From: farris@ruhets.rutgers.edu (Lorenzo Farris)
Newsgroups: alt.dreams
Subject: Re: Don't interrupt me you dream character!
Date: 30 Dec 92 03:21:48 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

In article <1992Dec29.202544.3398@tcsi.com>, miket@hermes.tcs.com (Michael Turner nmscore Assoc.) writes:
:
:There is already some dream personality research going on -- I was just
:suggesting a new approach to it.

I'm sorry, my post was not intended as an attack of this idea. Just a
clarification, IMO, based on my own experience.

:
:This line of speculation was kicked off by Maiko Covington's reports
:of having dream personalities speak different languages in her dreams,
:including languages that the corresponding real-life people didn't know
:(But that Maiko did.)  She was wondering how this was possible -- a
:reasonable puzzlement, given how counter-intuitive it is.
:
:It's hard to remember that people in dreams are really just projections
:from memories of people in real life, and that the abilities and
:knowledge they have can include all the abilities and knowledge that
:the dreamer has (but no more.)

This would make more sense to me, adding to this the fact that your
dreaming mind doesn't often care about consistency and logic. Such
systematics might work in one person's dreams, but totally meaningless
in another's.

:
:[Obviously I'm neglecting the potential parapsychological aspect here.
:That's for another discussion.]

Maybe the discussion could start here. ;)  I think that even in
psychic dreams, the dreaming mind (as does the waking mind, IMO)
interprets such experiences with whatever metaphor it is most
comfortable with.

:My hypothesis about how this could happen with some frequency was that
:the appearance before the dream-ego of a person associated with one
:language fires up the set of speech centers in the brain associated
:with that person/language combination, for use by the dream-ego --
:POSSIBLY limiting access to those speech centers by other dream
:personalities, and thus POSSIBLY increasing the chance that those dream
:personalities will hook into any existing alternate speech centers.
:Bilinguals are interesting subjects in view of this hypothesis precisely
:because they have (at least some) distinct alternate speech centers that
:dream personalities might access.

I'm not to fond of trying to tie physiology to mental events, but to
each hir own. :)

:
:But maybe I went too far when I conjectured that there are latent
:dream personalities associated with the languages of a bilingual
:by way of some kind of personality split perceivable even in waking
:life.  Your "personae" explanation sounds like a more accurate view
:of it.  I was speaking from the point of view of being basically
:monolingual.

For some people, your scenario might actually turn out to be the case.
I think a better way to characterize the personae model is just as
that, a model, which explains general experience more easily, for now.

			cheers,
				Lorenzo
-- 
Happiness is just a                     ******************************
remembrance away.                       *  Lorenzo Farris            *
                                        *  farris@ruhets.rutgers.edu *
                                        ******************************
Newsgroups: alt.dreams