Dream thread.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

To stave off boredom here’s this morning’s dream. It’s remembered sort of in reverse order (I often remember my dreams that way) But I’ll describe it in ‘forward’ order. I dream in colour BTW (and also in ‘color’) which I only found out recently is not common.

The first remembered bit. I’m talking to a boy. I worked out after the dream that he was my son (I don’t have one in RL) I am telling him to go in (we’re outside a block of flats) and up to his mum’s room to tell her that he knows we are getting divorced and that he is ok with it. Reluctantly and with sadness he goes in.

Snip some non-remembered details.

I am on a plane to America. I am on my way to some kind of special holiday destination roughly on the west side of America. The place has a stangely English sounding name.

Snip more non-remembered details.

I seem to be in the 1920s (or at least my dream self thinks I think I am). I am hanging off the side of the train that is to take me to my destination (still the one from earlier details) This is scaring me sh*tless as the train keeps going through narrow tunnels and arch type things at high speed. I am only just hanging on Indianna Jones style. Eventually the train stops at a station and I decide to get in to the train. I get nervous as the ticket man approaches. He asks for my ticket and informs me that I must pay a $30 deposit. I reach into my pocket, sure enough I have the correct ticket, and some English money. I can’t find a 20 and a 10 so I give him two 20s. Then I find a 30 (no such thing exists in Sterling) and swap it for one of the 20s (don’t know why). The Ticket man accepts this without apparent surprise, despite the money being foreign and too much.

We get to the destination. Looks interesting enough. I go in.

I am stood in a wide open pedestrianised area. It feels like I’m back in 2004 (or at least back in ‘now’) An attractive girl addresses me and asks “Are you foreign? You look strange”

“Yes I’m English. I am having a really long day”

I look at my reflection in a window and see that my hair is a mess and I am scruffy.

“Do you know of anywhere I can have a shower?” I ask.

“The UK DC” is the chorus from the girl and her also-attractive friends. So I go off in search of this place. Afterwards I remember thinking how cool America is if pretty girls will speak to me in such a friendly way despite my appearance.

I find the ‘UK DC’ place and once inside it is apparent that it’s a kind of sports centre. I am in the lobby, but compared to how many floors and sports this place seems to offer the lobby is tiny. I go off into a side room as I can’t work out from the lobby where the showers would be, and I am a bit reluctant to use publich showers anyway. In this other room I find what appear to be shampoos, but I don’t recognise any of the brands so I can’t be sure. I try out the smell of one on my hands but get into a mess. I find some paper towels and try to clean it off, but for some reason it’s getting worse.

I’d rather not leave this sat open on a work computer so I’ll post it now and if I remember more I’ll reply in this thread.

2

I couldn’t tell if I creamed in color or not until just a couple days ago. I had a dream with a man in a very loud aloha shirt. I remember the colour scheme, so I must have dreamt in color.

3

:eek:

4

damn you. I can’t keep a straight face after that one!

:smiley:
Sorry about that. I have seen two references to dreaming in black and white being the norm. One here on the SDMB, and another on TV. So we’re special

5

I only cream in black and white.

6

:ashamed:

I’m just going to hide my flushed cheeks over there now.

Since we’re talking about dreams, gotta wonder if it’s not a Freudian slip.

7

Nahh. You cheered me up!
(I did have to walk out of the room with a towel pushed against my mouth though)

8

Well, here’s one I had the other day. It weirded me out enough that I got up in the middle of the night to write it down. Now…I just have to hope I can decipher my 2AM handwriting.

It was sort of a combo of the monster in Graduation Day, Part 2 episode (Season 3) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Basilisk from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. First, I’m at this kiosk in the mall buying a lasso and two boys came up to me - one of the boys was very blonde and fat, but they were between 2-5 years old. This snake thing was killing people and for some reason the cops thought I was involved in the disappearances. I’d been questioned by them at least once. Then, I was driving around in the town I now live in, telling my new boss’ boss about it. We pulled into this shopping center (because I needed to turn around) and the snake thing was there. I stopped, and the snake thing came up from the ground beneath my car and then it came through the bottom of my car so that it was inside the car (well, it’s head was). I was trying to get out of the car, but when I finally did and turned around to look, my boss’ boss had disappeared.

Then I woke up, completely weirded out.

