What If You Could Describe Your Dreams While Dreaming? | Hacker News Reader

What If You Could Describe Your Dreams While Dreaming?

nautil.us

15 pointsdnetesn6 comments

> There is substantial disagreement on the function of dreams. Some theories say it’s for strengthening weak memory associations, others say it’s for rehearsing dangerous situations. Some say they don’t have any function at all.

My favorite theory on dreams is that they help maintain the brain’s ability to generalize, just like a neural network has to deal with overfitting. The idea being, that the dream is supplying the brain’s neural network with noise injection to help it generalize.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560

i think it's pretty widely accepted that dreaming serves as a mechanism for memory consolidation (different time scales while attempting to "compress" the information to something useful) and also allows us to run simulations of things that would be either too dangerous or socially unacceptable in the real world.

also, i don't think it's noise. It's injecting full scenarios to see how the brain works with it (ie there is structure to the input)

Memory consolidation is indeed a possible explanation, but there’s no single widely accepted theory on why we dream, only many competing theories at the moment with various levels of data to support them.

It’s also possible that dreams serve multiple roles in brain health, both physiological and psychological.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream#Function

> also, i don't think it's noise. It's injecting full scenarios to see how the brain works with it

I don’t know... my dreams don’t usually seem constructed as a scenario. They seem totally random, moving from random encounter, scene etc, completely unrealistic in many instances. Cars with no front seat, buildings that don’t have physically possible layouts, words that are unreadable, etc. It sure feels like a lot of noise or random crap that somehow my brain is trying to make sense of. To me the “scenario” feels like fitting something plausible to the random data of the dream.

the reason for the dreams being "random" is that you don't have input from your sensory system (ie it's turned off and the brain is generating "synthetic" input). you can see how volatile and random out thinking is while dreaming (and you see how important the environment is in grounding our thinking)

I was at a retreat once and we had a dream session. There was little talk about what dreams are, how they function, etc.., but we shared our dreams in the group because the thing we would convey would be something that only we could convey. No one else could share our dreams, or the nuances, or the meanings, or whatever. I think of this every time someone in my family shares/describes their dreams.

I once dreamt of the most beautiful song ever. The next day I remembered what it was, and eager to write down this masterpiece I realized it didn't sound as beautiful as I thought: just dum-da-dum.

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