Why are dreams more engrossing and interesting than real life?

They are wish fulfillments.

Because humans have two kinds of memory: active (astral) memory and merely instinctive memory, gained through habit.

When you're going through daily life, you are mostly relying on the latter, which is the kind of memory involved in tying your shoes. Do you actively "remember" how to tie your shoes? Do you experience it? Or do you just do it? Well, you're in the same basic brain state when you walk to the store, or drive to work, or do your job, or even go about your leisure activities. Your animal body is following its ingrained instincts.

When you're dreaming, these instincts are suspended, and every experience is as a child experiences the world, before it has ingrained instincts to rely on. Your memories are called up as new, actively lived experiences, rather than simply subroutines with pressure valves determining how you act.

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>>9817997

>>9818006
How to regain this child-like experience of ever wonder? Can I brainwash myself in some ways?
>And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

>>9818018
stay away from that phone
learn to appreciate those close to you
stop hating yourself

I've been working on this for the past few months and the results have been amazing

>>9818006
Bullshit. Dreams are primarily an expression of those instincts. You can, and usually do, go through dreams like you go through waking life, which is why you don't remember most of them.

>>9818018
New-new-age people use the word "mindfulness". They're probably idiots but you might be able to glean some tips from them nonetheless.

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>>9818036
But you can never remove the bulk of filters added by your previous experiences and all that you learnt. I feel like you would have to be amnesiac or something

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>>9818051
you can learn to see those filters and experiences in a new way though

>>9818051
Do you ever find that the more you learn the more questions you have? I believe that the need to answer those questions for the pure sake of learning is what children have that adults don't. Many adults make absolute judgments because they think that's what it means to be wise, to be able to say something as the end all be all of a subject. I hope I'm making sense but I wanna say that the way to brainwash yourself is to stop brainwashing yourself with the idea that more experiences will bring you closure, and just let your experiences carry on doing that thing where they trip over each other and contradict each other and dont make sense. For example, why is xenophobia a thing among adults yet almost never found in children?

>>9817997
Because you aren't living your life. Dreams inspire the living, and haunt the dying.

But dreams aren't interesting or engrossing.

>>9818071
>why is xenophobia a thing among adults yet almost never found in children?

probably because children cant conceptualize nation however they do have racial preferences

https://nypost.com/2017/04/13/your-baby-is-a-little-bit-racist-science-says/

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>>9818084
>tfw that's the only part of the post you paid attention to
People make me wanna be blind and deaf for the rest of my life

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>>9818074
They are, and feel much more intense than everyday life, emotionally and aesthetically. It feels like everything happening in a dream has meaning, while not so much in ordinary life. As previous poster said, you live an unconscious life daily.

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>>9818074
>

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>>9818098
I actually appreciated the rest of the post anon. I do feel that sense of questioning but always think I'll feel closure eventually. Maybe that's why

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>>9818098
>People make me wanna be blind and deaf for the rest of my life
still looking for closure i see

Read Pessoa, my man.

>>9818123
What book specifically?

>>9817997
Because dreams are more real than real life.

>>9817997
Because they offer you a way to explore your subconscious through the realm of the fantastical. I'm never happier than when I'm dreaming, it's a pretty big problem for me because I skip class just because I enjoy my dreams so much. God damn, I love dreaming.
>>9818001
Wrong desu ne

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>>9818132

>>9818099
Your experience of dreaming seems quite different from my own. Dreams have zero emotional weight. They feel unreal because nothing matters. They are flat an empty, and all memory of them fades quickly.

>>9818139
Read >>9818015

Because they lack narrative and are a kind of direct gnosis into human archetypes. It is an encouter with the Forms and the result is wonder and estacy

>>9818142
I was aware you're invoking Freud, but I think to write dreams off as nothing more than wish fulfillment is derivative. It's an exploration of the inner self and how that self relates to the outside world. I consider dreaming to be a useful tool, rather than simply a way to live out things we wish we could be experiencing in "real" life.
>>9818141
I've noticed this divide a lot in people, when I first started noticing that many people didn't remember much of their dreams, and that what they could remember was dull and insignificant, it came as a pretty big surprise to me. Do you not have any dreams that you hold on to? I can remember dreams from close to a decade ago, with a lot more clarity than I can remember a lot of real life events from the same time period.

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>>9818142
(((Freud)))

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>>9818141
Why do we forget dreams so quickly? It's almost like a form of protection

>>9818157
You think they should be tools, but that's an even more simplistic view.

>>9818141
most of my dreams are like this but every once in a while i will have an extremely intense dream and wake up feeling either catharsis or melancholia

>>9818169
I don't think that's a fair assessment of my beliefs, dreams for me and many other people have a very positive effect, in helping to cope with anxieties, escape from reality, or gain deeper insight into the self - to that extent, I do consider dreams a tool. Can you explain in more detail why you consider dreams to simply be wish fulfillment, what exactly that entails and why you think my view is simplistic?

