This thread will be about dreams and language

This thread will be about dreams and language

Does anyone sometimes have dreams where you have knowledge of an abstract concept that is fundamentally unique and you've only ever observed it in this dreams? Concepts on the level of abstraction of "honor", "adventure", "evil", "good", "tasks". Things like this. Except that it's none of these but you feel it, you quasi-think it, you know it to be on the same level as these with regards to importance and how fundamental it is?

I imagine a way to represent this in literature would be to make up a nonsense word, but use it only in strange contexts but where it kind of "makes sense" in a way similar to how sometimes you know how to correctly use a word, but you couldn't define it if asked because you haven't looked into it enough

Does anyone have even the slightest idea of what I'm talking about? Maybe I'm just mentally ill.

>Does anyone sometimes have dreams where you have knowledge of an abstract concept that is fundamentally unique and you've only ever observed it in this dreams?
No, but I've had dreams where I feel like that is the case. Pretty sure that's what you're describing.

For instance once I had a dream where I was in this Japanese supermarket but it was kind of a video game and there was no floor but we were floating. And I knew I had to make sure to order my food and get home as soon as possible or else XXX would happen. And XXX within this dream was a very abstract sort of descriptive concept involving concepts such as me not doing the right thing, me being selfish, me not focusing on my life good enough, me not making the right decision, me fundamentally making a mistake that disappoints the entire dream-universe in a way that will be passed over but nonetheless will be ethically bad despite not having massive physical consequences

I don't know if that makes any sense once again, but this is what I'm talking about. Maybe it's just in-dream brain fuckups. It would be interesting to try to write a novel that makes the reader experience this

I had a dream last night I was an aviator with a gas mask on and I was going to do some aesthetically grunge shit. I had a little time to draw it at work today. I had a crowbar with me. I think I was going to destroy something or kill someone . I didn’t feel any qualms about it though. In fact, it was going to be exciting, it filled be with happiness like arousal. I craved it.
I lived in I want to say, a 40s time frame, maybe early 50s. Things weren’t stream punk exactly, but rather dystopian, as if there was a nuclear war and we were reusing technolog, like scraps that had survived, but weren’t as advanced as we were before the fallout. Maybe if something similar to the cold war had ended in the opposite direction.
People were afraid of me I think, those who didn’t know me anyways, and definitely those who I targeted. People who I worked with or were close to me liked me very much though, thought me as a friend or loved one. “Safe” or “protector” comes to mind. I felt no attachment to anyond though. It’s not that I was inherently bad, I was very charming in personality, I just didn’t feel normal human attachment. I wasn’t a bad person, but in private, my personal work which I loved very much, I did very bad things. Maybe that would make me a bad person... I most certainly was aromantic if I had to label it that way. The aura of the dream however, was intoxicatingly romantic in the way what I was doing was romanticized in my point of view, and how people thought of me was romantisized. Quite the opposite was true for both in reality.
The air was dirty, but not smog. It gave off an old-paper feel. The shading was like old tanned paper. I felt very alive in the dream, like I could feel the fresh adrenaline in my blood, to the point I blurred the lines between that feeling and the smell of copper in my mask through my intense and heavy breathing.
If anyone wants to use this as inspo be my guest because I don’t plan too. It was a really fucking cool dream though.

Dreams can be so abstract and interesting that sometimes I wonder whether real life is just a "life support" system to allow us to continue living the real purpose of life - to dream. Obviously nonsense, but when I wake up in the morning from a vivid and beautiful dream only to be instantly transported back to the real world and think to myself "yep there's my alarm going off, oh windows exist, oh I'm in a bed, oh I have to go to work, oh I'm a person, oh I have no girlfriend" it's a bit disappointing.

A few years ago I had a dream where I was a disembodied entity floating over a barren landscape split in half by a canyon with a river inside. For some reason it felt incredibly portentous, as though I were witnessing the creation of life on earth or something, I was also reminded of Kubla Khan but I don't know why. It really stuck with me and I was hoping to write something inspired by that but I've never got round to it

Never read Proust but doesn't he talk about this? I often feel disoriented when I wake up and have to remember what being a person is like again

Never read him either but now I want to

Terence McKenna described the same phenomena and also said that the end of a DMT trip feels exactly the same as waking up from a dream. Like you're sucked back into reality all of a sudden and your memory of the dream becomes foggy, then you have to re-check your parameters and all of a sudden remember that you're a human again

Do you know where Proust talks about this?

If you like that shit try psychedelics, you won't regret it.

One time I had a dream where I saw the perfect way to visualize space higher than 3 dimensions.

I forgot it as soon as I woke up and am still fucking pissed.

