Do we dream less as we get older?

[iambiguous]

Nick Drake “Riverman” youtu.be/idcaRTg4-fM
Tim Buckley “Song to the Siren” youtu.be/b49YfsjXw5E

[iambiguous]

What’s frustrating here is that even given internet searches attempts to understand the dreams of those who have never seen the world yields, well, practically nothing. Google “dreams described by those born blind from birth” and you get this: google.com/search?q=dreams+ … VkQ4dUDCBI

And while Maia made the attempt to explain her dreams to me, what would interest me is the descriptions of many others who are also blind from birth. How would they describe their dreams? Might not someone finally put into words a description that begins to make such dreams more effable to me?

In part because I have never really thought about congenital blindness before…and yet it fits into how I construe human identity as rooted in all of the existential variables that predispose us to think about the world around us as unique, one of a kind individuals.

And in part because dreams themselves have always fascinated me. The way they fit into my understanding of determinism, the way they connect the conscious world to our subconscious/unconscious reactions to it. How dreams can even exist at all.

So basically it is dreams themselves that I will explore on this thread.

[iambiguous]

Silly Wizard “If I was a Blackbird” youtu.be/D5okd4hbwh8
Crash Test Dummies “Superman’s Song” youtu.be/2VuZqi6EWa8

[Maia]

@iambiguous

What’s frustrating here is that even given internet searches attempts to understand the dreams of those who have never seen the world yields, well, practically nothing. Google “dreams described by those born blind from birth” and you get this: google.com/search?q=dreams+ … VkQ4dUDCBI

And while Maia made the attempt to explain her dreams to me, what would interest me is the descriptions of many others who are also blind from birth. How would they describe their dreams? Might not someone finally put into words a description that begins to make such dreams more effable to me?

In part because I have never really thought about congenital blindness before…and yet it fits into how I construe human identity as rooted in all of the existential variables that predispose us to think about the world around us as unique, one of a kind individuals.

And in part because dreams themselves have always fascinated me. The way they fit into my understanding of determinism, the way they connect the conscious world to our subconscious/unconscious reactions to it. How dreams can even exist at all.

So basically it is dreams themselves that I will explore on this thread.

If you can think of any precise and specific questions about how I dream, or indeed about anything else to do with perceptions, then I’m more than happy to try and answer.

What I don’t want to do is keep going over the same old ground. Boring is the very last thing I want to be!

[iambiguous]

@Maia

If you can think of any precise and specific questions about how I dream, or indeed about anything else to do with perceptions, then I’m more than happy to try and answer.

I don’t think of it as an exchange of questions and answers. In regard to dreaming, the gap between those sighted from birth and those blind from birth may well be too wide for that sort of thing.

Instead, from my frame of mind, it seems it can only come down to those sighted like me hearing as many different descriptions of the dreams experienced by those blind from birth as possible. Different people attempting to communicate their own dreams to the extent that it is possible given the only thing that is available to us here: a “world of words”.

@Maia

What I don’t want to do is keep going over the same old ground. Boring is the very last thing I want to be!

That you saw it this way does not mean that I saw it this way. That you were bored does not mean that I was bored.

But that’s how these things work for me given the manner in which I construe a “sense of self” here as the existential embodiment of dasein.

Therefore if I can sustain an exchange about dreams with others blind from birth, they might not become bored at all.

But, as I noted above, where to go [online] to find them?

[Maia]

@iambiguous

@Maia

If you can think of any precise and specific questions about how I dream, or indeed about anything else to do with perceptions, then I’m more than happy to try and answer.

I don’t think of it as an exchange of questions and answers. In regard to dreaming, the gap between those sighted from birth and those blind from birth may well be too wide for that sort of thing.

Instead, from my frame of mind, it seems it can only come down to those sighted like me hearing as many different descriptions of the dreams experienced by those blind from birth as possible. Different people attempting to communicate their own dreams to the extent that it is possible given the only thing that is available to us here: a “world of words”.

@Maia

What I don’t want to do is keep going over the same old ground. Boring is the very last thing I want to be!

That you saw it this way does not mean that I saw it this way. That you were bored does not mean that I was bored.

