You almost certainly have multiple dreams every night. You have just trained your mind to see them as insignificant so they just go away like the color of the eyes of the last waiter you had. If you would like to remember your dreams there is a lot you can do to let your brain know you want to again.
Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t especially grabbed at the beginning, and honestly, since I had already checked the length, shortly in I didn’t think I would finish it. Maybe just because I was sort of disoriented at the start and not really relating so it was hard to find a foothold. Maybe a quarter of a way into it though it started to come together for me and began really enjoying it. The final scene was quite vivid and it nicely sort of quickly put me into the shoes of the hero and the pride they felt for their accomplishment. The anger toward everything just before succeeding did a good job of making them seem believable. I appreciate you taking the time to write that and share it.
I do not consider myself a writer, but I do find it therapeutic, and it is something that I have a habit of doing at least a little bit of every day, in fact, it is something that I keep track of my “streak” of. I think of prose as the writing version individual etchings that a carver does when forming a block of wood into a sculpture. Any individual one on its own is not often very impressive. But it is the way they come together as a whole that creates something beautiful. I don’t know how inline that is with the accepted definition of the term, and really it isn’t a word that I have much cause for using, or much interaction with in my life.
With the recent popularity of chatGPT there are a lot of people who have just now started paying attention to modern chatbots. Many people see them and assume that how they are now is just how they are, as if we are at some sort of wall, and the things they are still bad at is something intrinsic to the way a computer is able to “think”. These are the people who insist that a human is required to make beautiful or worthy artistic writing. They have made this judgement based on this assumption that what they see now is how it has to be.
There is another group of people, however, that see this very differently, these are the people who have been paying attention to the space a bit longer. They are watching a rapidly accelerating trajectory. They saw how awful, yet intriguing, early gpt2 was with things like AI dungeon, and the enormous leap it took upon the release of gpt3. They watched Replicas morph from being a tacky gimmick to something that had enough of an emotional hold on people to make them distraught enough to cause stickied suicide hotline reddit posts when the owners made the decision to pump the breaks on their capabilities. Something that was perceived as many as “my best friend has been lobotamized and there is nothing I can do about it”. I know, crazy, right?
The newcomers that got washed in with the latest chatGPT wave see this metaphoric car and say it’s no big deal, it’s only going 30km/hr, but what they fail to realize is that .25 seconds ago it was practically parked, and the gas pedal is still very much on the floor. To the people who have been paying attention longer, they don’t see this single snapshot of a slow moving car, they are watching a rapidly accelerating vehicle and wondering if it is gonna hit 60km/hr by the end of the first second or 200, and they are also wondering if the acceleration is going to continue after the second is up and how long it can keep this kind of rapid growth going. Who knows, maybe this new wave came in with no frame of reference, made thir initial gut response and they will end up being right and the more long term observers will be wrong, but that’s almost never how things seem to go. Only time will tell though.
Is this ability to create something original and non-derivative a basic human ability or is it something that very few are capable of only after many years of developing their ability?
Are you able to right now create something original and non-derivative as an example?
What is an example of something that is truly original and not derivative?
Yeah, having a dream journal is a great idea! Just having it there and ready to use to write down absolutely anything you can remember from your dreams will start to make your brain realize that these memories are something you want to remember. Also, a dream journal is traditionally a notebook and paper, but a voice recorder works great too. There is an app called “sleep for android” that starts recording when it hears your voice so you don’t even have to move. Movement has a tendency to erase dreams, so whatever you do have your method very near by, and ready to go. There are pens with red led tips on amazon or wherever that make it so you don’t have to even turn on the light.
Having a dream journal ready is just the first step though. For one, maybe even with a dream journal you still won’t remember your dreams at first, so you may need to do something else to get the ball rolling. Throughout the night you go through various stages of sleep, in some stages you are much more likely to have vivid dreams. If you make yourself wake up with an alarm right after one of these stages(REM) then you will much more likely have a dream fresh in your mind. Everyone’s stages are of different lengths, so it may take a little trial and error, and there is lots of help online with fine tuning things, but in general I would say to set an alarm for about 5 hours after you go to bed. Your REM stages get longer as the night goes on, by 5 hours they are pretty long. This is also a good time to try out lucid dream techniques(WILD, WBTB…) as you go back to sleep.
There is more you can do to increase your chances as well. Limit bright lights/screens in the 30min to an hour before bed. Don’t eat right before bed. Try to watch yourself fall asleep, just pay attention to how your mind changes. Tell yourself while you are laying in bed that you would like to remember your dreams, but it is OK if you don’t, just set your intention.
Once you do start having dreams it is important to go over them. Read them throughout the day, and before bed, look for anything that sticks out as especially interesting to you. Look for patterns or similarities between your dreams. Pay attention to these things in real life when they happen, and get in the habit of doing serious “reality checks” in your daily life where you really try to determine whether or not you are currently dreaming, I know this may seem silly, but you want to take it seriously in real life if you want to take it seriously in your dream life. There are lots of different kinds of reality check ideas online, but it’s things like thinking about exactly how you got to the place that you are right now, do you have all your fingers, does text look readable, do light switches work, think about where you are then close your eyes and think about if you are in the same place as before you closed them. There’s tons of these, but this comment is getting long.
This just scratches the surface, but is plenty to get started. For in depth material there are some really great lucid dreaming books, Stephen LaBerge is fantastic. The practice of “Dream Yoga”(it is its own thing, not doing what it typically thought of as yoga in dreams) is a fascinating extention of lucid dreaming and there is some really good information out there on this as well. If lucid dreaming is the most incredible entertainment system ever, then dream yoga is the most incredible experiment labratory.