreams

[H2SO4]

I got this idea when i set my alarm (on my pc for big sound as i have them conencted to a home theatre setup in my room) to play killer queen very loud at 5 in the morning. I was dreaming during the alarm sound (for about two seconds before i awoke). I remember talking to my uncle then i heard the tapping of the drumstick on the rim of the drum for about a second and i remeber being startled by this phantom sound comming from know where. I woke almost immedietly.

 

 

So i got this idea. Im sure were all familiar with the fact that an outside stimulus can influence a dream if it isnt enough to wake you. So im wondering if i set my pc to play a sound file with some kind of sound that describes an event that happens in normal life (for example a sound file of a lawn mower that sounds like its going outside your window) and played it a few hours into REM sleep. one site noted that an outside stimulus will affect a dream but will inevitably always wake the person up. Im thinking ill try it this saturday but i need ideas for a sound file. Maybe some sounds of cars or an engine as im taking my first driving lesson sunday afternoon. Maybe this will make it rwealy easy for me to dream about driving or something

[Ndi]

Dreams have their function to relieve stress and grin on problems that your mind is battling. If you could indeed take full control of your dreams my bet is there are going to be problems - like those that pop when you are unable to dream.

[H2SO4]

i mean the extent to which you could do this is probaly ery limited, like dreaming about a lawn mower outside or something

[carol]

Maybe. If you think about something that bothers you so much before you sleep, I believe you will dream about it. I always try influencing my dreams this way so that I would have a good nights sleep. However, it rarely works (but I think it works).

[weknowthewor]

I think dreams which come naturally are related to some kind of direction showing of near future..

[Rocket Man]

try it, it's ANY stimulus that links strongly to a topic or memory.

make sure set some sort of alarm clock to wake you up a few minuites afterwards. (dreams have a nasty habit of getting forgotten)

[1veedo]

If dreams predict the future then just shape your future from the past and you'll dream about it.

[Genecks]

My most recent dream was being in a mall. Some guys came in with semi-automatic guns. They wanted to start killing people, and I hit the floor. Funny thing, though: I hit the ground first, wondering if people would follow suit. They copied my behavior. It was funny.

 

After some time, I eventually told everyone to rise and attack. It worked and the intruders had a beat down.

 

Interestingly, I was with my beautiful ex-girlfrlend in that dream. The best part was the beautiful ex, but everything else was nightmarish. I don't think dreams release stress.

 

I just want the sleep, memory, and recall bit to take place as quickly as possible. Hell, give me modafinil and let's call it another day. I don't care for sleep.

 

I think it's more possible to alter dreams after intermittent waking periods. Of course, a person has to wonder if it's still a dream.

[Ndi]

[...]but everything else was nightmarish. I don't think dreams release stress.[...]

 

They do, they just don't work that way. People believe that if you are upset you should see a field with flowers. And if you are happy, you should see a field with flowers.

 

There are things that eat *you* up inside, frustration most likely, that you bury deep inside so you can continue to act within the society. These things get stored, pushed deeply and what your brain does is resurface them.

 

Coping with frustration is recreating the frustration situation and solving it, letting of steam and balancing it. Think of it as simulation of "letting you have one of your own". The brain takes revenge on the world in this simulated environment, restoring the balance. The reason why you are upset at someone and it's all better in the morning is probably because you punched someone in the face all night.

 

My worst nightmares pop off in the worst of the situations, not the best, it's because the brain tries to balance. Nice, pretty smelling dreams typically means there's nothing to balance.

 

Interpretation is way trickier because the brain tries to recreate a situation that is what it understood of it. So if you feel frustrated about something but you know it wasn't X's fault (which is a conscious decision), your brain still functions at low level and still hates people below the threshold.

 

An example: I won a scolarship and I was supposed to work in high-end IT (which I did), but the accomodations were terrible to the point where I needed a drink before coming home. My dream was I designed a game that killed my friends. I won't elaborate, since it's a long story and a horrible dream, but what my brain received was "high-tech hopes turned around and bit". It couldn't care less the job was a dream, it just added everything and recreated the feeling the best it could in order to counter it.

