Moon Nazis are the worst.

For the past month, I’ve been coming out of a fairly bleak bout of clinical depression. I started taking my fluoxetine again, got outside, got exercise, did a little gardening, and the bete noir clawing at the back of my head has dwindled away. This is a good thing.

One of the interesting side effects I’ve noted, either of taking Prozac or possibly from my brain’s recovery, is that as my sleep habits returns to normal, I have some extremely vivid dreams. They tend to be in the morning, or at least I remember the ones that happen in the morning, and I don’t remember the ones from the middle or beginning of the nights.

This morning, it was that I’d been sent to a penal colony on the Moon (ala The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), and there I’d joined a group of guerrilla fighters against the Third Reich Nazis who’d taken over the place. Moon Nazis really are the worst, because with the Moon’s 1/6 gravitational pull, those Panzer tanks were real bastards. Plus, I was annoyed that the bad guys got the cool uniforms.

Previous to that, it was a sword - a katana, I think - that was so thin, viewed edge-on, it was invisible. In the right hands, it had cut a beam of sunlight from the heavens (which was then sewn into a kimono by the daughter of the sky). At the time, two cranky old men played a game of fist-sized stones in a small stream, each stone with a sigil that changed when one of them wrote a new sigil on a slip of paper and placed it on the stone. They were in charge of guarding the sword, and if anyone messed with them, it was serious ass-whupping time. A team of ninja assassin warriors had been hired to steal the sword. You could only join their team if you had once been a samurai, forsworn your oaths for love and had your heart broken. I woke up during the battle. The ninjas were definitely getting the worst of it.

So, what are your vivid dreams, and what do you believe influences them? I expect in a few weeks, my REM sleep will fade into the background, and I won’t wake up, trying to puzzle out how to get a stow-away aboard a rocket back to Earth when the weight is precalculated for exact fuel specifications.

I take Mirapex for restless leg syndrome, and I have some very strange dreams. (Extremely vivid dreaming is noted as a possible side effect of this drug) my favorite one was the one in which I was trying to feed a hockey player to a plant in my backyard.

Was it named “Audrey II”?

No, no, no, you’re referencing the wrong Heinlein book. The Moon Nazis are in Rocket Ship Galileo.

I have vivid dreams most nights. Not particularly interesting dreams, but they are usually quite vivid. Usually by mid-day my memory of them has faded. If I have any thing interesting tonight, I’ll try to share it in the morning.

My theory is that dreams are a bi-product of seratonin production. I believe that because I take 5-HTP for low-grade depression and 5-HTP is a seratonin precursor.

Of course, I have never seen one article or book that backed up my theory, so take it with a grain of salt…

Nazi Moonies are worse.

In case you are interested, I don’t recall a night in the past 10+ years where I’ve not had a clear and vivid dream. I’m pretty sure that every night I’ve had a full dream. I’ve mentioned this to other people who only seem to dream intermittently. I’ve not noticed any side effects, like reduced “rejuvenation” or anything like that.

In fact, it’s quite cool.

tim

When I was on Chantix for smoking cessation, I had some doozies. They were mostly fun, like action movies where I was the protagonist and totally badass, like the one where I was on the run from the law, fleeing to Mexico to avoid imprisonment for a totally justified murder, in a dystopian future where we all drove hovercars.

Then, the next night, I dreamed I was locked inside the Mall of America with the cast of Farscape. Aeryn had been taken hostage by Jay and Silent Bob, and Crichton and I set out to save her. And I stole Rygel’s hovercraft. Hovering vehicles seemed to be a theme.

The other odd one I remember was the one where my mother was marrying Lionel Richie, who always wore a naval dress uniform, and he hated me. I was visiting my mom, and he came over and brought everybody ice cream cones, except me. :mad:

I’ve recently started on A-Ds and man, vivid dreams! - I’m not used to remembering my dreams but now my psych has me dreamjournaling, I’ve had some doozies.

The one where I was doing programming, was convinced the rival team had snuck a trojan into my screensaver, and had me leading a rousing song&dance routine called “When You’re A Nerd” (yes, to the tune of “When You’re A Jet”) stands out - I can’t get the damn tune out of my head.

I can do without some of the others, though - having to pull a 100m long purple slimey vampire leech out of some poor guy’s nostril while all my non-mouth orifices are stoppered with wax to prevent infestation may be a good case for Dr Freud, but I was terrified.

Also, the vivid zombie-fighting one - a full-on movie-length dream, the worst bit was that the zombies gradually turned from slow&dumb to fast&smart. My terror rose accordingly.

