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The Workings of your Mind

rickolasnice

Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
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Colour

I'm pretty sure I don't dream in colour :(

For the most part my dreams have an old photo colouring.

Old_family_photo_by_allwell.jpg


But bits of it will have a small amount of colour with really low saturation.. For example.. a piece of clothing will be a faint red.. but even then it wouldn't be the whole piece of clothing.. more a slowly morphing patch of it.

And..

I also can't "see" colour when I imagine it. It's strange and hard to describe.. I can imagine a colour but I can not actually "see" it.. Like maybe if the part of my brain that interprets the colour red become active but the visual part doesn't.

I started to think that a lot of people that claim to see in colour probably don't.. They can imagine it as I can but the imagination is not in colour.. But I accept that that's probably my ego trying to deny that my brain is an old model.


Thoughts

What do your thought's predominantly consist of? Internal dialogue / words, pictures, neither, both?

I think I think almost only in words.. unless I am trying to picture something. For example.. If I go to get my phone before heading out to work my thoughts would be something like "Aright get my phone".. I wouldn't picture it unless I couldn't find it.

Maybe everyone thinks this way? Maybe I think in more pictures than I think I do, I just don't remember / consciously acknowledge it.

What about you?
 
My dreams have always been in colour, though I know what you mean about the level of saturation. The colours only appear vivid when it becomes a lucid dream.. if it's a regular dream then it's like looking through a frosted window or something. I never used to hear sounds in my dreams. When people spoke it when be directly implied what they were saying. This changed in my teens when I realized in a dream how odd it was. What also changed in my teens was how I thought.. prior I used to think directly and visually, but now language/thinking in words has crept in.
 
Ah I never thought about sound in dreams before..

I honestly don't know if i "hear" sound in my dreams.

And I too notice a slight increase in colour when i become lucid.. i think most of my memory of colour in my dreams have been around the point of lucidity..

Most of the time when I become lucid things will become a lot more clear and vivid but then the detail will start to fade.. gaps will start to appear in my "vision" until there is barely anything left and then.. I'm awake.
 
I can remember having an old black and white television.

As a child....definitely recall being able to translate the multiple shades of grey as hues of proper color.
 
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My dreams are very realistic. Sometimes I even notice/have noticed inconsistencies while I am dreaming and they get fixed, a cutscene happens, and the inconsistency is fixed. I dream in color thankfully.
 
My dreams are very realistic. Sometimes I even notice/have noticed inconsistencies while I am dreaming and they get fixed, a cutscene happens, and the inconsistency is fixed. I dream in color thankfully.

I regularly catch mistakes in the dream.. it's like I'm both participating and watching it like a movie.. a part of me watching it laughs in the background, "haha no fucking way, that's not right!". On occasion I've even forced the dream to rewind and play again in order to remedy the error. Got to say dreaming is a favourite pastime of mine.
 
I dream in color for sure. I wish I had more control over my dreams, generally I am just along for the ride. Sometimes I am able to make decisions and I feel present, but most of the time it's like I am participating directly in a movie or something... hard to describe. I've become fully lucid just a few times in my life. Also, I can see colors when I think about them a lot of the time but it's not like the vision appears behind my closed eyes, it's also hard to explain. On psychedelics I usually full-on see colors behind my eyelids.

As for your other question, I only think in words when I am trying to think of words. Most of my thoughts consist of "sensory/conceptual packages" (I call it). Words can be assigned to these concepts but they are not part of it until I attempt to make them a part of it. As a result I rarely use the same combinations of words to describe something I am thinking to someone more than once. As a kid I thought more in words than I do now, I'm not sure what changed, perhaps my large amount of psychedelic experiences did it, or maybe it's just how my brain has evolved as I've grown.

It's funny because I love language and I'm good with words and one of my art forms is writing, but my internal thoughts rarely involve words. Or words might be mixed in there in a nonlinear way, as part of the "conceptual packages". When thinking about something or working through it, it's like these conceptual packages rub together and interact and new connections are made. It's visual and often aural as well, but it's also largely beyond sensory data. Hard to describe with words honestly.
 
I can remember having an old black and white television.

I recall reading somewhere that generations who grew up with black & white televisions are much more likely to dream in black & white, and those who grew up with colour televisions are much more likely to dream in colour... Personally I dream in colour and I also hear things in my dreams (not always, though). Often when I hear "audible" voices while dreaming, my physical body - as well as my dream self - responds verbally. Both of my brothers do this also. If we're all sleeping in a room together, sometimes it sounds like we're having a conversation.

As for thoughts, I have different layers. The layer closest to the surface of my consciousness typically consists of words. As the layers go deeper, they become non-verbal. I suspect that I actually think without words (deeper layers) and my brain translates it into words (surface layers) so that I can comprehend it in a familiar way.
 
Ah I never thought about sound in dreams before..

I honestly don't know if i "hear" sound in my dreams.
That's interesting - I regularly have music in my dreams.
It's often centred around playing a song - in scenarios where I find myself onstage with a band in a dream - playing a distinct song (either one that I do play with a band I'm in, or - more frequently - playing a familiar song [by another band] that I don't actually know how to play in real life...or playing an original composition that I play live and know back-to-front. I suppose being a big part of my life, it makes sense that I dream about it - but the key point is that i dream in very vivid sound).
i suspect that all of my senses can potentially exist in dreams - the way things feel to the touch, the way they taste or smell. the hard part is remembering specific examples.

For me, some of the songs in these dreams are like putting a record on a turntable and dropping the needle onto the groove; i hear these songs note-perfect, word for word, from the first notes of the intro to the fade-out or end of the song - without distortion or confusion.
It is probably an extension of being a musician - but I quite often awake from dreams with vivid memories of songs playing in them. Or physically playing songs in the dreams - knowing the chord changes, the words - the whole process.

