Do you remember your dreams, and if so, are they interesting?

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
#1

Inspired by the “Violence in dreams” thread and a post in the thread about what will happen when video games become indistinguishable from real life, I have to ask, do you remember your dreams on a regular basis? And when you do remember them, are they exciting or relatively boring? If you were told that you had to give them up, would you miss them?

I almost never remember them, and when I do, it’s only the barest fragments. From what I remember of them, they’re usually just my daily routine or me playing some really great game that doesn’t exist. I would not miss them because there’s not anything to miss, but I’ve heard other people say that they wouldn’t give them up for virtually anything.

Valete,
Vox Imperatoris

#2

My dreams are usually pretty vivid and I am fascinated by them. The memories fade pretty quickly the next morning, unless I dwell on them and they would be uninteresting to anyone else, but I am always so amazed and think: where the heck did that come from?

One that I liked was when my dad came to visit me in my dream. He knew he had passed and was at-ease with it. He was so proud of the job he was in “over there” and how much money he was making. The number was about half what I make, but would be big money to him. And this was why I liked it. My sub-conscious was clever enough to give him a salary that would impress him, instead of one that would impress me. It made it more real for me.

#3

Mine are almost always extremely vivid, full-color, full length feature films type stories with a beginning, end, plots, reasonably developed characters and so on. Now, the plotlines don’t always make logical sense :D, but it’s obvious that what’s going on is part of an overall plot.

Sometimes I’m the main character, sometimes people in the dreams are all perfect strangers (to me that is). Many of them are “repeaters”, dreams about the same locations, situations and people, only slightly modified from dream to dream.

Some of them are so vivid and/or odd that I’ll remember them for weeks or months. A few that I’ve had, even years ago, I still remember (not every detail, just the basic gist).

Irritatingly, I still dream about a former boyfriend, even though we’ve not been together for 5 years (this Jan). Grrrr!!! I don’t dislike this man, he’s basically “the one that got away”. But in waking life, I’m OVER him, and don’t like being reminded of him while asleep…darnitall!

#4

I’ve been having a bunch of early-morning dreams where I know or suspect I’m dreaming, yet everything feels incredibly realistic; I can see, touch and hear like I’m awake.

And yeah, they’re weird. Lesse… I keep having dreams of escaping into the woods/jungle behind my house through some non-existant footpath. And of being on vacation on a cruise ship (something I’ve never done in my life). And that old standby, “Someone’s chasing me and I can’t run!”.

#5

I’m a lucid dreamer, so my dreams are vivid, colourful, I often remember them, but only sometimes remember that once I become aware that I’m dreaming I can take over and do cool things. Only once have I remembered my plan to “fly the next time I figure out I’m dreaming”. My dreams are not usually mundane, and often have at least one supernatural element, such as trying to escape a demonic leprechaun. When it is more mundane, it’s along the lines of dreaming I was visiting the zoo edit: and the animals were all wearing clothing.

I have perpetrated some violence in dreams, such as being able to effectively bash zombies on the head with a bat, but generally running, punching, and sports are sluggish. My personal theory is that this is somehow a reflection of the effect of sleep paralysis affecting my RL attempts to run, hit etc. Edit 2: Sometimes they are funny and I wake myself up due to laughter a few times every year, which amuses my partner to no end.

I would most definitely be devastated if I was told I had to give up my dreams.

#6

I dream very often and they are very vivid, colorful, and most of all realistic (I have pretty much chimed in with this in ANY dream thread).

I remember a good many of them, even some that happened a LONG time ago, to this day. They always involve me and they’re everything from cool, sad, angry, super depressing, absolutely frigging amazing (I had one of those two nights ago)

I have tried to control my dreams, but routinely fail. I have even had dreams that are really interesting, then fallen back asleep and had a dream where I described the first dream to someone.

I would HATE to give up dreams, and I wish I could re-watch them

#7

I have some pretty wild dreams, but there are a few stinkers too.

The other night I had a dream that I was at work, probably because we have been incredibly busy and working 11-12 hour days. I was a little mad at myself, because the last thing I wanted to do was dream about work, then go back to it.

I also had a dream that my fiance still makes fun of me about. I was on the telephone in my dream, and I got put on hold. And that was it. I just sat on hold for the entire dream. Strangely enough, if I am on the phone in my dream, this always seems to make me talk in my sleep. So the next morning she asked me who I was on hold with.

