I don't dream dreamed events in chronological order.
When I was a kid I kept getting told to show my working in maths. ("If you don't show the working, you get no marks if your answer is wrong." "But my answer isn't wrong, and if I show incorrect working I lose marks even if my answer's right.") This sometimes entered my dreams.
Once, I dreamed I was given a tricky maths problem and wrote the answer down, but was then forced to go back and do the working. When I woke up I realised the problem was a genuine hard problem I'd been given and I couldn't possibly have reached the solution without doing the intermediate working, so must actually have dreamed it before the solution even though I dreamed I did it afterwards.
Also, I often have lucid dreams, and enjoy them greatly. I've realised that not only can I choose how the dream progresses once it's lucid, I can also insert extra events earlier on. Indeed, if things become seriously inconsistent I wake up, so this is often necessary if I'm making an ambitious change to the dream's course.
For what it's worth, if a bear wishes to "make life difficult" in real life, you're dead. Frost On My Moustache reproduces the advice given by the Svalbard government on how to deal with polar bears. From memory:
Hope it's not noticed you.
If it does see you, hope it's not interested in you.
If it is interested in you, retreat while repeatedly firing eighty-calibre guns at its head, neck and chest as rapidly as possible.
Fervently hope it stops moving before it reaches you.
When it stops moving, wait a minute then approach cautiously and deliver half a dozen more shots to the cranium.
must actually have dreamed it before the solution even though I dreamed I did it afterwards.
That is interesting. Though I don't know if that's necessarily the interpretation, if it had happened to me I might consider the possibility that I first dreamed I had an elegant solution without actually containing the specific answer, even though I thought I did, and then dreamed the working, and then woke up and filled out the working subconsciously to have the answer and assumed that was the answer I had at first.
This was one of the more involved IMO past-paper questions. I really doubt I was capable of retconning a fully-worked solution subconsciously once awake.
Hmmm. FWIW I am capable of debugging while asleep. When I wake up I have a clear image of the bug, where I hadn't noticed when I went to sleep that there was a bug, nor did I know that I recalled my source code so exactly. (Unless I subconsciously noticed it when writing the code, and that information took a while to surface.)
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When I was a kid I kept getting told to show my working in maths. ("If you don't show the working, you get no marks if your answer is wrong." "But my answer isn't wrong, and if I show incorrect working I lose marks even if my answer's right.") This sometimes entered my dreams.
Once, I dreamed I was given a tricky maths problem and wrote the answer down, but was then forced to go back and do the working. When I woke up I realised the problem was a genuine hard problem I'd been given and I couldn't possibly have reached the solution without doing the intermediate working, so must actually have dreamed it before the solution even though I dreamed I did it afterwards.
Also, I often have lucid dreams, and enjoy them greatly. I've realised that not only can I choose how the dream progresses once it's lucid, I can also insert extra events earlier on. Indeed, if things become seriously inconsistent I wake up, so this is often necessary if I'm making an ambitious change to the dream's course.
For what it's worth, if a bear wishes to "make life difficult" in real life, you're dead. Frost On My Moustache reproduces the advice given by the Svalbard government on how to deal with polar bears. From memory:
That is interesting. Though I don't know if that's necessarily the interpretation, if it had happened to me I might consider the possibility that I first dreamed I had an elegant solution without actually containing the specific answer, even though I thought I did, and then dreamed the working, and then woke up and filled out the working subconsciously to have the answer and assumed that was the answer I had at first.