I’m not currently on any prescription medication aside from insulin, but I’ve been have some incredibly vivid dreams lately.

For example, the other night I dreamt I was married to my friend Scotty and our high school biology teacher. The contents of the dream itself were fairly mundane – making coffee in the morning, an argument about the dishwasher – except for the part where I was trapped in a swamp/bog and trying desperately to get home to my husbands. So we could argue about who forgot to put soap in the dishwasher.

I’ve also been having a series of dreams apparently based on the folk ballad about the two sisters who went walking by a cliff above a river, and the elder pushed the youngest in because she wanted to marry the man in love with the younger sister. Good times, dreaming you’re a skeleton at the bottom of a river, brought back to flesh by the sunlight on your bones. Of course, I’m damned hot as a re-animated, jilted bride.

I used to have vivid dreams all the time, many of which would have made great stories or backgrounds for stories. Or at least that’s what I thought, as the details of most of them faded away shortly after I woke up, leaving little but the wish that I remembered enough of them to write down. Oddly enough, they stopped (or at least the feeling that I was having them stopped) when my wife died and I started taking sleeping pills and anti-depressants. I’m off both of them now, and in the last few months they’ve started coming back ever so often. I keep telling myself that I should start keeping a pad of paper and a pen next to my bed so I can write down what I remember.

You know, now I can see how screenwriters get their ideas.

Different anti-depressants have given me different types of dreams. Some were screaming nightmares, others just incredibly vivid, but always night after night. Same with sleeping pills. Ambien would get me to sleep, but the nightmares I had weren’t worth it.

Lately, I’ve been having incredibly vivid dreams, due to the heat. Last night, I dreamed that I went to an grocery store (Whole Foods type) and bought fresh boiled bagels, and then went to an amusement park and rode on roller coasters the rest of the night. When I woke up this morning, I went to the kitchen to look for those bagels, it was such a vivid dream. I was so disappointed; I haven’t seen any in years, just those puffy faux-bagel things Noah’s and such try to pass off as bagels, and I was so excited to have real bagels again. :frowning:

Obligatory film reference:

“I hate moon Nazis.”

I will second the Mirapex experience. Particularly on days where I sleep in (weekends), I’m able to retain them longer after waking. Sometimes I lie there before rising and review them before getting up so that I will remember them all day. This, of course, doesn’t always work. I had a complex plot that I thought would write itself as a movies script, but the only part of the idea I was able to retain was that it would open with a shot of Jackie Chan doing some amazing stunt, then pull back to reveal camera and crew. In the ensuing story, Chan would play himself, a talented martial arts movie star, solving some real world plot.

Maybe I need to add that pad and pencil at the bedside…

You know, Moonraker would have been a much better movie with Nazis. Actually, I’m not sure anything would have made Moonraker better (except maybe sticking to the plot in the book) but Nazis probably would have been an improvement.

I’ll tell you this - if you thought goose-stepping was impressive on Earth, you should see it done under Lunar gravity. (If you weren’t impressed by the terrestrial version, take a look anyway - you might be pleasantly amused).

Bugger, I got most of it written out and realised that I’d rather keep it for a nano project.

But I’ve had a couple of conversations while I was asleep - I was absolutely convinced I was telling the truth.

I had a jealous partner (without reason, we split up shortly after these) he was convinced that if he questioned me while I was asleep I’d admit any affair (I wasn’t having one). I’d wake up after these conversations, remembering them precisely and having go through these god awful arguments about what they really meant… I still don’t know.

The first time he tried to question me it wet something like:

“Hey Maggenpye?”
“Shh!”
“Hey Maggenpye, have you-”
“SHH! You’ll scare them.”
“Scare who?”
“The fairies at the bottom of the bed.”

The second time he tried, I told him I couldn’t speak, because I was a salamander.
I remember the flames that wouldn’t burn me, because I was in my natural element, but if this non-magical dickwad kept distracting me, I’d end up scorched.

Oddly enough- this will be the plot of an animated Tim Burton musical after he’s done with SWEENY TODD.

Well as I mentioned, my dreams are vivid, but not interesting…

I dreamed that I was on a long hike near a river. We were fishing along the way (odd because IRL I have no interest in fishing.) My buddy had my waders, but I decided to go on into the creek with my hiking boots. I immediately regretted it. (Particularly vivid was the feeling of the water as it went down over and into my hiking boots.)

The creek was flooded, muddy and brown and I wondered if the special lure I had would be useful (I somehow thought it worked solely on sight.)

After casting I immediately hooked something big. Turned out to be junk floating in creek.

I woke up not too long after hooking the junk in the creek.