When I was writing the previous post and casting about for vivid, unpleasant childhood memories, the first one that popped into my head was having to have a one-on-one meeting with a middle school teacher I hated because I was in trouble with her for some reason.  (The English/history teacher from this post.)

I remember walking with her to her classroom, dreading the impending moment when we’d step through the door.  And I specifically remember that, while we were walking, she said something in kind of a goofy or mildly clever way (not anything mean, or about me), and then a few moments later, she said “that was a joke.  It’s okay to laugh.”  In a reproachful tone, not a reassuring one, like I was either impugning her sense of humor, or displaying a shameful social defectiveness, or both.  (It must have been obvious that I was very anxious and not in a state to laugh even if she had said something I found funny, which she hadn’t.)

That’s just such a perfect moment, you know?  It’s not like I’m mentioning this because I’m still bitter about it.  I’m just appreciative of her technique.  As awful teachers went, she had style.

aprilwitching:

shellcollector:

nostalgebraist:

It’s pretty weird how we can remain so detached from the experiences of our dreaming selves.  I was just saying, half-jokingly, that I was enjoying having a series of nightmares, but I know if I was experiencing the same kind of nightmare emotions in waking life I’d be horrified and intent on stopping it however possible.

Sometimes, if I’m having a week of really bad or intense dreams, I’ll feel apprehensive about going to sleep.  Other than that, though, I’m pretty callous toward the suffering of my dreaming self – that is, I’m indifferent to it in a way that would be callous if I showed it toward another person, much less myself.  I’ll have experiences in a dream that would leave me shaken for months IRL, wake up, remember them, and nonetheless cheerfully go about my day as if nothing traumatic has happened.

We’re able to distance ourselves from what happened to us in dreams, even if we remember them.  The sense that “that didn’t really happen to me” is powerful, even though you have a memory of it happening to you (as far as you could tell), and just how bad it was.  It’s interesting that this can happen neurologically, I guess?

So maybe we are so indifferent to our dream selves for retrospective reasons – we have this natural tendency not to care about things that happen to them/us after those things have happened.  But what about the prospective effects of this indifference?  Is there something cruel about my casual willingness to give myself nightmares?  I don’t care about them now, and I won’t care afterwards, but the guy in them sure cares.  And that guy is me, or at least I will later remember being him.

Wait, what? I totally don’t have this – the emotional response to dreams can linger for ages for me; there are terrifying dreams I still shudder to remember; and I perpetually get these shuddering jolts of strangeness when I remind myself that various dreams didn’t actually happen, I never really went to that place because it never existed, et cetera. Sometimes I even have dreams where I’m someone else - in one I was a pregnant teenager and definitely not me - and when I think back to those it’s like I inhabited someone else’s skin for a bit. I’ve had dreams that marked me and changed me just because they were not only in someone else’s POV but also took place over the whole of that person’s lifetime, and so there’s a part of me that feels like I lived a whole life once, in a single night. I think at least part of the OCD Horrors I sometimes get about having somehow killed people are a result of having had dreams where I murdered, and then having woken up to a situation where I needed to reconcile my revulsion with the fact that I remembered doing that, in a kinda Will-Grahamish way. 

I’m interested in the distribution of this – I can see from the post notes that I’m not the only person who often finds that the “that didn’t really happen to me” tag hasn’t been correctly applied. How common is this vs the other thing? And how does it relate to other aspects of neurology, psychology etc?

this is really interesting to me because it implies, like, not knowing you’re dreaming when you’re dreaming, and also that you think the things that happened to you when you were awake “actually happened” to you. i mean, i am for the most part aware that some things “actually happen” and some “don’t actually happen”. but…what is “actually happening”? a lot of the time the way i react to things that “actually happen” and the way i react to, say, fiction i find especially absorbing are very very similar, by which i suppose i mean both that i probably have a more intense imaginative/emotional connection with certain books/movies/stories etc. than the average person, and that while obviously i can be affected by and to some extent concerned about things that “really happen”, there’s a detachment similar to what rob describes with dreams. the sudden, solid shock– and for me, it is a shock– of feeling that one specific moment is occurring, and it’s happening to me, and i am wholly inside it, and it will have some meaningful consequence, and i see it in clear and finite terms– is rare. like, really rare. usually sort of unpleasant. i can’t figure out if these moments constitute some kind of weird adrenaline-rush hyperawareness on my part, or if that’s just how most other people go about their lives all the time, and it’s overwhelming and bizarre to me only because i am not used to it.

