Not sure if this is where this goes, but I thought it was pretty neat.

I love heights, I love motion, I love moving fast and going on roller coasters and all that. But last night, I had a dream where I was deathly afraid of heights (as afraid of heights as I am of the dark now!). The dream was sort of wonky, but nothing that defied the laws of physics or anything. The details don't matter, I just thought it was neat that a phobia that I most certainly do not have manifested itself in the dream state. Usually a dreamself has knowledge and memories your real self doesn't, but nothing major.

Has anyone else had this happen before?

Hey, WraithGod... let me rearrange your post a little bit


Sure. This is good mainstream stuff, an affect you do have (fear of the dark) gets attached to something with which it doesn't usually belong (heights).

Dreams play around with feelings, memories, personality traits... that's a big part of why they are so interesting.


There's a lot more to that. First, and I know you were trying to find words to fit, there really isn't so much a "dream" self and a "real" self, as there is a "your" self with different aspects.

Symbolic thought doesn't cut it as well as "sign-ic" thought in waking life. But, symbolic thought isn't a waste, either. So, when we're safe and cozy (if all goes well), we can indulge.

And here's the funny part: both aspects have access to the same raw material. The waking self overlooks a lot because you're busy and have other, immediate priorities. The resting self has nothing but time, and so has a tendency to chew over what the waking self overlooked.

But that's probably not because one has access and the other doesn't - choices were made, and now those choices are being reviewed. People who have waking need to do so learn to attend to what other people skip while awake, that is, make other choices about the same raw material.

Think of the people who blend perfume, or less glamorously, inspect fish for freshness. While most people hardly use their sense of smell at all, these people can give a dog a run for his or her money. Same nose, same brain, different attention based on different waking need. (Physics Nobelist Richard Feynman famously tested whether it was some "gift" by training his own nose as an adult. It worked like a charm. He became a bloodhound without a tail, just by paying attention to what would otherwise have been "unconscious" perception.)

BUT


The hell they don't. You should be keeping a journal, or at least a log of this stuff. It's one third of your life, why squander it?

Shame on you

I do keep a journal, actually. xD Most dreams are like this to me. In the dream, everything makes sense, like I'm awake. Then I actually wake up, and in this world, that sh** don't flow well. But the details don't matter in this particular situation. I was just excited because this is the first dream I've had where there has been such a definite alteration of my real-life self in terms of personality, not just origin. A phobia of heights. I can now understand what the people who actually have it are going through.

I don't look too much into the significance of dreams. Essentially, it's just your brain sorting through recordings of the day, be they new events or thoughts of past events, or basic concepts. Human perception still works to put it into a sensical form, but unfortunately, to the consciou mind it's NONsensical. I'm more than familiar with how the attention gate and the conscious mind filter out certain stimuli. I've written loads of things on these forums explaining that.

What I mean about the dream self is that in my dreams, I'll often have a whole new set of memories, like I'm a different person. I'll go to a place I've never been in real life, and it will be familiar. My home could be different, but in the dream it's still my house and perhaps always has been, to that self. I don't feel in the least bit displaced. This self was afraid of heights and accepted that skyscrapers that are still being built are an attraction and have lifts on the outside. Are you saying that I have different lives subconsciously, or just that my mind creates a whole new me based on the sorting process that causes dreams?

Shame on me .


I don't do "interpretation" (except my own) or any one-for-one "dream dictionary" stuff. But...


Wouldn't that be thought? And, at least on a good nght, maybe there might be some significance to those thoughts, just as on a good day, there might be significance to waking thoughts?


I'm not necessarily disgareeing with that, either. But I think it is labile, rather than some fixed mechanism, and what gets filtered in and out is, or can be, a learned thing. There has to be some filtering, since we have things to do, but the particulars are negotiable and changeable.


You're another one who has to visit the Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand. Clear walls and floors in some lifts. Bungee jumping off the building. Technical climbing tours of the exterior surface. You'll love it .


I don't think I am saying the first. The second one makes me want to scratch my beard .

