Trivial pursuit and human extinction

I've heard noises when drifting in or out of sleep, which definitely weren't real noises being incorporated into my dreams. But they're not 'messages' from the unconscious. The unconscious isn't some kind of magical ghost that sends you cryptic messages. Your unconscious just consists of any memories, beliefs, desires etc. which you aren't currently conscious of, and which you can't easily retrieve. But just because they're 'locked away', that doesn't mean there's anything mysterious about them. Most of your unconscious thoughts are probably incredibly boring... like memories of every time you've been to the toilet.

Dreams may consist material from the unconscious, but they're not messages. I mean, they're incoherent... why do you think people make absolutely no sense when they talk in their sleep? Because they're not really saying anything. Dreams are gibberish.

i think you've oversimplified things there.

I've read that dreams only last a minute or so, even though they seem to last much longer. Maybe the reason that our sleep-talking sounds like gibberish is because our brains are moving so fast in the dream state that we are unable to vocalize fast enough.
Although, there have been times that I've understood exactly what my daughter is saying - loudly and clearly - even though she's sound asleep.[/color]

I wish youd work on the connectivity of your titles and your threads. So howd yer brick sll turn out?

agrote

I have been studying psychology and cognitive science in my spare time and I am convinced that the unconscious is very important.

Cognitive science tells us that more than 95% of all thought is unconscious.

I'll tell you what makes me wonder about dreaming; many times I've been in that netherworld just before falling asleep, and I've been thinking about something that has nothing to do with me or my life and then suddenly come fully awake again and wondered "WTF was that???"
It almost seems at times I've channeled into someone else's mind and I'm having their thoughts....if you catch my drift. Like, completely foreign thoughts and subjects about which I know nothing, have somehow made their way into my mind.

...it's those thoughts that float into my head before falling asleep that puzzle me the most.[/color]

I have been studying a lot of psychology in the last year and psychology places a great deal of importance on the unconscious and upon dreams and myth.

They consider dreams are one means wherein the ego cannot suppress the unconscious and therein the conscious can gain some insight into the unconscious. Likewise myth serves the same purpose of all humans. In other words we discover some universal truths hidden in myth and we find some hidden truth hidden away by repression by the conscious mind.

I recently got my degree in psychology and philosophy. What you are talking about is psychoanalytic theory. Contemporary psychology is a science, and it has done away with such unsupported claims. What empirical evidence have you found that there is a unified 'thing' called the 'unconscious', or that dreams are insights into the 'unconscious'

coberst wrote:

I have been studying a lot of psychology in the last year and psychology places a great deal of importance on the unconscious and upon dreams and myth.

They consider dreams are one means wherein the ego cannot suppress the unconscious and therein the conscious can gain some insight into the unconscious. Likewise myth serves the same purpose of all humans. In other words we discover some universal truths hidden in myth and we find some hidden truth hidden away by repression by the conscious mind.

I recently got my degree in psychology and philosophy. What you are talking about is psychoanalytic theory. Contemporary psychology is a science, and it has done away with such unsupported claims. What empirical evidence have you found that there is a unified 'thing' called the 'unconscious', or that dreams are insights into the 'unconscious'?

Have I just fashioned faces in my mind? Faces that don't really exist??

happycat wrote:

Have I just fashioned faces in my mind? Faces that don't really exist??

Yes. You've seen lots of noses, eyes, hair colours, face shapes etc. in your life, and your mind is capable of reassembling them through imagination, or through dreaming. You dream of faces that you have never seen before, but what makes you think they aren't composed of parts that you have seen before? Or of parts to which you apply concepts such as size. It's possible to imagine a real nose as being bigger than it is, so it's possible to dream of incredibly big noses.

I used to dream that my sister had green skin. There's nothing very mysterious about this... I'd seen my sister before, and I'd seen the colour green, and during sleep my memories of my sister and of the colour green were activated simultaneously - or something like that.

or......was your sister the jealous type and you knew it, and that's how it manifested in your sleeping mind?

that's how I would interpret that dream