| In lucid dreams there's a whole category of things like this: reading a paragraph of text, looking at a clock (digital or analog), or working any kind of technology more complex than a calculator. For me personally, even light switches have been a huge tell in the past, so basically almost anything electrical. I've always held the utterly unscientific position that this is because the brain only has enough GPU cycles to show you an approximation of what the dream world looks like, but to actually run a whole simulation behind the scenes would require more FLOPs than it has available. After all, the brain also needs to run the "player" threads: It's already super busy. Stretching the analogy past the point of absurdity, this is a bit like modern video game optimizations: the mountains in the distance are just a painting on a surface, and the remote on that couch is just a messy blur of pixels when you look at it up close. So the dreaming brain is like a very clever video game developer, I guess. |