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Heard somewhere once that dreams have a hard time with details. It's all loose impressions that your brain rapidly confabulates into experiences. It's why (supposedly) light switches don't work in dreams. If any of this is true, the same probably applies to other devices.
People say that dream states don't do well with text or numbers in particular.
I've read in lucid dreaming communities that trying to read the time on a clock, or small text (and failing to do so), is how some people manage to realize they're in a dream as a first step to taking control.
I've read text in a dream. Short words and sentences. For instance "love you" in a fogged mirror. What gave It away to me was that there wasn't a shower in the bathroom. I lucid dream, but I don't have the best control over it.
What’s pretty interesting to me is, when I was tripping on mushrooms hard many years ago, the Mac OSX Aqua interface was beautiful but unusable (likely any user interface would have been), felt like interacting with a squishy wet portal to another dimension, and reading interface items and digesting what something like “close” meant was nigh impossible, like “is this element close to me?” “Should I close this element like a door?”
But years later, in dreams I’ve noticed it’s similar to how my brain was interacting with an interface while tripping, which definitely has similarities, it’s no wonder Aldous Huxley wrote
This has nothing to do with the post, but I have had multiple unconnected people tell me I was in their dream and every single time I was eating fried chicken. So either I give off the vibe I love fried chicken, which is true, or I'm off wandering though my friends dreams watching their weird shit while eating some tasty fried chicken.
Great, now I'm going to dream and some dumbass is going to be eating fried chicken in it.
No reason more than one thing can't be true, dreamwalker
had a dream recently where i was trying to take someones details in my phone but it wouldnt load the app and the keyboard kept fucking up as they were getting impatient with me. thanks brain, you son of a bitch.
People seriously don't see phones in their dreams? Unbelievable.
Do you?
Yes
I have dreams with phones all the time. I dream that I type something, I look at the keyboard for a second, and when I look back at the text box I realize I made a mistake and have to rewrite most of the text.
It helped me realize I already experienced a quirk of the brain while dreaming, that I found about some time after I started having this recurring dream: if you look at a text while dreaming, then you look away and then back at it, the text will change.
not on a phone but i've had discord conversations in my dreams before
I’ve had at least a dozen dreams of trying to text someone during an emergency and I’m unable to do so. I keep fat fingering the buttons and it won’t send.
Ah, I’m sorry. That sounds anxiety-inducing.
Dreams are usually pure anxiety for me. Do people actually have enjoyable ones?
Yes, the sex ones
I've had that dream many times! I cant recall it super specifically right now but funny enough, I think it's typically a landline keypad I'm screwing it up on for some reason.
That's about where I am. I commonly have a phone in my dream, but I can never type words properly.
A void cannot pierce the immaterium.
I definitely have had doom scrolling dreams as I fall asleep. Similar to Tetris effect.
My guess would be that, beyond basically a thin plastic brick that makes noises and you make noises into them, to talk to another person...
Most of the functions of a modern smartphone rely on a high degree of lingusitic symbolic abstraction that only makes sense if it is stable and consistent.
Dream logic and dream perception is notably... basically the exact opposite of that.
You'll get very visceral feelings and sensations and visuals that... while yes, are abstractly tied to other things... my guess is that basically the part(s) of your brain that actually does interpretation of a complex system of symbols (writing)... basically, it isn't functioning coherently, the parts that all align to make that make sense when you are waking conscious, they're all being rerouted in a bunch of other ways while you're dreaming, to help produce other parts of the dream... or just... maybe defrag your memories and trauma?
I think a dumbphone, an old thing plugged into a wall... that is 'simple' enough to remain a somewhat coherent 'dream concept'... but a smartphone, an entire computer and all the things it can possibly do....just too complex.
My guess would be if people are dreaming of smartphones, the dream concieved smart phone is likely to be ... one or two uses cases, apps.
Somewhat interestingly... you can kind of see this in how earlier AI still motion and video generators... have that wierd dream like ... morphing, flowing aspect to them, the details are never right if you look closely, they really struggle with generating like, coherent billboards or signage or the text on posters or in a book.
It gets lost in the noise, ... and these models are basically oversimplified, rough models of neural networks... with way, way more amounts of processing power and a vastly more expansive data set thrown at them, to compensate for them being a crude approximation of the human brain, which is basically the most complex thing that is known to exist.