Sometimes I don’t even remember dreams that I have had until something in real life triggers the memory, which sometimes can be like a week after I had the dream.

#8

I hardly ever remember my dreams, but when I do they’re pretty vivid. I’d prefer to never remember them, they’re either bad dreams or really boring ones.

#9

I’m noticing the term ‘vivid’ a lot. Does anyone have really washed-out, bland dreams? :wink:

I’ll chime in to say that, until a couple of years ago, I didn’t often remember my dreams. Since I started getting anxiety attacks, they’ve been accompanied by exceedingly graphic nightmares running about 2-6 times a month. The type that I wake up paralyzed from. You’d better believe I remember them. In detail.
This being said, I’m getting better with them. They’re happening less frequently, and the post-waking paralysis seems to last a shorter time.

#10

I once dreamed I was being chased by a skeleton, who was holding a pie.

#11

Hehe…

Maybe hyperreality would be a better word? To me anyway they seem more vivid even as compared to real life.

Very colorful, VERY colorful, maybe the oddness of so many of them adds to the vivid part of them.

#12

Sure! About half of my dreams are boring and pointless: such as this morning when I had an involved dream about shopping, and how I was looking at some marked down books that had water damage. The other half are pretty interesting.

The folks who rarely remember their dreams, are you the type of person who always sleeps until your alarm? I usually wake up in advance of my alarm, but on the days I sleep until it goes off my dreams almost invarably shatter. To remember your dreams they need to be just about the first thing you think about, and thinking about silencing a blaring alarm instead rules this out.

#13

Yes, I remember them, and yes they are interesting. Many of them consist of places that I recognize but they are distinctly different and when I dream of them they remain consistent.

Some dreams are repetitive in content but not place. For about 10 years prior to 9/11, I dreamed the US was attacked and I was flying courier flights. Oddly, The night of 9/11 I was asked to fly right seat on a courier flight which was a very surreal event. Haven’t had the dream since. My company went out of business in the dream which also occurred (not really much of a surprise).

The thing about dreams I find interesting is the balance between the 2 brain halves. One side is rational and the other is unbound. Some dreams are so bizarre that I can’t remember them for more than a few seconds because they cannot be rationally described. Other dreams are a mixture of reality and the impossible but in percentage that allow description. As an example, in some dreams I can fly by holding my arms in such a way as to create a supper efficient wing.

#14

I typically remember my dreams when I wake up, although they fade quickly unless I dwell on them for a while. Some are definitely more interesting than others, but I usually have at least one good one every night. I tend to wake up often when I sleep- about every 2-3 hours, so I can remember most of my dreams if I try hard enough.

Last night, in dream world, I went to Alaska but forgot to bring a coat. I think it got cold in here while I was sleeping…

#15

I honestly believe this to be a possible/partial explaination for the phenomenon known as “deja vu”. I heard a caller to the Art Bell (um, Coast to Coast AM, actually) show suggest this and it immediately hit me as true.

I’ve had precognitive dreams all my life, most of them mundane, and of the sort I didn’t recall until the event happened (walking down a street and seeing a particular scene like a bird flying by or someone walking a dog in front of me or bending over at the water fountain at school to get a drink, a snatch of conversation) and I often think, if someone didn’t recall their dream, they might have this really weird sensation of “I’ve experienced this before” but not be able to place why or how. Most of the time, I DO recall the dream as the “real life” event occurs, and think, wow, I dreamed this last night or the other night or last week.

FTR, I’ve experienced deja vu a few times, and it is one of the weirdest, most unnerving sensations I’ve ever encountered! It is NOT, as some seem to think, some vague feeling of having been somewhere or seen someone before, but the sensation of having lived the EXACT MOMENTS before, of having a memory of them but one that is only forming as they occur (again). You feel as if you are only watching each instant unfold as you already recall it doing. It is freaky, man!

But I wonder if those few times I experienced it were the few in which I did not, for some reason, consciously recall a precognitive dream I’d had of those moments. Might explain it.

Some other precognitive dreams I’ve had were more “serious”. One I had when I was 8 mths pregnant with my 1st child involved my husband. I dreamed he passed out and a “Dr” figure knelt down over him and I knelt down on the opposite side of his prone body. In the dream, I was so upset and the gist seemed to be that he’d had a a heart attack.

