Do we dream less as we get older?

Just something I’ve noticed with myself. I used to dream all the time when I was a teenager and into my early twenties, and I remembered them all quite vividly, but they seem to have tailed off in recent years.

Dreams/Nightmares represent stress, fear, and anxiety of great change in personal life. If your life becomes stagnant, predictable, “boring” as you’ve admitted before, then you will dream infrequently or not at all. This is an environmental effect. Human environments become exponentially safer and safer over time, reducing stress, and so reducing the dream-state.

There are two responses to this. You can choose to remain in this human ‘paradise’, continue to stagnate, or you can choose to step out of it, into the ‘Wild’, into Existence, in which case you willingly forgo your safety and will be reintroduced to the Austerity that causes the dream-state.

And then, for those of us who are not blind, the fascinating factors embedded in this: healthline.com/health/can-b … ople-dream

Actually, the older I get the more I dream. But, unlike with others I have spoken to about dreams, my dreams are almost never surreal or fantastic or nightmarish. They almost always revolve around actual experiences from the past.

But: what is still mind-boggling to me about that is how I never dream about the most intense year of my life: the year I spent in Vietnam. I have Army dreams but never MACV Song Be dreams. Why?

Also, I often dream about the Summers I spent in Miners Mill, Pennsylvania. But never about by childhood here in Baltimore. Why?

And then this part: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=196820

when I was young, I had many vivid, scary dreams that would haunt me,
but one day, I decided to challenge my dreams, I simply said, bring it on,
try to scare me with your worst… and I never had a bad dream thereafter…

nowadays the only scary dreams I have is of “young republicans” and that
scares the hell out of me…otherwise, my dreams are pretty basic…
but interestingly enough, never about anything intellectual or about a problem
I am working out in philosophy… my dreams seem to be about working out
some sort of reconciliation or closure about my past… people or events or
workplaces that I left before I could come to terms with it…
I have several workplace jobs (dreams) that I left on bad terms and I, apparently,
need to come to grips with…one job in particular…

so in my dreams, reconciliation seems to be what my dreams are about…

Kropotkin

Are you certain that the mundane causes less dreams or that they, the dreams are mundane too, hence not memorable enough?

That is definitely a factor in it. The whole essence of a dream/nightmare is Remembrance. That’s what it’s called.

While unconscious the mind fragments and defragments itself, reorganizing itself and identifying stressors.

Most “dreams” are forgotten, hence this is why people dream less or not at all, because they simply do not remember the unconscious process.

An interesting article, but yes, of course blind people dream. That anyone might possibly think otherwise is astonishing. My own dreams don’t involve any visual component. Actually, to be strictly accurate, I have to say that I don’t know for sure that they don’t involve any visual component, because I’m not sure I would even recognise it if it was present. But I’m pretty sure they don’t. They do, however, involve perceptions that I can’t easily describe, often very vivid.

Quantity or intensity or dreams has nothing to do with age. But, it has some relation with the remembrance of the dreams.

All humans use to dream almost in the same quantity, irrespective of age, gender or any other difference whatsoever. But, there is a lot of difference how much of the dreams an individual can remember.

Dream remabrance depends on many things like one’s state of mind, how much one sleeps and how relaxed is one going to the sleep. That is why children are able to remember their dreams more than adults though both use to dream in the same quantity.

With love,
Sanjay

Zinnat,

That’s just not true. As a child, I never remembered my dreams. As an adolescent, I never remembered my dreams. I’d sleep and just wake up. Now I remember like 3 dreams a night.

All I can hope for here is that you might make the attempt to take us through what you experience in your dreams. How would you describe what you experience.

With those not blind [like me] descriptions seem to revolve more around what we see in the dream. I see people at my old job or in my family or from my political activism years. I see us doing things. I see events unfolding as I see them in the waking world.

In the film Children of a Lesser God the attempt was made to explore the way in which those who hear and those who are deaf are and are not able to bridge that gap.

Admittedly, I have never had many experiences with those who are blind. So I wouldn’t pretend to understand the way in which the world appears to them. In or not in dreams.