But that’s how these things work for me given the manner in which I construe a “sense of self” here as the existential embodiment of dasein.

Therefore if I can sustain an exchange about dreams with others blind from birth, they might not become bored at all.

But, as I noted above, where to go [online] to find them?

I didn’t say I was bored. I said I was concerned about being boring. I am, however, very busy.

I’ve already described a number of my dreams for you, but I don’t remember taking part in any meaningful exchange about them.

So good luck with finding someone else to do what you want.

[iambiguous]

@Maia

I didn’t say I was bored. I said I was concerned about being boring. I am, however, very busy.

I’ve already described a number of my dreams for you, but I don’t remember taking part in any meaningful exchange about them.

So good luck with finding someone else to do what you want.

Again, given that we don’t have access to that amazing contraption that would allow us to understand our exchange from the other’s frame of mind, we can only agree to disagree as to why it was abandoned.

I think that it revolved more around how I make people uncomfortable given the manner in which my “fractured and fragmented” understanding of the world around me begins to sink into their own frame of mind. But that’s based only on my many actual experiences in relating that to others.

And a meaningful exchange about dreams was only possible to the extent that we pursued it by way accumulating many, many descriptions of many, many dreams.

And I am not intent on finding others to do what I want, but on finding those who respect my own boundless curiosity about this mind-boggling existence in much the same manner that I respect theirs.

The rest, as always, is buried in dasein.

[Maia]

@iambiguous

@Maia

I didn’t say I was bored. I said I was concerned about being boring. I am, however, very busy.

I’ve already described a number of my dreams for you, but I don’t remember taking part in any meaningful exchange about them.

So good luck with finding someone else to do what you want.

Again, given that we don’t have access to that amazing contraption that would allow us to understand our exchange from the other’s frame of mind, we can only agree to disagree as to why it was abandoned.

I think that it revolved more around how I make people uncomfortable given the manner in which my “fractured and fragmented” understanding of the world around me begins to sink into their own frame of mind. But that’s based only on my many actual experiences in relating that to others.

And a meaningful exchange about dreams was only possible to the extent that we pursued it by way accumulating many, many descriptions of many, many dreams.

And I am not intent on finding others to do what I want, but on finding those who respect my own boundless curiosity about this mind-boggling existence in much the same manner that I respect theirs.

The rest, as always, is buried in dasein.

I told you exactly why I decided to abandon this public thread, and switch to a more informal and, above all, private discussion by email, which I would have much preferred. But all you did is accuse me, effectively, of dishonesty. And by continuing to assume it was because of your “undersanding of the world” (or whatever), you’re still doing it now.

Since I’m working this evening, that is where I have to leave it. I don’t think there’s anything more to say, anyway.

[iambiguous]

@Maia

I told you exactly why I decided to abandon this public thread, and switch to a more informal and, above all, private discussion by email, which I would have much preferred. But all you did is accuse me, effectively, of dishonesty. And by continuing to assume it was because of your “undersanding of the world” (or whatever), you’re still doing it now.

Again, it’s just a fact of life [from my frame of mind] that we can only go so far in understanding each other in regard to discussions this inherently subjunctive. I could only react introspectively as I did given my own understanding of what was anything but a boring or repetitive exchange. I thought we were examining many aspects of our lives in a refreshingly honest and probing manner. Your own enthusiasm was certainly evident to me. Then it was like you…shut down. All I was left with was speculation. I still have no clue as to what you meant by a “natural conclusion”. It seemed anything but that to me.

And I would certainly be curious about the part where you thought that I was accusing you of dishonesty. Over and again I made it abundantly clear that I was drawn to your extremely articulate assessment of yourself in the world around you.

And when I responded to you by email, well, you shut that down to.

On the other hand, as we both seem to agree, people are strange. Especially people like us I suppose.

[Maia]

@iambiguous

@Maia

I told you exactly why I decided to abandon this public thread, and switch to a more informal and, above all, private discussion by email, which I would have much preferred. But all you did is accuse me, effectively, of dishonesty. And by continuing to assume it was because of your “undersanding of the world” (or whatever), you’re still doing it now.

