Heaven and Hell

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Septim741,

This obviously had an affect on you because you’re posting this thread, but you haven’t lost your sense of style I see (Pink Floyd), that’s good.

Please explain why you think there are only 2 possible answers to your dream?

I can think of more but I don’t want to imprint anything on you.

 

I don’t mean to avoid the question, I know you asked us to choose one or the other but I thought I could better help you this way (I think that’s more important).

You aren't very smart are you? Haven't enough people already said it? Dreams mean nothing.

Please don't belittle others for their opinions... it's kind of trolley. Don't want to incite any flamewars. ;)

[Peregrine]

I know there are people who will see this as nonsence, or look at it at an scientific way (You wanted your grandfather to say that, so your mind fooled you...), but I know it was my grandfather who talked to me that night.

 

Last night I dreamed of *censored* with a girl I like. It even seemed more realistic than many of my dreams. Now which is the more likely explanation:

 

1) While she's out of town on vacation, she has this secret lust for me that can only be resolved by *censored* with my dream-self. The person I saw was actually her, and I should take this as a sign of her true feelings.

 

2) I've been thinking about her a lot, and the dream is a reflection of my desires.

 

 

I know you will say #2, if you have any common sense at all. We have a perfectly reasonable explanation based on well-understood patterns in the behavior of human brains, and it doesn't require any unknown supernatural entities. No reasonable person would consider the first option to be legitimate, without a lot more evidence for it. So why is yours any different? Also to consider:

 

1) Where are my visits from dead relatives? I've lost two grandparents since the beginning of the year, and I would assume they loved me as much as your grandfather loved you. So, if it is possible for the dead to communicate with the living, why didn't they? In my case, they should have even more reason to do so... while you were merely not interested in religion, I am actively (and strongly) opposed to it. Surely if messages about the afterlife were possible, my grandparents would want to help me with this.

 

2) The statement about not knowing exactly what the fun stuff was is another argument in favor of it being nothing more than a dream. That's very common, at least in my case, to have that kind of backstory filled in without actually experiencing it (for example, knowing that I'm not just in a random battle, I've been in the entire war). If you were actually experiencing it with your grandfather, it would be far more memorable... how often have you had your memory of a day be that vague later that day?

 

 

If you believe you've seen Heaven and hell, you probably have. Others can't tell what you've seen, as they never saw it ;)

 

No, that just means he has decided to attach that meaning. Dreams have no meaning unless we consciously define them. While doing so may be useful if you're the creative type and want inspiration (at least in my case, my dream-self is far more creative, especially in symbolic terms), that doesn't mean your mind was actually aware of that meaning when it was creating the dream.

[FritzDerochebrune]

Last night I dreamed of *censored* with a girl I like.

It's not surprising you dreamt this.

1) While she's out of town on vacation, she has this secret lust for me that can only be resolved by *censored* with my dream-self. The person I saw was actually her, and I should take this as a sign of her true feelings.

Dream on.

2) I've been thinking about her a lot, and the dream is a reflection of my desires.

possibly. but every man has that kind of dreams, wet ones you call em.

1) Where are my visits from dead relatives? I've lost two grandparents since the beginning of the year, and I would assume they loved me as much as your grandfather loved you. So, if it is possible for the dead to communicate with the living, why didn't they?

uhm, you are 22 years old. If you still need comfort of dead ones, your just a little child

In my case, they should have even more reason to do so... while you were merely not interested in religion, I am actively (and strongly) opposed to it. Surely if messages about the afterlife were possible, my grandparents would want to help me with this.

You wouldn't believe it if they visited you anyway, so why would they bother? You wouldn't become religious anyway.

 

cya

 

Fritz

[Abramul]

In my case, they should have even more reason to do so... while you were merely not interested in religion, I am actively (and strongly) opposed to it. Surely if messages about the afterlife were possible, my grandparents would want to help me with this.

You wouldn't believe it if they visited you anyway, so why would they bother? You wouldn't become religious anyway.

Disagree. Validation would be fairly simple, especially if the deceased took a little time to set up something only they would know about.

