You might be interested in this LessWrong shortform post by Harri Besceli, “The best and worst experiences you had last week probably happened when you were dreaming.” Including a comment from gwern.
I liked that a lot, thanks for the share. This reminds me that I wanted to note that I also have incredibly positive dreams as well. I have higher dream highs, I am pretty sure, than most of my friends. This is especially true if I am able to lucid dream.
There are so many interesting things to note in that post and in Gwern’s comment.
There’s one part of Gwern’s post I’d like to pull over here because I think it adds to the conversation around how bad nightmares are (or aren’t.)
I agree with Harri’s observation that some dreams can feel like they are lasting an incredibly long time. And if it’s a bad dream that’s obviously really bad.
Gwern brushes that concern aside by saying:
“You can’t remember or produce hours of experience corresponding to [the dream], and when you try to intervene by waking people up in lucid dreams or doing tasks, they seem to still be processing time at a normal 1:1 rate.”
It doesn’t seem relevant to me that the awake person is processing time normally. I care about the subjective experience of whatever person is suffering. And if someone has an awful experience that feels like it lasts hours or even days, I think that’s worse than a subjectively shorter bad experience. This kind of stuff happens with psychedelics, too.
You might be interested in this LessWrong shortform post by Harri Besceli, “The best and worst experiences you had last week probably happened when you were dreaming.” Including a comment from gwern.
I liked that a lot, thanks for the share. This reminds me that I wanted to note that I also have incredibly positive dreams as well. I have higher dream highs, I am pretty sure, than most of my friends. This is especially true if I am able to lucid dream.
There are so many interesting things to note in that post and in Gwern’s comment.
There’s one part of Gwern’s post I’d like to pull over here because I think it adds to the conversation around how bad nightmares are (or aren’t.)
I agree with Harri’s observation that some dreams can feel like they are lasting an incredibly long time. And if it’s a bad dream that’s obviously really bad.
Gwern brushes that concern aside by saying:
“You can’t remember or produce hours of experience corresponding to [the dream], and when you try to intervene by waking people up in lucid dreams or doing tasks, they seem to still be processing time at a normal 1:1 rate.”
It doesn’t seem relevant to me that the awake person is processing time normally. I care about the subjective experience of whatever person is suffering. And if someone has an awful experience that feels like it lasts hours or even days, I think that’s worse than a subjectively shorter bad experience. This kind of stuff happens with psychedelics, too.