Dreams

[Amlux]

If you have an interesting dream, tell me about it! I keep a dream journal on my site and I really think it's interesting to do so. I just wrote a very long and in-depth entry in it. If you can't remember any recent dreams, tell me about the most memorable dream you've had in your life. Maybe it was a nightmare as a kid, or a sexy dream as a teen, or something else entirely! Whether you attach spiritual or psychoanalytic meaning to your dreams or not, they clearly have some importance for us neurologically given that we dream just about every time we sleep (whether we remember it or not). It seems that our need to dream is closely related to our need to sleep, and that's something absolutely central to our survival. And yet the exact purpose and function of dreaming is still pretty mysterious. So dreams are something I've always taken a strong interest in.

For those of you who say "I don't remember my dreams," I would respond: You might remember them more than you realize, but only in the ~10 minutes or so after you wake up. So I highly recommend keeping a journal by your bedside (even if it's a laptop). It's really hard to motivate yourself to take notes as soon as you get up, but there is a reward to it. You can unlock some interesting creative parts of your brain when you do. I also find that there's a cycle where the more you make yourself remember your dreams, the more you tend to without trying. That is, the more you take notes about your dreams, even if it's vague and short, the more your recall of your dreams will improve. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some genetic component to it and some might simply be more tuned to remembering dreams than others. It might be connected to ease of mental visualization, but I'm not sure about that. I have a friend who, like me, scores very high on the mental visualization (apple) test, but can't remember his dreams at all, unlike me.

I've never tried lucid dreaming, but I've had people recommend it to me. It seems like an obvious choice for someone like me who enjoys things like spirituality, dreams, and altered states of consciousness. But I guess it always seemed a bit... pointless? It seems like if the end goal is having a world where I can do or create anything, I would rather just draw that or animate it! At least then I could share it with others, and it would be stable and reliable instead of effervescent and temporary. But if anyone has tried it or wanted to, I would be curious for your thoughts.

So post your most memorable dreams, recent dreams you want to highlight, thoughts/tidbits about dreams, or whatever else here!

[Thricegreat]

I think everyone can dream if one takes enough choline supplements. I don't know the exact mechanism. But I guess it interacts with the hippocampus.

My most impressible dream was seeing a giant waving light. The whole dream was just seeing it. But since the light was so impressible, I even thought that it could be something like the Tabor Light. Though nothing special happened after that dream.

[drummyfish]

This is an awesome topic, thank you Amlux ^_^ Sleep, dreaming and the mystery of their purpose somewhat fascinate me too. For starters I'll spam all that comes to my mind about dreams. Things specific to me:

• I dream in color and quite vividly.
• I can remember my dreams well, but obviously only the ones during which I wake up (I think this is the rule).
• I get sleep paralysis here and there. I never got visual hallucinations but hear scary screams and cannot move.
• I experienced exploding head syndrome twice. I've written about it here.
• I've never kept a diary or trained lucid dreaming.

Memory seems to function in especially strange ways for dreams. Here is how it works for me (please share your own experiences on this):

• The memory of a dream and the emotion associated with it fade away very quickly. I can remember a dream well for several hours after I wake up and oftentimes it leaves a very intense feeling (nostalgia, love, ...), which stays for about the same time. As the day goes on, both the memory and the emotion fade away and the next day I could probably recall just bare minimum if someone asked me.
• However, oddly enough, the memories of dreams seem to remain somewhere deep in subconsciousness and they appear very interconnected. This was a striking realization for me: when I recall a recent dream and willingly focus on it, I suddenly remember another dream I had even years ago and thinking about it leads me to remembering another one etc. This seems to go until infinity (or at least I've never gotten to the bottom of it). This is weird as fuck.

I never trained lucid dreaming but on rather rare occasions I have a lucid dream when I realize it is a dream. It is cool because obviously you can have a lot of fun with flying or raping girls. The latter used to motivate me to learn lucid dreaming when I was much younger and hornier but isn't so anymore really.

