simont | Wow, cool

Wow, cool

I dreamed that my house had somehow acquired an extra bedroom.

Then I woke up, realised that was silly, got out of bed – and found my house had acquired an extra bedroom, but in a different place.

Then I woke up. Extra points for a dream-within-a-dream! I think I've had one of those before, but never that vividly.

(On the minus side, second time this week I've overslept. I need to get better at using this alarm clock…)

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I've had one of those like that before, but only under the influence of extreme painkillers.

OTOH, when I have an early start for something important I do often dream I'm waking up having overslept (then wake up properly and check the clock). This typically will happen a good few times.

I've had one of those before, too - I remember telling someone about my dream, then later waking up "again" and realising that the telling had happened inside the dream.

It's a strange feeling.

I had one, where I got rather freaked out, as it had every appearance of being an infinitely nested dream.

When I finally did wake up, I had quite a prolonged "omg am i a butterfly" moment.

Oh yes, I have had that one. And you wake up and go, oh shit, I have to do it all over again now.

Painkillers were quite scary. I don't think I had ever had a more realistic dream - I could feel the insides of my shoes.

I once had a dream where I kept waking up and finding I was still in the dream in exactly the same place I was before I woke up and no matter how many times I woke up I kept finding I was in the same place and couldn't get out of the dream.

It was very odd, but I did wake up properly eventually... I think. Either that or I eventually found a discontinuity upon waking up.

Hmm. When I woke up properly, I was in no doubt that I really was awake this time, but now you mention it I'm not sure why.

Perhaps it was the thorough mundanity that you never quite achieve in dreams. Why did Neo, when first removed from the Matrix and waking up in the real world, not immediately wonder if he was in another layer of Matrix? Because if he had been, Trinity would still have had an excuse to wear tight PVC. When he saw her in floppy blue wool, he knew he'd hit bottom.

In my case I was in a field with a cow, and I woke up and was still in the field, but the cow was gone. Then I woke up again and was more plausibly in hospital being supplied with aforementioned intravenous painkillers.

I once dreamed that I was having a lucid dream. Then the dream about the lucid dream became lucid.

That left me feeling quite strange at least until the early afternoon.

(Hmm. I need a "recursion" userpic.)

Does your house have sufficient bedrooms?

Ah, that doesn't work with me. When I dream, I dream hyper-real with lots of details, and it can be perfectly mundane. The longest I've gone is lunchtime before I thought, "hey, what the fuck? that didn't happen! I must have dreamed it!"

But, I love that explanation. *grins*

Have you read House of Leaves?

Oh yes. An extra one would be of negligible additional use in terms of putting guests up given the probability distribution of the number of guests visiting me at any given time, but keeping it clean would add to my housework load. I wouldn't say no to a few more cubic metres of junk-storage space in my existing spare bedroom, but a whole nother room would be excessive.

No. I briefly checked Wikipedia to see if I could tell why you mentioned it, but nothing jumped out at me and I didn't feel like ploughing through the entire plot description. (Not least because you might convince me I want to read it for real!)

It's just that early on in the book a house acquires an extra room while the occupiers are away for the weekend. Subsequently it turns out that the house is about an inch and a half longer and wider inside than out. Later, a doorway appears on the inside of an outside wall with a long corridor leading away into the distance.

After that things get a bit odd, so if corridors start appearing move out. Or at least don't investigate.

The recursive-sounding "dream within a dream" terminology is, I think, misleading. The "inner" dream is just a perfectly ordinary dream. Then you dream *about waking up*. (That's the only bit with serious meta-ness to it.) Then you carry on with another perfectly ordinary dream. At this point you can in principle dream about waking up again, etc., etc., etc.

It's rather like tail-recursion optimization, only backwards.

Hmm. So what would qualify something as a dream within a dream, by your definition? Would it be sufficient for the outer dream to successfully both save and restore a context around it (so that I dreamed about doing X, then falling asleep, then doing some other thing Y, then "waking up" and continuing to do X where I'd left off)? Or would the inner dream have to have some perceptible quality of dreaminess that the outer one hadn't?

Hm. Maybe you feel you're already being profligate with your bedroom-havingness :)

Ooh, that does sound good.

There's a thought. Maybe it is what you get if you forget to close a lot of brackets in the daytime - a whole extra pile of }}}} that manifest as waking-ups without corresponding going-to-sleeps.

That's one part of the book. It's encapsulated in another layer about a study (partly-finished, by a dead Mexican man) of a nonexistent documentary covering the events. In turn, that's within an account of events in the life of a psychologically troubled Californian trying to piece the other two layers together. There's also a strange thread I don't understand about the latter's relationship with his dead mother, copious and multiply-nested footnotes covering all of the above, written in different fonts to indicate the varied authorship, some scored out, including a load of stuff about a minotaur. It's obviously a haunted-house story, but there's a house and no ghost.

If this makes it sound like a strange and infuriating book, that's because it is. It's also an absolute doorstop. Enter at own risk.

Maybe the former, though I suppose I could still make the same argument. (So, hmm, it's more like inlining than like tail-call optimization.)

Perhaps it's most accurate to say: our dreams don't simulate enough of the world, well enough, for questions like "is such-and-such within that dream an experience of X happening or a dream that X happens?" to have answers. (Just like there might not be an answer to questions like "Was that thing you dreamed about really an old enemy of yours who had turned into a dragon, or was it a dragon pretending to be your old enemy?" or "What was on the other side of that door that kept moving away every time you turned towards it?".)

But I bet that neurologically the dreams from which you eventually pseudo-wake-up into other dreams are no different from the ones from which you wake up properly, into the real world.

I used to have them when I was at school. I'd "wake up", do a day at school, come home and go to bed and then wake up properly and have to do the day again.

Ye-ess, although "neurologically" seems to me to somehow miss the point. My experience when reading a book in which one of the characters tells a story-within-the-story is neurologically not qualitatively different from my experience when reading a book that's only one layer deep, but that doesn't stop it being a story depicted within the story.

I can see that for some purposes dreams and deliberate fiction are very different things, but for the purposes of me waking up afterwards and going "wow, that was really cool", I'm inclined to treat dreams as basically a kind of improvised fiction...

When you read a book with a story-in-a-story-in-a-story, you're keeping track of the nesting of the stories. (I hope.) When you have what's commonly called a dream within a dream, you aren't, and the nesting is only "discovered" post facto, after the allegedly nested dream is over. And, if my limited experience of such dreams is representative, the existence of the allegedly-nested dream has little impact on subsequent events in the "outer" dream, so there's not much psychologically or literarily to distinguish these supposedly nested dreams from merely sequential ones.

To a great extent we're arguing about words rather than facts here...

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