I believe I've just made a significant discovery about dreams.
I had a dream last night with many interesting features, besides the fact that it was in first person and involved a trip back to the Philippines and meeting a bunch of orphaned children and delagas. One interesting feature was that it explicitly featured in-dream deja vu, to the point where I not only asked the girl if we'd had this conversation before but speculated out loud about whether it was just deja vu. (From a waking perspective, it clearly was indeed deja vu.) Even more interesting, though, is my attempts to explain to some of the kids that I do in fact speak Cebuano as well as English, because they tell me something about how well my mind functions while asleep.
Specifically, in the dream, I knew that "kahibalo ka og Cebuano" wasn't quite right, that kahibalo meant "knowledge" but that that was kind of an Ilonggo way to say things. So I tried again, inside my head (another interesting feature of this dream is that it featured an inner monologue, separate from the dreamworld "plot"--I find this even rarer for me than first-person dreaming). I'm about 80% sure that what I came up with involved the word "pungutana" for "speak," something like "makahibalo ko pungutana og Cebuano."
That's interesting because my waking mind immediately recognizes that pungutana means "question" and not "knowledge" or "speak", which means that not only did my dream involve my dream-self creating a memory retrieval task for my brain, but that when my brain got it wrong, my dream-self failed to reject the failure and instead incorporated it into the dream as if it were accurate.
I think viewing dreams as a state of non-rejection and radical openness/gullibility explains a lot about dreams, or at least my dreams.
Incidentally, it did take my waking self more than a few seconds to remember that "makasulti ko'g Cebuano" is the Cebuano way to say it, and "kabolo ko Cebuano" is the Ilonggo way to say it. They use different verbs and different grammatical shortcuts.
-Max
I had a dream last night with many interesting features, besides the fact that it was in first person and involved a trip back to the Philippines and meeting a bunch of orphaned children and delagas. One interesting feature was that it explicitly featured in-dream deja vu, to the point where I not only asked the girl if we'd had this conversation before but speculated out loud about whether it was just deja vu. (From a waking perspective, it clearly was indeed deja vu.) Even more interesting, though, is my attempts to explain to some of the kids that I do in fact speak Cebuano as well as English, because they tell me something about how well my mind functions while asleep.
Specifically, in the dream, I knew that "kahibalo ka og Cebuano" wasn't quite right, that kahibalo meant "knowledge" but that that was kind of an Ilonggo way to say things. So I tried again, inside my head (another interesting feature of this dream is that it featured an inner monologue, separate from the dreamworld "plot"--I find this even rarer for me than first-person dreaming). I'm about 80% sure that what I came up with involved the word "pungutana" for "speak," something like "makahibalo ko pungutana og Cebuano."
That's interesting because my waking mind immediately recognizes that pungutana means "question" and not "knowledge" or "speak", which means that not only did my dream involve my dream-self creating a memory retrieval task for my brain, but that when my brain got it wrong, my dream-self failed to reject the failure and instead incorporated it into the dream as if it were accurate.
I think viewing dreams as a state of non-rejection and radical openness/gullibility explains a lot about dreams, or at least my dreams.
Incidentally, it did take my waking self more than a few seconds to remember that "makasulti ko'g Cebuano" is the Cebuano way to say it, and "kabolo ko Cebuano" is the Ilonggo way to say it. They use different verbs and different grammatical shortcuts.
-Max
--
I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.
I could not love thee dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.
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