Again, it’s just a fact of life [from my frame of mind] that we can only go so far in understanding each other in regard to discussions this inherently subjunctive. I could only react introspectively as I did given my own understanding of what was anything but a boring or repetitive exchange. I thought we were examining many aspects of our lives in a refreshingly honest and probing manner. Your own enthusiasm was certainly evident to me. Then it was like you…shut down. All I was left with was speculation. I still have no clue as to what you meant by a “natural conclusion”. It seemed anything but that to me.

And I would certainly be curious about the part where you thought that I was accusing you of dishonesty. Over and again I made it abundantly clear that I was drawn to your extremely articulate assessment of yourself in the world around you.

And when I responded to you by email, well, you shut that down to.

On the other hand, as we both seem to agree, people are strange. Especially people like us I suppose.

I made it very clear that I wanted to continue our discussion by email, and that my reason for abandoning this thread had nothing to do with you. But in response, you said that you didn’t believe me. To quote you:

+++But, in all honesty, I suspect otherwise.+++

And that’s why I didn’t email you again. I will not be accused of dishonesty.

[iambiguous]

@Maia

I made it very clear that I wanted to continue our discussion by email, and that my reason for abandoning this thread had nothing to do with you. But in response, you said that you didn’t believe me. To quote you:

+++But, in all honesty, I suspect otherwise.+++

If you took this to be an accusation, then, of course, I apologize. But it was never my intention to accuse you of anything. I was merely noting that “in all honesty” given my own genuine, introspective reaction to what you were telling me, there may well have been reasons that you yourself were not fully cognizant of. Again, based on my many experiences in the past opening up to others regarding the rather grim manner in which I construe value judgments, spirituality and purpose in life in what I have thought myself into believing is an essentially meaningless existence.

In fact I readily acknowledge this is in turn a common reaction I have to my own reasons. It is simply how I have come to think about “I” from within the turbulence of a profoundly problematic, drawn and quartered perspective.

Also, as I mentioned in the email, I was disappointed because from my frame of mind, I was sustaining a “virtual friendship” with you. And that seemed to be crumbling. But this won’t make sense to many because they don’t live in a world as imploded as mine. Sure, as I noted, I enjoy the life I live tremendously. But over the years all of my many “real world” friendships have collapsed. I don’t have that sort of connection with others anymore. And I thought perhaps I might have it with you.

But, for sure, you can only react as openly and honestly as you do in turn. It’s just the way it turned out.

Unfortunately, these particularly complex interactions often involve factors that are simply “beyond our control”.

[Maia]

@iambiguous

@Maia

I made it very clear that I wanted to continue our discussion by email, and that my reason for abandoning this thread had nothing to do with you. But in response, you said that you didn’t believe me. To quote you:

+++But, in all honesty, I suspect otherwise.+++

If you took this to be an accusation, then, of course, I apologize. But it was never my intention to accuse you of anything. I was merely noting that “in all honesty” given my own genuine, introspective reaction to what you were telling me, there may well have been reasons that you yourself were not fully cognizant of. Again, based on my many experiences in the past opening up to others regarding the rather grim manner in which I construe value judgments, spirituality and purpose in life in what I have thought myself into believing is an essentially meaningless existence.

In fact I readily acknowledge this is in turn a common reaction I have to my own reasons. It is simply how I have come to think about “I” from within the turbulence of a profoundly problematic, drawn and quartered perspective.

Also, as I mentioned in the email, I was disappointed because from my frame of mind, I was sustaining a “virtual friendship” with you. And that seemed to be crumbling. But this won’t make sense to many because they don’t live in a world as imploded as mine. Sure, as I noted, I enjoy the life I live tremendously. But over the years all of my many “real world” friendships have collapsed. I don’t have that sort of connection with others anymore. And I thought perhaps I might have it with you.

But, for sure, you can only react as openly and honestly as you do in turn. It’s just the way it turned out.

Unfortunately, these particularly complex interactions often involve factors that are simply “beyond our control”.

Ok, apology accepted then.

But it’s clear, from your reaction, and what you’ve said above, that you expected something more from me. Which I’m not in a position to give.

