I occasionally have dreams in which I am playing an RTS videogame like Starcraft. In these, I am a disembodied entity seeing the world only as it might be displayed in such a game. During those dreams, this feels natural and unsurprising and I don’t put a second thought to the matter. In fact, I’ve been having these dreams for a while now and only just recently noticed that odd fact that it’s not me sitting at a computer playing the game, it’s just the game being the only thing in the world at all.
Do other people have dreams in which they are not human-shaped or otherwise experience from a perspective that is very different from real life?
Tetris dreams are well-known phenomena, but the reports of them I’ve read are unclear as to the nature of the dreams themselves. Do you just see falling blocks? Or is it as if you are in a Tetris universe with nothing else? Can anyone comment or elaborate on the sensation?
I had numerous Tetris dreams during my peak of playing and for many months afterwards. My own experience was mostly going about my business in ordinary cityscapes, office spaces, rooms in my house, but with Tetris pieces constantly falling into gaps between objects. Rotate/drop was under my control but not always dependably so, sometimes creating an experience of panic as there was often some unknown but disastrous consequence of failure.
During this period incidence of such dreams increased with more Tetris-playing, but also were more often when I was stressed at work, in which cases the Tetris shapes were also somehow related to complex statistical / simulation programming I was doing in my day job.
I gave up Tetris cold-turkey when I began to see imaginary shapes falling between real objects during waking hours. Other games since then had similar but far smaller effects on my dream states.
I’m trying to recall, I haven’t played Tetris in a few years. IIRC, was like playing Tetris on my computer, but without anything in my peripheral vision.
I get something similar, in that I frequently lose my perspective as a humanoid actor in my dreams. It appears that in my own dreams I am more or less incapable of simulating another living being without subjectively experiencing that beings thoughts and emotions at the same time. Perhaps for that reason my dreams are usually of empty wilderness or stars flying around. However, a few times per month I wake up very confused at just being one person because while asleep I experienced the thoughts of multiple individuals simultaneously, including whatever emotions they felt and their relative lack of information of each others perspectives. The maximum number of people I’ve been at once was seven, where three beings were fighting another two beings to save the other three from being tortured.
I’ve seen top-down perspectives in dreams, such as those in 2D RPGs. I feel like I’m playing a video game, but I don’t have an awareness of a controller or anything; the characters just do what I tell them, and the “screen” is my entire visual field. (The actual experience of playing a video game tends to be similar: I almost never think about the controller or my hand; I just make stuff happen.) I also tend not to have much of a kinesthetic sense in dreams I remember, either.
Another weird thing: Everything I try to type in dreams is invariably misspelled. Once, in a dream, I was trying to Google something, but the text I was “typing” in the search bar kept changing pretty much at random. Only the letters that I’m “looking at” during any given moment stay what they are.
Once, in a dream, I was trying to Google something, but the text I was “typing” in the search bar kept changing pretty much at random.
Happens to me too, just instead of googling it is usually me trying to write something down, e.g. someone’s phone number, and failing to make the text legible or realising I wrote some nonsense instead of what I tried to write.
Actually, this is one of the techniques for lucid dreaming—how to realize that you are in a dream. You need a test that will reliably give different results in reality and in dreams. Different things work for different people, but reading and writing is among frequent examples. Other examples: counting, or trying to levitate. (With levitation it is the other way round: it works only in dreams.)
Strange. I just now realized I probably never used a computer in my dream, although I spend most of my days at computer. How is that possible? An ad-hoc explanation is that precisely because my life is so much connected with computers, I don’t perceive the computer as “computer”, but merely as an extension of myself, as another input/output channel. Most of my dreams are about being with people or walking in the nature; and I actually do a very little of that.
It’s very common for me to be human but different (child, woman, or very different looking man). Most common non-human forms are non-human-ape, wolf, or bird. Sometimes it’s an imaginary monster of some sort. But dreaming in non-human forms is generally fairly rare.
Most common non-embodied perspectives are either eye-level-view, television view-style, or looking down from a distance. In these cases, I’ll either self-identify with one of the bodies, or simply be an observer. This frequently switches mid-storyline.
I’ve had some dreams like that—a few dreams were specifically of the game Supreme Commander, and I also occasionally am in third-person in dreams as if I was watching from the screen of a third-person game—I don’t think it’s really “very different from real life”, it’s close to the experience of being immersed in a videogame, it’s just that rather than overlooking details you’re not paying attention to, those details simply don’t exist because it’s a dream.
