I have always been a very vivid dreamer. My dreams often play out like movies, with plots, sub-plots, and even a bit of character development. I usually don’t mind these dreams, except when they are nightmares.
I used to have horrible nightmares. I can’t even describe how vivid, disgusting, and frightening they were. And they were recurring, every single night for 2 or 3 years. It got to a point that I would simply not go to sleep at night, or I would, but only for about an hour or two. But that’s getting away from the point.
Lately my batch of dreams have been more interesting than frightening, and they usually have something to do with Utah, and people I used to know there.
So, does anybody know how to interpret dreams? I don’t want to post an entire dream (They are LONG) if nobody knows how to analyze them. Also, does anybody else dream like this? How common is it? I know nobody else in my family dreams this way. My dreams are so vivid that I can remember ones I had when I was a small child. Also, my dreams and my memories are beginning to twine together. On some matters, I can’t can’t tell the difference between the two.
No, I can’t interpret dreams. But I can answer a few of your questions. Let me state that I also have very vivid movie-like dreams and I also can remember some dreams from my childhood. I’ve always been able to distinguish dream from reality (as you said you get dreams and memories twined together) but I can say this. In a dream book that a friend of mine had, it touched base on this saying that sometimes we dream of our memories from long ago. So maybe your reliving memories through dreams which is why you can’t distinguish it from reality. I don’t think that recurring dreams are considered uncommon but I would check up on that because yours are lasting so long. My best advice to you is go to a library and get a book on dream interpretation. Not just that, you might want to get a book explaining dreams in general and why they occur.
If you have a particulary vivid dream, e-mail them and they will give you a really good interpretation for $15.
Except I e-mailed them MY dream and didn’t pay them but they liked my dream so much they decided to use it in their column and interpret it for free.
It’s worth a try if you don’t want to pay.
And they gave a good interpretation, too.
Mystics and fortune-tellers think dreams are magical, and we don’t even want to know what Freudians think. I think they’re both pretty much wrong.
Dreams are usually, IMHO, mostly just whatever’s most strongly on your mind, even though they might be disguised by metaphor and allegory. (People are good at that stuff.) The emotional tone is more important than the actual content, though it’s sometimes worthwhile trying to figure out more literal meanings.
So the nightmares probably reflected some sort of major emotional stress you were going through at the time. (Puberty? Family trouble? Whatever!) The Utah dreams sound like you might be missing the place and the people; it might be interesting to go and visit, and see how you feel about it.
Disclaimer: I am not a shrink! This posting is just a few random thoughts.
I too, think that recurring dreams are generally uncommon, unless you have a serious issue from the past that was never resolved in your own mind.
I could try to give it a shot if you want to describe the general aspects of the recurring dream, but it is definitely something from the past- because of Utah.
I used to live in Illinois as a kid. I dream of it a lot.
I also have two recurring dreams that vary a bit in plot, but are essentially the same thing over and over.
To be brief, in the dream I am taxiderming an animal, except that animal is not quite dead and it bites and snaps at me. And the tone of these dreams is very upsetting.
That site I gave you- I told them in detail about these dreams and they said there is something from the past that I think is dead but really is not (they described it ini more detail, but I am trying to be succinct).
And yes, I can remember some extremely frightening dreams from my childhood- I can stil rememeber the sound of the screaming and the fire and the green pus that oozed from the burn victim’s wounds (The burning man happened to be Abraham Lincoln, but don’t laugh- it’s not funny).
I, and my family, and a few people I didn’t know all went to explore this house I’ve never been to before. It was really huge, but also ran down, old and disgusting. And haunted. There were hundreds of ghosts that were kept under control by a “head” ghost, who happened to be my old boss, Mary Lou. The ghosts told us they were ignoring Mary Lou because they wanted to do their own thing. I promised to leave them alone, and I began to explore the house. I came back to the entryway where we had left our suitcases, to find they were gone.I asked my sister what happened to them, and she said the ghosts took them. So I sat down and begged the ghosts to be reasonable and pointed out that I just wanted to look around, I didn’t want to hurt them or ruin their house. They seemed to listen to me, and hundreds of ghosts flew by me into a “closet” where they stayed. When I turned around, Mary Lou was standing in the hallway, and the house was cleaned up spotless. She invited me to go into the “movie room” and so I did. THere was a giant screen but no movie. The room was also full of my old toys, ones that I’ve lost years ago and haven’t seen since.
Mary Lou told us to come with her, and so we said ok, and all of a sudden we were in my old hometown Oakley, in somebody’s back yard. She explained how that was her house as well, and we could go back there any time we wanted to sleigh.But the snow was up to my armpits, and it was too soft and powedery to sleigh on. She whisked us back to the other house after only a couple of seconds.
Once we were back, there was an old man standing outside of the house by two cars, with my BF. He explained that the house was going to self destruct, and told us we could take one of the cars, but we had to LEAVE. One car was an old Nova by parents used to have, another was my parents old Corvair. My BF, myself, and my sister all jumped in the Corvair. Than the man told us we could have 3 dogs out of 4. One was my dog George, another was Buster, and two were replicas of an old dog named Katie. We took the two replicas, and George, and than we hightailed it out of there. Then the house collapsed.
That was the gist of it, I didn’t add some other details, to keep it short.
Peppergirl, you’re lucky. My dreams are so vivid that sometimes I can’t tell the difference. And in my entire life I’ve only had three good dreams. The rest have all either been weird, or terrifying. Enjoy the good ones. There’s not much else you can do.
When I was young I had the same kind of dreams most of the time . . . a few repeated over and over until they got to be nightmares.
Then I hit puberty and they changed slightly.
In the past year my dreams have changed drastically in a way nobody wants to hear.
But I am pretty decent at interpreting dreams, just not written down like pepper’s was. The way I do best is to get things one at a time, so I can narrow down possible thematic issues early in the retelling of the dream.
Pepper, if you want, feel free to IM me and talk about this. I’m not promising a total revelation, but I’m assuming anything you can get to help you with this is time well spent, no?