Harri Besceli's Shortform

Harri Besceli

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The best and worst experiences you had last week probably happened when you were dreaming.

tl;dr - Compared to waking life, dreams are pretty wild and emotionally intense. Example - in a dream last week all my teeth fell out which was pretty distressing, and nothing as interesting happened to me in waking life. How emotional/ extreme an experience is seems like a good proxy for how good or bad it is. So probably the best and worse experiences you've had last week were whilst you were dreaming.

Why might this be true?

Dreams are extreme. In my recent dreams I've been in a fistfight, been flying and lost all my teeth. The most extreme things that I've done in the last week IRL include eating three chocolate pastries and having a large coffee.
Dreams are emotional. The last times I've felt grief, screamed in fear, or experienced infatuation have all been whilst I was dreaming. The most extreme emotion that I've felt in the past week was probably disappointment from losing a game of age of empires.
The 'extremeness' and 'emotionalness' of an experience seem like reasonable proxies for how good or bad the experience is.

Why might this not be true?

Dreams are less 'vivid'. Sensations or emotions in dreams can be less vivid than IRL. If I break my leg in a dream, it will hurt, but maybe not as much as if I were to actually break my leg.
Dreams are 'dissociative'. Dreams can kind of feel like watching a movie of playing a game. If a hippo is charging at me in a dream, I might be a lot less scared than if a hippo is actually charging at me.
Dreams are short. If we take REM sleep as a rough proxy for dreaming, the ratio of dream to awake time is roughly 1:10, so there's less time to have these experiences (though plausibly a minute of dream experience feels longer than a minute of waking experience, eg. sometimes I go to sleep for 15 minutes and it feels like it's been hours)

My best guess

The average minute of dream experience will be either more good or bad than the average minute of waking life experience, maybe by 3-5x
Probably the best and worst experiences that a random person had over the past week happened in their dreams
I really have no idea

Given it's hard to tell, I expect there's a lot of individual differences here. I might have particularly wild dreams or a particularly mundane waking life.

Does this matter?

If my speculations are in the right ballpark, it's not implausible that our dream experiences are more than our waking experiences in determining what our lives are like overall. If you buy a hedonistic theory of well-being, you might think that how good or bad people's lives are is largely determined by the quality of their dreams.
Regardless of the above, my guess is people will tend to underweight the importance of their dreams as a constituent of wellbeing because we don't remember them.
Lucid dreaming, sleeping more or less, and taking some kinds of medication are potential ways of changing your dream experiences. I'm not recommending any of these.
I'd be pretty interested to see an experience sampling study comparing people's assessments of their experiences whilst dreaming and awake, and think I'd probably change my mind significantly depending on the results.

4Sniffnoy2y

Nitpick: Sleepwalking proper apparently happens during non-REM sleep; acting out a dream during REM sleep is different and has its own name. Although it seems like sleepwalkers may also be dreaming somehow even though they aren't in REM sleep? I don't know -- this is definitely not my area -- and arguably none of this is relevant to the original point; but I thought I should point it out.

Yeah, my point was simply that we have "p-zombies" of sorts involving sleep, which demonstrate that you can take complex actions conscious-like reacting to the real world during sleep which would normally (if done while waking) seem to entail intense emotion but appear to not involve real emotion much or at all. So that helps support the idea that in a different part of sleep, you could be taking complex actions conscious-like reacting to a mental world which would seem to entail intense emotions but aside from the remembered content and some weak physiolo... (read more)

2Harri Besceli5y

My best guess is that I experience as intense emotions in dreams as in waking life. Mostly this is informed by personal experience/ introspection. I kept a dream journal for a while a long time ago, and at one point also rated how good or bad the most recent dream bit was after waking. I can't remember exactly what my scores were, but seem to remember it being consistent with dream experiences feeling pretty good or bad. (I might be something of an anomaly with my dream experiences though, I have narcolepsy and annoyingly for my housemates once every month or two I'll start screaming in my sleep). This Sleep, Dreams and Dreaming Oxford Handbook article talks about a study of 'dream content dimensions' [...] I haven't looked at the original study, and AFAICT there isn't any comparison of emotions in waking life to dreams, but was interesting to me that the ratio of negative to positive emotions reported was 4:1.