You see it in movies and books all the time. Someone is going through a tough time, lost, directionless, etc… They have a dream and work it all out, and things get better.
I’m 36(bleh) and have been dreaming for a while now, and I have yet to have a dream make me feel better, resolve something internally to me, or help with a direction or decsion I was making. I dream of vampires, sword fighting, hot chicks, crazy sex dreams, you know stuff you would expect from a sci-fi/fantasy geek like myself.
has anyone here had a helpfull dream? something that made you feel better, or helped you out?
When I was about 8 or so my dad was trying to build his business, so he was travelling a lot. For a few years, every time he would leave I would dream that he was dead. I would wake up crying, which would wake my baby brother and sister, which would make Mom cranky.
Finally one night I dreamed that he had died (again) but now we were at his funeral in a church. Everyone was crying quietly and the preacher was giving a sermon. My dad’s ghost was there too, pinching old ladies’ bottoms and pulling people’s hair and swooping and laughing and generally having a great time. I was the only one who could see him, and I kept trying to get him to shut up becuase you’re supposed to be solemn at funerals. He just kept telling me that he was having a great time being dead and that we should never be sad when someone good dies, becuase they go to heaven.
And laughing. He just kept laughing like someone just told him he had won a million dollars.
I don’t know why, but I never worried about Dad on his business trips after that.
There’s a man who died a few years ago, and who I never met but whose legacy lives in many people I know and work with. Our lives have many different intersection points, if he was alive I would have met him through ten different channels.
Once there was a lot of crazy stuff going on in my life and I had a dream about this fellow. It was one of my usual stupid dreams about messed up travel plans and so on, and I met him and he told me something that really helped me out with the crazy stuff that was going on.
It’s all too complicated and uninteresting and somewhat personal to describe here in detail, but going by the reactions of people who knew him when I told them about the dream, it was pretty meaningful, and it really did help me sort out what I was going through. I’m still a bit humbled by it, even though the hardened cynic in me knows that it was just my own brain putting together random thoughts while I was sleeping.
I was having a really hard time dealing with the death of my aunt a few years ago. About a month after she died, I dreamed that she picked me up in her red convertible, and we went driving along windy country roads, listening to Tom Petty. It was incredibly vivid. I could hear the leaves as they blew across the asphalt, and I swear I could smell her cigarette smoke. At the end of my dream, I got out of the car, and she put her sunglasses back on, and drove off, calling over her shoulder, “See you later!”
As strange as it sounds, it was one of the most moving dreams of my life. I’m actually crying as I type this, remembering.
After that dream, I had a little more peace of mind. I felt like I could “let her go.” I don’t believe in an afterlife, but God, that’s what I’d wish for her: eteranally cruising in her convertible (she LOVED that car) on a warm fall day, “Free Fallin’” blaring from the speakers.
When I am particularly overloaded with stress, which doesn’t happen often, I’ll have a “dead aunts” dream. Typically they’re sitting around and talking and laughing and pointing out all the silly things that I’m worrying over. When it’s time for me to leave, they each hug me and tell me they love me, that everything will work out for the best, and they’ll be back when I need them. It helps me let go of the things I can’t control.
I call those ‘visitations’, because they’re so lifelike. A run-of-the-mill dream for me always has a certain cartoonish/surreal flavor to it. A visitation is very concrete, and always plays out that the dead relative is back from the hereafter to check up on me. We sit around and discuss what is going on in my life, lotsa hugs, and “I’ll see you when it’s your time.” I’m always flying high the next day, too.
To address the original question, many times in the Wackyland style of dream, I’ve come across the solution to a problem I’m having, whether it’s work, academic, or life-related. I’ve also had the solution pop into my head while doing the morning bathroom routines.
Soon after I moved, I realized I couldn’t find my little 3" Japanese CDS. I love those little baby CDS, and spent a lot for them on ebay.
I had a dream that I found them in a box. When I woke up, I went to the CD shelf, took down a boxed DVD set and opened it. The 3" CDS were on top. I didn’t conciously remember putting them there, but my unconscious had kicked in.
