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Asked by hyperohan to Yee Whye, Valerie, Nick, Mackenzie, Lin, Jun, Jacob, Brian, Anna on 9 Nov 2019.
Question: What Are Dreams?
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Jacob Leygonie answered on 9 Nov 2019:
This is a really hard question. I believe dreams are still a big mystery for science; we have a lot to discover. What do you think are dreams? I would be happy to have opinions on that.
Some people have funny theories, like the one where humankind is a video game played by some higher order entities. In the way we create situations and people in our dreams, why wouldn’t we be the dreams of others?
Anyway, I don’t really agree with these twisted reasonings. I don’t have a lot to say about this question, but I wanted to point out that it also fascinates me; especially since we show, during our dreams, so much more imagination than when we are awake.
Maybe you already know that people can learn to master their dreams. Indeed, by working hard, i.e realising regular practices of meditation, one can enter a phase of “conscious dream”, where one can be awake while dreaming. This is great: you can decide to fly, as a bird, from one place to the other for instance. Also, this is not a gift or anything, it is something one can learn by providing the right amount of effort.
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Yee Whye Teh answered on 9 Nov 2019:
Like memories, we don’t really know much about why we dream or what are dreams. However, neuroscientists do have some theories that dreams help us form and strengthen our memories. Some of these theories have even inspired an important early idea in machine learning called a Boltzmann machine!
Comments
hyperohan commented on :
I think dreams are when your prefrontal cortex is constantly working while you are asleep, therefore you thinking unconsciously. Also, maybe since other parts of your brain such as the hippocampus which is where many memories are stored, the prefrontal cortex is randomly thing of things… so we do not really know what signs say in dreams because the words are jumbled up, since we do not remember what memories we have of reading properly.
hyperohan commented on :
A conscious dream can also be recognised as ” lucid dreaming ” which is achieved through meditation. 🙂 Also, my other comment did not seem to make sense. What i meant was the the hippocampus, where memories are stored, may not work when you are asleep, but the prefrontal cortex is, meaning that if the prefrontal cortex is randomly thinking of something with words in them,such as a sign, it may not make sense – you cannot read what the sign says when dreaming because you cannot remember how to read – since the hippocampus is not working – but the prefrontal cortex is. I hope this one made more sense than the last comment :D.