ekomstop said:

Who or what are they, exactly?  Anybody given this much thought?

One popular assumption (#1) is that if a person you know plays a role in your dream (say your friend Bob, for example), that basically all aspects of Bob your mind has collected over time through interaction with him while awake, will essentially make up who "dream" Bob is. 

Sounds like a reasonable assumption..Yes?  What about the dream characters you don't know in real life?

An assumption (#2) to this might be, these dream "people" or entities could basically be products created in your mind for the sole purpose of playing a role in your dream..based on your minds collected memory of all entities it has come into concact with throughout waking life.

Maybe so.  Anyone disagree with either of these statements at all?  They do sound like reasonable assumptions to me.  I don't mean to restrict the basis of this post to these two assumptions, especially if there are other ideas that may hold more weight here (if you have any in mind please share!), but these seem to be the only two I can think of at the moment..

I have been thinking about the possibility of a third element that may hold some additional weight in regards to the other entities that seem to appear so frequently in most (I'd assume) if not all of our dreams.  Before I go off saying maybe it would be worth considering there may some 'external' factors at work in dreams (while I can't deny it seems to me there very well could be) I am currently making an attempt at exploring different possibilities that dreams and the events that occur within them are all essentially a product of, and in turn take place entirely inside the experiencers mind.

So, if this is the case,  then I wonder, why is it so that dreams can have such a huge impact on a person on so many levels?  If everything that occurs in a dream is a product of your very own mind, how can some of the events that take place during them come as such an emotional shock to an individual?  All experiences would essentially have to be a part of YOU, would they not?  Have the emotions they can potentially bring to the surface simply been buried for so long that we have forgotten they were even there?  Did we ever know they were there in the first place?  If not, how did they get there?

Anyway..lately I have been dabbling with thoughts that seem to suggest a possible kind of A.I. created by the mind for your entertainment and learning pleasure, in dreams.  I have noticed repeatedly in dreams, alot of the characters involved seem to behave like they have their own agenda, as if they are 'extras' like in a movie.  Why are they in my dream?  To set the stage, perhaps..to create the perfect environment for that particular dream (experience).

So, now my question is....Who or what is controlling these characters?  Sure, going by assumption #2, they may essentially be a product of my mind..but again, alot of the time they do seem to be acting out of their own agenda, and, perhaps are not there for the sole purpose of influencing my perception of the experience.

Getting back to the thought of a kind of (artificial?) intelligence taking place, the only reference I can think of at the moment would be a certain aspect of Mckenna's (of course) description of his encounters with what he called "self transforming elf machine", things.  Yes, those things...please don't hit me..   Anyway, he described their ability to 'spit' out other impossible looking 'elf machines'.. and, these 'new' secondary creatures could then produce their own next generation of creatures..and so on.  An endless ongoing process of apparent conscious entities producing new independently conscious entities, which are in turn able to produce more, and more, and more.

Although "self transforming elf machine" type creatures may not necessary sound like a valid basis for a theory regarding anything..Please, bare with me for a moment.

The connection I am trying to make here is, assuming these 'self transforming elf machines' are in some sense pure consciousness as is what I would think might be active inside the dreamstate, that perhaps, while we dream, our mind in some sense might be able to take on this ability, and produce (temporary?) extentions of itself, which can then manifest into their own independent consciousness, and go about their business as if they were seperate from the source that created them.

Now that I think about it, that almost sounds like we could be taking a role as "god" while we dream..creating extentions of ourself, all the while those extentions explore and learn on their own, subjectively.  The thing that really bugs me about this idea is, when and how did I even choose to create these extentions of myself in the first place?  Would the information they collect during their subjective experience come back to me when I wake up?  Or would some aspect of their subjectivity continue to exist beyond that?

This is just me tossing some more ideas around, again I have no idea what to believe, or if I will ever find myself able to come to any conclusions.  Though I am very curious what others' take on this phenomenon may be.

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DNICEONER said:

Has anyone ever seen the film Waking Life......Its sick

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Indeed..that is one brilliant movie.   

Quote:

Frog said:
I'll be there's a whole lot of research that can be done on this issue.  I am assigning the task to Skorpivo. 

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Excellent.  I believe fireworks_god is expecting the results on his desk by tuesday morning for review.