Maybe you could say that a dream is roughly a low fidelity hallucination, compared to the high fidelity hallucination that our waking consciouness is.
I wonder how synesthetics dream, how the deaf and the blind dream...
I still remember one powerful, psychadlelic trip I once had ... I was aware of the difference between the 2D image projection component of my vision, and the 3D spatial approximation component... because they were now massively out of sync... either the 2D image was basically delayed, or the 3d spatial component was just basically broken, getting sizes of and distances to objects and their edges massively wrong, sort of warbling, frothing, kind of like in a video game where LODs are flickering between high and low detail models erroneously.
... But, anyway, this is all my barely informed spitball speculation, I could be completely wrong, my non expert, layman brain is just trying to do abstract pattern recognition.
Totally!
I’m using my phone as an extension for hobbies, mostly as a map and fining things, and I’ve had it multiple times appear in my dreams.
Then again, as a Kid the N64 often appeared in dreams. I was playing some dream-Diddy Kong Racing even.
No, I am not schizophrenic. I do have hallucinations in the corner of my eye when tired, but they disappear once I look at them.
Its actually entirely normal for people to 'see things that aren't there' in the corners of your vision, especially in poor lighting conditions.
Your eyes and brain are best at resolving detail of things you're looking directly at, and basically the brain does a best guess pattern match for things on the periphery... because sometimes, its just a bug or a leaf or just a weird trick of the light... but other times, its a fucking stealthy predator animal.
As to video game ... entities appearing in dreams, or just... dreaming you are in a video game... yeah I've had that happen too.
It seems to be easier for a dreaming brain to just either mix the virtual world and real world together, I guess like AR... or just throw you totally in to a simulated world... than it would be to dream of yourself as still being you, sitting in a chair, in front of a screen, and keep the clear distinction between the real world and the digital.
Again I think the commonity here is that when a system of abstractions and symbols only makes any sense when it is stable and coherent... a dreaming brain does not really handle well a highly specific and complex rule set: it either blurs them together, simplifies them massively, or just doesn't include them.
EDIT:
But yeah, if you use a phone as mostly a map and compass... thats not too conceptually complicated, if you limit it to just that. Of course I'd be surprised if the... fidelity, the detail of the map and compass were high, but they probably don't need to be if most of the dream if like, you hiking around looking for geocaches or w/e.
Theres a whole lot more visceral, more real elements to that experience that are probably gonna get more ... dream fidelity focus? on? The environment, the difficulty of moving through terrain, the beauty or terror, maybe the elation of finding the thing, the determination that keeps you going, the fear of running out of food or maybe having to shelter in place from a sudden onset storm...
No, I was literally dreaming that I had a controller in my hands and was playing the game on a CRT TV lol
Edit: I was also sitting on the rattan char I always sat in
My spouse has a recurring nightmare including a Nokia 3310
Vaguely related, considerably off topic:
... As a child I had a recurring nightmare about being chased by essentially demon possesed pants.
Because of this goddamned book:
https://www.rhcbooks.com/books/43177/what-was-i-scared-of-by-dr-seuss
I was deep within the woods
When, suddenly, I spied them.
I saw a pair of pale green pants
With nobody inside them!
Thank you Dr. Seuss, for literally authoring (and illustrating!) my nightmares.
My nightmare version was basically me trying to put my pants on for school, except oh no! a fucking poltergeist has possesed them, they are alive, they are bad, and they are chasing me.
Literally started having the nightmares the same night after reading this.
As a child I kept having a nightmare of a sentient kite chasing me through a hotel. I don't think any media exists I picked this up from so maybe kid brains just love producing nightmares of getting chased by random objects.
This is so bad and hilarious at the same time. I feel for you, even if my laughing makes me look like a liar (艸≧▽≦)｡
3310 is so strong it can distort the fabric of reality and enter dreams
All advanced tech is forbidden in that realm.
Tap for spoiler
It’s a joke, tin foil hatters
It's because it's something constantly in flux. You don't have an unconscious model of "a phone", because you've changed out your handset so many times that you're not inherently comfortable with the sensation. And because they're information displays, they don't form an unconscious impression.
I have had phones show up in my dreams but they don't work properly they usually show up when there is some kind of emergency and I need to call someone but nothing works the way it usually does and I am not able to call anyone or look up the thing I need to.
Someone swapped your phone with an Android.