[iambiguous]

What Dreams Are Like When You’re Blind
By Cari Romm
In New York magazine

Here’s a challenge: Reach back in your brain to the last dream you had, or at least the last one you can remember reasonably clearly. Think through how you’d describe it to someone else — where you were, who you encountered, what happened.

And now take a minute to think about how you know those things. If you’re like most people, the answer is pretty straightforward: You know because you saw them. Dreams are primarily visual, heavily influenced by the things we see while we’re awake (so much so, in fact, that people who grew up watching black-and-white television also tend to dream in grayscale).

I can only think back on the many times I have attempted to narrate my dreams to others. Yes, from time to time, sounds and smells and tastes were part of the experience. But mostly it was the things that I saw – objects and people interacting – that comprised the bulk of the description. So, when Maia created this thread, that’s the first thing that popped into my own prejudiced/ignorant head: she was blind from birth. So, how in the world can she dream at all?

It is still difficult for me to grapple with this. The closest I can come to imagining how I might understand it is to imagine that I am put into a room with objects, sounds, smells etc., that I am totally unfamiliar with. And where, blindfolded for days on end, I can only absorb the experience through my other senses. Eventually I am going to find this experience itself popping up in my dreams. But, still, having been sighted for decades it can be no where near the experience of those who have never seen a single solitary thing…ever.

First, the technical, biological parts. The really, really mysterious parts where somehow the brain, as though having a mind all its own, figures out itself what to do.

From God? From nature? From the “laws of matter”?

But when you don’t have any images to draw from, the brain is forced to use other materials to construct its dream world, creating sleeping scenarios rich in sensory information that would otherwise be confined to waking life. On a science website hosted by the University of Illinois, one user summed it up this way: “Our dreams are based on our memories. So a person who has never experienced ‘seeing’ will not dream using sight,” they wrote. “This is just like how you do not dream with sonar images, as humans can not use sonar.”

So the part where the brain just “takes over” and draws on [by drawing out] all the other senses. The part that for me gets all tangled up in “metaphysical” speculation about determinism and free will.

Again, the sheer mind-boggling mystery of it all.

[iambiguous]

@Maia

Ok, apology accepted then.

But it’s clear, from your reaction, and what you’ve said above, that you expected something more from me. Which I’m not in a position to give.

I’m sorry – truly sorry – to hear that.

But as I noted in our email exchange if you ever come upon an experience that you would like to share with me…an experience that you feel is not repetitive…please do.

And to the extent that you genuinely feel that I “expected something more from you”, that was certainly not how I construed our exchange. But I can only connect the dots between myself and others as openly and honestly as things genuinely seem to me.

And the more I reveal about myself – “I” as a fractured and fragmented existential contraption rooted in dasein – the more people pull back. It’s just not something they want to believe could ever be apllicable to themselves.

And, again, all those things that are simply “beyond my control”.

[iambiguous]

Joni Mitchell “Amelia” youtu.be/gcTDoi9JQiY
Peter Murphy “Marlene Dietrich’s Favourite Poem” youtu.be/ZaE7u0g-0qg

[iambiguous]

What Dreams Are Like When You’re Blind
By Cari Romm
In New York magazine

In dreams, “people occur to me the way that I know them,” says Tommy Edison, who hosts a YouTube channel as the Blind Film Critic. Edison, who’s been blind since birth, interacts with others in his dreams through sound, smell, and sometimes touch: “If I were to meet you in a dream, what I would know is your voice, maybe what perfume you’re wearing.” If it’s someone who’s helped guide him in the past, he might know them in a dream by the feel of their arm.

There’s a part of me that reacts, “Yeah, I think I know what he means”. But another part – the bigger part – still has no real sense of how a dream like that would be experienced. My brain is just too engrained in connecting all of the others senses to the world as I see it.

Sure, if it was a dream that revolved almost entirely around me listening to music, sound would predominate. In fact I’ve had dreams where my brain actually created songs I had never heard. I’d wake up thinking, “what a great song!”

Again, the mind-boggling mystery of dreaming itself.

