Why Can’t You Punch Hard or Run Fast in Dreams

you're on your way to school one day when suddenly you look and spot him the school bully he's at least six inches taller than you and looks like he hit puberty in kindergarten his muscles ripple as he flexes and now he's turned his attention to you the earth literally shakes says he takes step after powerful step in your direction this is it you'll have to fight you tell yourself and you prepare to throw the meanest right hook you've ever thrown in your life which lands with all the force of a feather the bully laughs doesn't even feel your pathetic attempt to clock his head off and instead prepares to return the favor you've turned to run it's your only way out of this now you pump your feet as hard as you can but frustratingly you can barely move your legs it's like they're made out of molasses or your feet are encased in cement no matter how hard you try to run you move so frustratingly slow and your bully is right there behind you every step of the way we've all had that dream and research indicates that it's quite a popular dream maybe you're not fighting against a bully but odds are that you've experienced a dream where you tried to fight someone or something off and ended up throwing the weakest most pathetic punches of your life maybe you're a lover and not a fighter though and so you decide to run in your dream only to find out that no matter how fast you are in real life or how hard you try to run you're basically stuck in place barely putting one foot in front of the other another popular variation of the slow running dream is a feeling of extreme pain in your legs where it takes every ounce of grit and determination you have just to force yourself into a slow limping walk but why does our brain do this to us why do we dream that we're so pathetically weak and incapable of the most basic actions after all when we fantasize or daydream we can be superheroes or make ourselves into one punch man and ruin Thanos whole career with one hit dreams are difficult things to study mostly because the observer is also the subject and typically that leads to bad science there's also the difficulty in trying to study something that you can only do during your sleep and it's not very easy to try and be scientific when you're unconscious yet back in the 19th century french aristocrat marquis de RV this anthony took some time off from inventing more ridiculous last names to we zone and descent the try and seriously study the world of dreams as a young boy he discovered that he had a strange talent the ability to lucidly dream lucid dreaming is the ability to control your dreams it allows you to be completely aware of the fact that your imagery but without breaking the unconsciousness that keeps you asleep this lets you take control of your dream manipulate it however you want while many people are able to train themselves to do this the Marquis was born with the ability to naturally do it and discovered this talent at the age thirteen this allowed him to perform some experiments while dreaming and he readily recorded his findings for instance it's common knowledge that you can't die in dreams though some people claim to have done so the Marquis wanted to find out if this was indeed true or not and thus would dream of climbing to the top of a tall building and then throwing himself off of its roof as he plummeted to his death though that dream would always change scenes and he would be unable to die even though he was fully in control of his dream it seems like his subconscious mind was still dictating the rules of the dream and forbidding him from dying instead of hitting the pavement in front of the building his dream would jump forward and he would find himself standing in front of the body on the street with people gathered around it witnesses told him that the man had jumped from the top of the building and this was an interesting observation clearly the Marquis mind was controlling the world of the dream and despite the Marquis having control of his own actions within the dream his brain was not allowing him to do anything that would harm him instead the brain recognized what the Marquis had done and what direction the dream was moving in and simply edited the outcome so that the Marquis lived but someone still died it was an interesting discovery to say the least and it speaks to just how much power the subconscious may have in dictating not just our perception and dreams but of reality itself the Marquis also made careful notes of the individuals he met in his dreams or of the places that he found himself while dreaming what he discovered is that people and places in his dreams mostly came from his own memories and very few characters or locations in his dreams were original the mind clearly was leading the Marquis down a tour of his own memories and the discovery hinted that possibly some of the parts of our brain that deal with imagination are actually not working during a dream state but why do we run so slowly in dream and punch so weakly well to find the answer to this and other questions researchers have started to turn to lucid dreamers in order to study the science of dreams in one study conducted by Jennifer Vint that the johannes gutenberg university of mainz in germany lucid dreamers were told to try and tickle themselves in waking life we're unable to tickle ourselves even if we're normally extremely ticklish that's because the brain recognizes what we're doing and shuts off the sensation as it would serve no physical purpose when someone else tickles us though the brain recognizes that it may be important for us to understand this information and thus allows us to feel it after all a tickle may just be a very creepy and overly friendly office worker who doesn't understand personal space or it could be a venomous spider making its way up the back of your neck that straight tickle you just felt yeah that's one of its legs as it silently slides up into your hair odds are at least some of you just brushed your hand over the back ear neck because even the imagery we created for you is enough to cause the sensation yet if you were to try to do it with yourself it wouldn't work if we can't do it in the waking world then finding out if we could do it in the dream world could yield answers to just how much