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I never understood why some people enjoy describing their dreams.
My dreams are generally pretty messy, make little sense, and are often embarrassing in some way so I don't particularly feel like sharing them.
OTOH my wife will happily spend 15 minutes telling me her latest dream every time she wakes up.
Turns out, according to TFA, I'm the odd one!
To describe dreams is to deal with words, with consciousness. To describe them is to try to make sense of them, somehow - of the words, too. To speak them is to make those words material, real, to give them a sound you can hear. To share them is only thus being human.
This comment feels like a deepity[0] to me.
Saying anything at all is "to deal with words". Discussing anything at all about your internal state is "to deal with... consciousness".
Yes, it is deeply human to put to words internal thoughts and share them with others (that's what I'm doing in this comment, after all). But there's nothing special about dreams in that regard.
And unlike most ideas we attempt to communicate, dreams are by their nature fragmentary and illogical (or perhaps "pre-logical" is better phrasing). While humans love imputing meaning and profundity to obscurant musings (whole academic careers have been built on that fact), that doesn't mean they are actually meaningful and/or profound.
What an awful anti-intellectual neologism. People on HN love to talk about rubber-ducking their code, but do it for your dreams and get made fun of. Unless you’re a famous writer :)
I do not agree at all that the word "deepity" is in any way anti-intellectual.
It is an intellectual stance to try and filter what truly is profound from what merely appears to be or what merely elicits the same emotions. Unfortunately our current world is flooded with substance-less garbage that masquerades as something more. We are still in the age of gurus, of the blind leading the blind for profit, as we have always been since forming societies, but now we are in the epoch of web scalability, where the reach of any guru has been amplified to engulf the whole world.
Training oneself to be able to recognise whether a message actually contains any knowledge or whether it is word salad that produces the same emotions is more important than ever.
I must admit I stopped abruptly. It's not a complete thought, and the last phrase was "aborted", for which I'm sorry: I lack the mastery I would want with English language to continue, considering the complexity of the subjects I tried to touch upon and my broad experience thinking, reading, writing and dialoging about them. Nevertheless, I stand by what I said, although it's "poor", but right now I'm not willing to debate. The best I can do is to point out to authors like S. Freud and the surrealists, so you can perhaps see deeper into my comment, and wish you the best! :)
This is the kind of literary nonsense that has annoyed me ever since I turned 20. If you don't have anything to say, no one care if you're human, and no one should. I see zero virtue in making inspired noise, even if you're famous, more so if so.
Good thing about written text is that absolutely nothing is forcing you to read it. It is not even like sound that you can't prevent to hear.
Not every text have to be deeply virtuous. It is OK for them to be just about figuring things our and manipulating own head.
Great, but it's ok to write it's not interesting too then?
I think you'll appreciate Chip Morningstar's hilariously scathing satirical take on pomo litcrit!
https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
>How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure
>Chip Morningstar, Electric Communities
>"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
>This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind than perhaps people in the field are accustomed to. Being a vulgar engineer I'm allowed to break a lot of the rules that people in the humanities usually have to play by, since nobody expects an engineer to be literate. Ha. Anyway, here is my tale.
[...]
>Contrary to the report given in the "Hype List" column of issue #1 of Wired ("Po-Mo Gets Tek-No", page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them.
[...]
https://www.wired.com/1993/01/hypelist-19/
>Wired Magazine: Jan, 1993: Hype List: 2. Po-Mo Gets Tek-No
>Look out, the post-modern crowd is invading computer science, leaving jargon and dazed academics in their wake. The recession woke up the post-modernists to the fact that technology, not comparative lit, is where the money is. So now we have Marc Poster writing on "Lyotard and Computer Science," and Kathy Acker talking about "the author as hacker." Although the hypertext field has already succumbed, some neo-nerds are trying to keep the po-mo forces at bay. At the last Cyberspace conference, the tech heads in the audience refused to be intimidated by quotes from Frenchmen, and heckled the po-mo's off the stage. Personally, I'd much rather have Foucalt quoted at computer conferences than Dijkstra. And hey, computer scientists need new jargon - I'm still hearing "paradigm" used in the Kuhn-ian (non) sense. (Dig that hip po-mo parentheses trick!)
>This is the kind of literary nonsense that has annoyed me ever since I turned 20.
No one cares, buddy.