9

I seem to have a lot of vivid dreams since being on antidepressants. But I have never had a dream containing surreal beings. Do people really dream about people with fish heads, or donkeys talking with their mother in law’s voice?
Most of my dreams seem to take place within a couple of distinct non real world locations. A city with a castle I know quite well, and its surrounding environs. Or a group of Islands somewhere off the southern Italy coast that are close enough together to swim between (though there is a regular ferry). A few nights ago there was a festival in the castle with drummers and stilt walkers, which meant they had closed off my usual rout through the castle and I had to go through the streets, which was a shame because it was raining. But the city does have quite an interesting red light district, which I tend to go to when lucid enough to control things :wink:

10

sigh You people make me jealous…I can never remember my dreams. I’ve been working on it a lot, and have gotten to the point where I can usually vaguely remember generic plot-lines. Last night, for example, I had a downright surreal dream in which I got married. That’s all I remember of it, just that I got married, and it was sudden.

The last time I remembered a dream in detail, thought, Martha Stewart made a guest appearance, so, maybe it’s good that I don’t usually remember things…

11

I rarely remember any plot from my dreams, but if it was particularly vivid or unusual, I’ll remember a few frames and maybe some sound.

For example, on the field exercise I was on last week, I dreamt of monsters. I never dream of monsters. They were coming down a brown, dusty mountain. I remember one was like a blue head and hands surrounded with a blue mist. And I remember the red dragon-like thing that came and snatched me up right before I woke up.

Then, there’s one dream I had as a kid that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. Regis Philbin, on stage at a nightclub, lighting his farts.

12

I don’t know if this will help you much, but it helped many of my friends who will wanted to learn to remember dreams. I’ve never atually studied the physiology of dreams, and this is not scientific but this is what works for me empirically . Also if you’re not a computer geek type person this may confuse you more than help. :slight_smile:

I like to think of the brain as a Multi-threaded system. During the day the the conscious mind has the cpu. When you go to bed it switches out, and the sub-conscious takes over. One of the main jobs of the SC Is like a batch filing system. It goes through the images and sounds an thoughts of the day and decides if they will stay in short term memory, get archived in long-term memory, or just get deleted. Now sometimes something happens(external stimulus or interrupt) to trigger the system controler an emergency context switch back to conscious mind. A strange sound, or breathing stoppage or whatever. When the conscious mind takes over in an emergency nothing gets cleaned up from the data buffers quite in time. Whatever random files were cached are analysed under the panic/flight-or-flight stimulus recognition program. Which is essentially what alot of nightmares are. The brain extrapolates the random data of the batch filer to determine what the threat is. Of course by then the actual stimulus was missed, so you sit scared in the middle of the night wondering why Abraham Lincoln tried to stab you with your 8th grade gym teacher’s eggplant parmesian.

Pretty much everybody remembers these because they went from full sub-conscious to full conscious instantly and then focused on the images to swap them back to physical memory for long-term storage.

On the otherhand if you get a normal night’s sleep, and have a scheduled and orderly context switch the data buffers get cleaned up and emptied normally and prepared for the conscious mind process.

Wake-ups of various urgency have different levels of left-over data to work with.

Now here is the part that helps. Just practice. Thinking about using those cache buffers as soon as you wake up, put something by the side to the bed to remind you to think about, and immediately think over everything in your mind consciously when you wake up. The urgent wake ups are easy to get a lot of details and work hard on those. Eventually the medium-quick wake ups become easier then even the ‘normal wake up rested on your body’s own schedule’ wake ups become possible too. If you’re really devoted you can force extra oportunities to practice easy dream remembering by setting your alarm to wake you up in the middle of the night, but your roomates and neighbors may make your live a real nightmare.

13

snerk Yeah, I don’t think my roommate or the other people in my dorm would be huge fans of that…

But thanks for the suggestions - I never really thought about the different types of waking up. Though sudden wakeups are hard for me to come by - my roommate gets up before me almost every day, so I usually sorta vaguely stir long before my alarm…

14

I had that dream again this morning, the one that bothers me so much. I hadn’t had it in probably a good ten years.

