Monday, November 11, 2019

Lucid Dreams and Cartoon Physics

Back in the late 1980's while I was a senior in high school and then in college I did some experiments with lucid dreaming. Unfortunately, I don't remember the details of the training. It really wasn't that difficult. After a few days, I had a couple of lucid dreams.

In that state of consciousness, the experience of the dream world is vivid. As a dreamer, I was able to exercise some degree of agency and choice, however, it was within the context of a nonsensical world.

One of the dreams I remember involved delivering musical instruments somewhere. In the dream world, it was possible to just stack the instruments all over and inside the car. All but one of the instrument cases stayed put. That final one just kept sliding off the hood of the car.

We seem to have some built-in understanding of physics, and that understanding informs the dream consciousness. However, that understanding is really the cartoon physics understanding. The experience of day-to-day life and motion of objects leads to a non-verbal sense of how the world works. This sense of things covers 99% of the cases we experience, however, it's a much less accurate model than Newtonian physics, of course. When people get their car stuck on an icy or snowy driveway and they only have the cartoon understanding, for example, they don't know what to do.

It's actually pretty interesting that the dream version of physics is cartoon physics rather than something more detailed. It's also pretty interesting that some intellectualized idea of physics doesn't inform the dream-state ideas. Maybe extensive physical training, like many hours of ice skating, would push more of those newtonian model of physics ideas deeper into the consciousness.

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