the terror of being unable to protect my child, though, was an emotion i never recall feeling.
is it possible to experience emotion in a DREAM STATE that you had never experienced in an AWAKE STATE?
or had i experienced such terror previously, and simply do not recall it?
Well, there's a few ways to think about this, that's a very interesting thought. I'm just gonna throw some things out there and maybe one of them'll stick...
One thing I thought of is that I've read that research shows that to the brain, dreams are just as "real" as an experience in reality. I read this in something talking about how you should cultivate lucid dreaming in order to defeat your fears and insecurities, better yourself in various ways, etc.
So to experience "something[1]" in a dream state that you'd never experienced in a waking state is not extraordinarily remarkable. It's the same thing to your brain as if it had really happened, so you reacted the way you would if it was the first time this had happened to you in real life
Another thing I thought of is that terror of harm to your child has definitely got to be wired into the human mind by millions of years of evolution.
A third thing is that the human mind is an extremely powerful computer and part of why we're such social animals is because we have empathy, which in my nerdly opinion is probably similar to running your own copy of another person in emulation on your own computer. You've probably seen plenty of images of parents with their children at risk or already hurt or kidnapped or lost, in the media. Every year there's at least one and often two or three high-profile stories about something horrible happening to someone's child. So you've already experienced it vicariously plenty of times. Your mind already knew how to react "correctly" to this archetypal plot device[2] due to exposure and empathy.
[1] I assume that by "experience something" you mean the emotions inspired by the dream experience and not the dream experience itself, although it works either way.
[2] Disclaimer: I do not mean to diminish the emotional horror and feeling of senseless, arbitrary caprice that you felt in your dream, or that any parent feels in response to imagining harm befalling his/her child, by calling it an archetypal plot device. I only said that because I think story is a powerful force in human affairs and harm to a child has such a powerful effect on any human that it inevitably was a part of human stories since the beginning. Especially since, until modern times, children surviving their term of pregnancy, let alone their birth, let alone their extended childhood was a rarity in human affairs, and tragic loss all too common. I admit this: my heart sank when I was
reading your account of a dream in which harm almost comes to
a child that doesn't exist. And I'm a 24 year old and unlikely to have any children for at least six years, if I choose to have any at all. So I'm even more removed from this experience than you but I felt this sickening dread reading your account of it. It should be no surprise that you felt what you did in response, but it's definitely interesting, isn't it? We're such fascinating and strange creatures.
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Topic: Just an intriguing dream... (Read 7874 times)