Be aware whether you are making an assumtion that dreaming is repetition or recreation of sensory input. Apparently I am pretty aphantastic and some weird things I noted about dreams is that they don’t neccearily have any concrete shape. That is in a dream there can be a car but the car doesn’t have any shape. Trying to understand dreams as kind of hallucinated images is going to have very hard time with that. But one can try to understand this as the brain making a scene, rendering it to image and then using image recognition to “read in the scene”. For same kind of experience it can make sense to skip the rendering and image recognition steps and just go directly from scene construction to scene experience. Thus you can have a “car” “there” without a shape (or even pinned down location) as it was never assigned one. Thus the existence of “unrasterised” experiences might be easily missable for people who think throught very concrete and vivid terms.
Thus I claim we don’t know whether people see dreams.
The distinction can also enter into the waking world. I had some earworm songs stuck in my head but at some point when the stuckness was really deep I started to actually hear them. And when I actually heard them I realised that before I only referenced them in detail rather than hearing them. I could imagine that individual persons are likely to be very constant in their aphantastic-fantastic characteristic and production of that contrast of differently coding/experiencing data would be rare.
Less sure about this one as I don’t have direct experience but apprently if there is particularly evocative pictures that describe events that are strongly associated with sounds being generated some people will synesthetically hear the sounds. In this case as it can be physically asserted that no external audio data is available that part of the experience is pretty surely edited in by the brain. I wouldn’t be surprised if the upper parts of the brain would have a hard time figuring out which part of the lower parts data is based on external data and which part is guesswork. If a tree falls and you hear it but there was no athmosphere did it make a sound?
Thus I claim we don’t know whether people see dreams.
That’s a pretty bold claim just a few sentences after claiming to have aphantasia.
Some of my dreams have no visuals at all, just a vague awareness of the setting and plot points. Others are as vivid and detailed as waking experience (or even more, honestly), at least as far as vision is concerned. Dreams can fall anywhere on a spectrum between these extremes, and sometimes they can even be a mixture (e.g. a visual experience of the place and an awareness of characters in that place that don’t appear visually).
Yes, people do see dreams. I’m fairly certain I can tell the difference.
I guess there is a difference between whether all people see dreams or whether any person sees dreams. I don’t mean to claim that dreams do not happen but whether sight is involved for all people. I guess a person that has had a non-visual dream can be certain it is not the case that every dream has been seen.
I am imagining a questionare that has options like “A) I see my dreams in color B) I see my dreams in black and white” to have different results if a option like “C) I don’t see in my dreams” was present. The possible misdirection would be to not include C based on a guess that nobody reports it based preconception of what dreams are.
Be aware whether you are making an assumtion that dreaming is repetition or recreation of sensory input. Apparently I am pretty aphantastic and some weird things I noted about dreams is that they don’t neccearily have any concrete shape. That is in a dream there can be a car but the car doesn’t have any shape. Trying to understand dreams as kind of hallucinated images is going to have very hard time with that. But one can try to understand this as the brain making a scene, rendering it to image and then using image recognition to “read in the scene”. For same kind of experience it can make sense to skip the rendering and image recognition steps and just go directly from scene construction to scene experience. Thus you can have a “car” “there” without a shape (or even pinned down location) as it was never assigned one. Thus the existence of “unrasterised” experiences might be easily missable for people who think throught very concrete and vivid terms.
Thus I claim we don’t know whether people see dreams.
The distinction can also enter into the waking world. I had some earworm songs stuck in my head but at some point when the stuckness was really deep I started to actually hear them. And when I actually heard them I realised that before I only referenced them in detail rather than hearing them. I could imagine that individual persons are likely to be very constant in their aphantastic-fantastic characteristic and production of that contrast of differently coding/experiencing data would be rare.
Less sure about this one as I don’t have direct experience but apprently if there is particularly evocative pictures that describe events that are strongly associated with sounds being generated some people will synesthetically hear the sounds. In this case as it can be physically asserted that no external audio data is available that part of the experience is pretty surely edited in by the brain. I wouldn’t be surprised if the upper parts of the brain would have a hard time figuring out which part of the lower parts data is based on external data and which part is guesswork. If a tree falls and you hear it but there was no athmosphere did it make a sound?
That’s a pretty bold claim just a few sentences after claiming to have aphantasia.
Some of my dreams have no visuals at all, just a vague awareness of the setting and plot points. Others are as vivid and detailed as waking experience (or even more, honestly), at least as far as vision is concerned. Dreams can fall anywhere on a spectrum between these extremes, and sometimes they can even be a mixture (e.g. a visual experience of the place and an awareness of characters in that place that don’t appear visually).
Yes, people do see dreams. I’m fairly certain I can tell the difference.
I guess there is a difference between whether all people see dreams or whether any person sees dreams. I don’t mean to claim that dreams do not happen but whether sight is involved for all people. I guess a person that has had a non-visual dream can be certain it is not the case that every dream has been seen.
I am imagining a questionare that has options like “A) I see my dreams in color B) I see my dreams in black and white” to have different results if a option like “C) I don’t see in my dreams” was present. The possible misdirection would be to not include C based on a guess that nobody reports it based preconception of what dreams are.