Does rationalism affect your dreams?

Would you feel better if we took some of that karma away?

Actually, it's only very rarely that I can relate my dreams to any of my experiences, recent or otherwise.

I find it rather amazing how many people's dreams, when they describe them, sound basically mundane, like things that could more or less happen in real life. For me, dreams have always been, not just too weird to possibly mistake for reality, but too weird to make sense of after the fact.

I have one dream in particular which I remember because it was probably the happiest dream I've ever had, and left me in a great mood when I woke up, but if I tried to describe it I wouldn't even be able to explain why it was happy.

Whenever I'm doing something visually stimulating for a while before bed, it ends up going in my head while I'm in the process of falling asleep. Tetris, MarioKart, any puzzle game involving moving pieces. Sometimes if I look at a lot of .gifs (really short animations) I get semi-dreams in the form of a lot of little clips. This is all especially weird because most of my waking thoughts are verbal, but my dreams are nearly all visual.

It's happened at least two or three times that I can recall that I've come home late after a night out, gone to bed, and had dreams where I was still out. Also, the first time I lucid dreamed I was woken up by an argument on the street outside my room - I fell back asleep and had a lucid dream, and didn't realize until someone told me the next day that the fight had actually been real and it had merged seamlessly into my dream.

I think these are exceptional though - otherwise I don't think I tend to have dreams based on my experiences.

I've dreamed in scrolling text before due to extensive MUD playing.

So have I. Which MUD, out of interest?

I spent spent literally years playing WOTmud, playing the Gaidin Wedrifid, from whom I took this name. (By 'years' I refer to actual logged in hours that can be measured in years, not years passing during which I played MUD.) I ask because 'Rain' was also a prominent character on that MUD - a wolfbrother or something impressive like that - I think he stabbed folks a lot.

It has been more than a decade since then. All I have left are the less-reliable memories-of-memories of the dream. Having said that, I recall the dream being of text coloured like the MUD I was playing, but I am pretty sure that there was only the text. I don't even recall anything that happened in the dream or if I previously did and have forgotten.

I'm able both to read and to type in "day residue" dreams: those that are primarily based on prior events while awake. I've often had dreams which involve me reading and posting to internet message boards.

For dreams occurring on a deeper, more symbolic level, I haven't had the same experience, though I couldn't say whether that means I can't read in those dreams, or only that I haven't remembered doing so.

Perhaps individual circumstances matter. I was hyperlexic in childhood and to this day my preferred learning style consists of reading and/or rote copying, which I've learned is unusual.

I am not sure about reading, but writing is impossible for me, in dreams. When I write something, and I read it again, I see that I actually wrote something else. So I try to correct it, and again it is wrong; and that is very frustrating. Doing calculations, even as simple as counting my fingers, is also impossible.

From what I read online on topic of lucid dreaming, different people have different "abilities" and "disabilities" in dreams, but some of them are rather common (for example the inability to count one's fingers). If you make a habit of testing these skills a few times a day, it may help you notice when you are dreaming.

I can't help you there. Not enough detail has survived the years.

That's a very common claim; but it runs counter to my own experience in dreaming.

Given what I felt (or 'felt', as the case may be), your first suggestion seems more likely than your second; though given what little I do know of the brain, the second seems more plausible than the first. I don't have enough data to think one is significantly more likely than the other, and I'm not sure where I might find or create such data.

As for the downvotes, I'd made a private bet to myself before posting, that I was sufficiently oblivious to and unaware of local social norms that I'd make /some/ social error causing my post to be downvoted to oblivion, and that I wouldn't know why unless someone explicitly told me, which I expected to be unlikely. I'd thought I'd recalled LessWrong's "oblivion" was five downvotes rather than three, but was wrong about that.