Dreaming is something that I've always found fascinating - whether it is the imaginary "what-if" scenarios to the utterly random visuals. However I want to discuss quirks in our dreams - perhaps these are phenomena that some others have experienced as well, but I will share them from my own perspective.
- Deja vu
Surely we have all experienced something like this, where we encounter the "exact" same moment in our real world as something we had previously dreamed of?
I doubt there is a rational, scientific explanation for this phenomenon, in fact, it would be written off in the scientific world and there would be no actual explanation for this.
Yet, it makes us think - "are we living in a simulation"? Or are there different realities? Perhaps time is a spiral and we are just getting a preview of the next rung up? Who knows, but I attest that these are real. Food for thought, and really makes us question our reality. Yet, dreams have no "predictive" power - we tend to "realise" these deja vu moments only when they happen.
- Lucid Dreaming
Back in high school, a group of us were reading the wikibook on Lucid Dreaming, including all the "techniques" to induce this. After many nights of questioning "waking reality", using "wake-back-to-bed", trying to count every few minutes, eventually some of us were able to induce lucid dreaming.
It's very hard to describe, but in this state, you are free to do as command, including flying around and summoning people into your dream.
Physically, I have noticed my "head" getting a heat sensation during these lucid dreams.
Time perception is absolutely warped, as per usual in dreaming, so there is very little to say whether hours or seconds have passed in a dream scene.
Over the years this skill came and went, but it's almost like a muscle memory, something to practice.
However, if you do it too often, you start questioning "actual" waking reality, and you are always unsure whether you are in a dream.
Which is actually quite funny because perhaps we are living in some kind of dream...
- Warped sense of space
OK, so this is probably my strangest experience in a dream. But I used to get these quite a lot when I was younger - in my dream I would be in these abstract rooms. Most of the time, it would feel like the room is very small and I am filling the space of the room, giving a sense of claustrophobia.
I do recall asking someone once whether they also had these sort of dreams, and then they looked at me as if I was crazy.
I don't think there is any particular meaning for these dreams, but perhaps this is something that is beyond our earthly lived reality - perhaps this is simply the chamber where I plugged into our matrix!
Seriously though, there is way more to the human consciousness than what meets the eye. If you think about altered states of perception via drug use, synasthesia, even just individual differences in perception (with society being ever more aware of neurodiversity), we just need to look beneath the carpet to find the trap door that leads to more interesting discoveries.