Dreams I often have include:

• An alternative version of the area I live in; for example there's an IRL highway nearby my place and in my dreams it's really a TrackMania track that even has a loop to drive through. There are also new villages that aren't there IRL, some quite bizarre because, for example, they're really small but still have skyscrapers. My brother told me he has this also and apparently his "dream world" is even much richer and more consistent than mine.
• Flying -- I think this is fairly common. I can fly in almost every dream, either by swimming in air or by using a tiny piece of cloth or something, I generally enjoy this a lot.
• One of the most frequently recurring themes in my dreams are returning back to elementary school, high school or my janitor and laundry job. For some reason it's usually not about university or other jobs I've had. These dreams are quite stressful -- I know I have already graduated but for some reason I have to go back to school and I usually realize I'm shit and can't keep up. Same with the job dreams: mostly it starts with my boss calling me to get back to the job and she assigns me to clean some skyscraper that turns out to be a very complicated maze that I even struggle to navigate.
• Another kind of dream that repeats for me lately is about being on a vacation by the sea where I plan to do things like going swimming at night, but then I realize the vacation is over and I missed the opportunity. My mom told me she's having the exact same dreams very often.
• Sometimes I dream about gory accidents. It's not really stressful though, I think it's because I watch gore before I go to sleep, it's a sort of fucked up habit I somehow got into.
• Having trouble speaking, again probably a common phenomenon. I'm talking to someone and have important things to say, but somehow it's extremely difficult to pronounce words. Very frustrating.

Another weird observation: right before falling asleep I oftentimes get short but extremely vivid visions of flying over a field for example. It's different from a dream because I'm still mostly awake and it looks pretty much like reality, like a high FPS, ultra HD film footage. It tends to awaken me more for a while before I eventually fall asleep.

[Amlux]

• I get sleep paralysis here and there. I never got visual hallucinations but hear scary screams and cannot move.

I only experienced something like this once. I never had hallucinations or any sensations really though. I was just totally conscious but couldn't move my body or open my eyes at all. It was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.

Dreams I often have include:

Funny how you mention TrackMania as I often have experiences like this too where games turn up in my dreams. It seems like skills that you practice a lot get cycled through in your subconscious well, as I often have my brain try to recreate the stages for shooting games I've played and have a lot of memories of. Sometimes this happens while I'm falling asleep too and I get the kind of Tetris effect. I've never played Tetris enough for it to happen with Tetris in particular, but I often find myself recreating strategy games, whether that's trying to micro units in Warcraft III or evaluate strategies in Heroes of Might and Magic III or whatnot. When I studied Japanese most intensely, I would often have dreams where I spoke in Japanese too, though usually my grammar and verbiage was bizarre and illogical upon retrospect. It's probably a sign that I should study more that I'm not dreaming in Japanese as much these days.

I have the returning to school dreams a lot too, either high school or college. I'm not sure what that is but maybe it's a common theme for people who feel like they have some task they haven't accomplished or feel arrested development towards some life mission? I've never experienced flying dreams, but I do have the ones where you're naked or near-naked in public fairly often. Apparently it might be a way of channeling feelings of anxiety or insecurity. I've always had kind of a kink for exhibitionism so I find it kind of exciting in erotic fantasies but it's never been pleasant in dreams.

[Phonolagnia]

One thing that happens often for me in dreams and annoys me a great deal is I'm trying to say something to a interlocutor, and they can never quite hear or understand what I'm saying, they just keep repeating "what?". Maybe this reflects an insecurity in diction.

[thanatos]

I do often remember my dreams. I wouldn't describe them as exciting or anything of that nature, nor do they have any kind of "relevancy" in my life when I remember them the moment I awake. The best way I can explain the dreams I've been having in the last two to three years always involve other people in my dreams. I don't recall ever having a dream where I am by myself and never engaging in some sort of mindless banter and asking myself where I am or what I'm doing. When I have these dreams, I always seem to be talking and communicating normally with other people, sometimes with my family members, or people I've known in the past about random subjects. I don't remember what those subjects are. Strangely I've found that in some dreams I get, I encounter people with faces I have never seen before, in person or in entertainment/fictional settings. Odd. I'm quite the introvert in real life and I don't talk to people or socialise, as I like to keep to myself. These dreams are the exact opposite of that introverted personality, I become an extrovert and I can converse normally with people as if they were my best friends and not feel judged. Perhaps I've written the perfect storybook in my head when I'm resting because all the characters are controlled by me. In terms of introversion, if I were ever in a situation where I believe I've found the "right person", I open up a bit more. But I have yet to find the "right people" because I'm always surrounded by humans I'm incapable of ever getting along with so I have to force myself to act like the others, I don't want them knowing the real me and I don't care what others have going on in their lives.