I want a third option, that presentation is an important aspect of symbolic thought. Fitting a new personality for you to try on and then discard, like a theatrical costume, can be a way to get certain ideas across, or to explore those ideas in the first place.

Different people have different dreaming styles, so if "who am I this time?" happens a lot for you, then maybe that is what works for you, and nothing more complicated than just that.

Hrm, I should clarify. There's conscious thought, that which we are distinctly aware of, and subconscious thought, that which we aren't. Subconscious thoughts aren't true "thoughts" in my book because they are at the back of the mind, really, not fully comprehensible and formed. Underlying feelings and all that sort of thing, and probably the rationale behind phobias when you encounter what you're frightened of. Your brain sorting through it isn't actually thinking, and by sorting through it is looking for significance itself. For example, if you go for a walk, come home and study, then go to sleep, your brain will choose which memories from the walk and which snippets of information from studying are worth keeping.



By definition, it is! There was a video we watched in Psych class as an experiment. We were told to count how many times the group of people in the video threw a ball back and forth. When the video was over, we were all eager to see what the whole point was; counting is easy!

Turns out a guy in a gorilla suit walks across the screen for half of the video and dances around. If your attention was on the counting, you didn't see him AT ALL, but watching the video the second time you wonder how you couldn't.

If we had been told to look for a gorilla, we would likewise have had no idea how many times the ball had been passed back and forth. The whole process is called "priming", and it is what helps normal people pick out familiar faces, crazy people find fairies in photos of leaves, and wine connoisseurs to sort out scents.



<--- I'm in Toronto. CN Tower, baby. =P These buildings looked like more apartment-building-like Empire State buildings.



That would be fun, to pick and choose what you wanted to turn into every night. I have dreams that last days, though I sleep for only hours. Maybe I could be a fairy princess for a lifetime, whee!

I have to disagree though, I believe dreams are the brain babbling away and nothing more. =) The only significant part is what you're left with in the morning, be it the memories now permanently encoded in your long-term memory, or new perspectives on life from your CAREFUL waking interpretation of your dreams. 'Cause hey, I'll never know what a fear of heights really feels like unless I develop it myself, but it MIGHT be how it was in my dream. =) Thanks for the input!

Fair enough. I am betting, though, that as time goes on, you will come to have a greater respect for the source of dreams (that is, yourself doing business as "the subconscious") than you have now.

And we are in "back handed" agreement about the role of waking reflection on dream contents. The maximum benefit occurs when both modalities of thought, symbolic and discursive, are turned to the issues of our lives.

As to the dream which kicked off this thread, it was a little bit more than a neat idea (although it was that, too). If I had that dream, and if like you, I was afraid of the dark and not of heights, then I would reflect on the experience as follows.

Isn't it odd that I would fear something that has no power to hurt me, darkness, when I don't fear something that does have that power, heights? Well, not at all, I go on to think, since in both cases, the threat lies in the potential, not the actuality.

I am unafraid of heights because, while I could fall, I won't because I am well supported. With darkness, anything could be lurking there, and even though nothing usually is lurking, I can't do anything about what might be there...

And the three dots mean that the thinking would spin off from there, probably getting farther and farther away from any actual concern of yours, because I am not you, and I don't have either fear anyway, I am just doing "what if?"

However, your dream reflects the perfectly rational contemplation of the curious circumstance that you fear one source of potential harm, and not another. And as a thought, it was perfectly formed, not one bit haphazard or babbling.

The impression that it is babbling is based upon your waking discursive thought "If I had something to say, then why not just say it?" Possible answers include:

(1) Your faculty for symbolic reasoning cannot express itself in English, and your faculty that can express thoughts in English was asleep at the time in question. When not alseep, it is busy all the time.

(2) Your symbolic faculty was only asking a question anyway. You have to admit, it is a good question.

(3) Your symbolic faculty did have a suggestion or two, but these were better expressed symbolically than discursively. For example, Picasso's Guernica expresses his point well compared with professional prose accounts of the same historical event.

Food for thought. See you out there.

Thanks for the input, eight bits. I'll take it into consideration as I write my journal.