I liked this shit, moar. Btw try ketamine, it warps the language in pretty interesting ways.

Pretty sure Hegel proved you couldn't have an idea completely disassociated from language

I just got a book on mystical experiences, language, and the ineffable. A lot of philosophical works on mysticism touch on the ineffability of certain types of experience.

Yeah, abstract philosophy can definitely prove that babies never exposed to language can't have any ideas whatsoever, even retarded ones. /s

A baby will never have ideas such as "courage" or "loyalty" if you never teach him these words, all a baby does is experience and attempt to understand the physical world. All abstractions need a word associated to them.

WTF IS THIS IMAGE
IS THIS WHAT THEY DO
WHEN WE AREN'T LOOKING?

I dreamt I worked 4 hours overtime, and ate old french fries I found in a barrel on the way home.

Would not recommend. I woke up feeling pissed and unwell.

Makes a good deal of sense if I put my "psychedelic thoughts that are either absolute garbage or a deeper insight to the universe" hat.

>Does anyone sometimes have dreams where you have knowledge of an abstract concept that is fundamentally unique and you've only ever observed it in this dreams?
Might not be quite what you're talking about, but I've had entire (fever?) dreams that were so horrifyingly incomprehensible once I awoke that I felt physically sick, dazed and completely disoriented, trying to banish the thoughts of the dream from my mind, feeling like I'm going insane, desperately tossing and turning, unable to return to salient thought, unable to answer the demented questions asked by the dream. Numbers. No answer. Hazily stumbling to the bathroom, splashing water on my face to no avail, mind recoiling from the alien images and thoughts, whirling around itself in confusion. I wanted to call for help, tell someone I'm going crazy, but didn't, if only because it didn't last too long. The feeling slowly faded and I went back to sleep. This kind of dream has occurred something like three or four times that I vaguely remember. Two words to characterize them: confused misery. It now occurs to me that it might really be a taste of insanity. It has certainly been enough to convince me that real madness is nothing to be desired in any way, shape or form. Even now, typing this, a little of it is coming back into my awareness so I'll stop, fuck this shit.

For around the past week, I have had dreams in which I am tutoring my friends about various concepts. When this happens, my dreams are more vivid and my mind is more focused than when I go about my usual day. It has been causing me some frustration since throughout the day I can't even seem to pay attention in lectures or focus long enough to complete simple tasks

help me :C

so how were the words "courage" and "loyalty" invented in the first place?

>psychedelic thoughts that are either absolute garbage or a deeper insight to the universe
Kek

How do you differentiate between the two

You want to fuck your friends

Have you considered reading Kant on the deontological nature of moral duty? As something innate in us, as a constitutive aspect of reason itself, and as something that "holds" even if/when all worldly consequences are contrary to it (i.e., when one knows that following one's rational moral duty will have little to no utilitarian effect in the actual lived-in world)?

That's what your post reminded me of - specifically, of an attempt to conceptualise and "hold onto" that unconceptualisable, a priori moral sense, which may or may not emanate from God.

Here are some random things your post made me think of:
- Kant on the "thinkable, but not knowable" concept of God, as the Highest Good and originator/guarantor of morality. God/the highest good cannot be an object of intuition because it is not a sensuous entity - it comes from INSIDE, it is a synthetic a priori proposition of practical reason. It is a "regulative" principle.
- On the feeling of straining to conceptualise something, of (in Hegel's terms) trying to "reduce" it to the "dead" form of an ACTUAL concept from the manifold of POSSIBLE conceptions: Husserl on Meaning-Intention and Meaning-Fulfillment, in his constitutive phenomenology; specifically, the role of "place-holder" (not explaining this well) concepts which are "empty" of actual content but which the mind erects in expectation ("intention") of their fulfillment - that is, the mind "intends" (thinks, takes as its object) the fact that the concept WILL BE FILLED AT SOME POINT. That "fact" in itself, e.g., experienced as a hunch or gut-feeling, is an intend-able object of consciousness.
- Max Muller's "Perception of the Infinite," the first essay of his Gifford lectures I believe (might be wrong), which talks about Kant's noumenal (including the regulative idea of God/the highest good within it!) as the Infinite - as something we constantly strain toward, in our only-ever finite conceptions, constantly stretching out (intending!) in order to grasp it, but always falling somewhat short of it; only ever describing it apophatically.
- William James in the Varieties of Religious Experience, very similar to Muller, except that the In-finite is something WITHIN US, something within and undergirding our subconscious (i.e., the TVAM TAT ASI of mysticism), which we strain to turn *inward* in order to grasp in its fullness.