Or a dream where I am preparing a meal in the kitchen, smells would predominate. But the bulk of my dreams are rarely of that nature. And I can only assume that if I did lose my sight, eventually my dreams would catch up with this new reality. Then I might get a little closer to dreams in which the visual was just not a significant factor.

For people who aren’t blind, though, research has shown that that type of sensory diversity is something of a rare occurrence. In a 2014 study in the journal Sleep Medicine, researchers asked 50 volunteers to track their dreams over the course of four weeks: 11 people who had been born blind, 14 who lost their sight sometime after birth, and 25 sighted people as a control group. The study authors didn’t find any significant differences between the three groups in the content or emotional tone of the dreams, but they did discover a handful of major differences in how they experienced their dream worlds.

In other words, we are all basically the same…until we’re not. We all experience content and emotion in the waking world so we all experience the same in our dreams. And then, it seems, it can only come down to the gaps between us rooted either in our sense perceptions [from birth or otherwise] or in the thing that most fascinates me: the embodiment of dasein.

The content and emotion in your life…in your dreams. The content and emotion in my life…in my dreams. And then figuring out the least dysfunctional manner in which to communicate it. Which, as this thread seems to indicate, is often easier said than done.

[iambiguous]

Steve Miller Band “Journey To Eden” youtu.be/xJALQcCHuF0
Steve Miller Band “Song For Our Ancestors” youtu.be/Lw27fX-NYck

[iambiguous]

What Dreams Are Like When You’re Blind
By Cari Romm
In New York magazine

In dreams, as in waking life, the blind subjects of both types relied more heavily on their other four senses: 86 percent of blind people reported at least one instance of hearing while dreaming, compared to 64 percent in the control group; 70 percent of blind volunteers experienced touch, versus 45 percent; the blind smelled at double the rate of their sighted peers, 30 percent to 15 percent; and tasting was 18 percent to 7 percent.

All this of course will probably be understood by most as just commonsense. Yes, this is exactly what one would expect, right? But: the more ineffable aspects would seem to revolve instead around the manner in which those blind from birth expereince the other four senses in a heightened manner…or in a qualitatively different way. It’s one thing to hear, touch, smell and taste when you do have vision to connect them to the world around you. But what if you don’t? How does that impact your understanding the world in ways that you don’t even think about consciously?

When the researchers focused on the blind people who had once been able to see, the gap was smaller — people who have some visual memories can build them into their dreams, filling in the image gaps with their own imagination. “For people I’ve met since [I went blind], their faces are just blurs or how I imagine they look,” one user wrote on the Illinois forum, but “someone like my mother looks forever 30.” Typically, though, those visual memories fade over time — the images become increasingly rarer and blurrier, and the dreamers eventually begin to dream more like their congenitally blind peers.

Here we are able to grasp just how futile it can become to discuss this without taking into consideration that there are so many different contexts that any particular blind person might be embedded in. Still, it’s no less fascinating to imagine how dreams change over time the longer that someone who was once sighted has been blind.

Just as it is telling how, blind or sighted, your dreams are going to change given any number of abrupt or momentous changes in the life that you live. It’s not like anyone can pin down how we ought to dream. Even if the dreams themselves are in so many mysterious ways beyond out control.

Dreams are no less rooted subjectively in dasein. Thus to the extent that those like Freud or Jung or others fail to take that into account in regard to either blind or sighted people is the extent to which they are failing to grasp what can play a crucial role in interpreting them.

[iambiguous]

And then the dreams of those who are deaf: lingvano.com/asl/blog/how-d … ple-dream/

Which is why, as I noted to Maia, it would be fascinating to listen in on a discussion between those who were blind from birth and those who were deaf from birth discussing things like dreams. How they might connect and how they might not. Then the part where the discussion shifted to the dreams of those were not born either blind or deaf. What could or could not be shared here.

Then the dreams of those like Helen Keller. Which I will explore if it’s out there.

[Maia]

I’m sorry but I’m finding all this a little bit creepy and obsessive. I offered to answer any questions that you have, but you told me that you didn’t have any.

That’s fine, of course, but why keep posting links to songs, or links to articles about blindness?