What do people who live an entire life in one night's dream learn about the world?

Question

I read a few articles in the past that there have been people who fell asleep, lived an entire lifetime in their dreams without realizing that they were asleep, and then woke up in their younger body again. While I'd also like to know what kind of psychological effects this might have on someone, I'm more interested in what they take away from the dreamworld itself.

There've been articles pointing out these instances, but when I looked for the details, they're all pretty much nonexistent, or at least very hard for me to find. Hence my question here: Aside from memories of people who never actually existed, can someone learn more about the world itself from their dreams? Like math, science, animal facts and such? Is it possible for them to gain a greater understanding of economics and business? Thought processes of wisdom? And if any of this is the case, is it also possible to gain false knowledge on the world? Like a spice that doesn't exist, or facts that make no sense for an animal?

TLDR: What happens to the mind after living an entire lifetime in a single night's dream then waking up, and what can/do they learn/grow from that?

Answer 1

I suspect your inability to find many details is telling because dreams don't really work like coherent narratives. You may have heard of "dream logic," which is where you "know" things in the dream that shouldn't be possible, like that you're running from a monster in a nightmare even though you haven't seen or heard anything. The dream is more like a mix of images and subconscious feelings than something you're actually watching or living through. Additionally, the details of a dream are actually consolidated when the person wakes up and may not be the same as what "actually happened," to whatever extent that phrase makes sense here. So, you can't really "live another life" inside of a dream. If someone reports this, assuming they're not hoaxing, it's more like an illusion of feeling like that happened after they woke up.

Since it's not a real experience, they can't learn anything from it in the sense of obtaining new factual information they didn't know before, like going from not knowing calculus to knowing calculus. "False learning," if you will, is indeed a lot more likely because it would just be their brain making something up. The likelihood of the dream telling them some animal fact or scientific equation out of nowhere and just happening to be correct is so unlikely it might as well be impossible.

However, it is possible for people to learn things from dreams in slightly different ways. People sometimes do change their lives because they were so impressed by something that happened to them in a dream, especially when you consider that many people believe that dreams are a way to communicate with "another realm." Dreams are also important for memory formation and intuition, so while it's not possible to learn a fact you didn't already know from a dream, it is possible that information could combine in a way you didn't think of while you were awake. For example, James Watson, one of the scientists who discovered the DNA double helix, claims to have made a breakthrough while dreaming about climbing a spiral staircase. To be fair, he had a possible ulterior motive to downplay the influence of Rosalind Franklin, whom he reportedly disliked. But whether he was a reliable narrator or not, the basic example still shows what I mean.

The conclusion I'm finally arriving at is that it should be possible for someone to gain insight or new ideas from a dream like that, but not more so than any particularly emotionally-impactful dream. The same thing goes for other psychological effects. You could, for example, gain a phobia from a dream depending on how scary or lifelike it felt. But in the end, it's still just a dream and, therefore, limited to what your thoughts are capable of producing.