Dreams as PODs?

Dreams. Fascinating things. They can give flashes of insight, or underly our motivations. But has anybody actually used a dream as a point of divergence? It seems to me that that could easily be the case in times and places when dream knowledge was highly valued - say some knowledge given in or interpretation of the dream turns out to be coincidentally useful to current events - and furthermore they could give motivation to people.

What do you folks think of the use of dreams as points of divergence?
 
Dreams, I believe, play a major role in reorganizing our deep thinking.

But by that token, one would think that some figure who might have a different dream than OTL does so because their circumstances are different somehow. Then it's the different circumstances that are the real POD.

On a historical timescale, different dreaming is a subset of different thinking.

So by that same token, we could easily see abuse of the "dreams can be PODs" idea. It would be the same kind of abuse I've seen in some timelines, where the whole reason and justification of all the frequent divergences is, some historical figure the author thinks was put upon tragically with bad results for the world as a whole, is suddenly a super-smart and far-sighted Mary Sue who just has different ideas and reactions than their real-life counterpart did, for no reason other than it would have been better in the long run if they had.

So we don't need dreams as PODs to enable that sort of bad writing, since it is apparently an option without that concept!:eek: But I'd guess that a lot of people, bewildered by the novelty of the device (here) or hoping to bewilder others, might take to smuggling in ridiculous flashes of insight and foresight, repeatedly, in the form of dreams.

When dealing with a modern person from our era that doesn't assume that dreams are from some external spirit world, it's well enough to take note of the vividness of an insight that might come from a dream, but stepping back a bit we just say "so and so had this idea;" we don't distinguish whether they had it by day or by night. They considered their circumstances and came up with a response--maybe it wasn't the waking mind that worked it out, but it was certainly the waking mind that executed the new plan, so...

What if we are dealing with people of a different mindset, who do believe dreams are sent by the gods or some such? Can we get away with "the gods" sending them some very good advice? Nope! Presumably if Athena or Thor was sending some Greek or Norsewoman some message in OTL, presumably if these same gods said something different in an ATL, it was because they too had solid reasons. And presumably if Loki or Vulcan was not telling any ironsmiths of their era how to make steam engines, they'd maintain the same sort of discreet silence in an alternate timeline, unless it happened to be "steam engine time" in their Alt-world for the same broad reasons it was in ours.

In short--dreams may be a vivid and poetic way of describing a POD. To suggest they are the POD is at best to subscribe to the view that actually there really are other intelligences than human at work here--a defensible and interesting notion to be sure--but more likely, will be tried out as a cover for really dumb timelines. That last is a shame and I'm certainly not suggesting that we must shun dream 'PODs', just recognize them for what they are.
 
Dreams. Fascinating things. They can give flashes of insight, or underly our motivations. But has anybody actually used a dream as a point of divergence? It seems to me that that could easily be the case in times and places when dream knowledge was highly valued - say some knowledge given in or interpretation of the dream turns out to be coincidentally useful to current events - and furthermore they could give motivation to people.

What do you folks think of the use of dreams as points of divergence?

In my aborted Mali Empire TL, a dream was the final push for colonization/discovery.
 
Shevek23 said:
In short--dreams may be a vivid and poetic way of describing a POD. To suggest they are the POD is at best to subscribe to the view that actually there really are other intelligences than human at work here--a defensible and interesting notion to be sure--but more likely, will be tried out as a cover for really dumb timelines. That last is a shame and I'm certainly not suggesting that we must shun dream 'PODs', just recognize them for what they are.

Let's say Washington has a dream involving a hawk, which inspires him to approach Benedict Arnold and in the process he finds out that Arnold is a lot more upset than he thought he was, and Washington is able to deal with that - somehow. (I say somehow because I'm not sure how that would work, but if I was pursuing it as an idea I'd get into it)

In a sense, that dream was the POD. On the other hand, the real change is not so much the dream itself as how Washington reacts to it.
 
IOTL Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte often experienced unsettling dreams which awoke him at nights. One such event was such that the notoriously superstitious emperor called off his planned invasion of Prussia, which was scheduled to go ahead the very next day. The night was 3 July 1866, at the height of the Austro-Prussian War. Now suppose Louis-Napoléon has a slightly more restful night instead and..
 