I am mentally unstable, but it may be the case that you were doing Jungian archetypal depth psychological dream exploration and brushed against your own sense of the "moral law within" (Kant), which is itself the infinite-ineffable and regulative principle ground of your finite conceptions of morality. TLDR: You saw pure platonic goodness swimming in your dreams and it swam with you for a while, in front of your eyes which are normally closed in wakefulness but were open in a dream.

A few nights ago I had a dream where I could 'paint' music in a physical sense, I rounded and smoothed off notes - adding many smaller notes along their edges, almost akin how anti-aliasing smooths out the borders between two surfaces.

You can't

Some dudes did some selfless shit that helped people and other people saw it happening and made up a word for it.

I kind of get you, but I think I have only experienced it once .
There are dreams that I have where I feel a special significance to them, moreso than other dreams.
Most of the time I disbelieve the idea that dreams can be prophetic, or spiritual, and I generally subscribe to the theory that it is kind of like a de-fragmenting process. How the brain deconstructs and stores experiential data in meaningful patterns in the unconscious, and this is rendered as a dream as memory is being recalled and moved around.
There are some though that immediately stick to me as significant, and I remember them vividly.
The most recent one was a somewhat regular dream at first, then it increased in its vividness and the house I was in morphed into a large temple complex, with myself in the main shrine, and I came to understand and that it was a gathering at the temple of a very powerful person. I left the room, and was approached by the daughter of the owner, who asked if I believed in miracles, to which I said I couldn't be sure. She then said it was miraculous that I was here, then said something that began with a T sound, which described a concept or word which I slightly understood in the dream but do not understand now, and then left. A few other odd, seemingly significant things occurred in the dream that I doubt people are interested in, but the remainder of the dream was me trying to find her again and ask her what she meant by this word, and I had the idea that it was very important for me to remember this word when I awoke.

I dreamt that my uncles and aunts were gathered round me like children, and I was introducing them one by one. That's bizarre.

I had an LSD hallucination where I realized that a lot of adults are just children in adult bodies. That's why they're so dysfunctional, mean, arrogant, and simultaneously unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful. Idiots playing dressup and thinking showing a bit of boob or abs makes them special. Children.

You really shouldn't need LSD to realize that.

It's not like I learned something new, I just had a hallucination where this became very apparent to me like I just saw it for the first time. You should know what I mean if you've ever tried it.

I get what you are saying, sorry your wording seemed to indicate it was a revelation.

There is a large difference between mature and immature people. It's just that when someone is a young age it is understandable for them to behave or think a particular way, but when someone is in their mid 20s or or 30s and they still seem to react to things the way someone might as a teenager, that's a problem.

I don't think it's as cut and dry as "lol everyone is shit at all ages"

The doors of perception were cleansed.

Exactly user

I was reverted to seeing things as they are instead of through the filter of language and thought.

You are definitely mentally ill.

Your psychedelic image (no eye contact a big tell) and your borderline incoherent concepts are major red flags.

So many artists end up babbling about nothing. Expression is important in art, but it's not more important than communication. If you forget that you'll gradually continue to go nuts forever. You're welcome ;)

A-user...

YA WHAT

Thoughts on this?

That's wonderful. From what I've heard, LSD is a complete paradigm shift that everyone ought to try at least once. What you write about language and thought has some serious weight to it. I'm young, but I can see the process taking place. Real things are made into concepts, made dull through ideas, gutted and meshed and recycled in the mind until all wonder is squeezed out like the air in a tube. How many people remember what it's like?

Going to a building in the city where the only way in is through a particular five story building that continues upwards essentially infinitely. You go into the building through the front and you can't get out again. I spent all dream running through this fucking maze which leads to an entire network of human made subterranean passages which technically exist above ground and there is no way out except through a one way valved door in the most botanical section of this building whilst being chased by invisible alien life forms. The building only appears on specific hours of the day and is invisible to passer bys. It lures in people such as myself into escaping from that one end, killing at least three people in the process where I got to the garden wall when I had to crawl up through a white net that had been erected over every portion of the sky in order to fly out of the sky and into another building of the exact same dimensions that I had just been into. I got to the other end of the building and thus passed into an alternate dimension in which there was a perfect pristine white and beige city which was completely empty with completely empty streets identical to the one that I had just used to enter the building and a street that continued in all directions that the eye could see and once you got there you were trapped forever in the alien conquered version of the alternate universe I had just been into which was apparently supposed to be England and was alerted of this over a loudspeaker that occurred in my mind and then I woke up. It was implied that the aliens weren't actually invisible but had altered the subatomic substructure of the universe and I never actually saw any of them, I just knew that they existed.