Comment by plasticchris
1 year ago
But your brain is disconnected from your body during dreams, to keep you from flailing around. Sometimes you even wake up before the block is lifted and can’t move. So controlling such a device would be difficult.
1 year ago
But your brain is disconnected from your body during dreams, to keep you from flailing around. Sometimes you even wake up before the block is lifted and can’t move. So controlling such a device would be difficult.
You're describing sleep paralysis, right? It's not so much a disconnection as it is an inhibition. Attempts to move most of your muscles are blocked, but external stimuli still get in. You know, once upon a time someone started the washer while I was presumably in REM, and I started to hear something in my dream. When I woke up, it only took me a couple minutes to realize that what I had been hearing in the dream was some greatly slowed-down version of the washer that had just been started, since I guess my dream time was travelling faster than real time. I think the only reason it didn't wake me up is because I'm used to sleeping through the sound of the washer running and may even normally filter it out. That's just the first time that someone managed to turn it on in the middle of my actual dreaming phase.
Yeah, that’s right. I had it once before I knew it was a thing and could see, hear, feel, but not move. Quite terrifying at the time, even if it resolved pretty rapidly.
I've been trying to induce it willingly for around a decade at this point. Same for lucid dreaming. Haven't really managed to do either one, not sure if I am capable of it either. Oh well.
1 reply →
> But your brain is disconnected from your body during dreams, to keep you from flailing around
Tell that to sleepwalkers!
I believe there are two "obvious" theories on how sleepwalking may occur:
- Sleep paralysis doesn't properly activate, and someone accidentally transfers the motion of walking into real life. proprioception may pass through to the dream, they might perceive a dream environment that allows them to navigate the real one. (i.e. righting themself from bed, staying upright while walking)
- They aren't fully asleep, but they aren't awake/aware either. I've had my fair share of people telling me that I said or did things after waking up and before immediately going back to sleep, and those are things I don't remember doing at all, probably because they weren't properly recorded in memory because my brain was not fully awake. (Some of these cases could have been DID though.)