Wow, cool

[simont]

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…)

Comments

[simont]

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...

[gjm11.livejournal.com]

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...