The best and worst experiences you had last week probably happened when you were dreaming.
tl;dr—Compared to waking life, dreams are pretty wild and emotionally intense. Example - in a dream last week all my teeth fell out which was pretty distressing, and nothing as interesting happened to me in waking life. How emotional/ extreme an experience is seems like a good proxy for how good or bad it is. So probably the best and worse experiences you’ve had last week were whilst you were dreaming.
Why might this be true?
Dreams are extreme. In my recent dreams I’ve been in a fistfight, been flying and lost all my teeth. The most extreme things that I’ve done in the last week IRL include eating three chocolate pastries and having a large coffee.
Dreams are emotional. The last times I’ve felt grief, screamed in fear, or experienced infatuation have all been whilst I was dreaming. The most extreme emotion that I’ve felt in the past week was probably disappointment from losing a game of age of empires.
The ‘extremeness’ and ‘emotionalness’ of an experience seem like reasonable proxies for how good or bad the experience is.
Why might this not be true?
Dreams are less ‘vivid’. Sensations or emotions in dreams can be less vivid than IRL. If I break my leg in a dream, it will hurt, but maybe not as much as if I were to actually break my leg.
Dreams are ‘dissociative’. Dreams can kind of feel like watching a movie of playing a game. If a hippo is charging at me in a dream, I might be a lot less scared than if a hippo is actually charging at me.
Dreams are short. If we take REM sleep as a rough proxy for dreaming, the ratio of dream to awake time is roughly 1:10, so there’s less time to have these experiences (though plausibly a minute of dream experience feels longer than a minute of waking experience, eg. sometimes I go to sleep for 15 minutes and it feels like it’s been hours)
My best guess
The average minute of dream experience will be either more good or bad than the average minute of waking life experience, maybe by 3-5x
Probably the best and worst experiences that a random person had over the past week happened in their dreams
I really have no idea
Given it’s hard to tell, I expect there’s a lot of individual differences here. I might have particularly wild dreams or a particularly mundane waking life.
Does this matter?
If my speculations are in the right ballpark, it’s not implausible that our dream experiences are more than our waking experiences in determining what our lives are like overall. If you buy a hedonistic theory of well-being, you might think that how good or bad people’s lives are is largely determined by the quality of their dreams.
Regardless of the above, my guess is people will tend to underweight the importance of their dreams as a constituent of wellbeing because we don’t remember them.
Lucid dreaming, sleeping more or less, and taking some kinds of medication are potential ways of changing your dream experiences. I’m not recommending any of these.
I’d be pretty interested to see an experience sampling study comparing people’s assessments of their experiences whilst dreaming and awake, and think I’d probably change my mind significantly depending on the results.
though plausibly a minute of dream experience feels longer than a minute of waking experience, eg. sometimes I go to sleep for 15 minutes and it feels like it’s been hours
The argument from LaBerge and other psychologists is that when it ‘feels like it’s been hours’, it’s just an illusion or narrative fiction, which you can’t detect because the critical thinking has been disabled, and no more real than when in a play, the curtain drops and then rises ‘hours later’.
“You may be wondering, then, how you could have a dream that seems to last for years or lifetimes. I believe this effect is achieved in dreams by the same stage trick that causes the illusion of the passage of time in the movies or theater. If, on screen or stage or dream, we see someone turning out the light as the clock strikes midnight, and after a few dark moments, we see him turn off an alarm as morning shines in, we’ll accept (pretend, without being aware we pretend) that many hours have passed...” [pg 22, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990); Stephen LaBerge & Howard Rheingold.]
You can’t remember or produce hours of experience corresponding to that; you simply remember having remembered, etc, shortcircuiting to the final mental state without having actually gone through the apparently preceding states, like the skeptical argument that the world could have been created 5s ago by God in the exact same state as it would have been if it had actually been created billions of years ago naturally. Similar to how you can spend decades or ‘billions of years’ in a psychedelic state, or be ‘trapped forever in a timeless crystal’ like Scott Alexander mentions—don’t worry, time passed anyway and he got better. (See also false insights, retrocognition.) And when you try to intervene by waking people up in lucid dreams or doing tasks, they seem to still be processing time at a normal 1:1 rate. An additional piece of evidence is how people say “time slows down” in an extreme event like a car crash, but if you have people go bungiejumping and you test their perception of time using clocks, they aren’t able to perceive anything they normally wouldn’t. Quantity-wise, it seems like 1 minute of dreaming ~ 1 minute IRL.
Now, quality-wise, they may be able to remember more, there’s some followup research on that, but that is more about motivation/valence intensifying things than ability or unlocking some ‘overclocked mode’ in the brain. (They always could, they just didn’t bother.)
So the question devolves back to the intensity of the experience. If you want to optimize it for some sense of utility, then if dreaming has near-zero intensity, optimization is a lot less appealing than the naive toting up of”I spend X minutes a day in REM sleep, so that’s Y hours a lifetime” would suggest.
