… that you later remembered it as an actual event?
When I was a child, I used to have a recurring dream that I could fly for short periods of time by getting a running start and then simply folding my legs behind me. In the dream, I would start out just going a few feet before settling to earth, but the more I practiced the farther I could go, until I could zip all around the house without touching the ground. I used to have this dream all the time, and it was very vivid.
Years later, I found myself “remembering” all the fun I had as a youth, zipping around the house without touching the ground. I almost mentioned this to a friend before I caught myself and realized that it couldn’t possibly be true. And yet, I had what seemed to be a perfectly clear memory of it. If it weren’t for the sheer physical impossibility of it, I’d swear that as a little child I did, in fact, know how to fly.
Yes, I have. When I was about eight, I dreamt I’d gone to the store and stolen a toy, came home, and put it in my toy box. Now I remember it as if it actually happened, but I know it didn’t–the toy wasn’t in my toy box and that store doesn’t even sell toys!
But for a while I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was an actual memory.
Yes and no. I don’t tend to have very realistic dreams in the sense that my dreams have no visual and rarely have a soundtrack. However, they happen as a sort of abstract sequence of events in a very similar way to how I remember things. This means that when I’m actually remembering a dream I often have trouble telling if it was real or I dreamt it.
It sometimes bothers me for most of the day, although I usually have it figured out by lunchtime if not earlier. Fortunately this hasn’t happened in a while. It’s really disconcerting when I have a really nice dream, I wake up feeling all happy thinking about the great things that happened to me yesterday, brain starts to engage and I suddenly think “Oh crap, it was a dream wasn’t it?”
Damn that can get depressing.
Incidentally, I also had the flying dream when I was younger and was for a time convinced that I could really fly like that. The problem was that in my dreams my ability to fly was always rather erratic so when I couldn’t do it I just thought “Hmm. It must not be working now.”
I had a dream once, when we lived in our old house, that I jumped off of the landing at the top of the stairs straight down into the foyer…not a suicide jump or anything, but a gentle floating down. I “remembered” this years later, and realized that it couldn’t possibly be true. But it seemed so real!
You just described about half of my dreams. I’ve had to catch myself often from asking someone why they did a certain thing that never really happened.
Me: Hey, do you remember when we…[mental] Wait, that was dream, you fool! Abort! Abort![/mental] Never mind.
My hypnagogic imagery seems to involve very very very daft and surreal caricatures, and little else. These seem quite real (probably because I am awake while I see them)
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I have dreams where I go shopping and find the coolest stuff… gadgets and whatnot… and when I wake up I think I’ve actually bought them. It’s only when I can’t find them that I realize it was just a dream
agog I never realized it was even possible for people to have the exact same dream, but you just described one I remember vividly. For the longest time I thought that had actually happened, and I would occasionally contemplate duplicating the effect during waking hours (as a kid, don’t get the wrong idea) but common sense always won out. This is sorta neat.
Actually, your experience with flying dreams sounds very familiar to me. I don’t have them so much anymore, but when I do they see SO REAL. I usually, in the dream, feel like a forgotten skill has suddenly been remembered. “Oh yes! This is how you fly, that’s right. How could I have forgotten? Well, from now on I will certainly remember. Ha ha ha, won’t I surprise them all…”
I (unfortunatally) almost never remember my dreams with the exception of one. It was a re-occuring dream all the way through my younger years and into my late teens. Basically I would be running along this huge open plane. Over little hills and into tiny gullies but I could see forever, it seemed. The only problem was gravity seemed a little - off. It was quite a bit less than we experience here on earth so I had a hard time gaining “traction” on the ground which made what could have been a very nice run quite annoying. It reminded me a lot of trying to run in the shallow end of a swimming pool - where the water is just up to your neck. Sometimes I would just be running for no real reason and sometimes I was definatally running FROM something, but I could never figure out what it was. Just some feeling that there was something running after me.
Oddly enough it wasn’t until I was around 22 that I realized it was a dream. Honestly. I thought it was a memory from when I was living on the praries. Very strange.
I don’t have the dream any more, and haven’t remembered a single one since. Hmph.
Several times when I was working on my MA degree, I’d fall asleep while reading a book, then dream that I had read the rest of the book. On at least one occasion, I “referenced” a quote that I had actually dreamed. I was only caught out once.
That’s the most glaring example, but I don’t think there’s a single week that goes by that I don’t dream something realistic enough that I don’t wake up believing it really happened. I think the scariest one was when one year I dreamt that the premier of Romania, Ceaucescu, was executed in an uprising, and the event sparked off a chain of riots that began World War III. The very next day, it was reported that Ceaucescu had been executed.
As a child I had a dream that if I held a piece of torn cardboard in one hand, and waved the other hand over it, the cardboard would turn into a faceted diamond. Sounds weird, but that’s in the nature of dreams. It was so vivid and real, that when I woke up and realized I had been dreaming, I was disappointed that I couldn’t actually do it.
I once had a dream that I started working at Target. The dream was so real that some time later I spent half the day trying to remember whether or not I actually worked there (I never have). I think I had the dream when I was miserable working at my fast food job and was seeking greener pastures and applying for work in other places (relatively speaking, working in retail seemed a lot better than fast food). I don’t even remember if I turned in an application to Target or not.
All the time. Almost every dream has some aspect that is so real it confuses me, even the surreal ones.
I get a lot of funny looks from friends when I ask them about something that happened in a dream, and a lot of the time if I have to remember to tell someone something, or do something, I do it in my dreams and am positive I’ve actually done it in real life.
It can be extremely disconcerting as I get frequent nightmares, and it can be very hard sometimes to convince myself that my paranoias are only brain-poo. I’ve been upset with people because of something I later realised was only a dream.
On the reverse side, quite often people will tell me I’ve done something that I was SURE I had dreamt up. Rarely anything outrageous, but it’s worring to not actually be able to tell the difference sometimes!
Once when I was a kid I dreamed I came into some money and bought a huge bag of candy with it. (A lot of money, huh? LOL) Anyway, in the dream I was sorta skipping down the street with it in my fist and the dream was so realistic that I woke up with my hand in a fist “holding the bag” and I actually flipped the covers back to look for the candy thinking it had fallen out of my hand. I got up and started franticly looking for the candy thinking “Where’d I put it? WHERE’D I PUT IT!!!?” Weird!
I can’t think of any instances of that happening as an adult because I don’t think I really dream about mundane plausable stuff. I seldom wake up and say “Where’d George Clooney go?” for example.
I once (I think) had a dream that I was at a party and talking to a lad I know about gardening. Now I can’t actually remember whether it was a dream or whether I was slightly drunk, but looking back I think that it probably was dreamt.
I don’t have interesting dreams with flying in like the rest of you!