 i suppose sometimes i get really sad about stuff, and other times i don’t much care, but that doesn’t seem tied to the (perceived or “actual”) “reality” of the stuff so much as, i don’t know, my tiredness or hormone levels or the turning of the seasons or what mind/emotion-altering substances i have or haven’t ingested lately.

in the dreams i remember, i’m usually either a version of myself– i mean, sure, maybe a substantially altered version of myself, but i’m not a developed, wholly distinct person or character with no memory of who i normally am and a detailed sense of a personal history unique to that dream– or, probably even more often, i’m kind of an invisible, characterless, non-interfering, disembodied observer (whereas i only FEEL like a disembodied observer when i’m awake). so i can’t speak to the thing you two describe, where “you” experience “being” a person with a totally different history and life experience and outlook/personality than the waking-world you (which seems like it enforces a comfortable, clear dream/waking split in rob’s case, while making dreaming a much more confusing, stressful, and emotionally draining experience in shell’s :( ).

anyway, there’s a feeling/realization i would describe as “oh, that’s right. i’m DREAMING,” that i almost always get at some point during a dream. it doesn’t mean i don’t care about what happens in the dream, and it doesn’t usually mean i can really direct the course of the dream a la true lucid dreaming, but it does mean i stop getting all worked up about it, because it’s not really a big deal if a giant rat gnaws off both my legs or something. i’m going to wake up eventually. the funny thing is, this happens to me when i’m–i think–awake, too. i suppose then it’s less “oh, that’s right. i’m DREAMING” and more “oh, that’s right. this is just the subjectively interpreted experience of a bunch of cells and processes that are under the sweet and transient delusion that they are somebody, that they think and feel and are substantially distinct from an inert corpse”. and then i stop getting all worked up because it’s not really a big deal if something hurts me. it’s like watching tv. i’m going to die eventually.

i can relate to rob’s nightmare enjoyment, but for me that can apply to “real life” as well, i think? both in that i have a self-destructive streak and in that i’m more attuned than i think some people to…well, you know. to love someone else is to set oneself up for inevitable sorrow and emotional trauma, and fear and confusion and guilt and regret. but i still believe it’s one of the more worthwhile aspects of human existence, you know? i still keep doing it. i can’t delude myself about what i’m getting into, but here i go anyway. this drink will sting my tongue. this movie will give me terrible dreams and make me jumpy all weekend. something bad is going to happen if i follow you, and i don’t mind. (do i?)

…man, you know what’s kind of funny and annoying, though? (does this ever happen to you?) when you dream about arguing with someone, or, like, they do something really shitty in your dream, and you wake up and you KNOW that the waking life Susie Q. you encounter is entirely innocent of whatever the Susie Q. in your dream said or did, but you can’t help being slightly mad at her for a minute anyway, or kinda wanting to continue the dream argument because ooooooh you thought of SUCH a good comeback just after you woke up…

That does happen to me sometimes.  Once, in college, I dreamed about arguing with my friend @dagny-hashtaggart​ and feeling really indignant about how unfair he was being, and after I woke up, that “you’re wrong and I’m gonna show you dammit” energy stuck with me for much of the day.  It was nicely invigorating, actually.  But I wasn’t angry-invigorated at Joe anymore, I was just angry-invigorated without an object.

I also once had a dream where some guy I didn’t know (but had seen around campus) turned out to be a horrible/evil person, and sometimes afterwards if I saw him on campus I’d have to remind myself the dream wasn’t true.

Multiple people have reblogged the OP to say their experience is not like mine (very much so in @shedoesnotcomprehend’s case), which is interesting.  I had no idea!

About “dream selves” – I didn’t make this clear in the OP, but I’m actually like you (Lia) in that I am usually pretty-much-myself in dreams.  Of course I think in dream logic and stuff, but at the time I feel like myself, and in retrospect the experiences feel like they happened to me, not someone else.  It’s just the level of impact that’s different.

Actually, now that I think about it, it’s almost exactly the way I feel about memories from a very long time ago.  Like, when I think about a bad dream I just woke up from, it feels like thinking about a memory of something very bad (but not lasting-trauma-bad) from my childhood, one I remember in a lot of detail.  I remember being me, and suffering, but I’m distant from it now, and it doesn’t rouse any emotions in me.  (Bad relationships with teachers are a good example – I can remember all the frustration, but I can’t rekindle it even a bit.  If I met those teachers on the street now, say, I wouldn’t feel angry at them.)