My own observation is that while my dreams are not infrequently quite unpleasant and nightmarish in content, probably the majority of my dreams are negative, the corresponding emotional reaction is not there. Many dreams ought to have one waking up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, unable to focus for the rest of the day, but they don’t. (And when they do, we call them ‘night terrors’. Why aren’t all bad dreams “night terrors”? Why does it decrease with age, and correlate with psychiatric problems?) But even if one were to write them down (and I did for a while in a dream journal) to block forgetting, I feel back to normal practically upon waking, and definitely within a short time. I’ve surely had thousands of terrible, terrible experiences in my dreams (like last night, I had a long and vivid dream about waking up to my father having suddenly died overnight, where I was “very sad”—but upon waking, I was much more cheerful than one would hope I would be if my dad had abruptly died), and they still have not added up to any major PTSD or depression or even noticeably affected my waking life. So that is pointing towards the experience of dreaming being far, far less intense than it seems.
We could also point to sleepwalkers of various sorts: even when executing complex actions (like murdering someone), I’ve never seen any accounts which mention deeply felt emotions. (WP emphasizes their dullness and apathetic affect.) Or if I watch a cat, paw twitching as they clearly are hunting something in a dream, they seem excited, but not nearly as hyper-excited and intense as when I watch the same cat in a real hunt. (We could also point to anesthesia awareness survivors, who do seem often deeply traumatized by a single awakening during surgery—even ones that they don’t remember afterwards—and in fact triggering endless nightmares as a side-effect.)
I think this makes sense from a functional perspective. Why would dreams have any more than a shadow of waking life’s impact, any more than daydreaming about yourself as an action hero or writing a comic book script feels like the real thing would? If dreaming is for some sort of model-based learning process, it’s probably best to decouple it from the autonomic nervous system in the same way you’re definitely decoupled from your muscles and limbs. If you are imagining yourself being shot a dozen times a night to explore your imagined responses or experiences, you don’t want to physically react like that a dozen times a night! That would be extremely bad for you physically and psychically: if you reacted to dreams even a small fraction as much as to the same event in real-life, then after decades of dreaming many times per night, night after night, you would have a dozen different PTSD disorders and half the DSM. A full emotional reaction/qualia would appear to be wasteful and unnecessary for the learning. A shadow suffices for simulation.
So that’s a physical reason why dream-experiences would be far more impoverished (and thus of less moral weight) than real-life experiences.
My own observation is that while my dreams are not infrequently quite unpleasant and nightmarish in content, a corresponding emotional reaction is not there
My best guess is that I experience as intense emotions in dreams as in waking life. Mostly this is informed by personal experience/ introspection. I kept a dream journal for a while a long time ago, and at one point also rated how good or bad the most recent dream bit was after waking. I can’t remember exactly what my scores were, but seem to remember it being consistent with dream experiences feeling pretty good or bad. (I might be something of an anomaly with my dream experiences though, I have narcolepsy and annoyingly for my housemates once every month or two I’ll start screaming in my sleep).
The main observation is that dreams tend to be negative on many dimensions. The most common emotion is apprehension; aggressions are more frequent than friendly interactions, and misfortunes outnumber good fortunes.
I haven’t looked at the original study, and AFAICT there isn’t any comparison of emotions in waking life to dreams, but was interesting to me that the ratio of negative to positive emotions reported was 4:1.
There is a missing factor from this, which is anticipation and retrospection, in terms of weighting the relative value/importance of experiences.
Personally, I heavily discount the importance of imaginary experiences. A real papercut is hundreds of times more impactful in my decision-making and valuation than a dreamed amputation.
I’ve recently started ‘gratitude emailing’ - emailing a friend with things that I’m grateful for, who emails back with things they are grateful for, and then I email back etc.
I’ve found it hard to create a habit of gratitude journalling in the past, but this has been pretty easy and fun. I think this is because:
There’s a social expectation to keep doing it
Things that are in my email inbox feel more urgent
I feel like I’m helping my friend by doing it
It’s nice to hear about what someone else is grateful for
It’s a good way to keep in contact with someone (the friend I email is my mum, and it’s a nice way of staying in touch)
I recently finished a major work project and wrote a review of the project to be shared with my colleagues. The main questions I wanted to answer were a) Was this worth doing? b) How could it be done better next time.
Towards the end of writing the review I noticed that despite having written a bunch of words on these questions, I felt like I hadn’t actually answered them. It felt like I was writing a review of the project, as distinct from actually reviewing the project. I started a fresh page, aiming to answer the questions, and ended up having quite different takes on these questions than when writing with the intention to communicate.
