Dreams: Why are people so certain of (non-metaphysical) false beliefs about them?

[Fiery Diamond]

Dreams. We don't know their purpose for certain. In fact, we understand remarkably little about them. That doesn't stop people from forming very confident beliefs about them. To avoid forum-dangerous topics, I'll set aside the more metaphysical beliefs that some people have about them and focus on more mundane ones.

Why are people so certain that the the things they have heard/read/whatever about dreams are true? Many of them take the form of insisting that certain things are impossible to do or experience in a dream: you can't taste, you can't feel pain, you can't run, you can't make sudden movements, you can't die without dying in real life, you can't meet new people with new faces... the list goes on; these are just ones that I've personally encountered. And every single one of the ones I've listed is false.

And yet, when I tell people that I've had dreams wherein I died, rather than reevaluate the claim that dying in dreams causes you to die in real life (unprovable if true, demonstrably false if false), they disbelieve my personal experience. When I tell people that I've had characters in my dreams whose faces didn't match anyone I knew or had met, they insist that I must have seen someone in passing with that face and just didn't consciously remember it, rather than considering that their assertion that dreams only recycle faces might be wrong.

I just woke up from a rather vivid dream in which I was having a discussion with my dream version of my brother about this very topic (while aware that I was dreaming - that's another one: "you can't be aware it's a dream without waking up or going full-on able to control the dream lucid dreaming!"; I've had plenty of dreams that I knew were dreams at the time that I was unable to control). I ate dark chocolate Reese's cups (which I had been eating before I went to sleep) to prove a point: I absolutely can taste in my dreams. Amusingly, I also pinched myself but didn't feel the pain, which surprised me because I absolutely have felt pain in dreams before when I've been shot by bullets in my dreams.

Though that latter part may be related to the fact that in my personal experience, which I make no claims about being universal, physical sensations are generally muted in dreams: tastes are less intense, pain is diminished compared to what it should be, etc. Oddly, this doesn't seem to apply to the sense of touch or temperature, at least if my most recent dream is anything to go by. I deliberately touched my brother's hands and hugged my father, and I felt the texture of skin (in the first case) and body heat (in the second case) rather vividly.

People believe a lot of odd things about dreams, and many people are incredibly obstinate when told that another has personal experience refuting those beliefs. I honestly don't get why they are so invested in those mundane beliefs. The more metaphysical ones I can understand the investment - people tend to hold those kind of beliefs close to the heart - but ones like I've mentioned here? Why be so insistent when told otherwise?

What do you all think?
What are your personal experiences?
What beliefs have you had or encountered (let's not talk metaphysical ones to stay on the safe side of the forum rules)?

[Sigako]

I work in a different field of neuroscience, but I can remember some details.

Dying in a dream - happens, though it often wakes people up. Although it might depend on your perception and understanding of the concept, or lack thereof (a rather perilous field on its own).

Running - eh, tricky. In some cases you can, in some you can't, varies both between people and individual dreams. I remember reading about what it actually depends on, but I only skimmed the text in question, and it was about 15 years ago, so, sorry, can't elaborate. Something about focus of attention, and I suspect monkey dilemma plays a part, but that's it.
Sudden movements - related to the above, but also to the strength of the dream. If the dream is relatively shallow, such a movement might overcome sleep muscle arrest and wake you up.

Faces - well, yes and no. If you live in a modern city, you might see hundreds of people every day. A person's capacity for detailed remembering of faces is limited, and is usually reserved for someone important and/or remarkable, the rest eventually blurs together in a sort of a library of stereotypes and features.
These two pools can be used by imagination to construct the face you want, either based on someone or actually new, both consciously, like when painting, and subconsciously - daydreaming, actually dreaming or the like.
From my personal experience - I don't see faces in my dreams at all. If I try to concentrate, they all look like empty spaces. Yet I clearly perceive them as people familiar to me, complete strangers, characters based on combination of someone I know and some role and whatever else, depending on narrative. As if I could see a link to a resource, but graphic engine failed to render it.