[malformed_jill]

i wish i could remember a lot more of my dreams, but i only have a vague recollection of them without much of the elements. i think they're usually just based on irl stuff and people i've met in my past and nothing much fictional or even arousing, just dreams about me doing or watching everyday life... talking about casual things that i cared so little about that i can't even give an example in this post
the only kind of funny and memorable ones i remember involved animals. i remember having one of my typical 'everyday' dreams when i walked on into a large dog and its bark in the dream forced me awake. but the one i remember the most (and only one i've written down thus far) is another 'everyday' dream with me walking about in some large urban park with a clear view of the city over the trees, and then some sloth bear suddenly started galloping towards me, and i remember feeling the adrenaline in that dream until it stopped with a fake out, right in front of me, and spoke:

How do you like this place/dream so far?

i think that's the last part i remember, i probably cussed out that bear afterwards for having such a terrifying entrance
i'd probably take supplements to try and evoke more dreams, since they're a pretty elusive thing to me, but i prefer getting nutrients from food directly...

[Deoster]

I tend to remember my dreams as I wake up and forget them in the next half hour or so, so it would probably benefit me to keep a dream journal. About once every few months though I have a dream interesting enough that I remember it in the long term.

When I was a kid (maybe age 7-10) I had a lot of falling dreams, where I would be falling off a cliff or a very high tree or building, and coming to the realization that I was about to die and having to confront that before waking up in the last minute. I also remember a significant dream from around the same time period where I was a detective tracking down a killer to an orphanage (I was a kid and so was everyone else in the world it seemed, so the orphans and the proprietors of the orphanage were, somewhat humorously, the same age) and when I found him amongst the orphans he stabbed me and I remember very vividly having the thought "I'm not going to be alive anymore... what am I going to tell everyone?" I was kind of preoccupied with death at this age.

As a teenager I didn't have too many erotic dreams, despite wanting them and being sort of preoccupied with sex. I had a few where I was mostly just in the presence of a naked woman and I would always wake up *right* before the moment of penetration, which was frustrating at the time but a bit funny in retrospect.

I didn't really have any friends at a certain point, and no IRL friends for a long time, so I would occasionally have quite sad about hanging out with either old friends or imagined ones. Some of the locations were kind of interesting though, I would often be in these big empty abandoned industrial looking places but acting as if this was just a normal hang-out spot.

I remember one notable dream where I was with a young Japanese girl and I wordlessly understood that she had to kill herself and I was just sitting with her.

I had an interesting dream on the night of my seventeenth birthday where I downloaded a computer program called something like "Causca" which put the image of a red geometric Cthulhu onto my screen that created visions in my head of enormous floods that were really striking and deeply scary to me at the time. I had this feeling that I had some incredibly old spirit inhabiting my computer and that it was showing me deeply ancient fears and horrors (which, I suppose, given the prevalence of ancient flood myths is kind of true).

Most of my dreams recently have been a bit tame and boring. It's mostly been somewhat odd and stilted or random scenarios involving places I live and people I know. I'll try to make a habit of writing them down consistently regardless.

[drummyfish]

Today's dream: I was near the sea climbing rocks at the beach with some friends, which I enjoyed a lot. Then I went to swim and a dog (or a small pig) with a puppy (piglet) followed me. When I got to another beach, I noticed the dog was no longer following me, so I went back, climbed the rocks again to look if it got in trouble, and from above I noticed a huge bear resting half underwater in the shallow beach. Someone told me it was okay but suddenly he got up and started to chase me, but I was able to stay out of his reach by jumping and climbing the rocks, then I think I woke up.