>If you don't have anything to say, no one care if you're human, and no one should.
This sentence left me speechless. Do reflect on what you just said.
---
Such a clickbaity article, what is it even doing on HN? A minimum-effort paragraph of introduction regurgitating the bloody trope that "no one likes to listen to other people describe their dreams", then a copy-paste-powered compilation of a bunch of... quotes from some writers describing their dreams? To think that someone probably got paid for this article, and here we are worrying about ChatGPT lol
Guess what, I couldn't bring myself to read any of that. But if an acquaintance of mine (or even you, @markdestouches) decided to tell me all about some dream they had the other night, I'd listen attentively, maybe play the game of ascribing meanings to it. Because why the fuck not?
Sure, most people's dreams are boring nonsense, but so are their lives. What is more "useful" to talk about anyway - salaries? All the things we hate about JavaScript? The food you ate last week? "The economy"? A dream, on the other hand, is a piece of someone's mental activity that is completely detached from real-time sensory input, and I find that kind of shit positively fascinating!
---
I'm reminded of a somewhat dream-like real life story about dreams:
An ex-partner used to have these very long and vivid dreams that had more interesting imagery and symbolism than half of the sci-fi/fantasy films, books, all that genre fiction (of which I was an avid fan; and she much less so, but still somewhat immersed in that kind of media.) However, what I absolutely hated is that she always recounted her dream from last night in the evening as we went to bed. And, since they made for such nice bedtime stories, of course I would always drift off to sleep. Then she would ask, "are you sleeping?", and get really mad at me for dozing off while she was telling her dream. Which was obviously more important to her than letting her man get some rest at the end of the day.
Okay, I get it, I see how this kind of experience (even if it's in a milder form, but compounded with other interpersonal frustrations) can make someone compulsively unreceptive to others telling them their dreams. (Especially if they're the superficial kind of person that comes to HN for the cultural content and life advice lol) And yeah, she was an abusive kind of b...person the rest of the time, too - I'm really glad that the only way I can ever meet her any more is... in the occasional nightmare.
Now, here's the rub: I still remember the sheer vividness of her dreams. (It really was good stuff - could've worked as one of those abstract European movies; except it would probably take a bit more of a CGI budget than is par for the course.) But since it was >10 years ago, and she never bothered to write em down, I only remember their content very vaguely, as if in a dream: something something colors, something something a journey, etc.
That is, I remember someone else's dreams from 10 years ago with the same level of detail as my own half-forgotten dream from last night.
Inception, huh?
Seekers of forbidden techniques, take note - I think this is the kind of stuff yall show up to bother me about every once in a while? See how easy it is to get me to spill the beans if you just do the opposite and leave me well alone? (And no, I don't think it works without the acute negative reinforcement, but yall already do that kind of crap for no reason whatsoever, so that's on you. By all means try it on someone, it's not going to help you with the predicament but I'm developing quite the taste for watching it backfire.)
---
Just remembered another "cute" story about listening to others' dreams, as recently recounted by a friend.
This one involves another classic trope: that of a woman getting mad at a man because she had an unpleasant dream about him.
So they wake up, and she's really upset about the dream she's had and wants to know his opinion of what it all means.
He listens to all the heartbreaking things he's been up to in her dream, considers the matter, and has the following realization: "oh, that's a dream about how you would feel if I started treating you like you've been treating me."
This, paradoxically, calms her down. She is relieved to hear this. They take the matter no further. Soon after, they have a violent argument, and break up.
What practical thing did I learn from this story? Dreams can be helpful when you have difficulty bringing some information to the threshold of your awareness; or others'.
Dreams are one of the most fascinating mechanisms of the human mind.
I understand the feeling of exposure, as they might well be revelation of the subconscious and unconscious mind that bypass your awake self-imposed limits and shames.
For that very reason, though, your wife is doing something quite intimate when sharing them with you.
Why is this any more fascinating than nails growing or some hairs falling out or eyeballs moving around during sleep? Body does body things all the time.
Sometimes I have incoherent thoughts while I sleep. So what? Sometimes I have them when I'm drunk or really tired or whatever too. Even when fully awake and conscious, most people (myself included) don't have the most exciting thoughts, certainly not enough to monologue about.