The next morning, I recalled the dream but put it out of my mind (damn those pg hormones) . A good friend of ours came over for coffee and my husband stood to go get a refill and collapsed/passed out. Fell to the floor and the friend and I assumed the exact positions relative to him that we had in my dream.

We ended up taking him to the ER after he came to, as his color was very bad, where he ended up being held for 3 days after they detected an abnormality in his EKG, eventually diagnosed with Marfans (the genetic condition which contributed to his death 15 yrs later, from severe heart and lung disease), and was sent home with a heart monitor.

I dreamed of being pregnant for 6 mths before I actually conceived my son. Woke up almost screaming half the time, lol, since I was SO not ready for it! But after 7 yrs of marriage, I guess I was as it turned out.

In other dreams, I’ve had “visitations” from the dead, including a neighbor I’d just met 2 days before who was killed in a drive-by shooting. He came to me and begged me to go and see his widow and help her through it and I did. She came over and we talked for a few hours and I never saw her again (as she moved away soon after) but she mentioned that she felt her late husband was around her, and said she’d been awakened twice by the the feel of someone (him, she thought) sitting on the foot of her bed. I don’t doubt it.

Many of my dreams are simply fantasy and/or “a bit of underdone potato”, but some are much more…precognitive, visitations, spiritual messages. They feel different. I can tell.

I recall dreams from my childhood and later. Some are just so vivid you don’t forget. Like the one in which I, at 6 yrs old, flew through the neighborhood and into the branches of a magnolia tree in the yard of a neighbor. The next morning, I tried, in vain, to fly off the ottoman, since I so vividly recalled flying around the living room the night before in my dream. (I’m sure I did :D)

I’ve had many others, very vivid, very meaningful. And which are as easily recalled and important to me as any waking memory. Hell, it’s a third of my LIFE!

I kept a dream journal for a few years. I found it very helpful in both recall and understanding. The only reason I stopped was that I found myself spending so much time writing every morning that it became an issue…and the more I wrote, the more I recalled. For those seeking to remember more, try this. Even with an alarm (which I frequently used) just take a few moments to THINK after you wake and shut off the alarm, what did I just do? What did I dream? Where WAS I just a moment ago/last night? Then wait and relax, it will come to you. Allowing yourself this bit of extra time and focus is crucial. If you jump right up and go on with the day you are likely to forgot it all and be one of those who says, “I never dream” or “I can never remember my dreams”. BS. We ALL dream and we can ALL remember them.

I found that writing it down helped me see aspects I would have otherwise mised (even recalling the dream, not to mention the dreams I would not have recalled had I not trained myself to recall them).

One example: I had this long dream/series of dreams involving all sorts of things. It was only after I awoke and began recording the events did I realize that the series of dreams made up the spectrum. As in the first contained something stressing the color RED, the next the color ORANGE, then YELLOW, then VIOLET, then GREEN, then BLUE.

I noticed immediately that the colors were out of their natural order, something I never would have noticed had I not taken the time to write it all down. I interpreted it as a message that my priorities/energies were out of order, and that was true for me at the time.

Yes, I dream in color. Yes I have lucid dreams sometimes.

Dreams ROCK! :cool::smiley:

#16

I just remembered, I had the weirdest dream recently, in which I “came awake”, as in a lucid dream, and said to myself, “this is a dream…no way this is actually real.” But then managed to convince myself that it WAS real, in the dream! Was one of those in which you dream that you WAKE UP and yet are actually still in the dream.

Was strange, involving the rearrangment of my bedroom furniture and the removal of my toilet, lol, but I managed to accept that it was real, even after my rational self intervened in the dream and argued that it was a dream. :smiley:

And I’m actually very good at lucid dreaming and “waking myself up” during dreams and saying to my dreaming self, “hey! Just a dream! Bash that zombie a good one and move on, idiot!” :smack:

#17

Another vivid dreamer here.

My dreams feel like an alternate universe. It’s got all the same places as the real world, but everything looks different. A bit like Silent Hill (which seems quite a dream-inspired game / film), except that the dream versions are usually prettier than the real thing.

For several years I recorded some of my best dreams. I recorded about 600 before I got bored of it – basically I found that the images and emotions of a dream become misty eventually no matter how hard I’d try to record all the detail.

I have lucid dreams, which are the most vivid, but I like the non-lucids too; because in non-lucid dreams you may be acting out some kind of scenario, but in lucids, you’re just you again.

