Proof that humans can get used to pretty much anything

You can train yourself to remember dreams if you start writing down everything you remember.
You can also learn to recognize that you are in a dream and take control (look up lucid dreaming).
- Or don't, maybe we are supposed to forget them. For instance I do not want to remember my dreams as I have barely ever had a pleasant one. I'd rather wake up in blissful ignorance of whatever shit my broken brain threw together while it tries to suffocate me.
  
  just wanted to point out that most people don't have a lifetime of nightly nightmares, and your could be eased with some therapy, or at least mushrooms and puppies.
  and if you LIKE nightmares and want more, slap on a nicotine patch right before you go to bed.
  
  I subscribe to the idea that dreams are a byproduct of your brain defragmenting itself, or priming its neural-net with images trained during the daytime.
  To remember the byproduct might undermine this process, in the same way that feeding a NN its own output might produce garbage output later.
  
  Being able to become lucid in your dreams means you can also have a certain level of control and face whatever it is that causes that fear, and get over it
- Every single dream I have is lucid. Nightly I live entire lifetimes and wake up and have to convince myself this is reality and I don't have those friends and families. To this day there are times I have to ask my irl friends and family if a certain memory is real or not.
  It's interesting but also heartbreaking and exhausting.
- This is anecdotal, but I read a story by someone who learned to lucid dream and regretted it. They said they never felt like they slept anymore, because they're lucid all day and night.
  
  No idea about that, it never interfered with my sleep but I also didn't do it frequently. These days I don't even remember my dreams the majority of the time and I've kind of lost interest in the whole thing, takes discipline to accomplish in the first place and I kinda lost interest TBH.
- As with the above posters, any idea if regularly dream journaling (and potentially lucid dreaming) is actually healthy or not?
  I say this as someone who gets pretty bad nightmares and has had numerous lucid dreams (even transitioning from nightmare to lucid dream)
  I have no idea if further engaging with my dream state is healthy or not?
  
  I have never heard of it being dangerous before, but if I had to speculate I'd say it probably depends on how you use it: You might be able to take command to end the nightmare but I'm not a doctor or psychiatrist but maybe in avoiding the nightmares altogether you're denying yourself some sort of personal growth or insight?
  The real answer is probably: More research needs to be done.
  
  On rare occasion I’ve taken control of nightmares in a Lucid dream state - typically waiking up momentarily and then going back to sleep.
  I’m just not sure if the psychic cost of having these types of intense dreams encoded in memory is healthier than just sleeping and not remembering.
  A bit plagued by my dreams ( thereby my subconscious ) if I can remember them.
  That was the question I guess, I hear the idea I should engage more to remember dreams, but not sure if that is healthy for people to do who have vivid and disturbing dreams regularly (eg. Under attack, people I love getting hurt ect…)
  
  It's probably safe. The very reason I started getting into lucid dreaming was to control my nightmares.
- I've heard training for lucid dreaming can kinda fuck you up, because it becomes harder for you to distinguish between dream and reality.
  
  You can always stop trying to distinguish between dreams and reality and just accept whatever you're experiencing as a sort of superposition of both.
  
  Lucid dreaming literally means you're aware you're in a dream.
  
  IDK about that, but I've only done it a few times. Mostly I just used to to fly around my neighborhood like they'd do in old Kung Fu movies.
  
  I've tried it when I was younger (20s). I don't really remember my dreams now. It is something like a muscle you need to keep using. Write down sentences, draw pics, doodle anything that will help you remember when you wake up.
  I didn't have problems distinguishing from reality, but I did want to sleep a lot more.

HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM.
Death of the Discworld
- Terry Pratchett - G.N.U

Relevant xkcd
- More than relevant. Stolen from. This person just slightly reworded an XKCD comic into a tweet.
  
  Yeah, that was my thought too, though it is possible they came up with it independently. Or forgot they read that xkcd which came out 18 years ago (fuck!).
  It has happened to Randall himself before (see the header)

Sex is weird too. You undress and make your self vulnerable and expend a lot of energy and risk catching a disease and then fall asleep. Either we do it for fun or to create a parasite that we have to take are of.
- To be fair, in comparison to living, it is a lot of fun.
  
  And clothes are restrictive anyway
- Most animals don't have clothes to take off and don't fuck at sleep time
  Humans are odd, and I think our sleeping after sex is just that we've structured society to leave the best time for sex late
  I never slept right after sex as a youth as the end of the educational day and when my parents would get home left only daylight hours with sufficiency privacy

check out the film "Dark City"
- Just writing to confirm that I am typing this during the daytime, and it is in front of me, and I am not just some memory of a comment you saw on lemmy
- Or the Trek episode Schisms
- Fantastic flick

Every time I lucid dream, I end up waking myself up with something stupid like tripping as I step off a curb.
- Just realizing I'm dreaming wakes me up every damn time. The only times I've gotten to have some fun is when I don't question why the laws of physics suddenly changed and just go with it. The second I start going, "Wait a second, I think I'm drea-" boom, I wake up. It's infuriating, I just want to fly around or explore the ocean depths or some shit.
- Whenever I realize I'm dreaming I usually just get really excited and it accidentally wakes me up. I don't get time to do cool stuff.