I don't get this mysticism around sleep and dreaming. Everyone does it, and it's not particularly magical. Or intimate, for that matter. Friends share details of their dreams way too often, and I wish they wouldn't... 99% of the time it just sounds like the mind "metabolizing", I don't need to know what happened, much less sit down with some silly book to randomly assign meanings and weights to every minute of it.
It's like some people believe the dreams are a portal to a higher consciousness. But frankly they just sound like noise.
I agree with your 3rd and 4th paragraph.
However, I argue that that your first sentence frames things poorly. Nails growing, hairs falling, the body doing body things is fascinating. Are dreams exceptional compared to other behaviours of the body? No. Are they fascinating? Yes. Are many people disproportionately obsessed with them? Also yes.
Dreams sometimes are wild, effectively just becomes another story.
I had a dream where I was speeding down the frozen highway on an electric scooter. The game was to get faster and dodge traffic. Each time I got hit and died, I'd restart from the beginng. This occurred several times before I woke up
Not a good enough story to be worth telling anyone. Also not very wild.
Not worth telling anyone at all? Maybe not worth a blog post, but I'd tell my partner and we would have a chuckle.
This could lead into a conversation about internet fueled exceptionalism draining the joy out of the simple things in life, nothing is ever good enough in the shadow of the exceptional things constantly happening everywhere to everyone.
I’m exactly like you. In my personal opinion, dreams don’t matter, they’re just our brains doing whatever it needs to do to stay healthy.
The most fascinating of mine are when I am in the situation of doing something like Standup comedy or whatever. By that I mean all the jokes absolutely suck or have no real punchline - it is like jokes made by current LLM. I'm not saying I am great at comedy, but I do WAY better than dream me does.
But I am like you, they almost never have any cogent meaning or structure. As Charlie Brooker put it once "Dreams are... weird"
I only share dreams with a sentence or two, and only with specific loved ones who will enjoy the one or two details that would be interesting to them. Like, my dad's dead, so I tell my mom if I have a nice dream with him in it. Or a friend said something snarky to me in a dream, and she guffawed when I told her. Why was Donald Trump driving a moving truck for me last night?
But most of the time, I agree, my dreams are garbage that nobody needs to hear.
I love dreams, but I hate when dreams are shown in movies or characters describe them in books. I just skim until reality resumes. Dream interludes almost never offer insight and are just boring.
Depictions of dreams in movies can offer insight, but that's why I really dislike them: it seems like really lazy writing. "How did he figure that out?" "Oh, it just came to him in a dream." I prefer characters that can think and work things out themselves, instead of just being handed the answer by the script itself.
The character can find the answer, but how do you the viewer know what happens in their head to reach it? Either they deliver a bunch of exposition to explain themselves, or the director uses the medium more effectively to actually show you what is happening in their head.
In movies dreams are usually the most insightful. It's just insightful to the characters state of mind, not the nuts and bolts of plot progression.
"Character dreams about X" is just a cheap cop out. Real people anxious about things show that stress in many ways, and aren't always able to just direct it into a single coherent dream that gives them sudden illumination. It just comes across as lazy writing...
True. But they never seem to convey more than "character X is worried about potential event Y."
And never forget the outrage created by https://dallas.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dream_Season
When you make the audience invested in the storyline only to completely yank it by saying "it never really happened," turns out they become aggitated.
It can occasionally work in films but they need to be used very intentionally. I'm think like in The Big Lebowski or vaguely Being John Malkovich
I agree with you. The only good dream sequences I remember are from dharma and greg, they act like my dreams. https://youtu.be/-on07_-ixTI
Dreams are just stories. Through the lense of the audience they undergo the same critical scrutiny as any other story. It's not good enough to put a stamp 'dream' on a story that doesn't make sense and think the audience will be ok with it. IMO dreams are good in novella format where the line between reality and fiction is blurred out, like the work by Jorge Luis Borges.
You should check out the comic series sandman. Or the first season of it on Netflix. The whole thing is about dreaming.
ON THE SOUL: Ed Fredkin, Unpublished Manuscript
http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/...
>The John Cocke Theory of Dreams was told to me, on the phone, late one night back in the early 1960’s. John’s complete description was contained in a very short conversation approximately as follows:
>“Hey Ed. You know about optimal encoding, right?”
>“Yup.”
>“Say the way we remember things is using a lossy optimal encoding scheme; you’d get efficient use of memory, huh?”
