I don’t think everything is based on expectations. A few nights ago I had a non-lucid dream in which I had got a job offer in the mail to teach a ballet class for children, (in an airport no less.) and I was looking over the mail to find out what room number it was. The first time I checked it, the room number was a string of numbers. I scanned the doors, and each one had long string of numbers outside the doorway, but none of them matched the ones I had just read. After going past doors, I rechecked my paper. It was filled with a different string of numbers. I was frustrated, and instead of realizing this was a dream sign, I asked one of the security guards. Nonvital information to my point, but I was on the wrong floor. Don’t you hate when that happens?
I was expecting the numbers to stay the same because I didn’t realize I was dreaming, and they still changed. Explain this?
I think it is a bit different with long strings of txt/numbers and such, cause it will be alot of information for your brain to remember. Dreams are indeed usually quite a bit more unstable than waking state in some aspects, no matter what you expect.
What i react to is that there is so many articles that claim that is simply impossible to use a lightswitch, read and such in dreams, even though alot of dreamers here is a living proof that this is not true at all.
At the time of the experiments, researchers already knew dreams are highly influenced by expectations, associations and thoughts in general. So yes I think they agreed expectations play a big role in the light-switch task. However, the question was “could there be an upper-limit to this expectation”? If you were able to perform the task with success, then it’s easy to dismiss these experiments. But to me this question is very well worth to investigate. If everything you tried in a dream worked fine based upon expectations, even then, how can you really be sure there isn’t such thing as a ceiling limit to certain expectations, which would only become visible under certain special circumstances (just like Moss also acknowledged)? And that’s exactly what they were trying to investigate using the light-switch task.
Clocks have all the right figures for me. The only difference they have from real clocks is that their time changes when I look away and back again. However, I’m expecting them to change (it is, a RC) which is why they do. If I wanted to, I could make it remain the same quite easily.
And about that ND you posted up. Sounds to me like your sub-c was giving you a DS .
I think what you are saying is quite valid, however, if the task were around expectations wouldn’t they use a blind sample and compare it against another sample that was given the expectation? If they were trying to reach an understanding of ceiling limits for luminosity, surely there are better methods.
Hm I agree there are better ways to investigate solely the impact of expectations within dreams
Nevertheless, this investigation raises an important issue about possible ceiling limits in dreams. In one of the papers it was mentioned more experiments were under way, but there was no reference… I’ll look for it though
I had an interesting dream the other night that must have been sparked by this post… and yet I didn’t think to go lucid!
So I would like to share this dream here!
To my recall, I have never dreamt about turning on lights etc, but I can now say I have. I was in my apartment and I went to turn on all 4 light switches for the lights (in RL there are only 3) One light went on (the furthest away from me), the next light went on, but flickered like the light bulb was about to die… this was the second closest to me, and the closest didn’t go on at all!!! The light that didn’t work… I repeatedly flicked the switch several times until the lights worked (cause in RL those friggin lights do that ) The light that was flickering, I got that to work by grabbing a chair, standing on it, and then tapping the ceiling around the light… it blustered a little more light, flickered… died… and then came to full life. The dream ended with me content that I got all the lights to work.
Haha great dream! A perfect example to show that the outcome of the experiment is often very different for different persons, no matter if there is such a thing as a ceiling limit. Because, according to the theory of Moss, the light closest to you should work best, not the other way round! Can you remember if you looked at the light-switch when you tried to turn on the lights?
I must of looked at the light switch, because I specifically recall that it had 4 switches and in RL there is only 3 (I do not recall when this fact became available to me - if it was in the dream or rather later on?)
But, when I turned on the switches (for the first time) it was all in one swift motion… like you run your finger across them.
I wonder why, if we discuss possible limitations of imagery in lucid dreams related to the “light switch doesnt work” phenomenon, noone would mention the possibility that, besides a possible “brightness” limit, there might also be a limit on how much sudden change the dreamscene can have. Compare it for example with a test many of you probably try now and then in a LD (with more or less succes); the “snap your fingers and the dreamscene of my choice will appear”-test. Somehow (to my knowledge at least), this is mostly very hard to do. Changing your dream images 100% in a very short time just seems pretty hard to accomplish. To me this looks a lot like the “light switch doesnt work”, because in this scenario you have to change a (near totally) dark room into a room with full detail. Ofcourse all these limitation can be caused (perhaps partly, as it seems possible to remove these limits with practise) by our expectations, but I just thought i’d mention this anyway.