There is only grappling to the best of our ability to communicate with those who, in any number of important ways, are different from us.

Blindness of vision is forgivable.

Blindness of the mind, is not.

It’s probably best if I describe a specific dream, one that sticks in my mind more than any other (which I’ve mentioned before). I had it when I was at school, a few days or so before we came home for the summer holidays.

I was crawling through a massive pile of rubble, consisting of bricks, broken glass, pieces of splintered wood, that sort of thing. I could feel all these things scraping the bare skin of my knees and hands, cutting them open till they bled. I could smell the dust in the air and I felt a terrible sense of desolation and destruction. It was all so vivid, even more so than real life.

That doesn’t really mean that Zinnat is wrong, much of what we remember we dream is dependant upon our state of mind, and how life is treating us. It is as he says, we dream all the time, but we don’t always remember them.

I know that I dream a lot at my advanced age, but I don’t hold on to those dreams when I awake. Maybe I should, but I know that sleep and dreams can also be a method of escapism for people in my condition, so I try to engage with the world rather than hide in sleep.

I should add that I’ve kept a daily journal, or diary, since the age of 11, and went through a phase of recording my dreams in it as well as daily events. Eventually it got to the stage that the dreams were taking up something like 90% of the text, so I eventually stopped doing it. I suppose this may have something to do with why I seem to remember them less now.

Again, for many who are not blind, it might be difficult to grapple with dreaming about bricks, broken glass and splintered wood in ways that did not involve having first seen these things in the waking world. To dream more in terms of how these things feel when the body encounters them is just something that sighted people will only be able to grasp up to a point. They are more likely to wonder how a blind person can experience a brick without ever having actually seen one.

On the other hand, blind or not, dreaming or not, we all come to have our own understanding of what a “sense of desolation and destruction” feels like.

But here the communication between people can become all the more difficult to translate into an understanding that both can agree on. Here, instead, others are thought to be blind because they don’t understand something the same way you do.

I find this interesting… as a profound hearing impaired person, soon to be
totally deaf, I have never had a single issue in my dreams with hearing loss…
always during my dreams, I can hear quite well… whereas in real life, not
so much…my handicap has never been a problem in my dreams…

my dreams are not so much about what I can’t do, as my dreams
are about how much I can do…I can fly and sing and fill an entire
room with laughter… things I can’t do in real life…are dreams some
sort wish fulfillment? things that aren’t possible in real life are possible
in my dreams…are dreams possibly, an intention to seek out
and identified what my possibilities are? what is possible for me,
is what dreams are all about? not what you can’t do, but about what you can do?

I wonder…

Kropotkin

It’s the same for me, of course. No matter how many times people try and explain to me what it’s like to see things, I just can’t imagine it. And it’s something I’ve tried to do my whole life. It’s endlessly fascinating, mainly, I think, because it’s impossible to ever comprehend what the other person perceives. I have probably bored people to distraction asking them to describe things.

This is very much the experience of people who lose their sight at some point in their life, too. Their dreams are full of visual imagery.

I recommend that you keep your fears to yourself and those you trust most, because people will tend to use them against you throughout life.

Of course for me, here at ILP, the fascination and the frustration revolves more around endless failures to communicate regarding all of our conflicting moral and political value judgments. But I suppose the exasperation can be even more the case with something that everyone does in fact agree exists. In or out of a dream, a brick, broken glass or splintered wood can be held in our hands, touched, the weight of felt. We can come to experience what we ourselves perceive them to be through various senses in different contexts. But if someone is not able to actually see the brick in her hand or as part of a wall or a building…that’s just a fact of life. Communication here between those who see and those who don’t can only go so far.

It’s like that scene in the movie A Scent of a Woman where the blind Colonel Slade has Charlie Simms come to the limo and, with his hands, explores the contours of his face. His own way of “seeing” him. Here I suppose beauty would be in the fingers of the beholder. But, as they say, when someone lacks vision or hearing, their other senses often become all that much more acute.