I'll think that my dreams make sense while I'm having them, sometimes I've even written down plot elements from my dreams when I woke up in the conviction that they were brilliant and I would have to reuse them. Unfortunately, things that seem brilliant when I'm still half asleep tend to look anywhere from stupid to lunatic once I'm properly awake.
My dreams do have recurring consistent elements, but I've actually lost the ability to make things happen in my dreams by willing them hard. For a while when I was a kid I could, but after some point I found that if I tried it, I would simply wake up instead, and this is still the case.
It often seems as if my dreams are being created by someone who's in an adversarial relationship with me, and if I learn anything about using dream logic to my advantage, they will eventually catch up and change it on me.
To clarify: my dreams certainly don't make sense in regular logic. However, I've found they usually make sense if I replace certain axioms and resulting theorems about reality with alternative ones which apply to dreams.
Causation dissolves somewhat in dreams: it's not that "things happen /because/ I will them to", because "because" doesn't make sense in dream logic. It wouldn't work if I believed, in the dream world, that wishing things to happen causes them to happen (I have tried this). It's more "when I want things to happen, mu...
Given how much you have learned of the techniques of rationality, of Bayesian updates and standard of evidence, of curiosity being the first virtue and being willing to update your beliefs... have any of your dreams been affected by them?
The reason I ask; I'm reading the entirely of the Sequences, and am about an eighth of the way through. And I've just woken from a dream whose plot was somewhat unusual. I had noticed some mildly strange animals and/or people, and upon trying to find out what was going on, discovered a small riverside camp of people who fell well outside what I understood to be the realm of human variation. The person I had started investigating with then claimed to be a god, or if I preferred, a vastly powerful and intelligent alien entity, and offered to do something to prove it to me. I remembered that I had once established for myself a standard of evidence for exactly this sort of question - the growth of a new, perfectly functional limb, in a way outside of present medical understanding... and in a few moments, my dream-self was the possesser of a nice, long tail. I had not been expecting that to happen, and noticed I was extremely confused, and deliberately raised my estimate of the probability that I really was talking to a god-like figure by some number of decibans. At the end of the dream, said deity-figure said that he would offer to split us off from his 'main project', on a few conditions - one of which was 'no more clues', since he had given us 'more than enough to figure out what's going on'... ... whereupon I questioned a few things, and immediately woke up.
I don't recall having a dream of anything like that sort before - and I dream in understandable narrative plots so often that I sometimes dream sequels. So I'm curious; is this a normal sort of thing that happens to LessWrongians?