There are a few things that are common in my dreams and if I stopped in the dream and considered, I’d know immediately I was dreaming.
[ol]
[li]For some reason I cannot - for the most part - behave violently. I cannot punch or shoot a gun. When I try to shoot in a dream, I find I do not have the strength to pull the trigger. Oddly though, I can *sometimes *body-slam people. I find these things very strange - not sure what it says, if anything, about my sub-conscious.[/li][li]Likewise, I cannot seem to shout. Just this morning I was trying to yell in my dream and it only came out as a whisper.[/li][li]I can’t fly but I can glide. Going down steps, I find I can glide down a flight, sometimes I can even cut corners and glide down several flights. It seems so natural in the dream. I always think (in the dream) that I am never more than a few feet off the ground, so it isn’t unusual.[/li][/ol]
Do you have tells in your dreams?
I haven’t had a lucid dream since I was a kid.
Sometimes when I’m having a particularly bad dream, it will hit me all in a flash. I’m dreaming. Then I’ll wake myself up immediately.
When I’m dreaming…
-
indoors, it’s often dark or gloomy - and the light switches never work when I try to use them.
-
when I’m attempting to accomplish something / get somewhere, events always occur that puts that task completion / destination farther and farther away.
…and I sometimes realize “this is a dream” when the above occurs and wake myself up.
The OP isn’t talking about lucid dreams.
For me, I’d be doing something really stupid, on purpose. Like… No need to put on shoes as I hike out over these rocks with all these people I don’t even know, or no need to put on clothes today!
Or, I’d be flying or backing up my car and if I turn my head I can see absolutely nothing and my brakes don’t work.
Gliding instead of flying! YEAH! This happened to me, about when I turned forty. I used to have wonderful flying dreams (although I never had full control; I often would end up getting blown way off course.) Now, I’m lucky to have a gliding dream.
As an unreconstructed Freudian, I wonder if it has to do with loss of full and easy erectile function. (One of the advantages of this is not suffering from embarrassing unwanted erections. Those were the bane of my school days, but now… “Mighty Samson” has become “Old Rutherford.”)
I also have the frustrated violence thing! In one recent dream, I was so mad, I tried to bite the other guy. And couldn’t! (And woke up with the pillow in my mouth!)
Basically, I think you’ve hit on the central theme: in dreams, you can’t do certain things. A monster appears, and you can’t run. You go for a drive, and the car stalls, or runs off the road, or simply fades away and you find yourself walking. You really want to hit someone, and your arm won’t move.
There was an earlier thread on reading in dreams. VERY frustrating! The text just wobbles away into nonsense. It’s like reading etaoin shrdlu. (A classical reference that is no longer relevant, now that typesetting is done by computer. Who slings lead type any more?)
I forgot that one. Sometimes I’m driving and my brakes won’t work - and also, sometimes it seems like I’m in the back seat but still driving. Haven’t had that one since I got my latest car.
I can never have sex (always keep getting interrupted by something) or go to the bathroom (usually because the toilets are all dirty or overflowing) in my dreams.
I know I’m dreaming because the instant it occurs to me that I’m dreaming, I wake up.
- can never dial a phone, usually trying to dial 911
- can breath underwater, very cool. and the water is never cold
- Plane always crashes, I always survive
This. Since I’ve been spending LOTS of my copious spare time staring at a computer screen (mostly reading on-line news and SDMB), I’ve begun to dream frequently in plain text. It’s always the same: The text seems perfectly legible just briefly, but quickly becomes unintelligible. (Note, this doesn’t necessarily distinguish dream-text from real-IRL-on-line-text :p) Then, I’ll go back to the top and try re-reading the text I already read, but now it’s unintelligible too.
For an illogical hallucinatory experience such as dreams, there seem to be surprisingly many memes that many people have experienced in their dreams. The movie Inception ( Review by Ed Zotti ) explored many of these. It’s surprising (I think) how many dream memes in that movie I was familiar with, and I suppose many viewers would have felt the same. That’s why the movie “works”.
In dreams, I don’t hear my tinnitus.
Of course, the really strange thing about dreaming is that you don’t stop to consider - within the context of the dream a lot of weirdness seems to make sense.
One thing I’ve had a lot recently is being able to rewind time, like a tape. If I screw something up in a dream - say, I break something, or a conversation goes wrong - I’m able to go back and do it over again. I think there’s some wish-fulfillment going on there - I’ve been having a lot of what-ifs and if-onlys in my waking life in recent times.
Actually, more seriously (but only slightly so) –
I sporadically have had dreams in which (in the dream) I inquired as to whether I was dreaming (sometimes concluding yes, sometimes concluding no), but that is rather infrequent in my dreams.
And it has seemed (within the dream) occasionally that I could consciously control the progression of the dream.
But I doubt that there’s anything like lucid dreaming going on there. And I doubt that there’s anything going on like, you know, actual awareness of one’s dream state. Rather, I think that dreams are so varied and so (generally) illogical or randomly logical, that any such events in dreams are just, you know, randomly part of the dream.
Invariable, after I really wake up (and sometime even this happens a few times before it’s really really), then it’s perfectly clear that all of the dream (or even multiple layers thereof) was just a dream.
that’s interesting…do you always notice it’s gone? or are you not necessarily aware of it’s being missing..?
How is this any different from real life? 
Not always. Sometimes it occurs to me while dreaming, sometimes when I recall the dream. I have been trying to remember that test when I go to sleep, to induce lucid dreaming.
Machines don’t work right. If I’m trying to use a computer it won’t do what I tell it to. Half the time if I’m ‘driving’ I’m actually running.
I’m … uh … doing certain things in public that I only do in private in real life.
If I was awake, Shakira and Mariah Carey would not snuggled up on either side of me.
I can’t get my cell phone to work. Sometimes it develops fold-out screens.
Looking for contact lenses, which either swell up like jellyfish or shell apart like mica, and multiply.
Can’t find my shoes. This is not an immediate tell and I spend an inordinate amount of time barefoot in mud etc.
The above-mentioned gliding. Once I realise this I can drift for a time but have little speed or control. Also useful for stepping gently down from cliffs.