I occasionally have dreams in which I am playing an RTS videogame like Starcraft. In these, I am a disembodied entity seeing the world only as it might be displayed in such a game. During those dreams, this feels natural and unsurprising and I don’t put a second thought to the matter. In fact, I’ve been having these dreams for a while now and only just recently noticed that odd fact that it’s not me sitting at a computer playing the game, it’s just the game being the only thing in the world at all.
Do other people have dreams in which they are not human-shaped or otherwise experience from a perspective that is very different from real life?
I used to have Age of Empires dreams. I’ve even had Tetris dreams.
Tetris dreams are well-known phenomena, but the reports of them I’ve read are unclear as to the nature of the dreams themselves. Do you just see falling blocks? Or is it as if you are in a Tetris universe with nothing else? Can anyone comment or elaborate on the sensation?
I had numerous Tetris dreams during my peak of playing and for many months afterwards. My own experience was mostly going about my business in ordinary cityscapes, office spaces, rooms in my house, but with Tetris pieces constantly falling into gaps between objects. Rotate/drop was under my control but not always dependably so, sometimes creating an experience of panic as there was often some unknown but disastrous consequence of failure.
During this period incidence of such dreams increased with more Tetris-playing, but also were more often when I was stressed at work, in which cases the Tetris shapes were also somehow related to complex statistical / simulation programming I was doing in my day job.
I gave up Tetris cold-turkey when I began to see imaginary shapes falling between real objects during waking hours. Other games since then had similar but far smaller effects on my dream states.
I’m trying to recall, I haven’t played Tetris in a few years. IIRC, was like playing Tetris on my computer, but without anything in my peripheral vision.
I get something similar, in that I frequently lose my perspective as a humanoid actor in my dreams. It appears that in my own dreams I am more or less incapable of simulating another living being without subjectively experiencing that beings thoughts and emotions at the same time. Perhaps for that reason my dreams are usually of empty wilderness or stars flying around. However, a few times per month I wake up very confused at just being one person because while asleep I experienced the thoughts of multiple individuals simultaneously, including whatever emotions they felt and their relative lack of information of each others perspectives. The maximum number of people I’ve been at once was seven, where three beings were fighting another two beings to save the other three from being tortured.
I’ve seen top-down perspectives in dreams, such as those in 2D RPGs. I feel like I’m playing a video game, but I don’t have an awareness of a controller or anything; the characters just do what I tell them, and the “screen” is my entire visual field. (The actual experience of playing a video game tends to be similar: I almost never think about the controller or my hand; I just make stuff happen.) I also tend not to have much of a kinesthetic sense in dreams I remember, either.
Another weird thing: Everything I try to type in dreams is invariably misspelled. Once, in a dream, I was trying to Google something, but the text I was “typing” in the search bar kept changing pretty much at random. Only the letters that I’m “looking at” during any given moment stay what they are.
Happens to me too, just instead of googling it is usually me trying to write something down, e.g. someone’s phone number, and failing to make the text legible or realising I wrote some nonsense instead of what I tried to write.
Actually, this is one of the techniques for lucid dreaming—how to realize that you are in a dream. You need a test that will reliably give different results in reality and in dreams. Different things work for different people, but reading and writing is among frequent examples. Other examples: counting, or trying to levitate. (With levitation it is the other way round: it works only in dreams.)
Strange. I just now realized I probably never used a computer in my dream, although I spend most of my days at computer. How is that possible? An ad-hoc explanation is that precisely because my life is so much connected with computers, I don’t perceive the computer as “computer”, but merely as an extension of myself, as another input/output channel. Most of my dreams are about being with people or walking in the nature; and I actually do a very little of that.
Failing to achieve any kind of goals is a very common topic of dreams.
Yes to both.
It’s very common for me to be human but different (child, woman, or very different looking man). Most common non-human forms are non-human-ape, wolf, or bird. Sometimes it’s an imaginary monster of some sort. But dreaming in non-human forms is generally fairly rare.
Most common non-embodied perspectives are either eye-level-view, television view-style, or looking down from a distance. In these cases, I’ll either self-identify with one of the bodies, or simply be an observer. This frequently switches mid-storyline.
I’ve had similar dreams.
In general I don’t think I’m aware of my self/body in dreams. Occasionally I’m different people but dont notice.
I’ve had some dreams like that—a few dreams were specifically of the game Supreme Commander, and I also occasionally am in third-person in dreams as if I was watching from the screen of a third-person game—I don’t think it’s really “very different from real life”, it’s close to the experience of being immersed in a videogame, it’s just that rather than overlooking details you’re not paying attention to, those details simply don’t exist because it’s a dream.