A reader named Aminto opened up a great topic of conversation in my forum which I thought deserved to be promoted to the big leagues. It has to do with all those weird random people running around in your dreams. Part of it reads:
I told someone a particularly disturbing dream once and they asked me who are all the people in the dream?
I started saying well, there was my dad and there was a robber and me and …
They interrupted me and said that surely everyone in my dream was actually ‘me’, because I was the one having the dream and therefore all the people, thoughts, words, etc. were actually generated by myself.
As I wrote in the response, there are a number of ways we could look at this issue. I’ll give you my interpretations of it from personal experience, and then you give me yours. Personally, I think what Aminto saying is right on one level, but incomplete on another. My best evidence is that I’ve had multiple “psychic” dreams where I saw a friend, their surroundings and people she was with, as well as the moods of the people, personal relationships between them and even the weather. I told her about it the next day and she correlated that it was all accurate down to the last detail. I’ve even had a dream like that with somebody who I’ve never met in real life, only known over the internet. I saw him, and who he was with and what they were doing, told him about it and it was on target (with some notable differences, but still remarkable).
So that leaves us with several options:
- People in dreams are figments of our imagination or aspect of ourselves (sort of like that Herman’s Head tv show)
- People in dreams are actual real people, and we’re meeting or connected on some other plane - astral, whatever
- People in dreams are both aspects of ourselves AND real people out in the world somewhere.
Or, and this is where it gets fun:
- People in real life are also aspects of ourselves, or we’re drawn to them because they match or somehow align with some interior image of ourselves
We could even push this further:
- Maybe there’s really no such thing as an individual self at all, merely clusters of personality fragments/facets which sort of group or constellate together in a variety of unique patterns which we call “individuals”.
Or we could address the possibilty that:
- Dreams are more “real” somehow than waking life. We usually think of them as being related to our waking lives, but maybe it’s our waking lives that are basically a slow vibration version of our dream lives - instead of vice versa.
One of my all time favorite concepts comes from I think Jungian Marie Louise Von Franz who said that we dream even during the day time, but that we’re not aware of it. She compared it to the sun and the stars. When we’re awake, our ego - like the sun - shines so brightly that it obscures these smaller more distant lights. But when we sleep, they come out into the forefront.
In any event, it really is an interesting topic. I lean towards the idea that if not all, then at least some dreams really do consist of interacting with other real people (who are either alive now, were alive at one point, or maybe even might be coming in the future, who knows). Maybe there’s some kind of sorting mechanism that puts people together in dreams who then sort of play certain roles for one another, almost like actors in a billion one act plays written by each one of us. That of course opens up the rather bizarre possibility that at times you’re merely an actor in somebody else’s dream. Certainly feels that way at times during ordinary life, that’s for sure.
One other tangent: the sheer numbers of people I interact with in my dreams is really what throws me. If they are all just inventions of my mind, then how in hell is my mind inventing entire people out of thin air who have personalities, histories, bodies, emotions and actions? It’s astonishing really if you add up all the people you meet in dreams over your whole life. If my brain can perform feats like that while I’m asleep, how do I know it’s not doing that while I’m awake?
What do you guys think? Have you had contact with others in dreams who you were sure were “real” people? How do you distinguish between these encounters and the aspects-of-yourself variety?
- END -
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14 Comments
All of the above…
Yeah I agree slomo. I think the thing to keep in mind when we’re talking about things like this is that our explanations are merely an attempt to grapple with the truth and put it into a shape which makes sense to our minds. Our explanations themselves are not the truth. It’s an easy point to forget.
Well, personally, I don’t have an opinion on the people in my dreams because to be frank, I’m still learning about my dreams, and still trying to become lucid (though not trying to hard at this moment). I did last night, though, have a really interesting and complex dream (again, and full of symbols that come out of nowhere). I’ll post about it on the forum.
Personally, though, I haven’t met any “real” people in my dreams. My dreams have included people I know,, but I’ve never met anyone, like a guide or yogi or mentor, in my dreams. I wish I could, though.
As far as inventing people, I’m beginning to lean towards one of two tangents, either all reality is made up by the brain (which gets really complicated, and assumes that everything you learn, you already knew), or we’re all connected on various levels, perhaps through the energy that seems to be everywhere, even in a vacuum (scalar EM). Thus we can communicate or share minds on an unconscious level through this pervasive EM field.
Thats my two cents
I’m pretty sure I’ve been around real people in my dreams. In my last really vivid one (maybe a year ago) I was floating through a school, just above everyone’s heads. I was a disembodied entity, and most of them didn’t notice me, but some of them did notice me. One girl looked right at me like she could see me. Others just sensed me in a general way.
I floated through classrooms, just watching the people and enjoying my weightlessness.
I agree with Don Juan, of the Castaneda books, that there are different types of dreams. Some dreams are random stuff from your brain. Like you watch a tv show about chipmunks and you dream about chipmunks. Or you dream about people you know, and your dream is an expression of your attitudes towards them or some unresolved issue you have with them.
But sometimes, your dreaming body takes you into different worlds (planes, whatever).
One more dream story:
My girlfriend at the time was sleeping over. She was on the floor, I was on the couch, laying opposite so I could see her face. I fell asleep and dreamt I was wandering outside the apartment. Then I floated up the stairs, through the door, and into the room where we were sleeping. Suddenly I felt an intensely evil energy, and saw a blackish shape in the room. I snapped back into my body and awoke instantly.