Exactly. And perhaps this is partly based on our expectation that it is hard to do. However I have tried changing my dream imagery as a whole, several times, while telling myself "this is all in my head, I can do what I want!!, and it still was nearly impossible to do. I wonder what experience others have on this.
In my dreams (still usually non-lucid, I’m afraid) I sometimes have trouble with light-switches, computers, or text in general. Clocks occur in my dreams very rarely – usually in anxiety dreams where I am, or am about to be, late for something important such as work, an exam, etc. – but are also consistent and reliable.
Most of the time these things work as well as anything else in my dreams – good examples might be bus routes and schedules (“this isn’t the bus/destination I wanted”), television (“why can’t I find the program/channel I want”), streets (“there used to be a way from here to there”), airliners (“boy, how come they can’t taxi the plane to the runway without going through busy city streets”). So I don’t really think that this is a phenomenom peculiar to light-switches, or to printed text or time-pieces.
In fact, I’m inclined to suggest that this phenomenom is more related to how abstract a dream element is. For example, I find phone-numbers, addresses, and change-due are more mutable, and more difficult to recall reliably once awake. Perhaps to some people this applies to their unconscious concept of an electric switch?
I personally suspect that Hearns – despite his intentions – failed to present the task in a way that didn’t suggest to the subjects/dreamers a possibility of failure.
I also suspect that a significant motive behind this experiment was the idea that this could relate to some measurable physiological constraint, which would satisfy the segment of the research community that discounts the scientific value of things that can’t be measured with laboratory instruments. (Perhaps I’m being overly cynical here).
The difference between your examples Bernard, and the light switch phenomenon is that you talk about failures to accomplish something that take a rather long time to do (looking for stuff you cant find, travelling etc), while the light switch should change the entire dream scape in a milisecond. So while your examples perhaps refer more to psychologocal and subconscious issues someone might have to deal with through dreams, the switch seems to point at some kind of physical restraint while dreaming (at least that’s how the autors would see it, and I intend to agree that this is plausible). Certainly non-working switches in ND’s seem to point in such a direction (since in a ND, you expect the switch to work, so it’s not based of your expectations).
And I agree that the idea was (and perhaps still is) a plausable explanation. It certainly was an intriguing – and more importantly for any researcher, testable – hypothesis.
But I am inclined to discount this theory anyways – on the simple grounds that in my personal dreaming experience, light-switches typically work exactly as one would expect. Ditto scene changes moving from a room or building interior to a bright outdoor scene.
Even then, I wouldn’t trouble myself to address this issue. There might, after all (as so often happens in science) still be enough truth in this idea to produce a better understanding of brain-function, lucid dreaming, non-lucid dreaming, and related phenomena.
But I keep seeing people being authoratively informed that ‘mis-behaving’ light-switches (as well as watch or clock-faces, and printed text) make for definitively reliable Reality Checks. Though these RCs may be very useful for some people, they definitly are are not universally dependable, and they shouldn’t be portrayed as if they are.
This is a bit late but… CosmonautFantome, the reason the room name on your paper changed was probably because your brain realized that none of the rooms on that floor had that name. So, it “reconsidered” what it saw on the paper and gave you what it thought to be the real name.
Haven’t seen any activity on this thread for a while… and then last night I had another dream where I turned on the light and all I got was another flickering light!
Bernard, I understand your point about ‘lightswitches not working should be taken as a universal RC theme’, and what you say is quite valid.
IMO, it comes down to expectations and thats what these RC do… they question your expectations. Lightswitches are just one of many - and I think any good source on LD, will add a disclaimer like - all these RC are personal and need to be modified for each individual.
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) The light that was flickering, I got that to work by grabbing a chair, standing on it, and then tapping the ceiling around the light… it blustered a little more light, flickered… died… and then came to full life. The dream ended with me content that I got all the lights to work.
A perfect example to show that the outcome of the experiment is often very different for different persons, no matter if there is such a thing as a ceiling limit. Because, according to the theory of Moss, the light closest to you should work best, not the other way round! Can you remember if you looked at the light-switch when you tried to turn on the lights?