Not the abstract idea of a song - but structure - the first verse, second verse (or whatever), the chorus, bridge/guitar solo or whatever.
So, based upon that, I can definitively state that I have sound in my dreams. Were it not for the presence of music in so many of my dreams, I'm not sure i could say that with such certainty.
Pretty darn fascinating...!
 
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^ This reminded me of a few episodes I've had during sleep where all of a sudden I'll be playing the guitar or piano, both of which I'm a novice at in real life, yet the solos or compositions I'm playing will be the most perfect sounding melody possible. Like I'll wake up and be "shit, I could make a million bucks if I could just remember the notes!". Very strange experience, like somehow my mind knows all the scales, intervals or whatever, and is able to construct "perfect" music.
 
I've just found the best aid to vivid dream (which is half way to becoming lucid)..

My girlfriend snores and being a light sleeper, i used to put the fan blowing directly at my face, so the whir of the fan and the sound of the air around my ears would drown out the sound of snoring.

Now it's winter - Fuck that.

I now go to rainymood.com (sound of thunder storm), plug in the ear phones and sleep like a baby.. The first night i did this i remembered a lot of my dream in a lot of detail*.. I decided to experiment with different sounds.. i found a 10 hour youtube video of the sound of an air conditioning unit, and one of space.. neither of these produced noticeable effects but a similar to rainymood one which was simply rain with a couple bird sounds mixed in did.. to a less extent. It's worth mentioning i have barely remembered my dreams, if at all, for months.

Ooooh as for sounds.. I'm pretty sure I heard the scream.. *see below

My dreams still looked like old timer photo's with weak hues though :(

NSFW:

My dream from the first night.. I wrote it up immediately after waking, so it's full of errors and hard to read..

Sorry but I cba to edit it right now :p

-----
Was exploring huge building along with loads of other people.+

Get on a strange elevator thing.. it's just a platform that resembles the same metal as escaltors. One girl didn't realise she
had to stand on it as it started going down so steps down onto it. As she does the floor starts moving like a travelator.

She falls off the back, screaming all the way. I tried to cover my ears with my hands but it made no difference. it was horribl.
the platform starts tipping backkwards. i somehow manage to stay on it until its at 90 deg .. i grab the platform and get a footing on
a step in the wall.. but as the plat form rotates it is now pushing me towards what looks like a meat grinder on the floor
I manage to get out just in time so i help other people who are being crushed.. i get one out but then see mike has his arm
caught in some kind of machine, so help him out, then when i turn around the last guya legs were completely crushed.. he was dead.

#a while later i notice sinister looking people, an old ish woman and people in protective clothes and masks, looking like they are painting an invisible wall when someone shouted:
they're blocking us in! I ran and slid on my belly through a bit they hadn't got to yet but there were more than one layer.
I start ripping away at the other walls, which was a bit like multiple layers of clingfilm, everyone joining me.
~T
out side she was ordering the men to shoot.. lines up about 25 metres away with sniper rifles, i led the charg. zig zagging
to the one focusing on me - he missed every shot.. as i got close to one he dropped his gun and pulled out a primitive axe..+
I jumped on him and used his own axe to hit him over the head, doing nothing to the guy.. then somehow one of the men+
flew into a building as if the hulk threw him.. the guy got up looking a bit like a glowing troll hulk.
#m

Fast forward into the future, everyone but me is now# different.. its a bit like invasion of the body snatchers.. the regular
dcant tell im not like them (they seem pretty normal) but the guards can, and theyre always looking for me. I think
things fof the past were banned.. creationism and religion being among them.. even though there was a shrine looking building
full of jehovas witness books that i used to hide and rest (nobody seemed to do anything out of place for a busy city street anymore,
i don't know how but i knew i would have been murdered for worshipping them if i was found in there.

Evading security and living a life of hiding in abandoned buildings.. i am stealing pieces of metal from various places -
door knobs, mainly, and etching poetry and messages of the old world into them before returning them to where they came.
-----

Some would probably think of this as a nightmare - After exploring lucid dreaming and dreaming itself - Nightmares interest me more than scare me.. but even so, this dream didn't have that nightmare feeling, i didn't feel afraid..
 
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Colour



And..

I also can't "see" colour when I imagine it. It's strange and hard to describe.. I can imagine a colour but I can not actually "see" it.. Like maybe if the part of my brain that interprets the colour red become active but the visual part doesn't.

I had never actually tried to see if I could see a color in my mind until reading this and was shocked to find that I could not. Like you say, I could imagine it--especially if I imagined something that is that color (say, a yellow banana as opposed to simply yellow). The reason that this shocked me is that color is a huge part of my life. As a painter I immerse myself in it, make decisions about it, have emotional connection to it etc on a daily basis. Frequently when I close my eyes and let my mind rest I will see gorgeous fields of luminous color that changes for no apparent reason; that is why it was a shocking discovery to realize that I cannot actually conjure a particular color in my mind's eye at will.


As far as my thoughts go--they are a mishmash of language and pictures. If I use your phone example, I would definitely be picturing the phone while thinking the words.

My dreams are definitely in color. Beyond that the color will have distinct qualities that are part of the mood or feeling level of the dream (bright and saturated or greyed down for instance, as the happenings in a dream change).

P.S.I love that photo you posted. My parents used to have a lot parties with their friends back in the fifties where they played silly games as icebreakers before the dancing got going. One of the things I loved that they did was to collect old photos of family groups like this one and people had to come up with conversation bubbles or thought bubbles for the people in the photos. This photo would have been perfect.
 
Close your eyes and work out something like 13 * 8..

Do you picture the numbers or do you "talk" your way through it?
 
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