[FritzDerochebrune]

Disagree. Validation would be fairly simple, especially if the deceased took a little time to set up something only they would know about.

So you mean something only Peregrin and the deceased knew about? If so he could still say he has an active immagination. If you mean something only the deceased knew, Peregrin still could say his mind made it up. Even if it is something only Peregrin knows, as a normal dream is created by your brain, he can say it is all just a product of his mind.

 

If you really don't want to believe it, you just don't believe it. You'll always find an argument not to believe it.

 

cya

 

Fritz

[Abramul]

Disagree. Validation would be fairly simple, especially if the deceased took a little time to set up something only they would know about.

So you mean something only Peregrin and the deceased knew about? If so he could still say he has an active immagination. If you mean something only the deceased knew, Peregrin still could say his mind made it up. Even if it is something only Peregrin knows, as a normal dream is created by your brain, he can say it is all just a product of his mind.

 

If you really don't want to believe it, you just don't believe it. You'll always find an argument not to believe it.

 

cya

 

Fritz

Something unknown to Peregrine, and possibly to anyone else as well. One example might be "There's a waterproofed box buried under the [x, y] brick in the patio with $10000 dollars in it."

[Malchik]

I think it is too sweeping to say that dreams have no explanation. It is more probable that there is no way to confirm the valid one. There is ample psychological evidence to suggest that certain types of dreams occur with certain specific mental issues (falling, walking endlessly forwards etc.). However even here the best you can get is an interpretation. Bearing in mind that a) we do not recall 100% of any dream and b) when we recall it we are already interpreting it using our own logic whether we want to or not, it is highly likely that a large number of seemingly valid explanations can be made for each dream and there is no way to identify the right one.

 

As to whether dreams 'mean' anything I am less sure. Oneiromancy, which relies on the interpretation of dreams is, like almost every other word ending in 'mancy', a form of fortune telling. (The perfectly scientific study of dreaming is Oneirology). If you go to sleep worried by a problem, the problem MAY figure in your dreams. Sometimes a dream connection may lead you on waking to see the solution. However it isn't the dream telling you what to do. All those connections are in your subconscious already. The fact that it surfaces in the dream is chance not design. I suspect, but do not know, that each dream is likely to have the same basis in every case - it is a recollection of those things we saw and thought about while awake. (E.g. Peregrine dreams of a girl because he misses her and she has been important to his subconscious and perhaps conscious minds before he went to sleep.) The subconscious sees many things the conscious does not. The connections the dream makes are not our waking logical ones so they often seem bizarre. But in the end, they are simply memories.

[Peregrine]

1) While she's out of town on vacation, she has this secret lust for me that can only be resolved by *censored* with my dream-self. The person I saw was actually her, and I should take this as a sign of her true feelings.

Dream on.

 

Funny how you realize this obvious problem with my dream, but are blind to it with your own.

 

2) I've been thinking about her a lot, and the dream is a reflection of my desires.

possibly. but every man has that kind of dreams, wet ones you call em.

 

Except:

 

1) Any sexual content was secondary to the rest of it, there was a whole lot more that was either just random or completely innocent.

 

2) I didn't actually see it, I just got the book-style "and then the next morning...". Literally, my point of view shifted to reading a page from a book. So the sexual value was essentially zero. I only used the *censored* bit as a joke, the important part was being closer to her, not necessarily in bed.

 

 

Also note that Septim's "I cut off a piece at the end, but you got all the details you need." is a pretty strong hint that the removed part involved exactly the same thing.

 

 

But the point is that dream just represents my desires, not anything about the outside world (at least any hidden information from the outside world, like her feelings towards me). I saw what I did because it has been on my mind a lot lately, just like your grandfather (as well as a desire to be with him again) had been on your mind a lot after he died.

