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Random, really?

I had this dream recently, in it, someone (a fabricated character no doubt, their face was annoyingly blurry) suggested an idea. It was a brilliant suggestion for the improvement of an everyday product, not a product I use nor one that I had been thinking about.

Was it my idea? Was I subconsciously considering methods of improving a device I hardly ever use? Was it random?

Dreams are truly a strange experience. I do not usually recall them, but when I do, I remember that I perceive them as if I were looking through a pane of foggy glass. As for their contents, they range from mash-ups of real-world memories to completely new settings and events (even cases where I wasn’t exactly “me”).

While these mental concoctions support the ‘random’ theory, it is the cases like the one I described earlier that suggest something else might be at work. While it is theoretically possible, I don’t think it is likely that random firings could create such an elaborate, structurally cohesive story.

What are the sources of our dreams, and what do they mean?

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At
01:59:13 PM
On
January 18
In
By
Tom Fadial

Comments

  1. Dreams are odd…and yet completely accepted.

    this cartoon illustrates it best
    http://xkcd.com/c203.html

    Ed

    Jan 18, 02:53 PM #

  2. Like everything else, perhaps they are the resulting reactions to the actions before them. And now, they are contributing to the chaos theory. For you have posted about these dreams, I have posted about them, time has been taken, and that effects continue in their domino motion.

    travis

    Jan 19, 08:11 AM #

  3. Dreams are often heavily comprised of so-called “day residue,” which incorporates images and situations from the previous day into the dream. Dreams are also often heavily influenced by our real-world problems and ideas. In general, very little of your dream content meets the definition of “random,” which would imply that images in front of you are coming out of nowhere.

    Any content you recall from a dream is usually retrospective. You’re remembering it after the fact. I think it was Susan Blackmore who theorized that when you dream, your brain is generating multiple narratives at once. The single narrative that you remember is the waking mind picking and choosing a fairly arbitrary (but not random) subset of the original narratives. Personally, it’s quite rare for me remember a dream as I’m having it (prospectively).

    Jonathan Dobres

    Feb 7, 05:51 AM #

  4. I’ve been having strangely elaborate and detailed dreams lately, particularly with detailed conversations that I seem to forget after I wake up.

    I think dreams are quite stress-related, and that your dreams reflect your inward attitude towards your own life.

    Or they could just be random. ~M

    Mark Long

    Mar 18, 05:46 PM #

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