This was a recent dream while I was sleeping. I was stuck without a car and was advised by a store owner to walk an (inconvenient) distance to the hotel. The worker there told me “he may have an alternative, but lets wait for the boss to leave.”
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At this point, that character KNOWS about the alternative solution, and has set a condition on revealing to me the solution….
How??? How can I, the subconscious creator of the problem, the character, AND the solution that the character knows….do this….WITHOUT knowing what the worker knows. AND it requires a condition to occur, before I reveal the solution to myself in my dream. So, I’ve created the solution in the worker’s mind, but I don’t, myself, know that solution until after the boss leaves.
In the dream, a few minutes pass, the boss leaves, and the worker reveals a hidden sleeping chamber that he had previously assembled without his boss knowing, that I can take advantage of.
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I just think it is very odd, that I wouldn’t know the solution in my dream, even though I clearly had somehow invented the solution in the imaginary worker’s mind. How does that happen? How am I able to create a solution that is hidden to me and will only be revealed after a condition has been satisfied?
I don’t think we know that much about how the dreaming mind works, but it’s entirely possible that your dreaming brain is just creating a narrative and doesn’t actually have the solution available at the time you are told that it exists. Why are you sure that the worker actually knows about the secret room until the moment he shows it to you?
I’m pretty sure I’ve had dreams where someone in the dream tells me they know some secret or are going to show me something and then when the dream gets to the big reveal either nothing happens or the scene flips to something else entirely.
Another possible explanation is that, while the ‘dream you’ doesn’t know the solution, ‘sleeping you’ knows it. IOW, your subconscious has set up the scenario in your dream that you, in your dream, will learn what you already know.
I have experienced something similar a couple of times. I suspect the solution lies stored somewhere but it may not be something that the conscious person might be able to recollect or would resort to. Maybe it is the subconscious lending us a hand. This is what I thought of the first time. The second time it was not about knowing stuff but about figuring out a something that required an out of the box stragegy. I’ve noticed that my sleeping self occasionally gets creative even when I’m not in a pickle, so I guess that’s how our brains work.
A bit different but hitting on the same question, I have dreams where I’m perfectly fluent in Spanish. I do have a Spanish degree and was once proficient in the language but I never would call myself completely fluent. Yet I have dreams where I understand and speak it perfectly.
My best explanation for both scenarios is pure delusion. I’m not really speaking Spanish and you don’t really have a solution. The sleeping brain is just really good at fabricating reality.
I don’t think there’s anything more inexplicable about this situation than about dreaming in general. When I dream, I’m often part of a more or less complex narrative in which a long sequence of events unfold, but I’m not consciously aware of the story from the beginning. Did some part of my mind know the whole story before it started? Or was I just making it up second by second as it went along? I think the latter is unlikely because often the narrative has an internal consistency that would be hard to explain if there wasn’t some outline of the story in existence from the beginning. Of course, often dreams do have a disjointed and ad hoc character unlike what a real life author would create for a carefully designed story, but there’s often enough consistency that it can’t just be a matter of “ok, what should happen next?” over and over again throughout the whole dream.
Does the dream really have internal consistency, or do you just think it has internal consistency because you yourself are in the dream and are using dream logic yourself? There are no objective observers in dreams, after all. The “you” who’s creating the dream is the same “you” who’s experiencing it, and your impressions of the dream and the emotions it makes you feel are also part of the dream.
A lot of the time when I dream about trying to resolve some sort of problem, the dream throws up a lot of justifications for why I can’t resolve the problem right away. That’s because the dream isn’t about the solution to the problem, it’s about having the problem. When the dream clerk told you “I can help, but wait until the boss leaves,” it wasn’t because he had secret knowledge you weren’t aware of - it’s because your brain wasn’t done with the “stranded without a car” scenario, and was trying to draw it out a little more by inventing a reason you can’t solve it right away. Later in the dream, your brain is done with the starting scenario, so it generates the “secret bedroom” solution on the spot so it can move on to some other scenario.
For me it’s not language, but music: in my dreams, I have written and performed the perfect pop song several times, although in real life I don’t play any instrument, just have a passable singing voice and am just a great admirer of music. This is all dream logic, just like the logic behind the dream in the OP.
I had a dream a few months ago in which I completely and sincerely believed something totally wrong and / or unscientific, that I absolutely don’t believe when awake. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but it was something like believing the Earth is flat. Say, someone said in the dream “you know the Earth is flat, right?” And I said “of course; everybody knows that”, and meaning it. Again, that’s just an example. It wasn’t flat Eartherism, but it was very akin to that.
When I woke up I thought “how can I have a completely different set of beliefs in my dreams than I do when awake?!?”. Yep, the subconscious is a very strange and complex thing.
A friend and collaborator of mine once had a dream that he had proved an important theorem. He woke up briefly, wrote a note to himself and went back to sleep. When he woke up and looked at the note it claimed that he had found a necessary and sufficient condition that a group be chocolate.
I once dreamed that I performed Van Morrison’s “Caravan” on stage. I am familiar with the song, but don’t know many of the words. So it’s not something I couldn’t learn, but I couldn’t do it without practice. In the dream I knew every word.
When you talk you don’t have it all planned out. You know the general idea you want to impart and you might consciously form some part of a sentence before you start talking. Then you talk, often at length, stringing together perfectly formed sentences that you clearly didn’t have a chance to consciously plan before you started. I imagine it’s much the same when we’re dreaming - the dream serves some purpose (sorting information?) and the narrative is formed on the fly to serve that purpose. I doubt that the brain has it all figured out up front. If it did, the dream itself probably wouldn’t need to exist because the purpose it serves would have already been met.
Is there a useful analogy between dreaming and AI? Dreaming seems to work the same way, drawing from a huge database of conscious and unconscious memories and assembling them into a semi-coherent picture.