#18

Gosh no, my dreams are so boring. One that stands out for its boringness was when I dreamed I worked at an office job and did filing all day. And it wasn’t even MY OWN office job, it was some random office job.

I wouldn’t miss dreaming at all … although I have heard that even if one doesn’t remember them (which I seldom do) dreaming is still important for good mental health. So let’s say I wouldn’t actively miss dreaming, but if not dreaming was going to negatively impact my mental health, then I’m happy to keep dreaming my boring dreams.

The thing that gets me is the number of people who don’t realize that even interesting dreams are mostly only interesting to the person who dreamed them in the first place. There are few things that make me cringe more than someone who pounces on me, saying “I had the craziest dream last night, let me tell you all about it!” There should be a One Sentence Rule on dream telling – keep it to one sentence (“I had a dream I was a jockey and racing in the Kentucky Derby.”) unless the other person asks for more information. If the other person says “Oh my, how interesting.” that is not asking, that is being polite. The endless “and then … and then … and then …” is conversational torture.

#19

My dreams have certainly given me sights and experiences I would never have had otherwise.

I often fly. Usually I fly like I would swim, if the earth was covered in water about 20 feet deep, water that no-one notices but me. I also remember dreams where I would fly like I was a wisp of smoke on a breeze, or ink dissolved in stirred water.

I remember one very happy dream that took place in the treetops of a beech forest in spring. Nothing much happened, just me, by myself, climbing, flying and playing around in the sundappled, maze of branches and young, sparkly, almost luminescent green beech leaves.

I often am somebody else. A man, a child, a warrior, a crook, a murderer, a nobody, in full grown stories like the ones CanvasShoes describes. I hav often died in dreams. It’s usually quite pleasant.

In one dream, from which I woke up very sad, I was girl who wasted her life hiding away in an old stuffy house, caring for an uninterested parent or somesuch. I remember the passage of time, and finding myself middle aged and sad about the years I had wasted.

And sometimes the scenery of my dreams is downright beautiful. I remember looking at some shards of blue painted china. In my dreams, I had built a whole city of blue/white china. A sort of Venice, with canals, bridges, all made of porcelain.

Sometimes I would go on a holiday, not enjoy it much, but be happy about the kind of dreams I got out of it.

In recent years, “real” people have gotten more important in my dreams; as a result, the dreams have become more bland. More film dialogue of the “he said -she said”-type, less scenery and special effects. :slight_smile:

#20

I’m sure I have regular, boring dreams, but the ones I remember are the interesting ones (at least to me). Like some others have posted, there are dreams I remember from years ago. The earliest dream I remember is one I had when I was four.

Two of my favorite dreams are one I had in college where a flock of dolphins flew by the dorm. And three or four years ago, I had a dream I was a peregrine falcon and flew around for a while. I woke up when I went into a dive and didn’t pull out of it in time, forcing me to land. I’ve had many dreams in which I flew, but this is the only dream I remember where I actually became another animal.

For as complex and bizarre as my dreams can be, the ones I remember often make sense to me if I think about what is going on in my life, or what I was thinking about within a couple of hours of going to sleep. Sometimes the dreams highlight problems I’m trying to solve, but often they simply reflect bits and pieces of the previous day, transformed into dreamland.

A couple of nights ago, I dreamed I was invited to the White House and that high level intelligence and government officials wanted to meet with me. Donald Rumsfeld escorted me in, but when he saw how I was dressed, he said it wouldn’t do and he’d have someone bring me a dress and high heels. I wasn’t too thrilled about that, but who was I to say no to the White House?

Well, before I went to bed, I had been thinking about the third novel in the series that I’m writing in which the character is of interest to high level intelligence and government officials. I want to take a trip to DC sometime to see for myself places that I want the character to go. Two of the places I’d like to see are the Pentagon and FBI headquarters, but writing about that also makes me a little nervous. I’m not part of that world. I’m just a civilian living in the Midwest, and that makes me feel a little insecure in my writing–what if someone from that world read what I wrote and thought it was ridiculously naive? So that’s why Rumsfeld was giving me dress code advice in my dream.

Nothing in the dream was an earth-shattering revelation. I’m consciously aware of all of it. But since I was thinking about it right before bed, it was re-spun in my dreams, and I’m often amused by how my subconscious transforms these things. I’d miss my dreams if I never remembered them, and this one gave me some insight into some things I could write in my third novel when my character goes to DC.