Somatic feelings - strong pain usually wakes you up, a protective reflex, the rest is nothing extraordinary. It's just that we're more used to pay more conscious attention to what we see and hear than to taste and smell on a routine basis, and thus our imagination is better trained with these senses. But for some people that's not true.
Remember the distinction between colored and black and white dreams? Turns out reports of it started when black and white TVs became publicly available, and younger people often aren't even aware it was a thing once.
Also, dulling the senses, you said yourself - if you usually ignore a sense while it's normal, you're even less likely to notice it dulled.

Lucid dreaming is a continuum, rather than discrete state, and more serious literature describes intermediate phases just as well. There's no definitive direction to the process either - you might drift between the states back and forth, turning at any point. In various parts it corresponds to physiological phases of sleep, you experience and intent, your general state at the moment and so on.


Obstinance - people like to be right, you know? Especially when they have no real proof and the question sounds deceptively easy and obvious. Also, metaphysical beliefs as a category are surprisingly broad, and there's no clear border to them, they just blur into other parts of our personal knowledge. Most of what is clearly defined as metaphysical was reserved as such by philosophers, so that they could argue about them to their hearts' content without dirtying themselves with vulgarities of mundane world (in one of the sources I've read it was stated explicitly by philosophers in question), but this attitude has faded somewhat nowadays, at least in some circles I know.

[Sigako]

I suspect a moderator will swoop in and carry this topic to the "Mad science" shortly after.

[Vahnavoi]

Dreams are genuinely mystical experiences. People who do not dream (or rather, do not remember and analyze their dreams) themselves have basically no empirical basis for distinquishing nonsense and confabulation from fact. Furthermore, the facts of dreaming are weird enough that they sound like nonsense anyway.

[Liquor Box]

Dreams. We don't know their purpose for certain. In fact, we understand remarkably little about them. That doesn't stop people from forming very confident beliefs about them. To avoid forum-dangerous topics, I'll set aside the more metaphysical beliefs that some people have about them and focus on more mundane ones.

Why are people so certain that the the things they have heard/read/whatever about dreams are true? Many of them take the form of insisting that certain things are impossible to do or experience in a dream: you can't taste, you can't feel pain, you can't run, you can't make sudden movements, you can't die without dying in real life, you can't meet new people with new faces... the list goes on; these are just ones that I've personally encountered. And every single one of the ones I've listed is false.

As you say yourself, we do not fully understand dreams. What we do have is lots of theories about them. That being the case, I don't think it's unreasonable for people to subscribe to those theories based on their own personal experiences and anecdotes. You seem equally confident about your own theories about dreams (eg, that faces can be original and not a subconscious memory of a face you;ve seen before), and that seems no more or less logical to me that other people's beliefs about dreams.

[danzibr]

My first thought it… whom are you speaking with? A buncha nay-sayers?

Personally, I used to have quite vivid dreams almost every night. Now I dream… not quite as often, but still “enough.” My dreams vary from not knowing I’m in a dream, to knowing but can’t do anything about it, to knowing and having some powers (but ya know, I’ve never experienced the dream omnipotence). Sometimes people I know well, sometimes not at all (I find it kind of silly people would *insist* you must’ve at least seen everyone in your dreams… we’re fantastic at making stuff up). Sometimes I’m completely me, like life status and everything, sometimes no. Sometimes pain, sometimes no, etc.

One thing that usually (maybe always?) happens is… I’m slow. Which was already touched on in the thread. Can’t run. And if I can fly, it’s slow and clumsy.

[Talakeal]

Lot’s of people have trouble accepting that other people perceive the world differently than them.

I remember reading a book on scientifically studying dreaming called The Head Trip a few years back and when I-went to share it with my friend Dave, a fellow Oneirophilliac, he got irrationally angry because it contradicted his experiences with dreams.

