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Brilliand comments on Dissolving the Question - Less Wrong
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I remember about three dreams per night with no effort. Sometimes when I wake up I can remember more, but then it's impossible for me to remember them all for long. If I want to remember each of four or more dreams, I have to rehearse them immediately, otherwise I will usually forget all but three. The act of rehearsing makes it harder to remember the others, and it's weird to wake up with 6-7 dreams in my mental cache, knowing that I can't keep them all because after I actively remind myself what 3-4 were about the others will be very faint and by the time I have thought about five the others will be totally gone.
In related(?) news, often my brain wakes up before my body, and I can't move so much as my eyeballs! It's like the opposite of sleepwalking.
If I'm lying in bed, totally "locked in" and remembering a slew of dreams, I know I am awake. No one has complicated thoughts about several dreams from totally different genres while experiencing that one is unable to move a muscle without being awake.
If I'm arguing to the animated electrified skeleton of a shark that has made itself at home in my pool that he'd be better off joining his living brother in a lake in the Sierra Nevadas, who is eating campers I tell him to in exchange for hot dogs...I have a good chance of suspecting it's a dream, even within the dream.
Neither of these are tests, of course.
...I've had some pretty complicated dreams, where I've woken up from a dream(!), gone to work, made coffee, had discussions about the previous dream, had thoughts about the morality or immorality of the dream, then sometime later come to a conclusion that something was out of place(I'm not wearing pants?!) then woken up to realize that I was dreaming. I've had nested dreams a good couple of layers deep with this sort of thing going on.
That said I think you have something there, though. Sometimes I wake up (Dream or otherwise) and I remember my dream really vividly, especially when I awake suddenly, due to an alarm clock or something
But I've never had a dream that I struggled to remember what was in my dream inside of my dream. At the least, such an activity should really raise my priors that I'm toplevel.
One method to check if you're dreaming is to hold your nose shut and try to breathe through it - if you're dreaming, your nose will work "normally", whereas if you're awake actual physics will take effect. (Note: every time I've done this while dreaming, I immediately got very excited and woke up.)