Mathemagician Video

[Harald]

(07-19-2021 11:24 PM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  But another quite interesting topic on mental math I've never seen discussed anywhere is the computations you can do while dreaming !

In my experience, I've been able to multiply a 4-digit number by a 3-digit number and achieve the correct result while in a dream, so though in the dream I used paper and pencil, it was obviously done in my sleeping mind. Most interestingly, a few months ago I was able to invert a 3x3 matrix with one-digit integer elements while dreaming, which is my best dreaming-math achievement so far.

In my experience, one difficulty of doing math while dreaming is that numbers and texts tend to change from glance to glance, as do the covers of books, street signs, underground station names (so you usually get lost when trying to go somewhere) and the like, but if you manage to stay focused you'll successfully complete the operation sometimes.

Another difficulty is that though I can do some math while dreaming, it takes a lot of effort and the operation proceeds very slowly. This amazes me in the dream, because I notice the unexpected effort and the slowness and I can't fathom why is that, since I know I can do these operations at much higher speeds with little effort. It would be a telltale that indeed I'm dreaming but usually I don't take the hint !

Perhaps I could use that as my totem (as per Inception): if I try to multiply two 3-digit numbers using pencil and paper and it takes me a lot of effort, then I'm dreaming.

Best regards.
V.

How do you know all this? Usually the second I open my eyes, everything I was dreaming disappears.

There is the exception of nightmares that occasionally did wake me up in the middle of the night when I was a child.
And once, I must have been about 10 years old, my dad gave me the task of calculating resistor values for an Ampere meter. The idea was to have a given analogue instrument with know voltage and current and to put in parallel a series of n resistors to get n different measuring ranges by connecting the positive test lead to taps in-between the resistors. (I'll try and draw a schematic if this doesn't become clear from my explanation.) The idea of this being to avoid switches to change the range.
Anyhow, I tried all day and couldn't figure out how to do it. While lying in bed I finally worked it out, and I think it was shortly after I had fallen asleep. It was all very clear to me. When I woke you the next morning all I could remember that I had found the solution, but not what it was.
It took me several days to find it again.

Cheers,
Harald