As someone who can vividly imagine all five senses, it was a shock for me to learn that most people can only imagine a few senses and some people none at all, and all of these people insist I am making it up if we actually discuss it.

[Willie the Duck]

What beliefs have you had or encountered (let's not talk metaphysical ones to stay on the safe side of the forum rules)?

Even those who do not ascribe a metaphysical nature to dreams sometimes indicated a believe that they are their subconscious/unconscious mind trying to tell them some deeper truth that their awake mind can't fathom or has worked out the answers to problems that the awake mind can't. My thinking on this is that-- while it's possible that dreaming allows one to let go of some restrictions and/or reframe some issues -- it's still the same fallible brain working on these issues. We have no reason to believe that this unconscious mind is any smarter or insightful than the waking one.

Faces - well, yes and no. If you live in a modern city, you might see hundreds of people every day. A person's capacity for detailed remembering of faces is limited, and is usually reserved for someone important and/or remarkable, the rest eventually blurs together in a sort of a library of stereotypes and features.
These two pools can be used by imagination to construct the face you want, either based on someone or actually new, both consciously, like when painting, and subconsciously - daydreaming, actually dreaming or the like.
From my personal experience - I don't see faces in my dreams at all. If I try to concentrate, they all look like empty spaces. Yet I clearly perceive them as people familiar to me, complete strangers, characters based on combination of someone I know and some role and whatever else, depending on narrative. As if I could see a link to a resource, but graphic engine failed to render it.

I haven't had a lucid dream where this is the case, but I have repeatedly dreamed that I was still working at a banking job I had in my early 20s. It's populated with a number of coworkers who are incredibly familiar to me, and I generally recognize them all. This is true even though I have some pretty hazy memories of some of the people there. I don't really know if I see the faces or recognize anyone, or if that's just the sensation my dreams give me (it could be generic stock dream figure that my dream tells me is one of those forgotten coworkers).

[Sigako]

Oh, right on cue: today in my dream I was attacked by dogs and felt pain, but it wasn't enough to wake me up.
It also had an inversion of usual lucid dreaming: I wasn't realising it's a dream, but I recovered my waking personality and some of its knowledge and was acting consciously enough to spot some contradictions.

Oh, to add to your initial list of contested stuff: sometimes I experience a "bleed-through", a term I cribbed from AC franchise - my memory may glitch, and parts of dream's plot, backstory, geographical layout (if I was going somewhere), "academical" knowledge, etc. may embed in my waking memories without usual "dream"-flagging, and it's a b***h to spot them later on. Once I almost got lost because of this, another time I embarassed myself by confusing between previous discussions in dreams and reality.

[JeenLeen]

I remember, from a Batman cartoon, the idea that you couldn't read while in dreams. Like, the letters would be illegible. It was a crucial point to Batman figuring out he was trapped in a dream. I believed that for some time, but then did read something in a dream which shattered that.

I don't think I've heard other common beliefs about what's possible or not possible in dreams (seeing faces, senses intensified or diminished, etc.) , but I haven't read or talked to folk much about it. I don't think there's anything I experience in real life that I would believe you can't experience in a dream, e.g., I've felt sensations, seen/recognized faces, etc.
Never quite experienced lucid dreaming; I think a couple times I was dreaming and realized it didn't make sense, and maybe a subset of those that it was a dream... but not much with it.

Oh, to add to your initial list of contested stuff: sometimes I experience a "bleed-through", a term I cribbed from AC franchise - my memory may glitch, and parts of dream's plot, backstory, geographical layout (if I was going somewhere), "academical" knowledge, etc. may embed in my waking memories without usual "dream"-flagging, and it's a b***h to spot them later on. Once I almost got lost because of this, another time I embarassed myself by confusing between previous discussions in dreams and reality.