I tend to remember my dreams as I wake up and forget them in the next half hour or so, so it would probably benefit me to keep a dream journal. About once every few months though I have a dream interesting enough that I remember it in the long term.

When I was a kid (maybe age 7-10) I had a lot of falling dreams, where I would be falling off a cliff or a very high tree or building, and coming to the realization that I was about to die and having to confront that before waking up in the last minute. I also remember a significant dream from around the same time period where I was a detective tracking down a killer to an orphanage (I was a kid and so was everyone else in the world it seemed, so the orphans and the proprietors of the orphanage were, somewhat humorously, the same age) and when I found him amongst the orphans he stabbed me and I remember very vividly having the thought "I'm not going to be alive anymore... what am I going to tell everyone?" I was kind of preoccupied with death at this age.

As a teenager I didn't have too many erotic dreams, despite wanting them and being sort of preoccupied with sex. I had a few where I was mostly just in the presence of a naked woman and I would always wake up *right* before the moment of penetration, which was frustrating at the time but a bit funny in retrospect.

I didn't really have any friends at a certain point, and no IRL friends for a long time, so I would occasionally have quite sad about hanging out with either old friends or imagined ones. Some of the locations were kind of interesting though, I would often be in these big empty abandoned industrial looking places but acting as if this was just a normal hang-out spot.

I remember one notable dream where I was with a young Japanese girl and I wordlessly understood that she had to kill herself and I was just sitting with her.

I had an interesting dream on the night of my seventeenth birthday where I downloaded a computer program called something like "Causca" which put the image of a red geometric Cthulhu onto my screen that created visions in my head of enormous floods that were really striking and deeply scary to me at the time. I had this feeling that I had some incredibly old spirit inhabiting my computer and that it was showing me deeply ancient fears and horrors (which, I suppose, given the prevalence of ancient flood myths is kind of true).

Most of my dreams recently have been a bit tame and boring. It's mostly been somewhat odd and stilted or random scenarios involving places I live and people I know. I'll try to make a habit of writing them down consistently regardless.

What a cool insight, thank you for sharing the spicy details of your teenage dreams lol, I appreciate it. I used to have and still sometimes have sex dreams (including penetration) but I'm not as horny nowadays so I don't pay as much attention to them. Rather than sex dreams though I used to be sort of "tortured" by dreams where I got somehow emotionally close to a girl, either invented or someone I've known in the past, and then when I woke up I just felt a strong affection towards her, and like I said this emotion gradually faded away during the day.

Another classic type of dream I remembered now is the "looking for the toilet" -- again I suspect this is super common and please let me know if you haven't had this dream, that would be genuinely weird. It often feels like hour long dreams where I need to do pee or poop and I am desperately searching for a toilet in a city or in a building, even on a ship etc., and I can never find it or, if I do, I can't do the thing because (and this is funny) it's like my brain knows it's actually a dream and it keeps inventing ways for why I can't do it, like I find a toilet but it's locked, so I break in but the toilet is actually broken and so on. Here it also often happens that I get a "recursive dream" -- I wake up and I'm like "oh, finally I can go to the toilet for real", and then I find out I'm still in a dream and then I wake up for real.

Yet another one I get is "being chased by a dangerous animal" such as a lion or a bear (see above). It is sort of scary, a bit of a horror movie, and the weird quirk of this sort of dream is that if the animal actually gets me, my brain suddenly allows me to cheat to get away, so I can usually just teleport or something.

Amlux, it blew my mind that you don't remember any dreams where you fly, I thought this was literally the most common experience in dreams and it's also the most enjoyable (even compared to the sex dreams). My dad told me he usually flies in his dreams as well. Since I share a lot of similar dreams with my family members I wonder how significant a part genetics plays in this? Or is it our environment?

Owing to this thread, yesterday I tried again the experiment with remembering my dreams before I went to sleep and it still works. This genuinely blows my mind, I just think of my recent dream and suddenly I remember a random dream I think I had years ago, then another one, then another one and it never stops. I thought I maybe wouldn't be able to do this anymore but it still works. Can anyone please tell me I'm not alone in this? It drives me crazy. It's so weird because on one hand you forget dreams quickly, but then they stay in your head for much longer than ordinary memories.