>>9818157
>Do you not have any dreams that you hold on to? I can remember dreams from close to a decade ago, with a lot more clarity than I can remember a lot of real life events from the same time period.

No. Most mornings I awake with no memory of dreaming at all. When I do, the memories are confused and vague.

I always found it baffling how often dreams are used as a device in fiction because surely no one has such specific, memorable or significant dreams.

>>9818189
That's pretty interesting, I wonder if any research has been done into this sort of thing? My dreams have been vivid for as long as I can remember. If you can recall, do you experience things beyond sight and sound in your dreams, such as pain, taste, smell etc.?

>>9818098
i liked your description

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>>9818189
if you start keeping a dream journal you will remember your dreams more vividly. people who have been dream journaling for a long time are able to have very detailed recollections of their dreams. federico fellini was known for his devotion to his dream journal and i believe david lynch keeps one as well.

>>9818187
How are those things you mentioned not wish fulfillments? Listen to yourself.

>>9818194
I only ever recall sight and sound.

>>9818205
I tried this for a while. There wasn't much to write, and it didn't seem to do much.

>>9818216
I suppose that's a fair point, if you wish to better cope with anxiety, and your dreams allow you to do so, then in a sense it is a wish fulfillment. How would unpleasant dreams fall under this category however? Also, what if a dream provides insight into the subconscious, but the dreamer does not desire any insight into his subconscious - is it then still wish fulfillment? Do the people here who report dull, unmemorable dreams still have their dreams classed as wish fulfillment?

>>9818300
Yes, giving vague and unknown anxieties and fears into a more concrete shape is a wish fulfillment e.g. you are sleeping and there's a creaking sound coming from outside so you dream someone is robbing your house; or if you feel like you're going nowhere in life so in a dream your feet are stuck on the floor and you can't move &c.

>>9818322
That's fair, I'll cede that to you. What then about the dull unmemorable dreams?

>>9818327
Can't remember exactly, sometimes they represent physiological situations (need to urinate &c), it's been a while since I read the book.

I think it's because dreams are purely symbolic experiences. The experiences themselves are determined by meaning and expectancy rather than the other way around. It's not exactly wish fulfillment, as someone else said.

Anyway this is not a /lit/ thread.
>>>/his/

>>9818346
I'm pretty sure I actually have interpretation of dreams hidden in my room somewhere, I'll make a point of skimming through it now, thanks for the discussion.
>>9818356
Philosophy is allowed on /lit/

>>9817997
I tried writing a dream journal multiple times so I could remember my dreams better to increase my chances of having a lucid dream but I always gave up after a few days/weeks because my dreams just bore me that much.
Not everyone thinks dreams are exciting.

>>9818365
Is it allowed in this manner though?

>>9818386
Unexciting life yields unexciting dreams. Sorry.

You can fool yourself into incorporating exciting elements you experienced second-hand, like in books or movies if they had enough impact on you. Probably not video-games unless they had very strong narrative aspects.

>>9818419
You could make the argument that it's offtopic since the OP doesn't explicitly mention any piece of literature, but seen as there's been direct reference to Freud and the Interpretation of dreams within the thread, you'd essentially be curtailing an otherwise decent discussion for the sake of an arbitrary distinction.

>>9818356
This thread is off-topic, but it's one of the more interesting threads up right now so I don't care too much. Half the catalog is off topic anyways, and the mods do nothing about it.

Has anyone else experienced feeling like being in a dream while being awake. It happened to me once when talking to a friend on a cold night. It's hard to describe what the feeling is like.

>>9818429
Good enough.

>>9818441
>the mods do nothing about it.
Then we ought to.

>>9818508
I think. Everything slows down and the air feels heavy. It's unreal. That might just be anxiety though.

>>9818508
I spent a considerable period of time existing in what seemed to be a state of unreality, ended up getting diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder.

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>>9818508
I've had extremely intense deja-vu before, very hard to describe, almost like a deja-vu of multiple deja-vu at once. Feeling of disconnection etc. Very dream like. I heard this is caused by pre-epileptic symptoms and the like but I never had any of these problems. This coupled with my very vivid dreams always leave me at lost for word, like I don't actually have any idea of what reality actually is.

>>9818125
The Book of Disquiet. It discusses the question in the OP pretty extensively.

>>9818646
>almost like a deja-vu of multiple deja-vu at once
happens to me quite often

Does anybody else keep a dream journal?
I started having amazing dreams a few months back and so I wanted to record them but they've started becoming so mundane that it's just not worth recording them every night.
What should I do?

>>9819362
Stop writing them down for a couple weeks, and in the meantime don't go lucid just because you can if the circumstances are of no interest