So I walked around in an LD this morning and tested dream characters with simple math. I first tried two young women on the street. I asked them both simple multiplication (with sums larger than 20, though–like “What’s 5x7?”). Neither of them answered correctly. I followed them to a party where I questioned two more people, a younger man and a middle-aged woman. Neither of them answered correctly. I felt like everyone at the party was probably hollow so I left it.
Outside again I came across a boy at a chain link fence outside of a ballpark. I asked the boy if he’d answer a few questions for me, but he wanted to know what was in it for him. I dug into my pants and, luckily, found my wallet. I opened to check it for money and found several bills, and a few receipts and wrappers. Without looking closely, I handed the boy a “bill.” He said, “Hey, this is a candy wrapper.” I looked down and it was a candy bar wrapper. So I dug into the wallet again and found a $20 bill. The boy was impressed and greedily took the $20.
I asked him three simple multiplication questions and he got them all correct. I remember one of the questions was “What’s 5x5?” Another was 7x6, and after supplying “42” he muttered a joke that I didn’t catch or can’t now remember, but I think was related to Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe.” After the third question, his friends arrived and they wanted to watch a baseball game together on top of the dugout. I climbed up there with them, eager to test the boy further. Despite the fact that I’d proven to myself that some characters fail these questions and some (or at least one so far) had gotten the questions right, I decided that multiplication answers (like 5x5) might be accessed with visual memory. That is, the boy may not be “doing math” at all, I thought, but simply using my visual memory of a multiplication table.
So, thinking that, on top of the dugout, I asked the boy a simple subtraction question. I asked him “What’s 42-11?” He answered, “511” (“five eleven”). I laughed and I took this to mean he meant “five feet, eleven inches.” I told him that 5’11" would equal 71 inches and the answer to the subtraction problem was 31.
At that point my girlfriend, IRL, shook me and I woke up.
**
Regardless of the consciousness and abilities of dream characters, I realize that I proved to myself that I’m quite capable of performing simple math in an LD. I spontaneously came up with multiplication questions with sums larger than 20 and I knew the answers as I asked them, and knew that dream characters had gotten them wrong.
Also, it might be tempted to say that the little boy only knew the correct answers because I knew them, but then how do I explain that four characters before him did not know the answers? I would describe my frame of mind when I began the test as excited. I wanted the dream characters to respond correctly. I wouldn’t say that I was disappointed after they failed; I would say I was curious and amused. They were so sure that their answers were right. For instance, I would ask “What’s 6x5?” and they would off-handedly say, “44.” Some answers they first four gave weren’t even close!
Curiously, in Tholey’s study one of the experimentee LDers also got correct answers from a child.
I’m impressed by the fact that I was able to do math in a dream so easily, and that I performed a multi-step operation. I didn’t automatically know that 5’11" was 71 inches. I had to think about it. I thought to myself, before correcting the boy, “Well, 5x12=60. Add 11 and you have 71.”
Last, I cannot help but wonder if the Expectation effect might have been at work in the subtraction question. Did the boy fail the question because I doubted his ability? (Yet, again, I wouldn’t say I doubted the others’ ability. I was merely open to what they said, I feel.) He could have gotten the multiplication questions right because of my visual memory of the answer, but why didn’t the others access my visual memory if that’s so? Subtraction could be more difficult because it requires an intermediate step; it requires memory. Yet in other contexts dream characters exhibit memory.
Curiouser and curiouser…