In general, I think that writing with the intention to communicate my thoughts makes the quality of my thinking worse than if I’m writing with the intention to think. The best strategy I have for dealing with this at the moment is separate out the two processes, first work out my thoughts on a given question, then edit these thoughts to communicate them to others (I find using separate documents a useful way of separating out the processes).
Sometimes the opposite feels true. For example, if I’m trying to answer a question or solve a problem and I’m struggling, writing a message to someone asking them for help solving the problem can lead to me finding a solution myself.
The best and worst experiences you had last week probably happened when you were dreaming.
tl;dr—Compared to waking life, dreams are pretty wild and emotionally intense. Example - in a dream last week all my teeth fell out which was pretty distressing, and nothing as interesting happened to me in waking life. How emotional/ extreme an experience is seems like a good proxy for how good or bad it is. So probably the best and worse experiences you’ve had last week were whilst you were dreaming.
Why might this be true?
Dreams are extreme. In my recent dreams I’ve been in a fistfight, been flying and lost all my teeth. The most extreme things that I’ve done in the last week IRL include eating three chocolate pastries and having a large coffee.
Dreams are emotional. The last times I’ve felt grief, screamed in fear, or experienced infatuation have all been whilst I was dreaming. The most extreme emotion that I’ve felt in the past week was probably disappointment from losing a game of age of empires.
The ‘extremeness’ and ‘emotionalness’ of an experience seem like reasonable proxies for how good or bad the experience is.
Why might this not be true?
Dreams are less ‘vivid’. Sensations or emotions in dreams can be less vivid than IRL. If I break my leg in a dream, it will hurt, but maybe not as much as if I were to actually break my leg.
Dreams are ‘dissociative’. Dreams can kind of feel like watching a movie of playing a game. If a hippo is charging at me in a dream, I might be a lot less scared than if a hippo is actually charging at me.
Dreams are short. If we take REM sleep as a rough proxy for dreaming, the ratio of dream to awake time is roughly 1:10, so there’s less time to have these experiences (though plausibly a minute of dream experience feels longer than a minute of waking experience, eg. sometimes I go to sleep for 15 minutes and it feels like it’s been hours)
My best guess
The average minute of dream experience will be either more good or bad than the average minute of waking life experience, maybe by 3-5x
Probably the best and worst experiences that a random person had over the past week happened in their dreams
I really have no idea
Given it’s hard to tell, I expect there’s a lot of individual differences here. I might have particularly wild dreams or a particularly mundane waking life.
Does this matter?
If my speculations are in the right ballpark, it’s not implausible that our dream experiences are more than our waking experiences in determining what our lives are like overall. If you buy a hedonistic theory of well-being, you might think that how good or bad people’s lives are is largely determined by the quality of their dreams.
Regardless of the above, my guess is people will tend to underweight the importance of their dreams as a constituent of wellbeing because we don’t remember them.
Lucid dreaming, sleeping more or less, and taking some kinds of medication are potential ways of changing your dream experiences. I’m not recommending any of these.
I’d be pretty interested to see an experience sampling study comparing people’s assessments of their experiences whilst dreaming and awake, and think I’d probably change my mind significantly depending on the results.
The argument from LaBerge and other psychologists is that when it ‘feels like it’s been hours’, it’s just an illusion or narrative fiction, which you can’t detect because the critical thinking has been disabled, and no more real than when in a play, the curtain drops and then rises ‘hours later’.
You can’t remember or produce hours of experience corresponding to that; you simply remember having remembered, etc, shortcircuiting to the final mental state without having actually gone through the apparently preceding states, like the skeptical argument that the world could have been created 5s ago by God in the exact same state as it would have been if it had actually been created billions of years ago naturally. Similar to how you can spend decades or ‘billions of years’ in a psychedelic state, or be ‘trapped forever in a timeless crystal’ like Scott Alexander mentions—don’t worry, time passed anyway and he got better. (See also false insights, retrocognition.) And when you try to intervene by waking people up in lucid dreams or doing tasks, they seem to still be processing time at a normal 1:1 rate. An additional piece of evidence is how people say “time slows down” in an extreme event like a car crash, but if you have people go bungiejumping and you test their perception of time using clocks, they aren’t able to perceive anything they normally wouldn’t. Quantity-wise, it seems like 1 minute of dreaming ~ 1 minute IRL.
Now, quality-wise, they may be able to remember more, there’s some followup research on that, but that is more about motivation/valence intensifying things than ability or unlocking some ‘overclocked mode’ in the brain. (They always could, they just didn’t bother.)
So the question devolves back to the intensity of the experience. If you want to optimize it for some sense of utility, then if dreaming has near-zero intensity, optimization is a lot less appealing than the naive toting up of”I spend X minutes a day in REM sleep, so that’s Y hours a lifetime” would suggest.