Human memories are stored in flesh
Flesh has to be replaced constantly
When you sleep your memories are being copied and reallocated to new flesh, the things you experience in dreams are just a series of incredibly losely related themes and concepts. In general human memory searching relies on association of concepts rather than any sorted lists or some other silly inorganic solution.
- That sounds cool, but I don't think it's strictly true.
  Memories that have many pathways won't be lost due to a few broken pathways and are reinforced with further experience: learning or remembering.
  Others are simply gone with neurons dying or the pathways getting severed.
  Neurogenesis doesn't happen as much in adults, they're the longest living cells in our bodies - adult neurons last a lifetime
  
  I boiled down the complex neurological system of organic memory in living beings down to a paragraph, of course there is room for a lot of nuance and sophistry.
  
  Also: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0375-9.epdf
- I believe this to. Like ram being transfered to slower media but filtered, parsed, etc to keep the important parts.
- Flesh has to be replaced constantly
  That's more than a tad inaccurate.
  
  Some tissues live a lot longer than others but as a general statement it holds true.
  EDIT: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0375-9.epdf
- I guess this goes here :
  https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ?si=TXevA3dqx-9hyZ7u "They're made of meat"

Almost everyone does it almost every day, it would be more strange if everyone was freaking out about it.

I used to be able to remember my dreams, or at the very least I would wake up with a sensation that I had had a dream, but anymore though I just feel like a blank slate, like nothing happened. If I dream anymore I’m completely losing them because I don’t even have the feeling that I’m forgetting anything, it’s just blank when I sleep now.
- If you happen to smoke weed that can do it. I've barely dreamt (that I remember) in years
  
  That's one of my favorite parts of weed, I want to sleep, not have to watch some shitty movie I'm not able to control or interact with.
  
  I've always heard that weed smokers have less dreams, but as someone who kinda started doing it more regularly within the last year, I haven't experienced that? Honestly I think I tend to have more vivid and weird dreams when I've smoked before bed. Do some people not get the REM suppression?
  
  Alcohol does it too. I've heard people say that's what dts are. Your brain dreaming while you're awake.
  
  I used to smoke weed, but that was 20 years ago and I hadn’t ever been a big smoker.

If I don't smokadaweed before bed I do tend to remember them. One of the reasons I try not to smoke late in the evening.
- I have the opposite issue. Really stressful, anxiety inducing, or nightmare dreams.
  Weed fixes that problem for me by being an organic skip button for dreaming
  
  My understanding is you get less rem tho and less rest as a side effect.
  Double sided sword, or whatever

The natural selection implications for dream amnesia are wild.
- What do you mean, care to elaborate?
  
  My 100% BS conjectures are:
  to save energy versus committing the dream to long term memory
  to facilitate childhood/adolescent development, as object permanence is learned you need the external world to be the consistent one. You can't waste energy learning to adapt to the worlds in your dreams in later childhood.
  as adults dream amnesia can help avoid relived or newly generated trauma incurred as the begin processes your external experience.
  Idk, there's lots of possible benefits. In not about to do the research paper deep dive. But the wild part is that dreaming developed and the mechanism for not remembering the dreams also developed and there was a selective pressure for that to be the case.

havent had 8 hours of "lucid coma" since before most of you were born
- Yeah me either. In the last 24;hrs I got 2 hrs then a little later 40 mins then a number of hours later one more hour.

8 hours sounds nice. I usually manage about 4 or 5
- Obligatory sleep hacks from a person who loves sleep:
  Clean bedsheets
  No phone in bed
  Same sleep time every day
  Same wake time every day
  Exercise during the day
  No lights in the room. No LEDs, no street lights
  White noise
  If you do any one of these your sleep will improve. If it doesn't, I give you full permission to flame me and my dog.
  
  White noise is critical and underrated.
  
  I have slept many nights, on average about once a day for many years. In my experience, it's the routine that has the most effect. I know it's super difficult to maintain but going to bed and waking up same time everyday is the key.
  
  This concept is known as "sleep hygiene" if anyone wants to read further.
  
  What does your poor dog have to do with this?
  
  Ear plugs have been a life saver for me. I can't sleep without them now, fortunately they sell them in huge containers so I only have to buy them like every year and half.
  
  Don't have children
  
  no way. sleep is great but sleeping in is glorious.

Capital won't care about dreams until they can inject commercials, propaganda, etc.
- Luckily the dream state is still one of the few remaining surrealist safe places to us humans.

