There is little doubt that external sounds can influence a dream, or even steer a dream in a new direction. This happened to me the other day, but I am not sure in how soon the external sound played out…While dreaming I heard loud bang (most likely from a truck driving by) and this played out in my dream as a plane crash.
My question is, do the external sounds have an immediate affect or does it create a situation to which a logical action explains its being.
Put another way: do you think my dream had the plane flying by, the bang was heard outside, and the dream had the plane crash. Or I heard the bang first, then a plane appeared and then crashed…
Once I dreamt that I was being attacked by large flies. There were millions of them, and they had a nasty bite. I discovered in the dream that if I was completely covered in flies, that I could fly. Not only that, but I could attack the flies that were not on me. So I endured the pain of being bitten so that I could attack the others. The buzzing was extremely loud, and the dream grew more intense. Finally I woke up with a start. But the horrible buzzing was still there! :eek:
My (ex-)roommate was asleep on his bed in the living room. The television was on, and the volume was turned all the way up. A tape of a CART race that he had recorded earlier was playing, and the cars were buzzing loudly. I don’t know how he could sleep through it! (And I don’t know why he felt the need to turn the volume all the way up in the first place.)
In this case, I think the sound predicated the dream.
I incorporate sounds into my dreams all the time. Typically, a real thunderstorm will also happen in the dream, or I will start singing a song I hear on the radio as I sleep. The singing is weird, because I can’t do anything else in the dream until the song is over.
Happens to me all the time! I have a bad habbit (well, more than one, but let’s not go there) of falling asleep on the couch during the evening news, after dinner. Whatever happens on TV can get incorporated into my dreams. Once, I dreamt I was walking through a factory of sorts. All of a sudden, an alarm bell went off repeatedly. I exited the building as quick as I could, but nothing seemed to be going on. No fire, nothing. As I was making sense of it all, the alarm bell kept on ringing.
Then I woke up.
The TV showed an image of a phone ringing. Some commercial, obviously not lasting longer than 30 seconds or so. Upon seeing the commercial later, the part of the ringing phone lasts 3 seconds, tops. So, the ring woke me up, AND gave me an extra input into my dream that seemed to last for MINUTES at least. Your mind goes into hypertime when you dream: I’ve read somewhere that most dreams really last about 7 seconds in your brain.
Absolutely, in one of my dreams I had to iron some clothing. I turned on the electric iron and it began to buzz alarmingly. As in my morning alarm going off.
This used to happen all the time when I used a radio alarm. As a result, a lot of my morning dreams ended up involving classic rock songs, used car dealerships or Wrestlemania.
I wake up to NPR. This means that lately, Colin Powell and Tony Blair keep showing up in my dreams. It hasn’t been pretty, folks. On the plus side, even my sub-conscious knows better than to put George Jr. in my dreams.
NPR should do more stories on Viggo Mortensen. Or Denzel Washington.
It happens to me sometimes. The most memorable time it happened, it was in Iran, in 1978, during the beginning of the revolution. The Shah was still in power, but barely.
Some years before I went to Iran, I had worked for a heavy equipment company and worked around large dozers and other heavy grading equipment.
I was dreaming, and then the dream changed, and I was on a construction site directing a big “Cat” D-9 dozer. As it rumbled and clanked coming closer, the driver was ignoring my signals. It kept coming closer, shaking the ground, and getting louder and louder. It was so loud I woke up. Awake, I realized I could still hear it, and feel the vibrations in the floor. I went and opened the front door to look out. There was one of the Shah’s British Chieftain www.tacticaltanks.com/chieftain.cfm main battle tanks turning round in the street in front of my house.
In junior high I went to a summer camp at a university, where we stayed for a week and shared a standard dorm room with a roommate (first time I’d done anything like that). We all got to choose which classes we wanted to take, so schedules differed. I had an early class, my roommate did not.
I had a dream that I was stuck in the elevator as the fire alarm was buzzing and the building was burning down. I awoke to my roomate savagely beating me over the head with his pillow, screaming that my alarm clock had been going for too long (about a minute or two, I usually woke up much faster than that). It seemed like I was in that elevator much longer than that, though. I’m with Coldfire, I think some degree (maybe differs for everybody, or differs from REM episode to REM episode) of time dilation occurs in dreaming, and that the sounds occurring around you are incorporated probably immediately, or at most very soon after their occurrence.
I believe that the actual dream takes place within a very short time span (even though it seems like ages in your mind).
Sounds will probably be incorporated not long after you hear them - and yes, sounds have affected me too.
I’ve had the alarm-clock-intruding-into-dreams only once. My alarn is an angry-sounding beep. In the dream, I was in a building, and the fire alarm went off (actually the alarm clock). So I ran outside, but the beeping continued, as a truck was backing up on the street in front of the building.