[Deoster]

What a cool insight, thank you for sharing the spicy details of your teenage dreams lol, I appreciate it. I used to have and still sometimes have sex dreams (including penetration) but I'm not as horny nowadays so I don't pay as much attention to them. Rather than sex dreams though I used to be sort of "tortured" by dreams where I got somehow emotionally close to a girl, either invented or someone I've known in the past, and then when I woke up I just felt a strong affection towards her, and like I said this emotion gradually faded away during the day.

Another classic type of dream I remembered now is the "looking for the toilet" -- again I suspect this is super common and please let me know if you haven't had this dream, that would be genuinely weird. It often feels like hour long dreams where I need to do pee or poop and I am desperately searching for a toilet in a city or in a building, even on a ship etc., and I can never find it or, if I do, I can't do the thing because (and this is funny) it's like my brain knows it's actually a dream and it keeps inventing ways for why I can't do it, like I find a toilet but it's locked, so I break in but the toilet is actually broken and so on. Here it also often happens that I get a "recursive dream" -- I wake up and I'm like "oh, finally I can go to the toilet for real", and then I find out I'm still in a dream and then I wake up for real.

Yet another one I get is "being chased by a dangerous animal" such as a lion or a bear (see above). It is sort of scary, a bit of a horror movie, and the weird quirk of this sort of dream is that if the animal actually gets me, my brain suddenly allows me to cheat to get away, so I can usually just teleport or something.

Amlux, it blew my mind that you don't remember any dreams where you fly, I thought this was literally the most common experience in dreams and it's also the most enjoyable (even compared to the sex dreams). My dad told me he usually flies in his dreams as well. Since I share a lot of similar dreams with my family members I wonder how significant a part genetics plays in this? Or is it our environment?

Owing to this thread, yesterday I tried again the experiment with remembering my dreams before I went to sleep and it still works. This genuinely blows my mind, I just think of my recent dream and suddenly I remember a random dream I think I had years ago, then another one, then another one and it never stops. I thought I maybe wouldn't be able to do this anymore but it still works. Can anyone please tell me I'm not alone in this? It drives me crazy. It's so weird because on one hand you forget dreams quickly, but then they stay in your head for much longer than ordinary memories.

I've had the "looking for toilet" dreams once or twice, but I've never actually had a flying dream. I think it might be weirder to not have them though because it seems like a very stereotypical "dream thing" to happen. I think the closest thing I've had was a dream where I was controlling a hovering magic character in some imaginary video game, and whenever I'm playing a game in a dream the boundary between my reality and the game always blurs so to some extent I was that character. I've never just flown around in dream real life before, though. I think to some extent my brain still expects my dreams to follow the laws of reality, which maybe says something about my imagination lol

My Dad tends to have similar dreams to me, that being somewhat strange but still relatively grounded scenarios with stilted versions of familiar places, so I really do wonder if there's some genetic component, as we had quite different upbringings.

I think I have a similar experience to you about remembering dreams. When I think really hard about some recent ones I can almost always remember more, and remember older ones that I would ordinarily never be able to access. I imagine it's neurological, and the neurons that fire when you remember dreams end up associating with each other but don't have the occasion to fire again unless you're in that "recalling dream" state again. This is just my very basic layman's understanding of neurology though

Just about thirty minutes ago I woke up from a dream that I was playing the first level of Quake (I guess more experiencing than playing it, as mentioned above) but the level theme was "Xtal" by Aphex Twin (I kind of want to actually do this now because in the dream it had a very interesting aesthetic effect; for some reason it felt very "final," like the last game at the end of the world, somehow) and I found a new secret which was behind the level and had a bunch of weapons including a plasma gun and minigun and an elevator that took me up and then the context of the dream changed and I was taking that elevator up to some big automated library for research tasks but the elevator was cracked and the library itself was damaged with holes that was letting in rain from a storm going on which meshed with a real storm as I woke up.

This was actually a lot more unique than my usual recent dreams, so I am crediting this thread for unlocking that