Wait do y'all actually dream every day? For the full time of sleeping?
I only dream after I've already slept way more than enough for the day and even then it's like a less than 10% chance of having any dreams at all
- Everyone dreams every night, but not everyone remembers their dreams in the morning. I don't remember my dreams most of the time.
  
  Everyone dreams every night
  Really doesn't seem to be the case for me, there's a pretty noticeable difference between 'I had a dream but quickly forget what it was about' and not dreaming at all

We are, after all, merely brains in a (bone) jar. :-)
- brains in a (bone) ~~jar~~mech
  Ftfy
  
  I mean if we want to get technical...

I always tell myself I'm going to be fully self-aware when I enter the dream tube, but sadly I never remember if that happened or not.
- Start keeping a dream journal and get in the habit of writing in it the moment you wake up. The more consistently you do it, the more you'll remember as time goes on.
- Start by trying to force yourself to wake up mid dream. It's an easy "control" that you can expand to get more and more control over your dreams

I have had only a few vivid, real feeling dreams that have stuck with me for years. Do I know what they mean, nope. Do I wish I had more of them... yes. Working on improving my sleep in the last year or so. I think my average sleep time actually got a few mins. shorter. Oops.

Don’t forget time dilution.
They who master the skill of controlled time dilation will quickly ascend to rule the universe.. or so i was told in a dream.
- Problem solving in dreams can be hyper efficient. I once designed an entire web application in the short dreamstate between waking up to my alarm and the second ‘snooze’ alarm. Drew up the solution immediately and then went to work and built it over the course of a month. Mastering that would be so powerful for knowledge workers and artists alike.
  I’ve tried the same with music but, while I can create music in my dreams I cannot yet recreate it awake.
  
  Don’t give the MBAs any ideas.
- I had this same thought on an acid trip once. Good times.

8 hours of sleep ! Wow I'd love that ! If I can get 6 hours it's a great night. Haven't been able to sleep 8 hours in years except for the rare weekends where I don't get woken up by the neighbors dogs or to work my second job.
- Ear plugs bruh
  
  I will always shill Mack's Ultra Soft for sleeping
- Was going to say! I sleep 2 hours, up 45 minutes, sleep an hour, up an hour, sleep 2 hours, up 20 minutes. Like that all night long.

And yet we think our waking life is more real.

I mean sure we accept it, but we do put dreams to a high regard. Hence why you can say something is dreamy, or a dream come true.
Maybe we don’t know enough about dreams yet?
- We know a ton about dreams, we just don't know why exactly sleep "recharges" the brain which I find fascinating.
  This guy assumes people write off dreaming but when I was 17 I was utterly fascinated with the subject and researched lucid dreaming for many years, even teaching myself how to do it. That rabbit hole is absolutely wild.
  If anyone is interested in the subject, check out the book "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge, or watch the film Waking Life.
  
  I think the commonly accepted theory is that your brain is sorting through the day, through problems, through life. Even just playing. This makes sense seeing as how quickly humans fall apart without sleep.
  I was so tired once, that all I could hear was The Spice Girls Wannabe, and just the chorus because I never actually listened to their music, just the repetition of:
  YO, I'ᒪᒪ TEᒪᒪ YOᑌ ᗯᕼᗩT I ᗯᗩᑎT ᗯᕼᗩT I ᖇEᗩᒪᒪY, ᖇEᗩᒪᒪY ᗯᗩᑎT
  SO TEᒪᒪ ᗰE ᗯᕼᗩT YOᑌ ᗯᗩᑎT, ᗯᕼᗩT YOᑌ ᖇEᗩᒪᒪY, ᖇEᗩᒪᒪY ᗯᗩᑎT

Anyone who says this doesn't know what "coma" means. Or "lucid" for the matter

8 hours sleep? I wish... As I get older sleep become an elusive thing.

Look at the guy who sleeps 8 hours a night and also have dreams, I wish I would have that luxury

Yeah not all of us get the amnesia unfortunately.
- I've only had a couple dreams that were legit traumatizing. How bad could it be to remember 100x more of them!? That's like only one or two truly life altering traumatizing dreams per night!

We slip through the veil of reality, do we.

It helps having an idea of what causes the phenomenon, certainly. I get a lot calmer about basically everything when I know just what the hell is going on.

And you wonder why your dog is so fucked up lol

What more proof do you need that materialism is bullshit?

Pretty neat huh?

I don't dream and when I do they are usually mundane like going to work. Which makes me sleep in as I think I am already heading to work

Jokes on you, I dream maybe few times per year. And I remember times when I didn't dream about anything for years.
- I certainly rarely remember dreams especially in adulthood.
  
  I tend to only remember a dream for a minute or two if I have any.
  But, well actually there's one thing that I always remember - that most of them are fucked up. I don't remember why, though.