[Rocket Man]

perhaps dreams relax the short term memory, as far as i understand it, the brain is a tangled mess of connections.

if you get a few hundred neurons stuck in a loop, you'll still be able to operate, but when the mind relaxes, some of those loops might bleed out into other areas of the brain in order to call enough attention to get shut down.

essentially a full reboot.

outside stimulus might get into the process and trick the brain that it needs to ponder it for a while in order to close the feedback loop that isn't there, so you find yourself in some abstract dream where a hippo magically appears only to wake up and find some one talking hippos at you.

[ecoli]

I don't know how this is related, but I think it may be relavent. At any rate, I have been wondering about it.

 

Usually when I dream in night time sleeps, I have very little control over my dreams. It's almost like watching a movie, in that I can't conciously control anything I do. (which makes for some interesting, weird dreams).

 

But, if I wake up in the morning, a couple of hours before I intend to, I often fall asleep again. And, if I was already dreaming the night before, I'll often dream again, in a usually unrelated dream. However, in this second dream, I'll have a lot more control, and I can influence my actions quite a bit. I'm not sure why this is, but there's something about waking up and falling back asleep that causes my dreaming 'style' to be different. Perhaps it's a different class of dreaming altogether?

[Ndi]

Reboot every night or you start losing registry. I like it.

 

--

 

I noticed that dreams become more vivid and imaginative, more interactive with rest level. Perhaps it has to do with you being less tired?

[Rocket Man]

I noticed that dreams become more vivid and imaginative, more interactive with rest level. Perhaps it has to do with you being less tired?

 

i think it's closer to consious thought. sometimes i end up questioning something only to realise it suddenly didn't exist. other times things suddenly don't happen. i love ruling my astraction of the world.

[1veedo]

I noticed that dreams become more vivid and imaginative, more interactive with rest level. Perhaps it has to do with you being less tired?

This is very ambiguous. If you mean latter in the night, of course drams become more vivid, but it nothing to with being less tired and everything to do with sleep cycles.

 

But if you mean "If I get a lot of sleep the few nights before, dreams become more vivid," I'm not sure why. When you dont get a lot of sleep you end up spending more of your time in REM, which indicates that REM is very important (in fact there was a memory study which showed people who are waken every time they enter REM show very poor memory as compared to those waken up in other stages). This would appear to show that the opposite is true -- the less sleep you get, the more vivid your dreams are. Of course having more REM doesn't have to, I guess, mean more vivid dreams.

[MyThai]

Psychology research has stated that conciously trying to dream about something seldom works.

[fredrik]

Interesting questions. I have learned that during the years I've learnt to make more use of my dreams. I regularly use sleep in solving problems and while it is not possible to accurately and exactly control your dreams, trying to solve a problem while falling asleep this causes me to continue to solve the problem in my sleep, at least more often than could be explained by conincidence.

 

When I was a kid, I rarely understood howto interpret or "use" my dreams, but these days my dreaming seems to do fuzzy processing... in an emotional way. And often I wake up feeling more elightened, where my suggestions by conscious intuition was supported by the nights contemplation.

 

I have tried this on several kinds of problems, from biochemistry to physics and I have found that fuzzy creative problems does benefit from sleep reasoning. Occasionally I wake up feeling consfused and annoyed, and it's often when I feel that my sleep reasoning for some reasons has been disturbed (for example by an alarm clock). I hate waking up to the buzz. So I often wake one or two minutes before the clock. Amazing how the brain can keep the time pace at sleep.

 

/Fredrik

[Rocket Man]

the early worm is for the birds.

 

i'm not sure it's exactly fuzzy processing, rather, eight hours straight reasoning thoroughly filtered to give you the interesting parts. i know i'd start abstracting information after 8 hrs solid.

[fredrik]

This is possibly very individual but I don't feel very analytic when I sleep, it feels more like an emotional search. But I have been amazed how reasonable some of these emotions turn out to be at times. Sometimes I get a feeling that pure analytic processing may be a bit narrow minded, and these emotional search inputs helps find the not so obvious paths. I used to feel a strong frustration over these emotional and uncontrollade fuzzy dreams. It's like you have no control over yourself and it's annoying. But then I learned to trust and enjoy these fuzzy states. It feels a bit dual to the analytic part.

