Are Our Dreams More Complex than They Were 100 Years Ago?

[Chris]

also Redz, it sounds like you're close to lucid dreaming that fun state of being aware you're dreaming...next step is to try and take control without waking up - good luck!

I heard Stephen LaBerge give a talk about his work with lucid dreams a few years ago, and it was fascinating.  At Stanford, they have a lab where they actually teach people how to lucid dream.  I think if I really was able to master that, I might never get out of bed.

I also think one of the most interesting things I have learned about sleep is the fact that your short term memory does not get consolidated into your long-term memory when you sleep.  This is the reason why you do not remember falling asleep, and why you may wake up, turn off your alarm, and go back to sleep....but not remember doing it in the morning.  This also is why you almost never remember dreams, unless you are woken up in the middle of them, and are able to reinforce the memories right away, which consolidates them from short term to long term memory.  And of course this is directly related to why you rarely remember dreams from REM sleep, since it generally happens in the middle of a sleep period, and you wouldn't naturally be waking out of REM sleep, and therefore aren't able to reinforce the memories, and they are lost.

[celticmaestro]

I rarely have dreams that don't involve other people.

I had a dream the other night that myself and two friends were on a train to meet another of our friends and we were going to beat him up. He is a Laker fan, but that's not why we were going to beat him up. I remembered this a few days later and just laughed.

I had a dream last night that I was walking along the street and Daniel Day-Lewis was across the street so I shouted across to him "draaiiiiinage" (quote from There Will Be Blood) and I don't know what happened after that.

Rarely do I have dirty dreams though. I've had one in the last few years that I can remember. That sucks.

[ManUp]

I never remember my dreams anymore.

I seem to immediately forget them the moment I wake up.

Sidenote: Assuming you get a full night's sleep you dream everynight even if you can't remember it.

[biggs]

Excellent topic here.  First off, I agree that we may be having more Hollywood themed dreams these days due to the media(I've had plenty of Jack Bauer escapes), but if our dreams are really changing in their nature, I would say it's because our brains are evolving. 

I used to be a serious dreamer. 

In college I began having extremely lucid, vivid dreams, where I would meet people I have never seen before, tell those people that we were all dreaming, and fly around like it was nothing. Basically I was an active participant, directing the course of the dream rather than being a witness.

I also had a series of precognitive dreams, where I saw something happen that happened to me later in life.  Some were significant, some meaningless.  I swear to god I dreamed the Antione Walker/Raef trade before it happened,(believe if you will, no one on this board has ever given me any props), and later found out that my father and his mother (my gmom) have both had precognitive dreams in the past.  Crazy stuff! Unfortunately I never remember my dreams anymore.

Anyways my Grandmother's dreams were extremely shocking and deeply frightened her.  As a strict Irish Catholic, she thought she was possessed or something.  She actually dreamed of a murder happening before the actual event.

I imagine that her dream was quite vivid, lucid, creative, frightening, exciting, etc, much like the crazy ones that we have today.  Perhaps now a days there would be Music by John Williams, Helicopters, explosions, Lightsabers, and Christian Bale chewing out some sound guy 

So to some it all up,  I think that we have always had lucid, vivid dreams, where we can see through the symbolism and translate some real meaning and knowledge out of our dreams.  It's also arguable that 100 years ago people were exposed to all of their media through reading, so they may have in a way been more creative than us, needing to constantly visualize and imagine their media, rather than perceiving it through site and sound.  Like I said before, I believe that our dreams will only evolve if we evolve, not because of Jack Bauer and the internet.

[cdif911]

the course of the dream rather than being a witness.

I also had a series of precognitive dreams, where I saw something happen that happened to me later in life.  Some were significant, some meaningless.  I swear to god I dreamed the Antione Walker/Raef trade before it happened,(believe if you will, no one on this board has ever given me any props), and later found out that my father and his mother (my gmom) have both had precognitive dreams in the past.  Crazy stuff! Unfortunately I never remember my dreams anymore.

I think precognitive dreams are similar to psychic ability in that some of us are considerably more perceptive of our environments and thus can predict things better.  Our mind makes all kinds of connections we're not even aware of, so its not surprising to me that sometimes something we imagine could happen (manifested in a dream) actually does happen in real life.  Deja Vu is our triggering a rememberance of a dream, which we attribute to being something that already happened.  Same thing happens sometimes when someone mentions something and all of a sudden it helps us recall a dream we forgot we had - it reconnects our mind.  But when its so eerily similar that (whoa just happened, no kidding, it was a dream bout this deserted western town and I wanted a hamburger bad...easily over a month ago...and guess what I just ate, a hamburger, its funny when you're conscious of something) anyways - if something in a dream is so close to reality we feel we've experienced it before, we think we're predicting the future - we're not, we're just very good at pattern recognition, even if its not conscious