My own observation is that while my dreams are not infrequently quite unpleasant and nightmarish in content, probably the majority of my dreams are negative, the corresponding emotional reaction is not there. Many dreams ought to have one waking up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, unable to focus for the rest of the day, but they don’t. (And when they do, we call them ‘night terrors’. Why aren’t all bad dreams “night terrors”? Why does it decrease with age, and correlate with psychiatric problems?) But even if one were to write them down (and I did for a while in a dream journal) to block forgetting, I feel back to normal practically upon waking, and definitely within a short time. I’ve surely had thousands of terrible, terrible experiences in my dreams (like last night, I had a long and vivid dream about waking up to my father having suddenly died overnight, where I was “very sad”—but upon waking, I was much more cheerful than one would hope I would be if my dad had abruptly died), and they still have not added up to any major PTSD or depression or even noticeably affected my waking life. So that is pointing towards the experience of dreaming being far, far less intense than it seems.
We could also point to sleepwalkers of various sorts: even when executing complex actions (like murdering someone), I’ve never seen any accounts which mention deeply felt emotions. (WP emphasizes their dullness and apathetic affect.) Or if I watch a cat, paw twitching as they clearly are hunting something in a dream, they seem excited, but not nearly as hyper-excited and intense as when I watch the same cat in a real hunt. (We could also point to anesthesia awareness survivors, who do seem often deeply traumatized by a single awakening during surgery—even ones that they don’t remember afterwards—and in fact triggering endless nightmares as a side-effect.)
I think this makes sense from a functional perspective. Why would dreams have any more than a shadow of waking life’s impact, any more than daydreaming about yourself as an action hero or writing a comic book script feels like the real thing would? If dreaming is for some sort of model-based learning process, it’s probably best to decouple it from the autonomic nervous system in the same way you’re definitely decoupled from your muscles and limbs. If you are imagining yourself being shot a dozen times a night to explore your imagined responses or experiences, you don’t want to physically react like that a dozen times a night! That would be extremely bad for you physically and psychically: if you reacted to dreams even a small fraction as much as to the same event in real-life, then after decades of dreaming many times per night, night after night, you would have a dozen different PTSD disorders and half the DSM. A full emotional reaction/qualia would appear to be wasteful and unnecessary for the learning. A shadow suffices for simulation.
So that’s a physical reason why dream-experiences would be far more impoverished (and thus of less moral weight) than real-life experiences.
My best guess is that I experience as intense emotions in dreams as in waking life. Mostly this is informed by personal experience/ introspection. I kept a dream journal for a while a long time ago, and at one point also rated how good or bad the most recent dream bit was after waking. I can’t remember exactly what my scores were, but seem to remember it being consistent with dream experiences feeling pretty good or bad. (I might be something of an anomaly with my dream experiences though, I have narcolepsy and annoyingly for my housemates once every month or two I’ll start screaming in my sleep).
This Sleep, Dreams and Dreaming Oxford Handbook article talks about a study of ‘dream content dimensions’
I haven’t looked at the original study, and AFAICT there isn’t any comparison of emotions in waking life to dreams, but was interesting to me that the ratio of negative to positive emotions reported was 4:1.
There is a missing factor from this, which is anticipation and retrospection, in terms of weighting the relative value/importance of experiences.
Personally, I heavily discount the importance of imaginary experiences. A real papercut is hundreds of times more impactful in my decision-making and valuation than a dreamed amputation.
Gratitude Emailing
I’ve recently started ‘gratitude emailing’ - emailing a friend with things that I’m grateful for, who emails back with things they are grateful for, and then I email back etc.
I’ve found it hard to create a habit of gratitude journalling in the past, but this has been pretty easy and fun. I think this is because:
There’s a social expectation to keep doing it
Things that are in my email inbox feel more urgent
I feel like I’m helping my friend by doing it
It’s nice to hear about what someone else is grateful for
It’s a good way to keep in contact with someone (the friend I email is my mum, and it’s a nice way of staying in touch)
Thinking and Communicating as Separate Processes
I recently finished a major work project and wrote a review of the project to be shared with my colleagues. The main questions I wanted to answer were a) Was this worth doing? b) How could it be done better next time.
Towards the end of writing the review I noticed that despite having written a bunch of words on these questions, I felt like I hadn’t actually answered them. It felt like I was writing a review of the project, as distinct from actually reviewing the project. I started a fresh page, aiming to answer the questions, and ended up having quite different takes on these questions than when writing with the intention to communicate.
In general, I think that writing with the intention to communicate my thoughts makes the quality of my thinking worse than if I’m writing with the intention to think. The best strategy I have for dealing with this at the moment is separate out the two processes, first work out my thoughts on a given question, then edit these thoughts to communicate them to others (I find using separate documents a useful way of separating out the processes).
Sometimes the opposite feels true. For example, if I’m trying to answer a question or solve a problem and I’m struggling, writing a message to someone asking them for help solving the problem can lead to me finding a solution myself.