You are not logged in to Prodigits. Please register or login.

Subject: Pain in dreams
Replies: 34 Views: 876

shadow27 3.04.18 - 09:28am
Do you feel pain in dreams? There is this typical notion that you can't, but it has happened to me before (very rarely). So..

Ask anyone whether they've felt pain in their dreams, and you'll likely be met with the same reaction: a thoughtful pause, a pensive look, maybe a hesitant and confused ''I think so''. Theres that old cliche, after all - ''pinch me, I must be dreaming'' - that suggests physical pain in our dreams simply doesnt exist. But ask psychologists today and the answer, at least according to scientific research, is decidedly yes: Even within the comforts of your dream world, sensations of physical pain - whether its getting sliced in a knife fight or bitten by a dog - can exist and feel devastatingly real.
The nuances of pain - such as why it happens, how it happens, and its purpose - remain much less understood, even to those who have hounded the subject for decades. ''It never ceases to amaze me that the brain - while a person is asleep in bed cut off from the outside world - can create such complex and convincing worlds that we take as true,'' says Antonio Zadra,a psychology professor at the University de Montreal's Dream and Nightmare lab. Indeed, his research, and that of others over the years, shows hundreds of dreamers reporting they felt incredibly lifelike cuts, aches, and burns, as one 2011 study of more than 400 people in the International Journal of Dream Research reflects. So where does the sensation come from, and why? * +

shadow27 3.04.18 - 09:32am
According to Professor Zadra, there are two sorts of dream pain: the real and the phantom, and both are pretty rare encompassing maybe half a percentage of all peoples dreams. Real pain occurs when an external sensation from the waking world like when your limbs fall asleep into that numb pins-and-needles effect seep into our dreams. In one fascinating study, Zadra and colleagues used blood pressure cuffs to restrict people's blood flow during REM sleep, and individuals consequently reported feeling the sensation in their dreams - whether it was running through icy snow, dancing painfully, or wrestling with the cuff itself. * +

slick_01 3.04.18 - 09:33am
I felt an emotional pain once when a loved one died in one of my dreams * +

shadow27 3.04.18 - 09:34am
But what Zadra finds much more fascinating (and uncommon) is phantom pain: the kind your brain produces and plays out entirely within the confines of the dream, whether by cribbing off a memory of hurt you once felt, or something you maybe saw on Game of Thrones. ''[People] will wake up from instances where they were being tortured, or they had a spear in their ribs, and describe it as horrendous or unbearable,'' says Zadra. ''But the pain sensation disappears the second they wake up.'' That physical pain has no actual source in the real world, he says.

(Shadow - I wonder if perhaps that is wrong, and instead it is an *intensification* of pain that is minor or almost non-existant.) * +

shadow27 3.04.18 - 09:37am
Unfortunately, the mechanisms behind how the brain creates that pain arent well known, given that the concept of pain, even in waking life, is still a big subject of debate. And according to Stanford psychiatry professor,Luis de Lecea, its difficult to experience pain in sleep, given our sensory pathways are mostly disconnected from cortical input from the real world. Zadra does suggest that the neuromatrix model the idea that pain is a subjective construct of the mind could explain how the brain creates hurt in dreams, too.
But what about dreams where horrendous things happen, but you feel nothing at all? What determines when you feel pain in a dream, or not? * +

shadow27 3.04.18 - 09:40am
It's a testament to the mysterious wonders of the human brain that even virtual violence can be dreamt up. ''If we feel that dreams are created from our brains, it's absolutely fascinating that dream characters can scare us, get angry, seduce us, make us fall in love, and your brain is creating all this, and surprising itself,'' says Zadra. * +

dan27notts 3.04.18 - 10:52am
I remember once i was dreaming that water was coming out the back of a quad bikes exhaust and wetting me but i was actually just pissing the bed, is this the same? * +

sisfreak2017 3.04.18 - 12:02pm

You should change your Nic to
HonestDan * +

+ go to page 1-5
+ my page
+ functions
3 search
4 submit a reply
7 last page
+ bookmark
8 General Chat Forum
9 Forum Index

Custom Search