When characters’ dreams are depicted in movies and TV shows, they often appear in settings and situations that are very similar to the character’s “reality” as it would be in their waking life. What I mean is, say someone dreams about being at work. He will probably be shown sitting in his office exactly as it appears in non-dream sequences, with the same co-workers in their usual places, etc… The dream will usually follow some kind of logic, people will have coherent conversations, and so on.
Some famous examples: An entire season of Dallas turned out to be a character’s dream.
Dorothy’s visit to Oz was a dream, and even though it was set in a fantasy world, it had a story with its own internal logic and continuity, with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Now, when I dream, I might be dreaming I’m at work – but it’s not really where I work; instead of my office, I’m in the basement of my childhood home, until I realize, no, I’m in the dugout at Wrigley Field, which turns into a giant roller coaster car with Alan Alda sitting next to me laughing, until the whole thing disappears and I fall for a while before remembering I can fly…
In other words, my dreams usually make no sense, don’t tell a story, and don’t feature people and situations I normally encounter in my mundane waking life.
Am I normal in this regard or what? Or do I just have a ridiculously short attention span, even when asleep? Are your dreams logical and coherent like on TV, or full of weird non-sequitors, like mine?
A run-of-the-mill dream for me has an almost cartoonish quality to it, in the visual sense. I say that most of my dreams are like Wackyland in the old Chuck Jones/WB cartoons.
For me a dream can:
-make sense, or not;
-tell a story, or not;
-be grounded in the laws of physics, or not;
-sometimes reference previous dreams, reference previous dreams that never happened, or be self-contained.
I find most to be entertaining. I very rarely have a nightmare in the running from a monster sense. What I do have as nightmares are more along the lines of me being framed for a crime and I’m headed to jail, or losing my job; even these are rare.
The oddest was one time I dreamed I had insomnia. That was a real mindf**k…
I sometimes wake up with a sense of something unfinished from my dream, like thinking I had an appointment I had to keep but that actually only happened in my dream.
My dreams can be vivid but they are never completely realistic, like I may dream about being in my house or at work but they are never quite exactly like they are in reality. Sometimes the background is fuzzy and if I try to look closely at something or read something it will turn fuzzy.
Mine aren’t quite that hyperactive, but they’re pretty much like that. A lot of them start from a third person point of view and then change to first person. I’m usually in places that don’t exist, but I know they’re ‘really’ someplace else I’ve been before. The laws of physics? Forget it. I once had a dream that started in a major league baseball stadium. I walked outside to the parking lot, then went downstairs into an apartment building, and from something like the 14th floor, I walked through another door and was outside again, on a suburban street.
Sometimes there are stories in the dreams, but it’s rare for them to be linear. I’m usually with people I know. Only rarely do my dreams relate to real situations. Maybe this kind of thing would work in a movie, but for TV, where dreams are supposed to comment on or advance the plot, you wouldn’t see it.
I still have vivid memories of a dream from about a year ago where I said goodbye to a friend who had died, and we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in opposite directions. That, you might see as part of a story.
Many of my dreams are linear and logical, or have long stretches of linear logical storyline. I also have the kind that flip scenes quickly and don’t follow reality, but my dream mind seems to think it makes sense. My dad says he always knows that he is dreaming when he is dreaming, but 99% of the time I never know I am dreaming until I wake up. Almost all my dreams follow the laws of physics, unless it is a rare time I realize I am dreaming and then I make them break on purpose.
I’ve had really BORING dreams that I’m getting dressed and going to work. I’ve also had interesting in a boring way kind of dreams that I’ve gone back to take a tour at my alma mater. Those were entirely logical and realistic, just me touring new facilities built after I graduated (although IRL, so such new facilites have ever been built) and going to see where professors offices now are etc. It was all fairly linear and quite believable when compared to reality.
On the opposite end of the spectrum I’ll have crazy-ass dreams that I’m at work on Roseanne Barr Day and being chastised for not wearing a Roseanne costume like everyone else, by my boss (who is for some reason a12-year-old) who’s dressed as Cliff Claven who isn’t a character on Roseanne anyway!
I agree with the OP’s description of the typical dream abstractions, where reality and situations are fluid combinations of thoughts, ideas, places, people, etc.
However, some dreams can be veryrealistic, to the point of waking up and not being sure if it really happened or not.
My dreams are very realistic, with surreal elements. For example, a realistic dream about junior high that also featured a big pile of monkey corpses. Or a realistic dream about a work social event, with the addition of an absolutely unlimited and supernaturally incredible dessert buffet, from which I was somehow unable to select anything chocolate.
I’ve had that dream so many times I can’t remember if I ever actually forgot that I was taking a class in school. I don’t think I did, but I have so many vivid memories from those stupid dreams of showing up for finals without ever having known about the class before that I just can’t be sure.
Once in a great while I’ve had dreams that have enough of a “plot” that, if only I could remember them well enough, I could base a pretty cool story or movie or something on them. But they were clearly fantasy; I don’t remember having any dreams that conformed closely enough to my everyday life that they could have been mistaken for waking reality.