 

 

1) Where are my visits from dead relatives? I've lost two grandparents since the beginning of the year, and I would assume they loved me as much as your grandfather loved you. So, if it is possible for the dead to communicate with the living, why didn't they?

uhm, you are 22 years old. If you still need comfort of dead ones, your just a little child

 

Are you that emotionally damaged that you think only children want to be with the people they care about? I've lost three grandparents (the fourth died before I was born) without getting a chance to say goodbye. If there was any way I could talk to them, I would take it, and I'm sure they would feel the same way. If you don't understand this, you have some serious emotional problems, and probably aren't capable of forming a close relationship with anyone.

In my case, they should have even more reason to do so... while you were merely not interested in religion, I am actively (and strongly) opposed to it. Surely if messages about the afterlife were possible, my grandparents would want to help me with this.

You wouldn't believe it if they visited you anyway, so why would they bother? You wouldn't become religious anyway.

 

It would be fairly easy for them to demonstrate that it's not just a random dream. Hidden information, for example, there are plenty of independently verifiable things that I don't know that they could tell me as proof of their identity (or at least that there is something supernatural going on). Returning every night would at least prove that it isn't just a random dream. And so on.

 

 

 

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There is ample psychological evidence to suggest that certain types of dreams occur with certain specific mental issues (falling, walking endlessly forwards etc.).

 

My point was that issues like that are things your brain is already aware of. There's no deeper meaning at work, your brain is just pulling images/feelings/etc from your conscious life and presenting them to you as you sleep. The only knowledge you have is the knowledge you went to sleep with. Any attempt to bring in outside meaning (like it being a vision of hell that his conscious mind was not informed of) is done after the fact, you're arbitrarily deciding on a meaning that was completely uninvolved in the actual creation of the dream.

[Malchik]

There is ample psychological evidence to suggest that certain types of dreams occur with certain specific mental issues (falling, walking endlessly forwards etc.).

 

My point was that issues like that are things your brain is already aware of. There's no deeper meaning at work, your brain is just pulling images/feelings/etc from your conscious life and presenting them to you as you sleep. The only knowledge you have is the knowledge you went to sleep with. Any attempt to bring in outside meaning (like it being a vision of hell that his conscious mind was not informed of) is done after the fact, you're arbitrarily deciding on a meaning that was completely uninvolved in the actual creation of the dream.

 

I agree that there is nothing in a dream that is not already within a subconscious mind, although having knowledge and being aware that we have that knowledge is not the same thing. But I agree that it is NOT the dream that has the meaning in itself. I already said this in the post.

 

What I find interesting about dreams is that whilst popular theory is that they have no function, the nature of the subject means one significant question cannot be answered. We all dream several times during periods of sleep. We remember only a couple of percent. So what, if anything is special about the things we do recall? As there is never going to be a way of accessing the 98% we do not remember, the question is unanswerable. I have no expertise in the field but the little I have read suggests that recalled dreams are not related to a particular part of the sleep pattern. In other words they do not correlate to pre-waking moments, or periods of REM sleep.

 

It is easy to assume that they are remembered because the mind realises they are more significant. However there is no evidence that dreams help in problem solving which is the situation in which the 'significance' would seem most important.

 

Given time I might research further to see if a physiological reason for why some dreams are remembered has been discovered. In the meantime I like to think that while the dream in itself has no meaning, the fact that we remembered it does. And yet attempting to establish why we remembered a particular dream is so speculative as to be pointless.

[Karasuman]

"You aren't very smart are you? Haven't enough people already said it? Dreams mean nothing."

 

Disagree. Eating, sleeping, breathing, blinking etc... Everything the human body does has some purpose behind it. It's just that some of those things it does we don't fully understand. It's easy to disregard something as meaningless simply because it's not understood.

 

Dreams aren't always the supernatural phenomenon they're made out to be. Dogs dream, so does that mean that Phyto is having an existential epiphany about his life every time he goes to sleep? No. But I tend to see dreams as a hit-or-miss concept. In regards to humans, I think some dreams mean a lot more than others. Some are plain gibberish, and some are probably a little more than that. By "more than that," I am referring to desires, fears, failures, things of that nature which affect the average human mind on a pretty deep scale. I don't know exactly why we dream (and neither does anyone else for that matter), but I don't think it happens just because. The body is a model of efficiency. There is very little, if anything, that it does just for the hell of it.