I was going to say that distant memories don’t raise the same ethical issues as dream memories (is it cruel to myself to make myself have nightmares?), but then it occurred to me that this might play a part in adult cruelty to children.  Adults who have suffered in childhood (as most have), but who don’t have lasting trauma from it, may be inclined to discount harm to children because they’re distant from their own experiences of it.  (“I was bullied and I turned out fine” – they say, no longer feeling the pain of the bullying, no longer fully qualified to express in first person how bad it was.)

On a more mundane level, I wonder how much the word “nightmare” may mean different things to different people.  (The other day I was watching a lecture by a neurologist and was startled when she said that “true” nightmares only happened in non-REM sleep – but it turned out that by “true” nightmares she meant night terrors.)  Some people describe nightmares about fear of physical injury, running away from things, waking up with their hearts pounding, etc., and I basically never have that kind of dream.  The dreams I call nightmares are more like psychological horror stories, with very strong negative emotions but not fear for my life itself.

(via aprilwitching-deactivated201808)

Apolitical, tropical explorer; hard-coded and ubiquitous; immortal. Extremely dangerous.

Finally checked out 17776, very good, gives me first-time-reading-Homestuck nostalgia

Measuring the size of the science was, from early on, a problematical task when this sort of mathematical Science of Science came into being in the 1920s and 1930s.

It’s pretty weird how we can remain so detached from the experiences of our dreaming selves.  I was just saying, half-jokingly, that I was enjoying having a series of nightmares, but I know if I was experiencing the same kind of nightmare emotions in waking life I’d be horrified and intent on stopping it however possible.

Sometimes, if I’m having a week of really bad or intense dreams, I’ll feel apprehensive about going to sleep.  Other than that, though, I’m pretty callous toward the suffering of my dreaming self – that is, I’m indifferent to it in a way that would be callous if I showed it toward another person, much less myself.  I’ll have experiences in a dream that would leave me shaken for months IRL, wake up, remember them, and nonetheless cheerfully go about my day as if nothing traumatic has happened.

We’re able to distance ourselves from what happened to us in dreams, even if we remember them.  The sense that “that didn’t really happen to me” is powerful, even though you have a memory of it happening to you (as far as you could tell), and just how bad it was.  It’s interesting that this can happen neurologically, I guess?

So maybe we are so indifferent to our dream selves for retrospective reasons – we have this natural tendency not to care about things that happen to them/us after those things have happened.  But what about the prospective effects of this indifference?  Is there something cruel about my casual willingness to give myself nightmares?  I don’t care about them now, and I won’t care afterwards, but the guy in them sure cares.  And that guy is me, or at least I will later remember being him.

Really curious if I’ll have a Twin Peaks nightmare after this episode, the way I did after both of the last two episodes

TBH I’m kinda enjoying this, it’s like David Lynch is hijacking my dreams to air Bonus Content

I haven’t had time to read much of it, but the book “Cerebral Cortex: Principles of Operation” by Edmund T. Rolls seems like the kind of thing I always wanted to read, but which I assumed couldn’t exist because we didn’t know enough about the brain.

That is, it addresses fundamental “how does the brain really work?” questions by synthesizing anatomical facts, hypotheses about network dynamics, and experimental data; it’s unafraid to make generalizations, but respects the diversity of mechanisms at work rather than proposing some grandiose One Weird Trick theory; it includes mathematical models but doesn’t get lost in small-scale trivia (of the “here’s a stochastic process for the statistics of this one type of spike train” sort); it covers a wide swath of material, but focuses on the picture that emerges rather than the discrete pieces of underlying research (yet still cites them if you want to follow up).

I’m not in a position to know how speculative it all is, and there’s the possibility that the author is concealing where his own theories begin and the more textbook stuff ends, weaving it all into this “comprehensive” whole.  But even if so, it’s noteworthy that such a thing could be produced at all: if not the final picture of how-it-all-works, it’s at least a picture that doesn’t set off any of the usual oversimplified-bullshit sensors.

The [incr tsdb()] environment is a tool for grammar and system profiling and treebanking. Some people find its name hard to pronounce, especially novice users.

nostalgebraist:

@somervta helpfully linked my post about LIs on agentfoundations.org, MIRI’s forum for technical discussion, and it’s getting some comments over there – here’s the thread if you’re interested

(I didn’t link it myself because you can only register there via Facebook and I didn’t want to do that)

I clicked through with Facebook just to see what would happen, and instead of forcing me to go by my real name like I expected, it forced me to go by “240″ (because I’m user number 240).  I was like, OK, fine, and I wrote a really long comment, only to find that it’s only visible when I’m logged in?  Anyway, here’s confirmation that “240″ is really me in case anyone wanted it.