I’ve told the story before, but I’ll bore you again.
About 3 weeks before my mother died, I had a visitation style dream where she showed up at my place about a hundred miles away from hers to go out for breakfast. We went, and as we walked across the parking lot to go into the greasy spoon, I asked, “Mom, why are you here? You know you’re really in bed dying, and not healthy like you appear now. No, wait. Don’t say anything. You just stand there, and let me look at you like you are.”
Her response was, “This is how I want you to remember me, not as I really am now.”
I was on the phone to my sister about 30 seconds after I woke up to make sure something didn’t happen overnight.
Not exactly help, but interesting nonetheless – I had a dream several years ago about how to build a working 3D TV system. It would work, too. It’s just not terribly original – other folks have come up with the same thing. Not technically demanding, but it’d be hard to persuade manufacturers to market a system like this without a proven profit.
By the way – the classic tale of Scientific Insight from a Dream – Kekule’s discovery of the structure of Benzene by having a dream about a snake putting its tail in its mouth – has been seriously questioned and arguable debunked. There were discussions in the literature about this and other possible structures of benzene before the suppopsed date of his dream. I have some articles from Chemistry journals on the topic.
I’ve figured out moral delemas in my dreams. One morning I’ll wake up after senerios have run in my dreams. The one that I wake up feeling good about the dream is the way I fall on the issue. The ones that leave me feeling emotionaly dirty and upset are the ones I couldn’t live with doing.
I guess you can say that I have “reminder” dreams- dreams that remind me I have to do something or focus on something.
For example, I had a dream where my teenage daughter kept on getting smaller and smaller until she was ant sized in the palm of my hand. She then slipped through my fingers. When I woke up, I had the feeling of guilt and the realization that maybe I am not paying enough attention to her lately and she could slip away from me.
I have had similar dreams concerning the house collapsing in on itself (gotta check that roof leak and check the furnace before it gets cold) and getting lost on my everyday drive to work (got to get more organized in the morning before work and during the first few hours I am there).
A few nights after Diggity, my Golden Retriever, died I had a dream that all the dogs I’ve owned and lost in my life came bounding towards me to play. It was one of those vivid, tactile dreams that seem completely real. I could hear them, smell them, feel their breath on my face.
When I woke up I knew I’d had the mother of all doggie wish fulfillment dreams. But I felt better.
In my younger days, when I used to progam for many, many hours straight, I’d occasionally have “coding dreams”; sort of an abstract algorithmic dream where functions and variables and code all had some sort of visual representation.
There were two effects from this: one, if I were working on a very difficult problem, I’d often wake up knowing the answer. I don’t think I solved it in the dream so much as the dream got me thinking in different ways, and it was just easier to solve in the few minutes after I awoke. This happened often enough that I used to actually count on it; sadly, I don’t have code dreams much any more.
More interestingly, the visual abstraction of code from my dreams stayed with me, and I often (even now) think of code itself in the same visual way. It’s not something I control consciously, and it’s not particularly useful most of the time, but it’s an interesting counterpoint to the purely textual/abstract task of programming.
I’ve had dreams where I found something I’d been searching for, like Annie-Xmas.
I’ve also been known to wake up at three-bloody-a-m seeing in front of me the solution to a difficult problem. This didn’t help me none when the problem was from the previous day’s Algebra II exam, but it does help nowadays, when most of the big problems I have at work don’t need to be solved in 3 hours or less.
This happens to me reasonably often - enough for me to take notice.
The most significant was immediately following my honeymoon a few years ago, at a time when I felt sure my then-wife was having an affair, but couldn’t work out who. The only guy she saw on a regular basis through work was gay, and there didn’t seem time for her to meet other men.
I awoke in the middle of the morning after the most vivid dream, where I dreamt that it was not a guy she was sleeping with, but a woman at her place of work. Everything immediately fell into place - and I was absolutely right.