Oh, and Dorothy’s visit to Oz was not just a dream in the original book; the hokey “it was all a dream” ending was one of the liberties the movie people took. Alice’s visit to Wonderland was a dream, but at least that story had more dreamlike qualities to it.
It really depends for me. Last night I dreamt that my girlfriend asked me to make a cherry roulade for dinner tonight. She was sitting on the couch playing Call of Duty 4 while I was on my lap top across the room. We had been in this position right before bed… so the line between real and dream was pretty blurry. I was mostly sure it was part of my dream but in the morning I asked her and she confirmed it. I don’t even know what a cherry roulade is." Now if she had said “No, I really want a cherry roulade sauce with the steak tonight. Why don’t you ever listen to me!” It wouldn’t have fazed me.
If I fall asleep when I’m drunk, my dreams usually mirror very closely what I was doing beforehand. For instance, after coming home from a long night out on the town, I once dreamed that I was walking around the city at night with my friends, looking for a bus or taxi. OTOH, I also vaguely remember that dream including a creepy old witch-lady in a basement somewhere. That’s how most of my dreams are - they tell a story and have some degree of internal consistency, but there are always some weird things thrown in.
The TV/movie dreams that bug me the most are the ones where a character dreams about a dramatic/traumatic event from years ago, exactly as it happened in real life. I’ve never had anything like that happen, and it just seems so unrealistic.
I had a wonderfully bizarre dream once where my own brain couldn’t believe what it was coming up with. It was obvious that it was trying to concoct a scary nightmare and frighten the crap out of me, but just couldn’t script it together. It went something like:
…and then I locked the door to my empty hotel room. I opened my luggage and hordes of butterflies flew out and…
–no, that’s not good. rewind–
…and leprechauns jumped out, all with William Shatner’s face! Then they…
–wait, that’s even worse. Work with me here. Rewind–
…but the luggage’s lock had turned to cheese! Soft blue cheese!..
–sigh. Really. I like cheese, startling maybe, but not scary. Rewind–
…but I couldn’t work the luggage because my hands had turned into dog paws! Mwuhaha! Now I’m trapped without luggage and no opposable thumbs and…
–screw this. I’m waking up.–
I sometimes get dreams that are extremely realistic. What typically happens is that I’ll wake up (still dreaming, but I dream I woke up) and I’ll look around and see a totally realistic rendition of my apartment. I’ll get up, do routine things - make breakfast, turn on the tv - everything will work like normal. It’s almost identical to what actually waking up would look like.
Then, 5-15 minutes into that segment, I’ll suddenly wake up again (but again still dreaming) - I’ll think to myself “woah, that’s weird, that dream was really realistic”… and I’ll make myself breakfast, sit at the computer, shower, whatever.
And then 5-15 minutes later, I’ll wake up again, within the dream. I’ll start thinking to myself “I’m still dreaming, right? This is disturbing… well, there’s my couch, there’s my fridge… everything looks real… I must be awake”… I’ll go through 3-8 instances of this, where I’ll keep waking up within the dream to a very realistic enviornment.
It’s so realistic and disconcerting, in fact, that when I actually wake up for real, I don’t trust that I’m not in a dream. It takes me a good 20-30 minutes to be confident I’m actually awake, and that I won’t suddenly find myself waking up within a dream again. It’s very disturbing.
Mine seem to have ever changing variables of who, what, where, when.
Whereas in real life these are constants.
In the dream you’re trying to grasp the answers to these questions but because your mind is randomly making them up you get confused.
I’m at the farmer’s market in West Allis, no wait it’s actually a train station, and it’s now in Orlando, and I’m there with a co-worker, no wait I’m there with my high school senior class, we’re apparently going to Disneyworld, but now there’s my friend at age 6 with his family, and we’re not at Disneyworld we’re at Six Flags…
My dreams are realistic enough I rarely know when I am dreaming (every once in a while, I will have a dream and know it but this is rare).
Just this weekend, I dreamed that my parents had died in a car crash on the way to my sister’s house and I had gone to thier place to pick up clothes and such for them to be buried in. It was complete with going to the places where I knew everything was in their house and finding them, etc. Very detailed. When I finally awoke, my pillow was covered in tears and my husband thought I had lost my mind. It took me days to shake the feeling that they were gone. (Okay, maybe still a little shaky, best phone my mom again.)
I long to be a person who gets to have purple bunnies or something completely obviously out of place to know that they are dreaming.
Here’s what I hate about the way dream sequences are portrayed - it’s that you the viewer (presumably emulating the point of view of the dreamer) always see the dreamer in the 3rd person. That never happens to me, no matter how realistic or weird my dream might be, I never see myself. I am myself, seeing other people. I don’t even remember ever dreaming about looking in a mirror and seeing myself.
This is the sort of thing that always takes me right out of a story, when they do a dream sequence like that.
Sorry, these comments might be more appropriate for CS, but you asked it here, so…
Roddy