I haven't quite had it that bad, but I have had a couple times where I thought something happened since it happened in a memory. Like, I thought I cleaned or did something around the house, only to realize I hadn't. Or I thought the toilet overflowed, but it was just a dream and I was relieved when I realized that via seeing the non-destroyed bathroom.

I'll often be confused if I'm woken up in the middle of a dream. One time recently while I was sick, I dreamt that various factions within my body were debating how to handle the disease, and a magic gem was crucial to their conflict. When my wife woke me up in the morning because the baby was doing something loud and frustrating, I almost told her something like "listen, the gem is under my pillow".
When I got awake enough to realize that didn't make sense, so I almost told her "I realize tihs probably doesn't make sense, but IF you need the magic gem, and it is real, then it's under my pillow."
Then got awake enough not to bug her with nonsense at 3 am.

[Sigako]

When I talked about seeing faces, I said "as if a graphical engine failed to render an asset". I think it's not so much impossible to see faces, as faces in dreams being constructed backwards to that of real life - first adding a flag of who it is and then filling in details against scanning the details and then trying to remember who's that. In my case with a glitchy step. Also, it's not limited to faces.

[NichG]

I'd sum up my experience on these sorts of things as: dreams allow you to experience qualia in a disentangled manner, which would almost always in real-life experience be co-occuring. So e.g. 'pain' has a bunch of components - the pressure of the pain source, the direct spatially localized sensation itself, the attentional amplification of that sensation as 'this is important, do something about it now!', the emotional response, the sensation of any kind of reflexive loss of control, the post-hoc realization of 'I am feeling pain', etc. Normally you'd get all of those as one big thing. In a dream, I think its possible to experience for example only the post-hoc realization of 'I am feeling pain' without the attentional urgency, spatial localization, etc stuff. Or you could get one of those other components but not the post-hoc realization, or really potentially any combination.

So as a result, when people go to interpret their dream experiences (and I don't mean 'the mirror represents my insecurity' kind of interpretation, I mean like 'these events were me dying' or 'this feeling was pain'), I think they're more likely to disagree on what was actually experienced than we're used to with normal day-to-day physical experiences. With common grounding in reality, we're used to being able to say things like 'that's so bright that it hurts' and other people know what we mean, even if its a different kind of 'hurts' than say stubbing your toe. When those elements become dissociated, you might have one person say e.g. 'the experience of being able to reflect that you tasted something is what tasting something is', whereas someone else might experience that same thing but say 'no, I don't think that's the actual important thing about being able to taste things'. This plus the filter of the different degrees to which people will actually analyze things in the moment of dreaming (versus morning reflections, which will quickly get reconstructive and muddy), as well as variation between people as to what they actually end up dreaming about.

That doesn't answer why people would be so particularly stubborn about dreams versus other things, but I would guess it has something to do with the way in which we recognize other people as 'the same as us' and the sort of way people get about topics like consciousness. Since we're talking about things we can't establish an objective measure of, the fallback is intersubjective agreement. Disagreement is reflexively taken as evidence of fundamental differences between things, rather than evidence against beliefs about the nature of a shared thing - because we're using the fact of agreement or disagreement as a kind of evidence towards another question already.

[Fiery Diamond]

With regards to reading in dreams, I can read in dreams, but words and numbers change when I look away and then look back at them again. I actually have more experience with this with numbers from me trying to look at my clock to see if I need to wake up yet. In my dream. Yeah.

I'd sum up my experience on these sorts of things as: dreams allow you to experience qualia in a disentangled manner, which would almost always in real-life experience be co-occuring. So e.g. 'pain' has a bunch of components - the pressure of the pain source, the direct spatially localized sensation itself, the attentional amplification of that sensation as 'this is important, do something about it now!', the emotional response, the sensation of any kind of reflexive loss of control, the post-hoc realization of 'I am feeling pain', etc. Normally you'd get all of those as one big thing. In a dream, I think its possible to experience for example only the post-hoc realization of 'I am feeling pain' without the attentional urgency, spatial localization, etc stuff. Or you could get one of those other components but not the post-hoc realization, or really potentially any combination.