I’m working on some mundane task - it varies; washing the dishes, searching for a book in the library, getting a paper written - and for some reason I’m having a terrible time accomplishing it. I have to have it finished by a certain time, because they’re waiting for me, I have somewhere to be. I had had plenty of time, it was an easy task, but now it’s HOURS past the deadline and I’m not finished. Even though it’s too late, I still have to finish the task, 'cause you never know, I might be able to catch up. I’m frustrated and frantic though, because dammit, I should be DONE by now.

And I’m becoming aware that there’s music playing somewhere in the house. The song varies - something I like, something I hate, even something I’ve never heard before. The identity of the song has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m dreaming - why not will become clear at the end of the story. I’m still trying to focus on my impossible task, but the music is irritating my already frazzled nerves, and I walk over to the radio to turn it off. It doesn’t turn off. It must be the stereo in the other room. Meanwhile, my mother(who isn’t always in the dream) is gently telling me “don’t worry about the music, you have other things to finish first” but I’m on a mission; I’m not going to be able to concentrate with the music going full blast like that. I go turn off the stereo. It won’t turn off, it must be broken. I unplug it. The music stays at the same volume. I run upstairs, yank out the plug to my clock radio, throw it against the wall. The damn music continues. I run all over the house, becoming more and more agitated, crying as I bash to pieces every radio I find but the music still plays and plays. I finally crumple in a sobbing heap in the living room, while my mother looks on, unable to console me.

A moment later, I wake up shaking, and slam my hand down on the snooze button .05 seconds after I open my eyes.

My alarm clock is set to play the radio when it goes off; I’d slept through it, but incorporated it into my dreams. The music is real so I can’t shut it off. It’s a vicious trick my subconscious plays, making it a major plot point that must be dealt with (when I’m physically incapable of doing so), instead of leaving the song in the background, like the orchestral score or something.

Where this dream comes from and why it bothers me is no real mystery. I am terribly insecure about my own competence, and this dream is loaded with incompetence. Not only am I unable to complete a simple chore, I can’t stop the music from playing, and I can’t even avoid becoming an emotional mess about either problem.

The version 10 years ago was worse; I went through several weeks where I had the dream almost every morning, and was AWARE that I was dreaming. My alarm clock at the time was the annoying BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ kind. I’d hear it start, try to turn it off, realize I was dreaming, struggle to wake up, hit the snooze button, nothing would happen, realize I was still dreaming, bash the alarm clock into pieces against the wall, struggle to wake up, hit the snooze button, nothing would happen, realize I was still dreaming, bash the alarm clock into pieces against the wall, struggle to wake up, hit the snooze button, nothing would happen, realize I was still dreaming, bash the alarm clock into pieces against the wall…

My record was 22 minutes. 22 minutes with that cursed thing buzzing in my ear and I COULD. NOT. WAKE. UP. It was pure hell, being aware that you’re dreaming, waking up a hundred times (it had to be a hundred times) only to find that nope, you’re still dreaming, and who knows, you might sleep a very LONG time before you manage to wake yourself; I mean hey, maybe you won’t wake at ALL, 'cause really, who wakes up a hundred times without actually WAKING UP unless something’s wrong; maybe you’ll just lie here, with that thing buzzing and buzzing, till someone finds you comatose or something, which might be a while, 'cause nobody’s bothered to shut it off yet and it’s already been what, 20 minutes you’ve been trying to wake up…
I quickly got a new alarm clock after that.

15

I often have very vivid dreams, and sometimes they’re about such mundane things as washing the dishes. In fact, on numerous occasions, I’ve done such things as come home to find the sink still full of dirty dishes, I do a double-take and puzzle to myself saying “I’m sure I washed those…” Then I’ll sit until I reconstruct what else was going on around the time I did them and remember that it involved flying monkeys and walking through walls and I can conclude that I, in fact, dreamt doing the housework.

Once, I had a dream so vivid that when I woke up I couldn’t stop myself from dashing to the computer and writing down an atrocious poem. In the dream, I was in class at my university, and the professor was presenting (in a very bizarre way) a problem that had confounded modern researchers… but yet which I could understand. I couldn’t get it that idea out of my head for days after.

Then there’s those dreams where I decide I don’t like what’s going on, and I “pause” things… but decide I don’t want to wake up just yet, so try to change the channel. It doesn’t always work.

16

I had this one last night, the first one in a while which I felt compelled to type out when I awoke. It’s a bit long, but it has a lot of good weirdness.

