Frequency of dreams occuring - meaning what?

[Owledge]

Is there any solid understanding from old knowledge or own experience about the implications (causes, messages, results) of the frequency with which dreams are occuring?

I'm excluding the case where one is simply so sleep-deprived that a lot of experiences have to be processed. I mean, what does it signal when while the sleep patterns are regular and dreams occur sporadically, one night there's a lot of dream acitivity, the sleep stuffed with various very creative, interesting dreams?

 

And do you experience phenomena like this that in any way correlate to your meditation practice?

[suninmyeyes]

Dreams are like a mental/emotional/spiritual sweat.

So even if there is a regular sleep pattern ,its really all about how a person relates to events in life .And that determines whats going on in the dreams.

And to answer your question ,no ,but i feel the way meditation correlates to my dreams.

I hope i understood your post correctly.

[Owledge]

...,but i feel the way meditation correlates to my dreams.

That is what I am curious about.

[Sloppy Zhang]

I have a friend who has noticed that for some days at a time he'll have very few, sporadic dreams, then for a couple of days he'll have an explosion of very intense, very vivid dreams.

 

He's been trying to figure out what causes this stuff, if there is a cause, or if it's just a natural phase, and everyone has a different dream cycle.

 

For me, I don't pay much attention to it.

[Aetherous]

Edited May 20, 2010 by Scotty

[suninmyeyes]

That is what I am curious about.

 

Well,from personal expirience-meditation is a tool that helps declutter the mind.

As the time passes it may become a constant habit through the day and night.

Becouse these meditation rhytams go deeper and deeper into psyche and changing the personality s/he was born(adopted) with.It will affect all aspects of life.

Which includes dreams.

This means more clarity or feeling natural in a dream state,less sweat/thought/emotion processing.

That is how it is in my universe.

[Birch]

There is an idea that everyone dreams, several times a night but that not everyone remembers them.

I have read that dreaming is effectively a sorting out of whatever you have encountered (both in the world and inside yourself). I wonder if it is "cleaning" or not.

 

Some of my current dreams are filled with being taught things. Especially cultivation type things. I have no idea who is doing the teaching. So I'll wake up and go "aha"! It doesn't mean I get better at anything I don't think;-)

[Owledge]

There is an idea that everyone dreams, several times a night but that not everyone remembers them.

Is a dream that is not remembered a dream at all? Doesn't the definition of a dream imply that? Could it be that those that are not remembered are "unconscious brain activity" that happens all the time? Maybe the waking state draws us very far away from that activity, and when we sleep and thus it doesn't, some part of us connects with that activity.

[forestofclarity]

I don't think so. Do you remember what you had for breakfast forty nine days ago? No, but does that mean it was unconscious?

 

Or if at first you don't recall a dream, and then you do, does it suddenly shift from unconscious to conscious?

 

Stephen LaBerge has done intensive scientific testing on dreaming subjects. Measuring brain activity and correlating this to dreaming, he estimates we have many dreams in a night.

 

Is a dream that is not remembered a dream at all? Doesn't the definition of a dream imply that? Could it be that those that are not remembered are "unconscious brain activity" that happens all the time? Maybe the waking state draws us very far away from that activity, and when we sleep and thus it doesn't, some part of us connects with that activity.

[Birch]

Thanks Forest.

 

Nice transition to an almost OT. Maybe I should move it to Trunk's thread. The "unconscious." I've been looking at this one and I'm starting to think it's really not as simple as is sometimes made out. Nor is it necessarily Freudian;-)

 

I haven't come across any really great books (apart from Freud and Jung) on it either, so would enjoy some recommendations.

 

If cognition is often (always?) selective (now based on what exactly would be a good discussion) then I was wondering if what we might commonly term "unconscious" is really just a sort of a reverse understanding of the things left out by our cognition? Or is it something else?

 

And as conditioning conditions our cognition (and we desire to hang on to it whatever it is because otherwise we can feel very uncertain and we don't enjoy that feeling necessarily) then perhaps many more things get left out? Add language and people who are bigger and ostensibly "smarter" than you and who tell you what you're "really" seeing and we've got a winner.

 

Except our awareness is still acting all the time, so we end up with a sort of a "knowing" despite the conditioning. And this in itself can cause more suffering, not because there is no us, but because we know what's going on but we don't (want to?) believe it (ok, maybe that's too strong?)

 

So we make stuff up about it. Often about other people, often about ourselves. Or we let other people make stuff up about it, or ourselves.

 

Before I lose the OP topic. Dreaming would seem to me to be one of those activities that might help us shed more light on what's going on in the waking state. Why we remember some dreams and not others.

 

To actually be conscious inside a dream, knowing it is one is another feat I've only read about. And it seemed that this actually caused problems with the person's waking life because of the techniques they used to drop into the lucid dream state. Maybe this is where the line about the butterfly dreaming he was someone else comes in? Was it a joke about crazy meditation students;-) ?

[Owledge]

To actually be conscious inside a dream, knowing it is one is another feat I've only read about. And it seemed that this actually caused problems with the person's waking life because of the techniques they used to drop into the lucid dream state. Maybe this is where the line about the butterfly dreaming he was someone else comes in? Was it a joke about crazy meditation students;-) ?

That reminds me of a scene from the movie "Waking Life". The chief character is listening to a guy who tells him about how amazing it is to be conscious of dreaming. He tells him that there are clues that help you realize that you are dreaming, like light switches won't work, or you can't read small letters, and that you can do everything when you manage to realize you're dreaming and don't wake up.

After the talk the listener gets up to leave, and at the door, smiles playfully and flips the light switch ... but the light stays on. He flips it again and again, but the light stays on. After a confused look he leaves by floating through the door.

[Sloppy Zhang]

That reminds me of a scene from the movie "Waking Life". The chief character is listening to a guy who tells him about how amazing it is to be conscious of dreaming. He tells him that there are clues that help you realize that you are dreaming, like light switches won't work, or you can't read small letters, and that you can do everything when you manage to realize you're dreaming and don't wake up.

After the talk the listener gets up to leave, and at the door, smiles playfully and flips the light switch ... but the light stays on. He flips it again and again, but the light stays on. After a confused look he leaves by floating through the door.

 

 

That was good.

 

If anyone is interested in lucid dreaming, ld4all.com is a great place to get started.