 

Another fun thing is that when I was a kid(10 maybe?), I used to have these silly nightmares about a monster coming to get me and when I woke up the next day I was amazed but how come I could not tell fact from fiction while I was dreaming... because it was soo easy and trivial when analyzed in the awake state... this was crystla clear, yet I was uncapable of handling it in the dream state, why? it's still "me"? I thought about this several times because it was a recurrent dream. Then finally I tried to implement a trigger in my mind so that I would cause myself to wake up as soon as I was dreaming that thing again, and eventually I succeded. I remember the exact feeling... I was asleep, dreaming about the monster coming, and while dreaming I new that the escape was to wake up, bcause then I would analyze the monster to pieces in a second. And I recall trying to control my arms to push myself upwards in beed physically to cause me to wake up. It was very difficult to in some weird way communicate between the dreaming state to send a controlled singal to the muscles in the arms... I usually I had to do a few attempts, and finally the control of my arms from withing the deam was sufficient to lift my own weight out of the bed, and I was awake... and I could beat the monster. After I learned how to escape from the monster, it didn't come back anymore

 

/Fredrik

[fredrik]

I've recently been dreaming about thing related to the dynamics of relative probabilities in relation to day time projects and I am searching for an emotional state, that is presents the solution. Then going from emotion to analytic description usually is not the main problem. It could probably be done in the awake state, but it's a bit like utilizing the downtime better and it's easier to focus when you are dreaming. In the awake state there is too much distracting information the blurs the search.

 

/Fredrik

[Pleiades]

I can’t believe no one has mentioned lucid dreaming yet. Lucid dreaming is basically when you realize you are dreaming and can then control things. There are several ways of inducing a lucid dream on purpose, but I've only ever had them by accident.

 

This one time, I had a normal dream that I was trying to turn off an alarm system, but every time I’d fix it and walk away, it would start up again. I later woke up to find that the fire alarm in my building had been ringing, then going quiet for a minute or so, then ringing again. I have a bad habit of sleeping through fire alarms.

[spikerz66]

oooh pleiades..... that doesent sound to safe.

[Pleiades]

Meh, it was a false alarm anyway.

[darkelfv]

Couple of things, Really cool thread by the way.

 

couple of quick tips on lucid dreaming.

1. when you wake write down the dreams you remember before they are gone forever haha.

2. The best time for lucid dreaming is after you have already woke. Take a short nap just after you have waken up and you will be more aware of whats going on in your dreams. The more aware you are the more likely you can control whats going on. This can take time and effort, I usaly wake my self up 5 seconds after i relize im in the dream.

 

the body naturaly releases a paralytic into your system as you fall asleep , so if you move in the dream you don't sleep walk. People who don't have this work fully end up sleep walking. Or visa versa wake up and can't move. I know i have done both in diffeernt stages in my life. Scary as hell to wake up and can't move. oh the screams.

 

My experence with monster dreams, ha i guess i seen to many horror flicks because i end up chasing the monster or checking it out, oh cool thats a neat one sorta thing. There is only 2 types of dreams that really get to me. 1. when i wake up and talk to people then wake up again and again and finaly wake up and relize there not there. after 10 15 minutes of waking up to relize you just woke up from what you thought was awake just drives me nuts. 2nd losing a loved one, Not death, but not being able to find them.

 

I have a friend who paints in his dreams because he can. I use my dreams to alter my mood or explore things i can't do in real life. There are lots of random dreams but training your self to take advantage of them can only make your life more enjoyable.

 

Im not someone who is easliy afraid, but if you get scared in a dream, like mentioned before just will your self to wake up. keep doing that and it will work, sometimes it takes a while depending how much your body is asleep that chemicle doesn't go away imediatly . Also its actuly more benifical to train yourself to change the situation if your scared and make it something good, if you do this more often, you can avert or over come the things haunting you.

 

One dream i was being chased in the start of the dream, i was like hrmm that thing is not real so this must be a dream. I wiped away the whole scene and started flying (flying is so fun). Then I remember singing and I felt so good and awestruck that my next week was just filled with this precence of joy. Nothing ruined it for me, not even unlucky events or bad day at work.

 

well theres my 2 cents