I’m in my house, holding a meeting of some people I feel I know, but not personally. Rather annoyed with the whole thing, I tell them I have to meet someone and they must leave. A woman seems cross and says “Isn’t this a bit more important?”
I dismiss her with “Not to me.”

As they are going, my cousin comes by “to see if I am running”. We begin to jog around the neighborhood, suddenly we a running at very high speed. At the first turn, I feel myself pulled to the outside of the road. I lean severely to my inside, almost falling but managing to hold the lane. We round the corner, and there is a large “Finish” sign above the road, like a marathon banner. Problem is the road is blocked by a high plywood barrier, the kind you would see at a construction site. We see door-sized gap at the bottom, we both slow just enough to hit the fence without being hurt and walk through.

Now we are downtown, we walk down a couple of steps to the back of a long, narrow restaurant. There are tables on either side of the aisle, but the place is much too small for them, almost like the tables are miniatures.

I say “C’mon lets cut through here,” and we open a door and enter what feels like the stairwell in my freshman dorm. We climb a flight of stairs to the next door, from here my cousin is gone from the picture. The door opens into what looks like a small club or indoor cafe. A football teammate I haven’t seen since high school sits alone at a small table near the door. Looking up at me with some aggravation he says “I need to get my blood changed.” I walk past him, he shouts “THIS guy! THIS guy!” and points toward me. I feel surprised but not particlarly annoyed as I keep walking. To my right is a table of people I vaguely recognize from high school and University, they seem irritated at the shouting but not at me. I acknowlegde the group with a few glances and walk by, they seem happy but I don’t stop because I feel I have something to do.

A girl who I feel I should recognise stops me and says “You forgot.”
I think she is a waitress and say “No, I didn’t buy here.” She looks a bit hurt but doesn’t try to hold me back.

As I am about to leave the place, I see a kid I knew in elementary school, looking just as he did then. He asks “Can you help me?” I feel like I should and stop.
He says “I need you to give me a ten.” I pull out my wallet and sift throught the bills, mostly twenties, and find a ten for him. He is holding another ten to give me in return.
“Why do need mine if you already have one?” I ask him.
He looks a bit desperate and says “I have to give my dad a ten and I can’t give him mine.”
“Why not?”
“Because it has ‘I love you dad’ written on it.” He looks embarassed and worried and says “Please, you should have it anyway.”

So we trade bills, I see the writing on his ten. The “I love you dad” is in light red ink in kind of a little girl’s script. I notice the bills look like monopoly money, kind of bland on the front and blank on the back. Centered on the back of the “I love you dad” bill, there is this bold-face type:

		                                                **FOR   USE**
		                                                   **10  -  30**

The girl from before comes up to me and says “I think you dropped this.” She is holding what looks like a small photo negative, only it is a shade of green.
I respond “No it’s not mine.”
“Yes it IS!,” she says in a voice something between demanding and pleading.

About then I notice I am not putting the bills back into my wallet, but instead into one of those picture envelopes you used to get from the photo shops. I take the negative from her and she looks very happy. I hold the image up to look at it, but it is too dark inside to make out anything clearly. As I take it outside for a look in brighter light, I wake up.

My dreams usually switch first and third person perspectives, this one was entirely first person. I felt really good when I woke up, I hope this one comes around again so I can see what was on that negative.

17

Now see, I absolutely love these dreams. If I leave the TV on while I’m napping, I usually incorporate it into the end of my dream (I guess while my brain is working on waking up). It can be something as mundane as C-SPAN (sorry to anyone who finds C-SPAN fascinating - no, really, I’m sorry) and it will make for a really cool dream. Commercials tend to have pretty comedic results. What’s really interesting is when someone shuts the TV off just before I wake up, and I have this really surreal dream and no real explanation for it. One of the strangest examples happened a few years ago. It was late morning, and I was exhausted. I was watching TV in bed, and fell asleep. In my dream, I had gotten a phone call from my husband’s aunt, and she had gone into this long and lengthy discussion about white asparagus; how its grown, how to cook it, good accompaniments, etc. In my dream, I never hung up, and when I woke up, I had this horrible feeling that I’d answered the phone and talked to her and fallen back asleep.

