I ALWAYS dream in first person. I have NEVER experienced lucid dreams, or that realisation that I am dreaming, when dreaming. The ‘pinch test’ doesn’t work for two reasons: 1, I am not in control of my dreams, so I cannot decide to test myself. 2, If I experience pain in a dream, it is experienced the exactly the same as being awake. Pain being a mental event (philosophically termed ‘mental event’, despite whether mental events exist, to which I believe they do), if experienced in dreams, how then can one distinguish it from the experience of pain in waking reality?

I realise that I am quite unique in the topic of dream experience. I know this from philosophical classes, and discussions with friends. And I may be alone with how I experience dreams, but this IS how I experience them; and so long as there is one variable, there cannot be a unified theory/concept/thought.

Other than ‘in waking reality’ I go to bed and rise from bed, I have NO way to distinguish dreams from reality. It’s a very weird, scary, exciting, and philosophically interesting experience.

I do not consider instant gratification to be beneficial inside of dreams. In fact, if anything I would prefer my dreaming self to be more self controlled than my waking self. I would thereby benefit from reinforcing and processing the outcomes of rational behaviors without some of the associated stress.

I reject the implicit assumption that we should want to submit to instant gratification in our dreams. I accept your conclusion. I acknowledge that there is likely a good reason for evolution to have made it difficult for us to be aware that we are dreaming. I wouldn’t trust people with that sort of information either. At least, not until they were able to rationally explain the purpose of dreams and demonstrate that they can use that knowledge to effectively achieve reproductive goals.

Often when I’m dreaming I “feel” that I’m awake.

You could also say, you often wake up from sleep and feel the urge to tell a story that you had a dream in which you felt like you were awake. But what your brain was really doing, and what “you” were experiencing, while you were asleep is anybody’s guess.

Don’t panic. If you weren’t meant to guess you’re simulated, you wouldn’t be in a physics that invites simulation arguments.

Unsimulated JBs in the same situation would also write simulation wonderings, so stopping you from doing so would invalidate the accuracy of the simulation.

I used to have dreams where my teeth would fall out fairly often. Then I went to the dentist, who noticed that my teeth were getting worn down, probably through grinding them while sleeping. He gave me a plastic mouth-guard thing to wear at night, and now I don’t have teeth-falling-out dreams any more. Perhaps dreams of falling also have a physiological explanation (some process inducing vertigo while sleeping), though I’d guess that naked dreams are more based on social fears.

I think you are on to something.

Here’s something a bit further along that line. When we create simulations, very often we “go inside” the simulation, for example, becoming characters in Second Life, soldiers in FPS games, etc. The very purpose of the simulation is to provide an environment to “play around” in and experience the simulation from a first person perspective, not a third person perspective.

So if this universe is a simulation, what does that say about who / what we might actually be?

I feel compelled to continue to write about it, because I’d rather get used to the tingling, than perpetually be afraid of it.

Am I dreaming? Well, since I’m unsure, I must be dreaming. Time to start flying!

didn’t occur to me while I was dreaming. But in recent years it seems that it’s finally sunk in to even that level.

It’s hard to say, of course, but I think that lately, in pretty much all the dreams I remember, I become aware at some point that I’m dreaming. But, strangely, it also seems like I remember fewer of my dreams than I used to.

In statistics there are various ways of improving the quality of a model. One way is to sample from the model and compare the samples to the real data. In this light we can view dreams as samples from the brain’s generative model of (visual) reality. This idea can explain some of the recent research about how learning depends on sleep.

Also, if the samples closely resemble the real data, it means that the model is good. So if you have very realistic dreams, it means your brain has a good model of visual reality.

See “the Wake-Sleep Algorithm for Unsupervised Neural Networks” by Hinton et al for a technical explanation of how this might work.