Receiving Advice in a Dream
I recently had a dream where I was meeting with one of my committee members. He was questioning me about my dissertation plans, and was asking me what I was going to do. I said that I still wanted to build a system, and make something useful. I then told him I was struggling to just get the system built.
He replied telling me it was an information transfer problem. I simply needed to transfer the information of how to build the system into my brain, so that I could build the system.
Of course, he was right. Creating a web app is not a hard problem, not in the least. There are many tutorials and examples and templates I can use to build one, I just need to learn how.
In fact, I already had this route in mind. I had started an HTML/CSS/Javascript course a few months ago, but alas, it fell to the wayside in favor of easier and more seemingly short-term rewarding activities.
But hearing this advice from my committee member made this approach seem much more reasonable and help to redirect my attention to a solution I knew about, but wasn't working towards. This, I'm thinking, is perhaps one of the ways in which advice or messages in a dream are helpful.
While I do believe that dreams can help generate new insights or ideas, they can also serve to help redirect our efforts towards what we knew we should do, but perhaps forgot. By hearing something we know from someone we trust or respect or admire, it can help to reconnect this piece of knowledge or wisdom into our working brain in a meaningful way.
While the particular case I describe was not receiving any new wisdom from a dream character, it did help me to realize what was going on, and to recenter myself around this direction.
I have a model of my committee member in my mind, which is a construction built from every interaction I've had with them, everything I know about them, and what I think they might do. In my dreams, I can run that simulation model, and hear from them. My brain may not be getting any new knowledge from the outside world during dreaming, but by running a simulation model of someone who I deeply respect and value their opinion, I can "guess" what they might say to me, and actually experience them saying that to me.
This process alone can be quite beneficial, especially if the model you have of the individual providing advice is significantly different from who you are in waking life. Interacting with dream characters allows you to connect with models you have, one might even consider them parts of the self (parts that represent others), and bring those parts into a lifelike experience in dreams.
This also highlights one reason why maximizing lucid dreaming may not always be ideal. In my dream described above, I actually performed a lightweight reality check (looked at the lines on my hand), and it failed, so I was pretty sure I was in real life. By not having awareness that I was dreaming, the interaction with my advisor felt very "real" -- it felt like an experience equivalent to meeting with him in person in real life. If I were lucid, I may not have approached the meeting with the same level of seriousness, or even changed the dream entirely. By simply letting my dream happen and paying attention to it, I was able to run and interact with a useful simulation model that effected my waking life positively.