Severin,
yep, I lucid dream a lot (very common I think). What impresses me the most about dreams is that it seems very much a shared reality rather than just my confabulation; that is, that the other characters that people my dreams seem to have compelling and intricate characteristics (physical and idiosyncratic) of their own, such that my sense is I "couldn't" invent them. I've had dreams I honestly feel "I could not have had".

Oliver,
I'm afraid your last comment, and most of the list you posted earlier, are a rather cryptic? Not that I'm asking you to elaborate, unless you have the time and you want to. Of course everything we all say, no matter how laboriously we say it, is cryptic. On the other hand, as Jung once said, "the worst thing that can happen to a person is to be completely understood" (though I think I can think of worse things :-)

Hello Squeers,

Sorry to be vague. I have been toggling while working on something else.

The Self provides separation from the other, as in an English sentence, "I gave spot a pat". Here, "I" see myself apart from spot, grass does not. Synthesis cannot be achieved unless thesis and antithesis are distinct (Hegel).

You mention Jung: Jung saw the Self as a mid-point of personality around which we build an archetypes. "If we picture the counscious mind with the ego as its centre, as oppoesed the unconsconscious, and if we now add to mental picture the process of assimilating the unconscious, we can think of this assimilation as a kind of approximation of conscious, where the centre of total personality no longer coincides with the ego a point midway between consciousness and unconsciousness" is sought, wherein, the Self is a goal towards which we strive, motivating behaviour. Consequently, a truer sense of self might not manifest until middle age, as the person shifts from the conscious ego to the midway point between the conscious and the subconscious. Well, that's what Jung thought back in 1945.

More modern -out there- theories would include the notion of the Brain having an em-field (electromagnetic field) with quantum mechanical properties. Herein, the physical brain is layered into automatic unconscious functions (physical electro-chemical) and conscious functions (a wave function). Perhaps, it is with the latter, we again see consciousness entangled with time - In the weird theory at least.

Squeers

I don't 'get' people who claim dreams are boring.

Your comments have reminded me of serial dreams. Like a TV series in my mind.

Like you I have dreamt up 3 dimensional people I have never met - yet are completely detailed.

I also have a running dream which is set in Melbourne (where I live) but it is different to the 'real' Melbourne, but consistent each time I dream about the other Melbourne to the point now I can remember streets, railways, road networks, landscapes - like an alternative Melbourne I guess. I am often aware that I am dreaming this alternative city (this is where the lucidity comes in) and can sometimes guide the narrative, though not always.

As for being completely understood - I am sure we are not in danger of that, there being excellent chances we will talk at cross purposes at some point in the future. I do that all the time with other contributors here. How people of equal intellectual ability can view an event completely differently, putting the lie to the "eye-witness".

Now I am thinking about how I have used "future" and "time" in the above context.

Oliver

>> Self allows engagement with the environment <<

Without which we would just be reactionary and fail to learn and have no sense of linear time?

Severin,

I was about to post something about my own serial dreams.
I tend, for the most part, to visit new places when I dream - houses and villages or townscapes. Sometimes I visit places that I have lived in waking life, but most are dream inventions.
My most interesting dreams (which occur often) are when I visit a town or village, seemingly completely invented, that is new to me...and then I find that in subsequent dreams that I revisit this invented landscape or house or neighbourhood. I have revisited invented dream landscapes like this many years after have originally dreamed of them.

Squeers,

I've noticed "compelling and intricate characteristics" also in my dream characters and my landscapes - idiosyncrasies that I would have been hard pushed to invent in a work of fiction by my conscious mind.

Poirot

>> "compelling and intricate characteristics" also in my dream characters and my landscapes - idiosyncrasies that I would have been hard pushed to invent in a work of fiction by my conscious mind. <<

Extraordinary isn't it? The most recent 'serials' have been the Melbourne dreams. But have returned to completely fabricated landscapes from dreams long past also. And don't I wish I could capture the colour and detail in my writing? You bet.

And all this takes place in mere seconds or minutes of real time?

I often wonder what animals make of their dreams, we can clearly observe the twitching of paws, little growls or grunts, do animals remember their dreams and do they, like us, understand that the dreams are part of their sleeping life?

Hi Severin,

"Without which we would just be reactionary and fail to learn and have no sense of linear time?"

Yep. Like a plant.

On the other hand, only a small part of our bio-mass is conscious and appears to understand the environment. Albeit, the unconscious and the autonomic respond to the environment: e.g., the petellar reflex. Our knee is subject to time, but is not conscious of time. The neo-cortex might be another case. While the knee might be physically reducible to the QM world, perhaps, only the Mind could engage time, brought about by observation