Such dreams carry an extra feeling of reality, and I guess it’s the subconsciousness kicking in. For instance, I dreamt during the 2002 World Cup that England would win their next game 3-0 (horrendously unlikely!). I told people about it next day and joked I should put a decent bet on - the odds were great - but I never did. Sure enough, they won 3-0 and two of the goals happened exactly like I had dreamt they would.
Since then, I have such dreams two or three times a year I reckon, and now follow up on them when they happen.
As I’ve mentioned previously here, my dad passed away last month. I’ve been having trouble with it, and a big reason is b/c I’m not a crier by nature. So I’ve felt very bottled up and stressed, and I have had a few panic attacks that I think are related to this. About two weeks ago, I had a dream where my boyfriend and I were driving past the church where we had my dad’s memorial service, and my boyfriend wanted to go in. I didn’t want to, but I said yes. When I went in, there was a church service going on, and my whole family was sitting in the last pew, including my dad. When I came in he turned and looked at me, and then stood up. I could see that he was healthy and walking normally, not gaunt and having to walk with a cane like he had to the last years of his life. He came out into the lobby and hugged me, and I thought “I guess I was wrong. He’s ok.” He pulled away from me, looked me in the eye, and shook his head. But his face was still as kind as it ever was, and he looked so happy and healthy that it actually made me feel better. I woke up and cried for the first time since the shock had worn off, and I felt a lot better. Now I dream about him all the time, but it’s happy things mostly, and they make me feel good. Physically, I feel a lot lighter since it happened.
It made me think of the game we used to play when I was a kid. We would say that we would see each other in our dreams, and we would plan the adventures we would have that night before we went to sleep. I don’t really believe in an afterlife, but I do think that if my dad was going to contact me, it would definitely be in my dreams, and it would probably be just to play, like we used to do.
A similar thing happened to me Martiju. Back when I was married to my ex monster I kept feeling like he was having an affair. I couldn’t place with whom, however. There were a handful of women at his work that he regularly socialized with that could’ve been the one but for some reason my gut said “nah.” Even his late night coffees on a few occassions with one didn’t set off the alarm. Then I had a dream about a woman he worked with that would’ve been the last one I would’ve suspected.
Here’s the strange part. In my dream I was walking down the sidewalk and “Homewrecker” was walking in my direction. I could tell she was upset and looking for something. I stopped her and said, calmly and nicely, “If you’re looking for “Asshole Ex-husband” he’s in there” (pointing to a door along the walk.) She looked nervous and remorseful. I recalled she was wearing a solid, powder blue dress, black camisole and sandals, no stockings.
I told “Asshole Ex-husband” of the dream. His jaw dropped. He admitted to me of the affair and was astonished that I perfectly described an outfit that she wore often.
Also, when in school, I used to stumble through algebra and geometry. When stuck on something I would often dream of the correct formula or proof.
My dad passed away in April. A couple of months ago, I had a sort of dream-within-a-dream (not mawwiage!). In the dream, I knew that if I fell asleep, I’d dream about Dad. I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to have a dream about Dad, because if I do, it will hurt. Plus it will probably turn out to be stupid nonsense like that one I had about Fran and Paul.*” But then I decided that it would be so good to see him again that I’d go ahead and have the dream.
At the next instant, I was in the kitchen of my parents’ house, doing dishes. Dad walked in through the kitchen door with a huge smile on his face. I said, “Oh, Dad, I’m so glad you’re here. It’s good to see how. How are you?”
He told me that he was just fine and wrapped me in a bear hug, and told me how much he loved me. It felt really good.
Then I popped back into the original dream, and thought about how great it had been to see Dad, and then woke up for real and was all, “Woah.”
Fran and Paul = my grandparents. I’d had a dream after my grandmother’s death that she and Paul had been golfing in Florida as their afterlife, which is highly unlikely.
A few years ago, I saw a double feature of one of the Harry Potter films and “The Day After Tomorrow.”
That night, I had a dream that conflated the two of them somehow. A refrain kept running through it “There’s no need to worry; there’s no need to panic. Just put in a call to the Ballroom Mechanic.”
I remembered that and made it the basis for a story of mine.