A frustrating thing I sometimes experience in the morning after I wake up is my inability to immediately remember a dream I just had — often one that I somehow know deep down was cool, fun, or vivid. Eventually it'll come back to me, sometimes being randomly prompted by a thought, a sight, or a sound, and I can go through in my mind what happened. It would be so much easier (and cooler) if I could just record what played through my mind during the night and watch the film the next day. Even though the feelings I experienced during the dream would be lost and probably only partially recovered by my mind's reaction to reviewing the sights and sounds I had experienced, having a retrievable library of my subconscious' adventures would be an interesting way to possibly further connect with and learn about myself.
As far-fetched as this science fiction-esque library seems, it is something that will likely become a reality in the coming decades. There are computers now that can quickly observe and learn a person's brain activity and then roughly reconstruct a simple image or word a person is shown based on how their mind's eye sees it, as demonstrated in this Through the Wormhole clip. With the incredible pace technology is advancing, I would not at all be surprised if in the next twenty years we have actual videos of dreams.
In the above clip, Morgan Freeman tells us that the scientist performing these experiments believes that "we will be able to record our dreams as full-color, high definition movies." While I'm sure we'll eventually be making full-color movies out of our dreams, I highly doubt they'll be in high definition. During a dream we certainly believe that what we're seeing is reality (unless one is, of course, lucid dreaming) and reality is obviously in high definition experience. But when we recall our dreams and think about the sights we saw they're not really that high-def. At least from my dreaming experience, we more or less are focusing on one small visual at a time, a friend's face, a car moving toward us, the handle of the umbrella we're holding on to so we can fly. Everything else around us that we're not strictly focusing on is fuzzy and often blurs together our surroundings. Places and things around us often have little detail, at least compared to reality, and the details we are aware of are usually fairly vague. Even the the things we are specifically focusing on visually in a dream can sometimes be fuzzy or vague.
So if we were to record a dream and play it back, I doubt it would be super exciting to watch. Between all the fuzziness; jerky, sweeping changes of view; and narrow foci, it could be more of a perplexing and disorienting movie than we might otherwise imagine. It would seem perfectly normal while we're asleep, but very likely would not resemble at all even the most surreal dreams sequences we see in film and television.
Sound, the other important part of a dream that could someday be captured on video, would probably also be as disappointing in a movie as the visuals would be. From my experience, background sound in dreams, if there happens to be any, is not reality's background sound like chirping birds while walking outside or the TV while inside or crunching popcorn while in the movies, but very soft, vague noise that doesn't really signify anything in particular. Meaningful sound in dream, such as words you're speaking or that are being spoken to you, are often spaced out between dreams — in other words, there's a lot of just visuals and maybe soft, vague background noise between sounds you're really paying attention to. This would make a dream movie even stranger as it will mostly be visuals with perhaps some of the soft, vague noise here or there.
Last night I drempt at one point that I was in some apartment trying to maneuver a sleepwalking former track teammate back to his bedroom. He was rather uncooperative and we were having a short, reasonably coherent argument as I tried to shove him back down the hall. I can't remember exactly what we said, but, despite my mind at the time clearly understanding the words and what they meant, it was not as solid and clear a verbal exchange as one would find in real life. Our minds already know what they want to hear from our dreams and their characters and what we actually hear is probably just an audible representation of these ideas; our brains hear from the sounds what it wants to, but an external recording of it could possibly hear only audible gibberish. While many of the things we hear in our dreams, especially words, appear very clear, if they were to be perfectly recorded and played for our conscious ears they would likely sound fuzzy and a little incoherent.
A video of a dream would likely be blurry and vague visually, snapping quickly between scenes. Audibly, it would likely be fuzzy and a little incoherent, hardly giving viewers who didn't have the dream a better idea of what the visuals represent. What we see on the tape could appear much more perplexing and disorienting than how it felt while we were asleep. The actual story going on might be very hard to discern unless you're the person who drempt it and recognizes some of what you see and hear in the video. As great as our memory of reality is, when we don't have actual visual and auditory stimuli, as when we're dreaming, our mind can only simulate an incomplete, blurred movie for our entertainment. Still — if I got the chance to record a dream and then watch it, I totally would.
