Hi I’m pretty new, and I’ve only resently (the last couple of days) found out about ld’s (apart from a newspaper article I read a few years ago). I haven’t had one yet but hopefully I will soon.
anyway…
Does anyone know how your brain would know how things feel like if you’ve never felt them before. E.G. Riding a horse if you’ve never ridden one before (if you don’t know what one feels like I mean, I’m guessing your brain could guess about the movement) or something similar.
Thanks
I think your brain cpmposes the feeling you have with similiar experiences you already had and how you imagine it feels like.
For example you have seen many people riding horses in your life and you know how it feels to ride a motorbike. Combined with your imagination how it could feel you get the horse riding feeling in your dream.
This is a very simple example but that should be the basic way how it works.
Please correct me if i told something completely wrong.
Greets,
Amoebe
thanks
that sounds right
I agree with Amoebe. Your brain has gathered much information on how so many different things feel. The feeling of the horse’s mane, or the leather saddle, or the way your mind imagines the horse would move.
The only way to get it to be identical may be to ride a horse in real life, but a dream should be able to make it quite realistic.
i think everyone has the right idea here.
like right now i can imagine how sand paper feels without an actual tactile sensation.
the only difference is when you’re in a dream or an ld is that your consciousness isn’t weighed down by real world perceptions. dreaming is obviously the most powerful form of mind visualization, so i would imagine its also the best form of of other mind manifested senses.
ok so really if you haven’t already felt something it’s a guess, but is based on many other similar things which you have felt.
I’m guessing that dreamer asked this question because he/she is wondering how the brain will do something, Lucid Dreaming, that it has never done before.
Doing Reality Checks during the day will train you brain to “wake up” while you are dreaming. 
Really ??? Dont think so. 
Amoebe certainly nailed this one first try. I doubt there could possibly be ANY substance, material or activity that your mind couldn’t simulate given your existing real world experiences.
To remain consistant here with the inital example, everyone has at some stage felt leather. It’s also pretty safe to say that everyone has at some time been riding atop an instable object, perhaps playground equipment.
Most people can come close to imagining these events while awake, so it’s only natural that your subconscious, keeper of long-lost memories and sensations can recreate them accurately without any trouble.
What about death, that is hard to imagine what it would be like. I don’t mean the pain and the drowsiness, i mean the actual ending of your life.
In LDs and dreams when i die it just goes black or i wake up, i don’t actually feel anything.
Also what it would feel like in space, like outside a ship and staying alive. You would not feel a thing on your skin.
Post more things you think that are hard to imagine and if anyone has experienced them (in a dream) then they can say what that was like.
I sense Dreamer means sex:)
i remember posts about it while ago but couldnt find it
Alex:
I don’t see how the ending of ones life could be called a sensation. However, I have experienced death a number of times in dreams. Some, as you say, simply cause my vision to go black. Surely this is realistic?
The only thing you probably couldn’t simulate is the intense emotions, because after all, you know that you’re dreaming.
As for space. Well, if you were outside the ship, floating in space, and somehow staying alive, it wouldn’t be realistic anyway 
Unless you mean in a space suit. I found that when I dream of being in zero gravity, it’s almost exactly like being underwater. This is probably because I have never experienced zero gravity, and floating in water is the closest thing to it that I’ve ever felt.
Your point is valid though. There are a number of things most people have never done. Still, the mind does a good job of guessing what it might be like.
Hey, this is the same thing as Plato’s philosophy of forms.
He said that everything has an original copy in the world of forms and everything that is on earth is just a copy of that. And that one copy is perfect. And he claimed that a man who had never seen a dog, would know what it looked like because the man was also a copy from the original world and his original had seen the original dog.
Maybe the theory doesn’t fit to this world but it must do to the dream world. In the dream world there are nothing but copies of what we’ve seen in the real world.
We’ve brought a dead philosophy back to life!!