Then I looked at the TV to catch the last five minutes of a Martha Stewart episode. I pulled up the show info on the satellite box, and sure enough, one of the topics of the show was white asparagus. That just made me feel even more concerned that the aunt actually had called, to the point that I almost called her to make sure I hadn’t actually fallen asleep on the phone. Then I realized I could just check the caller ID, which assured me that no one had called.

In general, I have amazing dreams. Lately I haven’t been remembering them as well, which I think is due to the fact that I don’t sleep very well (or much) anymore. The most frustrating ones are the ones I have in the morning on the train. When I wake up, the dream is dancing just beyond the reach of my recollection, like a word on the tip of your tongue, and despite all my normal tricks for remembering dreams, I can never pull them back.

I also don’t have to be asleep for long to dream - I’ve taken 15 minute naps and had amazing dreams before. My most vivid, and most surreal, tend to come during afternoon naps in the summertime (or warm weather) for some reason. If I do that, I’m guaranteed jawdroppingly bizarre dreams that I will remember. So much fun!

18

I don’t usually remember dreams, sometimes I do but mostly I don’t. The ones I do remember really stick with me though, I can remember one from when I was around 5 still.

My strangest dream that I remember happened a few years ago, perhaps 4 or 5. All I remember is I was on the Titanic, instead of sinking it was rising from the bottom of the ocean. I don’t recall where I was, just that I could see the water falling away from it as it rose from the depths, and there were bodies all around. I seem to recall Indpector Gadget was there too, he was bouncing around the ship on his springy legs.

Next thing I know, Gadget and I are walking down this long hallway with arches at regular intervals, at the top of the arches in huge carved letters it spells out C-O-L-L-A-G-E or it might have been college, I don’t recall exactly. Then I woke up.

The other dream I remember that was scary and just a touch weird I died in.

It starts out with me on a motorbike of some kind and riding in a motorcade. I’m behind the limo with some sort of big shot (a President? Prime Minister? Diplomat? I don’t know. But whoever it is is a real bigwig that gets special bodyguards escorting them in great secrecy) and we are driving on a desert road.

Out of absolutely nowhere all these guys appear, some on motorbikes a couple in cars and I think there is a helicoptor but I’m too busy avoiding getting shot that I don’t really know for certain. I’ve pulled out my own gun (I think a glock of some kind) and am shooting back at those who are attacking us…

Suddenly there is a sharp pain in my chest and I’m falling, I and my bike go skidding a couple of meters but I hardly feel the pain from that. Reaching up, I pull off my helmet and drop my head back down to the pavement as the sound of fighting fades. Coughing, I can feel blood trickle from my mouth and know that I got hit in the lung. I know we were out numbered, and most likely the rest of the people are dead or dying. I also know I am dying. And I lay there on the pavement, a burning in my chest and the taste of blood in my mouth staring up at the clear blue sky… until the whole world fades to black.

Then I woke up.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that weird but it’s just not me. I’m not into guns and might be a passenger on a motorbike but never the driver. And it was the scariest thing ever, even scarier than my nightmare when I was 5 because I at least got out of that one before I died.

19

I have a set of recurring dreams, one in which I´m walking, just walking somewhere, and I start to feel increasingly tired, soon I reach a state of complete exhaustion but I have to keep going. It´s a very frustrating dream and I´m quite certain it reflects my current (at the time) state of mind.

The other is the complete opposite of it, I´m walking and I start to take leaps, higher and higher, as if gravity was fading; sometimes I even take wing and fly around a city or landscape, sometimes I come down to meet someone and then I take off again. I had that incorporated on last night´s dream, a kind of subplot; I flew over a seaside village and came down to talk with a girl wearing a wetsuit (surfer/diver, who knows?). In opposition with the first dream, seems that this one reflects positive states of mind.

20

I do not often remember my dreams, but I had one a few nights ago that was particularly noteworthy:

I was a fugitive, of sorts. Not necessarily from the law, but I know I was running from three people, working together to capture me. This took place initially in a hospital building and then ran into some sort of industrial complex as I evaded my pursuers.

What struck me as odd what not so much the subject, but the way it was “directed”, so to speak. It alternated between first person (through my eyes) and various camera views of me, and at one point, went to a first person view from the eyes of one of my pursuers. Essentially, it was like watching a movie, only this particular thriller was much more intense than any movie I have ever seen, since I knew it was me being chased.

Oh, and I also dream in colour.