As far-fetched as this science fiction-esque library seems, it is something that will likely become a reality in the coming decades. There are computers now that can quickly observe and learn a person's brain activity and then roughly reconstruct a simple image or word a person is shown based on how their mind's eye sees it, as demonstrated in this Through the Wormhole clip. With the incredible pace technology is advancing, I would not at all be surprised if in the next twenty years we have actual videos of dreams.
In the above clip, Morgan Freeman tells us that the scientist performing these experiments believes that "we will be able to record our dreams as full-color, high definition movies." While I'm sure we'll eventually be making full-color movies out of our dreams, I highly doubt they'll be in high definition. During a dream we certainly believe that what we're seeing is reality (unless one is, of course, lucid dreaming) and reality is obviously in high definition experience. But when we recall our dreams and think about the sights we saw they're not really that high-def. At least from my dreaming experience, we more or less are focusing on one small visual at a time, a friend's face, a car moving toward us, the handle of the umbrella we're holding on to so we can fly. Everything else around us that we're not strictly focusing on is fuzzy and often blurs together our surroundings. Places and things around us often have little detail, at least compared to reality, and the details we are aware of are usually fairly vague. Even the the things we are specifically focusing on visually in a dream can sometimes be fuzzy or vague.
So if we were to record a dream and play it back, I doubt it would be super exciting to watch. Between all the fuzziness; jerky, sweeping changes of view; and narrow foci, it could be more of a perplexing and disorienting movie than we might otherwise imagine. It would seem perfectly normal while we're asleep, but very likely would not resemble at all even the most surreal dreams sequences we see in film and television.
Sound, the other important part of a dream that could someday be captured on video, would probably also be as disappointing in a movie as the visuals would be. From my experience, background sound in dreams, if there happens to be any, is not reality's background sound like chirping birds while walking outside or the TV while inside or crunching popcorn while in the movies, but very soft, vague noise that doesn't really signify anything in particular. Meaningful sound in dream, such as words you're speaking or that are being spoken to you, are often spaced out between dreams — in other words, there's a lot of just visuals and maybe soft, vague background noise between sounds you're really paying attention to. This would make a dream movie even stranger as it will mostly be visuals with perhaps some of the soft, vague noise here or there.
Last night I drempt at one point that I was in some apartment trying to maneuver a sleepwalking former track teammate back to his bedroom. He was rather uncooperative and we were having a short, reasonably coherent argument as I tried to shove him back down the hall. I can't remember exactly what we said, but, despite my mind at the time clearly understanding the words and what they meant, it was not as solid and clear a verbal exchange as one would find in real life. Our minds already know what they want to hear from our dreams and their characters and what we actually hear is probably just an audible representation of these ideas; our brains hear from the sounds what it wants to, but an external recording of it could possibly hear only audible gibberish. While many of the things we hear in our dreams, especially words, appear very clear, if they were to be perfectly recorded and played for our conscious ears they would likely sound fuzzy and a little incoherent.
A video of a dream would likely be blurry and vague visually, snapping quickly between scenes. Audibly, it would likely be fuzzy and a little incoherent, hardly giving viewers who didn't have the dream a better idea of what the visuals represent. What we see on the tape could appear much more perplexing and disorienting than how it felt while we were asleep. The actual story going on might be very hard to discern unless you're the person who drempt it and recognizes some of what you see and hear in the video. As great as our memory of reality is, when we don't have actual visual and auditory stimuli, as when we're dreaming, our mind can only simulate an incomplete, blurred movie for our entertainment. Still — if I got the chance to record a dream and then watch it, I totally would.
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