Old memes I found on my phone part 2 (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by khannie@lemmy.world to c/memes@lemmy.world

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[-] MossyFeathers@pawb.social 0 points 1 month ago

Okay, there's actually a speculated reason for this: while you're dreaming, your body is paralyzed but your brain is not. When you go into fight-or-flight when you're dreaming, your brain starts trying to take sensory input from both your dream self and your real self. As a result, your brain is receiving mixed signals: your arm is moving and it's not moving; you're successfully controlling your arm but you can't control your arm. The result is that it feels like it takes a significant amount of effort to move your arm, and your arm moves slowly.

My own personal experience seems to support this: if I casually run or hit something in a dream, then it happens as expected. If I'm in fight-or-flight mode, then my actions occur in slow motion. However, I got lucky and became lucid during one such moment, and decided to try consciously focus on just moving my dream arm, and I was no longer moving in slow motion.

[-] Monument@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I used to have dreams all the time that I was being attacked or chased and could not fight back effectively. In some, they were full on night terror territory, where I’d be crying out, and others could not wake me.

Then the weirdest thing happened – for a very brief period I did boxing as fitness (instead of like, actually boxing). And I discovered that I can actually throw a hard punch (you know, when I’m prepared for it and have my hands wrapped and am wearing boxing gloves).

But for some reason that knowledge broke my suspension of disbelief as it relates to dreams. If something attacks me in my dreams, I know that the inability to punch means I’m dreaming, so I semi-lucidly just wake up now. If something seems too shitty to be to true, my brain just pulls the escape hatch and I wake up.