The other night I had a long, boring dream. Toward the end of it, I remember thinking, “Man, this is a long, boring dream. I wish it would hurry up and end.”
After I woke up, though, I got to thinking. Suppose I didn’t really have a long, boring dream, but simply dreamt that I did?
What’s the difference?
Is there one?
Thanks.
No difference. If you’re dreaming, you’re dreaming. Occasionally you become aware that you are. But you’re still dreaming.
I’m gonna to hijack a bit to talk about lucid dreaming (what you may have experienced). I’m a regular lucid dreamer. The other morning I was dreaming that I created a comic book. As soon as I realized I was dreaming, I focused on the book itself, and was amazed (in my dream state), how coherent the book was - I could recognize text, fonts, art, and even advertisements.
Boring lucid dreams are really boring. I live (sleep!) for the action dreams!
I think there’s a valid question here.
Sometimes I have what seem to be long, complex dreams. Or rather, I wake up remembering having a long complex dream, but only a few vague details of the dream remains in my head. So did I have a complex dream and forget about most of it except a few details, or did I only dream the details?
For an example, I remember one dream, where I dreamt I had a child that had died, and I was wandering around feeling sad about my dead child (my real-life children are fine). Except, I don’t think I dreamed the actual death of my dream child, rather my dream only covered the grieving part. So I didn’t dream the whole story of having a child, the child dying, and grieving for the child, but just the grieving. Except, the grieving wouldn’t make sense unless my dreaming brain imagined that the earlier details happened. Except I didn’t dream the earlier details, I just dreamed that they had happened, they weren’t part of my actual dream.
Dang, I can tell I’m not making sense.
I have a weird thing where I remember dreams but I can’t remember when I had them. It seems like they may have been a few days ago sometimes. I dunno if this fits into the topic, but does anyone else here have this? I’ll be going on with my day and I’ll remember a dream I had but it doesn’t have the proximity of having woken up and remembering them.
I usually remember my dreams when I first wake up but I forget them soon after.
Kind of makes sense to me. I’m thinking that you don’t have to actually dream about past events in order for them to make an impact on the present state of your dreams. You could be dreaming of just having the emotion of grief without having dreamt of the child or any of the actual history.
I mean, I’ve had dreams where I was a fighter pilot, but I never dreamt of going through the air force academy.
Happens to me too, but nobody else I asked (not too many people, like 2) does. I hope it’s not a tumor.
It’s NOT a Tuuumoor! 
I’ve seen this sort of thing being used to explain some “premonitions” that people claim to have. They dream about an incident, then start to believe they dreamed it before the event.