Cool! Thanks for this elaborate article. I just started writing down dreams again because I sometimes wake up in the morning with a feeling of "unfinished business". Like something emotional has happened when I was in the dream world but I cannot recall what. It's a very uncanny feeling.
The best writing of the new year so far! Could you please write more about dreams and their benefits? I would love to read more about them. Thank you!!
Really cool. I'm sure we over-corrected against the dubious dream analysis of the early 20th century.
I think Dave Pizarro said on an episode of VBW that he had experience lucid dreaming, and he gave up on it because he felt like it made his dreams lose something, and I think he even said it resulted in a sort of depression the next day. I have an extremely small amount of experience with lucid dreaming, but my experience agrees with this. I found it surprisingly uninteresting and unsatisfying. Have you experienced anything like this?
In fact I think it may have been the VBW episode on Erik Hoel's Overfitted Brain Hypothesis. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah I've modulated my lucidity up and down over the years, in response to how it made me feel.
One major pattern: the more I try to take over control of the dream, rather than letting it take its own course, the worse I feel. I've actually had dream characters come up to me and tell me to stop.
There's a sweet spot for me where I'm vaguely aware I'm in a place where a different set of rules apply. E.g. I'll remember I can breathe underwater, and will show more courage when faced with a physical threat. So it affects how I interact with the dream, but it still takes its normal course.
When this goes well, I wake up feeling incredibly well rested and in a good mood, more so than with a typical night's sleep.
I hadn't heard of VBW, but it looks amazing--thanks for the tip!
I recount dreams as part of my literary diaries. Whereas lucid dreaming might rob a certain element from the dream state, it seems to me that the reconstruction in language, which necessarily augments and denudes elements of the dream, is the ideal. Description in language then seems to influence subsequent dreams, and a psychologically gainful ecosystem is thereby established.
I mostly agree with this. When I write down a dream, something does seem to get lost in the language. But by spending time interpreting and projecting meaning onto different symbols, it starts to create a conversation with the unconscious. E.g. a symbol might start out as ambiguous, I'll project a certain meaning on it, and then in subsequent dreams it takes on that meaning more explicitly.
Initial pre-comment from me! I came here from a link on Reddit. Your SubStack name 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 like 'superbowl' - so something I'd never go to in a million years, in any epoch. However - the title & subject itself was of course compelling - so here I am, enjoying your content!
This reminds me a bit of certain branding issues of old. Powergen would always go by a web domain name + country name. So - Powergenuk, or Powergenfrance, etc.
That didn't work so well for their Italy division ('italia').
Cool! Thanks for this elaborate article. I just started writing down dreams again because I sometimes wake up in the morning with a feeling of "unfinished business". Like something emotional has happened when I was in the dream world but I cannot recall what. It's a very uncanny feeling.
The best writing of the new year so far! Could you please write more about dreams and their benefits? I would love to read more about them. Thank you!!
Thanks!
A couple people have asked for an article on Active Dreaming techniques, so I've got one in the works. Stay tuned!
Really cool. I'm sure we over-corrected against the dubious dream analysis of the early 20th century.
I think Dave Pizarro said on an episode of VBW that he had experience lucid dreaming, and he gave up on it because he felt like it made his dreams lose something, and I think he even said it resulted in a sort of depression the next day. I have an extremely small amount of experience with lucid dreaming, but my experience agrees with this. I found it surprisingly uninteresting and unsatisfying. Have you experienced anything like this?
In fact I think it may have been the VBW episode on Erik Hoel's Overfitted Brain Hypothesis. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Yeah I've modulated my lucidity up and down over the years, in response to how it made me feel.
One major pattern: the more I try to take over control of the dream, rather than letting it take its own course, the worse I feel. I've actually had dream characters come up to me and tell me to stop.
There's a sweet spot for me where I'm vaguely aware I'm in a place where a different set of rules apply. E.g. I'll remember I can breathe underwater, and will show more courage when faced with a physical threat. So it affects how I interact with the dream, but it still takes its normal course.
When this goes well, I wake up feeling incredibly well rested and in a good mood, more so than with a typical night's sleep.
I hadn't heard of VBW, but it looks amazing--thanks for the tip!
I recount dreams as part of my literary diaries. Whereas lucid dreaming might rob a certain element from the dream state, it seems to me that the reconstruction in language, which necessarily augments and denudes elements of the dream, is the ideal. Description in language then seems to influence subsequent dreams, and a psychologically gainful ecosystem is thereby established.
I mostly agree with this. When I write down a dream, something does seem to get lost in the language. But by spending time interpreting and projecting meaning onto different symbols, it starts to create a conversation with the unconscious. E.g. a symbol might start out as ambiguous, I'll project a certain meaning on it, and then in subsequent dreams it takes on that meaning more explicitly.
Super interesting, thanks.
Initial pre-comment from me! I came here from a link on Reddit. Your SubStack name 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 like 'superbowl' - so something I'd never go to in a million years, in any epoch. However - the title & subject itself was of course compelling - so here I am, enjoying your content!
This reminds me a bit of certain branding issues of old. Powergen would always go by a web domain name + country name. So - Powergenuk, or Powergenfrance, etc.
That didn't work so well for their Italy division ('italia').
Hah! I'd never heard that one before