>“Uh huh.” “Well the decoding could take into account recent memories and sensory inputs, like sounds being heard, right?”
>“Sure!”
>“Well, if when you’re asleep, the decoder is decoding random bits (digital noise) mixed in with a few sensory inputs and taking into account recent memories and stuff like that, the output of the decoder would be a dream; huh?”
>I was stunned.
Ed Fredkin Talks About John Cocke - 4 May 1990: Theory of Dreams
Nobody really cares about anything unless it’s part of a story they’re engaged with. Dreams are no different.
Eg: “In my dream last night I was big and went around eating buildings. I was angry for some reason” - boring.
Vs: “I work in a supermarket and I hate it. Last night I dreamed I was Godzilla, and I went to the supermarket I work at and reached my hand down and ate the supermarket whole. I could feel my coworkers still screaming in my belly, but I was still hungry”. More engaging right? It’s engaging because there’s story in it. It has relationship. Point of view. Tension.
It’s got nothing to with being famous. It’s all to do with being interesting. Dreams usually need to be digested a bit before they make good stories. They come out too wild. Too raw for popular consumption. Taming that (just enough) is the essence of good storytelling.
I don't feel your second version is more engaging. I think it's the fact that dreams are just "made up" and it's the same thing as if you would say "I was thinking that I was Godzilla". No-no would want to listen to that.
> No-no would want to listen to that.
Nobody would want to listen to made up stories? Nobody? Thousands of years of fiction would like a word.
Yes, nobody. For every random made-up thought someone actually wants to hear there are millions of stories not a single person is interested in. Dreams are mostly the latter.
One of my favorite things I’ve ever heard was a creative writing professor in college would tell us “nobody cares about your dog.” Granted that’s probably not completely true, the idea was more about not assuming just because you care about a character, your audience will. You have to get them to buy into the character.
Just a memory I had thinking about this article.
What was that Gore Vidal quip about in the future a famous writer being like a famous ceramist?
I don't know, what was it?
In 1993, Vidal lamented that literature had lost its place at the center of American culture:
"I said recently to a passing interviewer, 'You know, I used to be a famous novelist.' And the interviewer said, 'Oh, well, you're still very well known. People read your books.' And so I said, 'I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about the category. 'Famous novelist'? The adjective is inappropriate to the noun. It's like being — 'I'm a famous ceramicist.' Well, you can be a good ceramicist. You can be a rich ceramicist. You can be much admired by other ceramicists. But you aren't famous. That's gone."Being a famous novelist is mostly branding now. "Tom Clancy", "James Patterson", and "Clive Cussler" are brand names you see in big type, with the name of the actual author in small type below. Patterson has so many authors there seems to be a new Patterson book every two weeks. Clancy has been dead for years.
Jaron Lanier grumbles about this. He's a musician from the hippie era, and pines for the day when being a musician was a Big Deal. Before the days of two million Myspace bands running on laptops.
As for recycling your dreams, you can always use them to provide clickbait copy for ad sites. Although GPT-4 is taking over that business.
I disagree. For those who enjoy random people's dreams. https://old.reddit.com/r/thomastheplankengine/
While the subreddit is great, I think the original article still holds true for normal conversation. Your average person does not give a single shit about your dream and vice versa. Its value as a conversational tool is low and should be probably avoided unless specifically someone asks about your dream. The average person should probably never share their own dream unsolicited because there is a high chance it will add no value to the conversation whatsoever.
I don’t know if I agree with the article in that somehow these creative minds have more special dreams either. I just know that layman’s dreams, including my own, almost always bore me to tears and aren’t the parable or allegory we might think they are, if even that
I might sound slightly bitter but I’ve had literally hundreds of conversations over my lifetime hearing people sharing their dreams and I can easily count on one hand the amount of times that a productive or interesting conversation has emerged as a result.
That's the opposite with me! I just talked to my friend (yesterday) about his dream with a marriage and a child and how he met his feral girlfriend. He said he felt like he lived through a whole lifetime and we talked about dreams like that and how we could get more "inception" dreams where we live our lives and need psychedelic integration before coming back to our own dreary lives. I talked about the science of dreams and theories of them too and try to interpret it.
I always do dream interpretation too and it's fun to think of where those thoughts came from. It's just another way of thinking of dreams.
Nothing is as boring as other people's dreams – unless you are part of their dream, then they become really interesting.