So as a result, when people go to interpret their dream experiences (and I don't mean 'the mirror represents my insecurity' kind of interpretation, I mean like 'these events were me dying' or 'this feeling was pain'), I think they're more likely to disagree on what was actually experienced than we're used to with normal day-to-day physical experiences. With common grounding in reality, we're used to being able to say things like 'that's so bright that it hurts' and other people know what we mean, even if its a different kind of 'hurts' than say stubbing your toe. When those elements become dissociated, you might have one person say e.g. 'the experience of being able to reflect that you tasted something is what tasting something is', whereas someone else might experience that same thing but say 'no, I don't think that's the actual important thing about being able to taste things'. This plus the filter of the different degrees to which people will actually analyze things in the moment of dreaming (versus morning reflections, which will quickly get reconstructive and muddy), as well as variation between people as to what they actually end up dreaming about.

Those are interesting points that I hadn't considered. With regards to the different degrees of analyzing things in the moment of dreaming, I tend to do a lot of in-the-moment analysis in my dreams - this is probably related to my high percentage of dreams (at least out of those that I can recall having) that I am at least partially aware that I'm dreaming. I've outright tried experiments or attempted to memorize details in dreams before - the recent dream in which I tested skin contact sensation and ability to feel temperature from body contact (I grabbed my dream-brother's bare arm and hugged my dream-father with the intent of noting what sensations I perceived) and in which I ate dark chocolate Reese's Cups (and tasted them) is a good example. Similarly, I've tried to memorize the visual appearance of objects in dreams before because I thought they looked cool and wanted to remember them when I woke up (spoiler: it didn't work, but I got a very detailed image in the moment, despite forgetting nearly all the details when I woke up).

I would hypothesize (though obviously there's no real way to test this) that the more attention I'm paying to something in a dream, the more detailed (in terms of any and all senses perceiving it) it is.

That doesn't answer why people would be so particularly stubborn about dreams versus other things, but I would guess it has something to do with the way in which we recognize other people as 'the same as us' and the sort of way people get about topics like consciousness. Since we're talking about things we can't establish an objective measure of, the fallback is intersubjective agreement. Disagreement is reflexively taken as evidence of fundamental differences between things, rather than evidence against beliefs about the nature of a shared thing - because we're using the fact of agreement or disagreement as a kind of evidence towards another question already.

I'm having trouble following this paragraph. The first sentence makes sense to me. The second sentence I'm not sure what you mean by "intersubjective agreement." The third sentence I'm not following at all.

[NichG]

I'm having trouble following this paragraph. The first sentence makes sense to me. The second sentence I'm not sure what you mean by "intersubjective agreement." The third sentence I'm not following at all.

The idea of intersubjective agreement is that if you say something about your subjective experiences that happens to agree with my subjective experiences on the same thing without me prompting that, then it's (weak) evidence that there is something that could be true of the experience across people in general, rather than just reflecting other things about you or me specifically.

For example, your description of what reading in dreams is like matches my experience, but I didn't describe mine. So the fact that we spontaneously agreed is a form of objective evidence about a subjective thing.

People use the concept in the philosophy of consciousness to establish which things are interpretation and which things are common between people. However there's a thing where the degree of empathy can change based on familiarity, and so people can disagree on what other things they feel they are in agreement with. E.g. cat owners are more likely to believe that cats have conscious experience than people who don't own cats, on the basis that they can more easily interpret cats' behaviors as reporting on a subjective experience they can empathize with.

So basically, agreement of observations or ability to empathize and understand what the subjective experiences of others were is part of how we make a determination as to whether someone else is conscious in the same way as ourselves. So disagreement can be reflexively taken as evidence of otherness, rather than evidence of misperception or that the reality actually varies.