of the brain is truly alert or not while dreaming sure enough when lucid dreamers were asked to tickle themselves they were unable to and when they asked other characters in their dream to do it the characters refused to the brain was once more playing God over the dream and preventing behavior that it considered abnormal clearly the brain has a large degree of awareness while dreaming but the next question finding out just how much control was the time how long actions took in dreams and the different study of lucid dreamers were instructed to perform several specific tasks while dreaming such as walking ten paces counting to 30 or performing a gymnastics routine they were to signal to the observers when they began their dream tasks by moving their eyes rapidly left and right and then signal once more when they finished by repeating the gesture this was possible because while the body is paralyzed during dreaming the eyes generally are not and can translate dream movement into real movement as the subjects perform their routines scientists discovered that it sometimes took the dreamers up to 50% longer to complete their tasks than in the waking world despite the dreamers reporting that their dream appeared to them as if it were running at normal speed it's clear that some dreams were running as much as half as fast as real life this can explain why dreams that seem so short in content can actually take up an hour or more of real time nobody really knows for sure just how slow the brain can make dreams move but scientists now speculate that the cause for our dream weakness and our inability to run fast sometimes could be attributed to this weird quirk of dreaming perhaps the brain fails to completely trick itself into the dream state and a small part is left aware that something is not quite right that small part is the part of you that recognizes that when you throw a punch you should be throwing it really really hard or that when you run you should be moving quickly because you're stuck in a dream moving at half speed or slower versus real life though your punches and running are underpowered slow and weak normally if your brain was fully tricked into accepting the dream you would still be throwing slow punches because your dream is moving much slower than real life but because you're fully immersed you wouldn't notice this difference in speed and experience the punch at full speed with one part of your brain unable to accept the dream state though it remains conscious enough to understand that the force of a punch is equal to the mass of your fist and the speed you throw it and since you aren't aware that the entire dream is moving slowly the punch that seems normal to you lands with barely any force in essence your brain is fighting itself one part of your brain is trying to simulate real-life experiences within the dream state and it's new rules while the other part of your brain is aware that something isn't right and trying to force real-life rules into the dream state proof of this may be the fact that despite punching weakly or running slowly often whatever we're fighting or running from doesn't ever actually defeat us or catch up to us even though that part of our mind that's awake is very much screaming that it should do just that that's likely why dreams with weak punches or slow runs are almost always nightmares with the feeling of constant dread as we try to run away from something that's always right behind us or fight off something that we can't quite have an effect on it turns out dreams are a lot more complex than we may have originally thought while they've been notoriously difficult to study a partnership with lucid dreamers and advanced technology is now unlocking secrets of the brain that we were once - perhaps in the future lucid dreaming will be as simple as plugging in a dream machine of sorts and we'll be able to break past the limits our minds force on us in our own dreams at the very least next time you're running away from a monster at least you'll run full-speed or won't fight back like a wimp more incredibly some scientists even speculate that one day we might be able to actually record our dreams and then watch them on playback like our own personal movie spearheaded by a Japanese scientists a recent effort to record dreams involve using an MRI machine to scan a sleeping subjects brain as they dreamt to recreate the dream the scientists turn to a library of MRI scans from people's brains while they were told to think about certain things the idea is that brains show activities in specific areas when you think about specific things and so by comparing the dream scans with normal scans scientists can figure out what you were dreaming about and recreated in a crude visual format no you won't get to see exactly what you were dreaming but simply a rough animation of what was going on in your dream perhaps in the future though an advanced AI program could track your brain activity in real time and digitally recreate the dream you had for your viewing pleasure we imagine though that nobody would be much interested in watching one of their dreaded slow running or weak punching nightmares what's the weirdest dream you've ever had have you ever experienced the slow running and weak punching phenomenon

Channel: The Infographics Show

Views: 2,835,669

Rating: 4.8979077 out of 5

Keywords: dream, sleep, dreaming, punch, what do dreams means, why can't i yell in dreams, sleeping, dream meaning, meaning, lucid dreams, dreams, lucid, lucid dreaming, brain, lucid dream, deep sleep, mind, how to

Id: nDEWGgpQ1MU

Length: 10min 12sec (612 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Sirscruffalot]

I don't get it. I've been a lucid dreamer all of my life and I regularly use super speed to run to things or away from things. I also regularly punch things and people so hard in my dreams that they implode or go flying through the air. I've also died in dreams (though I suppose if I'm able to watch myself die I'm still a different and alive "self"? This video seems way too "definitive" to me. Anyone else feel the same? Am I just interpreting it wrong? Even people who don't dream lucidly must punch cars and baddies into the horizon when/if they dream about being the Incredible Hulk or something, right? It's part of the "reality" of the dream.