There are stories of people experiencing whole lifetimes within dreams
There are anecdotes about people claiming to remember living whole lifetimes within dreams.
Even taking this utterly impossible to prove claim at face value, there’s no way to replicate anything like that in practice.
And it should be deeply troubling
I’m about as concerned with this as the possibility someone might try to reverse my gravity or Frankenstein my head into someone else’s torso.
The plural of “anecdote” is “data”, and this is a fairly commonly reproduced story. I don’t know if you understand just how much of psychology and medicine in general is literally just self-reports. If we refused to listen to anybody about their personal stories, we’d know next to nothing about the human mind, and there are absolutely ways to correlate certain states of mind to external measures like FMRI scans.
this is a fairly commonly reproduced story
The “falling dream” is a fairly common reproduced story. But “we’re going to invent a device that gives you the falling dream” is a big claim and “we’re going to give you a heart attack in your sleep by inflicting the falling dream on you” is an even bigger one.
I don’t know if you understand just how much of psychology and medicine in general is literally just self-reports.
Self-reports substantiated with medical data to correlate the symptoms with real physical conditions.
You don’t rush a guy with chest pains into the ER, then skip the EKG.
And if the guy with the chest pains says “These pains feel like they’ve been happening forever”, you don’t put “forever” on his medical record under “onset of symptoms”.
there are absolutely ways to correlate certain states of mind to external measures like FMRI scans
States of mind are very different than conditions of physiology. And even they have their limits. The title card is pure fiction. And trying to tie it back to “a feeling I had when I woke up from a dream” isn’t any kind of evidence-based analysis.
I once had a dream like that, maybe 20 years ago. When I woke up, I was like:
“Oh, this is my old room. But how…? It was just a dream! Now I get to live it.”
It was a wonderful feeling. People would be hooked on it if it would be reproducible.
I also have memories of what happened in there, but I’m fully aware that my brain could be projecting.