Dreaming is definitely a part of the human cognitive process. If you do damage to a person (certain degrees of alcoholism have this effect) so the brain mechanisms that enable dreaming fail, or you torture someone by continually detecting their attempts to enter dreaming sleep (easily done with technology that has been around for more than half a century) and disrupt just that phase of sleep, while letting them have all the other phases of sleep they want, after a while (weeks, I believe) they will die, with physical damage to their brain visible in the autopsy. So in that sense, these people who take their dreams very seriously are perfectly reasonable people. Obviously dreams are important!

But I suppose now that this thread is inspired by this one. Which is a classic example of a dream "POD" being a red herring. Not so long ago there were other discussions of "what if the Romans had gunpowder?" That one, and this one, stand or fall by the reasonableness of Romans discovering gunpowder, reproducing it more or less reliably, developing some effective use of it, and so on. It doesn't matter how the formula is first stumbled upon; what matters are the odds of something interesting happening next.

Now if the dream didn't (wrongly!) claim it was a formula for immortality but rather, said "mix this stuff together just so and you'll get a powder which burns real quick and thus produces a bursting pressure that you can use to make various kinds of toys and weapons," that would clearly be some kind of ASB! And a particularly dumb kind too, unless the backstory established just what sort of ASB is whispering these subliminal messages into the ear of this Classical-era guy and why they are doing it.
 
Dreams. Fascinating things. They can give flashes of insight, or underly our motivations. But has anybody actually used a dream as a point of divergence? It seems to me that that could easily be the case in times and places when dream knowledge was highly valued - say some knowledge given in or interpretation of the dream turns out to be coincidentally useful to current events - and furthermore they could give motivation to people.

What do you folks think of the use of dreams as points of divergence?

My Salonika thread actually is based on dreams, and my Fuhrer Trilogy also started with a couple

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
Now if the dream didn't (wrongly!) claim it was a formula for immortality but rather, said "mix this stuff together just so and you'll get a powder which burns real quick and thus produces a bursting pressure that you can use to make various kinds of toys and weapons," that would clearly be some kind of ASB! And a particularly dumb kind too, unless the backstory established just what sort of ASB is whispering these subliminal messages into the ear of this Classical-era guy and why they are doing it.

Speaking of forumlas, while there is some question as to whether the discoverer of the shape of the Benzene molecule actually dreamed it as he said (which would always happen in a TL based on a dream POD), I think it's plausible if the person was already thinking about the thing.

I don't think the gunpowder person would necessarily be, but lets look at Cato's Cavalry as an illustration. Yes, this person just decided to try a stirrup one day - why? If the author of this really neat TL had wanted to, the TL could have realistically had a beginning of a cavalry man wondering how he can stay on his horse better, then having a dream where he is riding his horse carrying grape vines, and as his feet are tangled in them he is actually remaining ont he horse.

In other words, if the person is already thinking about something, and it's plausible they would have the knowledge to make connections, then sure. The dreamer in Roman times won't easily have the idea of mixing the components for gunpowder - but such a dreamer can have a problem, and with a little more chance to rest and consider his or her problem, in a way they can understand (feet caught in vines leding to stirrups), a dream could be a POD.

Of course, this may raise the argument, "Isn't the POD that they got just a bit better sleep that night and were able to dream?" But, that's splitting hairs - it's like asking where the "real POD" of any different decision is.
 
the Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev went to bed frustrated by a puzzle he had been playing with for years: how the atomic weights of the chemical elements could be grouped in some meaningful way--and one that, with any luck, would open a window onto the hidden structure of nature. He dreamed, as he later recalled, of "a table where all the elements fell into place as required." His intuition that when the elements were listed in order of weight, their properties repeated in regular intervals, gave rise to the Periodic Table of the Elements--which, though much revised since, underlies modern chemistry.

It was a dream during the day, when he nodded off after several hours work on the topic.

* taken from here
* and some information from wikipedia

That proves that if you constantly try to solve some problem - the solution may appear in a dream - your thinking process goes on while you are asleep
 
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