Do you have 'serial' dreams?

You have a dream, good or bad, and that’s the end of it?

Does anyone have dreams that follow a story, which continue with each, passing dream until a final conclusion or it just ends, without a finale?

I have some dreams which I forget as soon as I awake, but I also have dreams which will continue, sporadically, sometimes over months and might end without a conclusion or will reach a semi-conclusion which is so horrific I’ll wake up and be too scared to go back to sleep and conclude the story. The last was last night, where there were three groups; my group who were friends, a group of people who we were pretty sure weren’t of this world and didn’t like us, and a third, made up of very attractive and assured women but they also weren’t sure of the first group or us.

The second group who we weren’t sure of started hacking the other two with knives, swords and cutlasses. We all scrambled down the stairs, which were so wide no one could reach the handrails, the stairs were all concrete and if you fell you’d likely break a lot of bones and split your head open. We all got down, eventually.

It ended in shape-shifting, with the the third group - the pretty women - being horrifically murdered by the second, ten of them emptying their handguns into their chests, then they awakened, with an ecstatic look on their faces, like they’d been released, before shifting into a monster’s body. Their ‘group’ followed suit and so only me and my friends were human, being chased by crazed, desperate men with big knives and women/wolves. At that point I woke up and I wanted to go back to sleep, as I’d left my backpack with the first group in the hotel.

My first thought, being awake, was I wanted to “Go back to where your backpack is, with all of my stuff, although it isn’t as important as living”. It was at the top of the stairs. I dwelt on that for a while, fading in and out of conciousness, and then, a few minutes later I thought “Being alive is more important than the contents of your backpack; leave it there and escape.” So I imagined I’d just run from the first group with their guns and swords, and the monsters in the second group. It took some fortitude to realise my backpack and the demons were not true, which has happened many times before when I’ve just woken up from a nightmare.

I got up and tried everything to take my mind off of the nightmare I’d just had, which had been a few weeks in maturing. The story of my group, the group of those we didn’t trust, and the group of women we wanted to trust, had been a recurring image in my dreams for a few weeks. It took around three, painful hours to get back to sleep. My back ached, my head ached, my legs ached, my stomach ached, it was a horrific night. I was sweating, panicking, from around 2 until 6.

The ‘dream’ or ‘nightmare’ was so significant I was scared to go back to sleep, unless it continued. Anyone else experienced this?

This happens to me. I can be having a dream and wake up to use the bathroom, when I go back to sleep, I sometimes continue the same dream. It cool.

This happens occasionally to me, too. I think I’ve had at least a three-parter in one night.

I’ve had dreams where some reality will be created in one dream and then replicated in subsequent dreams. Kind of like a sim city scenario.

The dream theme I have with the most fear always has a tornado coming towards us ala the kind you saw in the background on the Wizard of Oz.

When I was little it was dinosaurs, and me always not being able to run away fast enough…

I blame Ray Harryhausen…

Sometimes I do.

Most often it’s a case of waking up in the middle (to pee, maybe) and then consciously choosing to return to the dream I was in the middle of. I can do that pretty regularly.

I can’t simply choose to resume a dream on a different night, but there are some dreams where it’s like a sequel to one I’ve had before. Not just a recurring dream because there are real differences in plot, setting, etc. - I think of it like the James Bond movies. Sometimes I’ll even have a moment of self awareness and the dream me says “Hey, I remember you from that other dream.”

I had a dream - one of my best ever - where I was visiting a haunted house in the New Orleans bayou. It was a classic with spanish moss and a white plantation house. There was lots of boating across lovely water (all my best dreams are about skimming along above the water). The house itself was haunted by two ghosts, a mother and daughter.

Then later, for the follow up dreams, I went back and replayed the mother and daughter before they died. I don’t remember how they died. It wasn’t a nightmare, just a spooky atmospheric dream. The mother and daughter part was in the 18th century and we all wore beautiful pannier gowns. Then we went for a ride on an airboat around the swamps, dressed like Marie Antoinette. It was pretty great.