MUSING #4 - Empathy + Dreams

MUSE: When dreaming, do you always stay yourself or do you become other people?

MUSING: 

I’ve asked this question to various people, resulting in most saying they are always themselves, yet a handful said they have experienced being other people in their dreams. For me, I am more often someone else than I am myself in dreams. At least of the ones I remember. Sometimes I jump from one character to another as the dream progresses. I’ve even experienced watching the dream as if it’s a TV show, as an invisibly-floating viewer along as the ride. There is still so much that is unknown about dreams, but more recent studies suggest that they take place to help our brains process memories. If that is so, why would I be playing out the dreams within a person that I am not and therefore have no memory of being? 

Though I could find multiple random reasons and unsupported claims as to why this happens, one that I’d like to reflect on now is connected to EMPATHY. Empathy is the ability to understand and even share the feelings of someone else, allowing the empathetic person to see and understanding a situation from another person’s perspective. It is believed, however, that to be truly empathetic, one must know someone personally going through the experience. Sympathy is is defined an understanding for someone else’s feelings and hardships, but does not note mutual feelings. Instead sympathy acknowledges that someone else is experiencing a hard time and leads to expressions of care and well wishes... but it does not involved sharing the difficult feelings or seeing the situation from that person’s perspective. For example, the world is sympathetic to the immense pain and death caused by CIVID-19 right now, but to be empathetic to the horrific situation you’d have to know someone personally being affected. So is it possible that an increased level of empathy allows someone to place themselves within a different person’s experience, be it dream-based, just as they are able to truly feel other people’s experiences in the waking world.... 

Along with empathy, it’s worth mentioning the possible involvement of the Creative Mind, specifically that of a writer who has to imagine being other people as part of their process. I’d even argue that the ability to become characters within their narrative during wakeful consciousness is only possible because of the presence of empathy. It is also believed that only faces that you have actually seen can appear in your dreams. This would support the role of empathy in my character hopping, since empathy can only be felt for those you know (and there have seen the face of, often). I’ve also considered that the character hoping may be a step towards lucid dreaming, which I’ve been interested in for a while but have not done in-depth research on. Dream journaling is a well known practice to work towards lucid dreaming, and I have been do for the past month of so. Though I can remember dreams for much longer since I started the journaling, I haven’t experienced any conscious control within the dreams. The character hopping has been happening for as long as I can remember and has always been out of my control, leaving me very confused when I wake and remember I’d just been a young boy or nameless adventurer. Have yet to be an animal though.... I think ;)