I looked immediately over at my gf, who was sleeping soundly. But all of a sudden, her eyes open and she’s looking right at me. Freaky. Then she told me she had also dreamed that she was outside her body, and had seen me come in the room in her dream.
And it turned out, although I didn’t heed the warning at the time, that she is intensely evil.
Cool, I think I’ll make a separate forum section for dreams and weird experiences. A few people have asked…
Haha. Hilarious.
So the tanned chick with the nice b cup breasts and the beautiful face i was having sex with the other night in my dreams was myself?
-tc
In Finnegans Wake Joyce employs the idea of every character in a dream being a derivative of the dreamer, and also having different characters derive from variations on the characters themselves, like some endless loop from which characterization springs eternal. Thus, the main protagonist HCE (Humphrey Earwicker Chimpden) transforms into various other characters, as well as Everyman (”Here Comes Everybody”). Joyce tips us off by having whatever form Chimpden takes on echoing his essence with the acronym HCE.
OH, NICE. This is probably my favorite category when it comes to dreaming.
I’ve actually had lucid discussions with dream characters about this. Discussions wherein during the lucid state the “actor” breaks character and talks to me candidly about the nature of dreams, and such… So, I’m really glad you used that term…
In one situation, I was having a pretty weird, disturbing dream until a few things happened to trigger it into a lucid one. The “scene” finally ended abruptly and I realized I was lucid, and I walked… well, I guess in some ways you could say off-set, with one of the characters that explained to me that he wasn’t my friend Tim, he was actually an actor, and that normal dreams are stories acted out by dream actors playing roles that are familiar. I realized then that it was actually my lucid dream guide in the form of my friend, and that he could take the shape of whoever he needed to be for each particular non-lucid dream.
As for the reality of dream characters, I have no clue. I know for sure though that when I’m lucid dreaming, background characters disappear or fade-out, and the whole view is pretty much limited to a small group of specific characters with individual personalities that seem much less “projections” (of myself perhaps) and instead individual entities with their own personalities. That’s usually what engages my interest in each of them, and i’ve had lengthy discussions with plenty.
From my POV waking reality is a “dream” as well, it just operates by rules that are a little bit more hard’n'fast than sleeping reality
WHich is to say that the reality which surrounds us when we are awake is a receptive matrix which to some extent accepts our projections and reflects them back at us, thus you run into people when you were just thinking about them, coincidences, etc
In sleep the rules get even looser thus people change from one into another etc, time telescopes, events repeat
Yes i think we communicate with other people in dreams, with spirits, and with aspects of our selves
Just like we do when we’re awake
I’m remionded of this book I read about Buddhism once, this student was asking a teacher about visions he had of heaven and hell and gods and demons, the teacher reminded him that these things are unreal creations of the mind - just like this world!
The word “real” loses meaning when everything becomes slippery, fluid and evanescent, no?
I mean, real compared to what?
Maybe its all just smoke through a keyhole
THe creations of my mind may be just as real as spirits or other people i communicate with in dreams as well
fucking trippy!
The people we think we know in waking life, I think, are also reflections of aspects of ourselves. Sure, there is a real person out there, and that person has some influence on the character in our internal drama, but under normal circumstances what we perceive as another person is mostly a character we make up, and therefore mostly ourself. Where it gets interesting is when the person suddenly acts completely out of that character (of which the person is almost entirely unaware) in ways that we can’t ignore.
To put it another way, all the world is a stage and that stage is in my own mind, and everybody is acting out a role that I wrote - but they don’t know the role, other than through clues they derive from watching me fail to correctly act out my role in their drama.
I do beleive that there is a real universe out there, and that it corresponds somewhat to experienced phenomena. But we look throug thick and warped lenses that were developed not for perceiving reality as such, but for inducing behaviors likely to result in survival long enough to reproduce. It just happens that a reasonably efficient way for those behaviors to be induced is to have phenomena that correspond to some degree to an external reality.
Cool, loads to think about.
I must admit that in the dream I was talking about first of, everyone really seemed to be different aspects of me, I’d been thinking about my relationship with my dad loads and it illustrated all the different complex feelings I had at the time perfectly.
Since then, it’s been very useful with some dreams to ask ‘what if everyone was just a part of me’ but other times, it’s like no way, that person behaves just like that in real life and the whole ‘everyone is me’ model breaks down completely. Same if I’ve just been watching some stupid horror movie and am dreaming about evil monkeys from outer space, I don’t tend to read deep meaningful insights into them!
I’ve not had any dreams where I’ve really felt that someone else had a message for me, I’ve been worried that I have had after some dreams (or excited, depending), but the reality of the dream hasn’t manifest in real life.
Like Error 404, I think he’s hit the nail on the head, there is a real universe, it’s just that our perception is incredibly subjective. Even our senses of sight, smell and taste and so on is subjective, not real. Imagine if we were all bats, we’d perceive the world in a completely different way!
I experienced something similar on my first and, unfortunately, only DMT experience. No joke, I came across one of those cybernetic elves you read about or whatever they are, and all I could think is, “Hmm, this is such a neat aspect of my imagination, she [the elf entity] must be a figment of my thoughts manifest in this state/realm.”
We exchanged more of an emotional contact in which she smiled at my thoughts on this and implied it didn’t matter, she loved me regardless. It was really neat, this sort of personal-but-universal love, motherly, Isis-like.