Of men and their oniric activity

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

And by men I mean humans.

I’ve always thought people’s oniric activity is reflective of their mental balance and overall well-being. I’m aware of the fact that I dream on a daily basis, but I don’t remember anything. People don’t remember every dream they have, but at a very early age I committed myself to wiping out any memory of my brain’s oniric activity. Not that it was (or is) an effortful undertaking. Generally I really remember nothing. Occasionally there’s a nagging feeling that something may have happened and if I focus I realize I’ve had a dream and odd pictures will pop up without making much narrative sense. I remember how when I was a child (and usually over an extensive breakfast) the members of my numerous family engaged in extracting the full contents of their oniric activity and making long comments on various elements and their significance. I used to be relatively intrigued, but at about 8 or 9 years of age I became convinced of their futility and decided to ignore them. I’m not saying dreams are futile, but I still ignore them. In general, I mean, because some of them are way weirder than the rest. But they’re still rare and I enjoy it.

I had one of these weird dreams a couple of days ago. By ‘weird’ I don’t mean ‘bad’. Nightmares are a distinct category and in my case it rarely happens. I had nightmares when I was a child and maybe a teenager but afterwards they were almost inexistent. ‘Weird’ ones though have continued, despite my effort to ignore or forget them. I remember the one I had a couple of days ago because it was kind of funny. I mean, it made me laugh when I remembered it. The general feeling was one of film noir. I knew I was in danger, but there was a case I was supposed to investigate. A young lady had been murdered and I had to go back in time and retrace her steps up to where her corpse had been found. My senses were all sharp and the dream included both my perceptions and analysis (performed in real time), which was why when I woke up it amused me how matter-of-factly I had jumped back in time without regarding time travel as a special procedure at all. The young lady’s dead body had been found on a riverbank at the end of a romantic promenade in a resort-like town. It was deep in the night when the police was called, and I went back in time to see what had happened in the evening. I entered the exact café the young lady had been to prior to her disappearance. The promenade was lined with stalls and restaurants, and their signs glittered in the night. The lamppost cast glimmering yellow light on the other side of the promenade, and beyond the dark green metal fence I spotted the shimmering river water, where the corpse had been found. Okay, the feeling was one of film noir but the images were in color. I felt more than just uneasy when I entered the small café. Every restaurant had tables both outside and inside. The young lady was at a table way in the back next to the rear wall, almost near the toilet, talking to a man whom I immediately recognized: Brad Pitt. Another source of amusement for when I woke, of course, but at that moment my preoccupation was to see whether Angelina Jolie was involved as well or not. (Ridiculous, I know.) She was not, but he was hand in had with what seem to be the waitress. She had obviously put something in everybody’s drinks. I studied every customer at the tables inside the café and they all appeared to be in some kind of trance. Fearing my own safety, I rose and rushed out of the café. The stalls, restaurants and lampposts had disappeared and the promenade was no longer a promenade, but a decrepit lane with dirty marshes on one side and dilapidated houses on the other. At that moment, I felt the dream had become more than weird and I decided to wake up. This is something that I can sometimes do especially if it occurs in the morning. It was morning and I decided to forget about it, but it was so funny I wanted to share it.

It seems normal to me to have such weird dreams with relative regularity and tons of oniric activity running in the background at night, but which I ignore and/or am vaguely aware of.

2

At least your post inspired me to look up the definition of “oniric”, so there’s that.

Regards,
Shodan

3

I’m sure that you (and I) aren’t the only ones.

4

I did but only because I’m used to oneiric.

I never remember my dreams so I used to assume that I simply didn’t have very many but when I had a sleep study earlier this year, the technician commented that I had five dreams over the course of the night. I had no idea that was even something they measured and it weirds me out that my brain has a whole other nightly adventure that my ‘consciousness’ is not privy to.

5

That’s interesting. Do you ever get fleeting memories of dreams if woken up in the middle of them? I do remember back in high school starting to keep a dream diary, and the more I kept the diary, the more dreams I would remember. The first day I would remember fragments of a dream, and then by the end of the month, I was recalling 5 or 6 dreams a night. That said, I always remembered at least a little bit of my dreams, so perhaps that doesn’t work. But if I don’t make a conscious effort to remember one upon waking, it disappears very quickly. My mother even had some kind of Polish saying about how your dreams disappear when you look out a window, or something like that.

(And, I too, learned a new word today. I thought this was going to possible about something else, Onan-related.)

6

Me too.

7

Very very rarely. I had to keep a dream diary for a gen psych class in college and I ended up just making stuff up because I simply could not remember my dreams no matter what I did.

8

That doesn’t necessarily sound too odd to me. I know a good number of people who just don’t remember dreams, but at least you’ve tried the dream diary thing. While I’m a heavy sleeper, I also wake up several times a night and feel cheated if I sleep straight through a night. It feels to me like if I do sleep through the night, I don’t remember the dreams, but if I do wake up during the night (like I usually do), I remember them the next morning, because I have a conscious or semi-conscious moment where I quickly reflect upon the dream before going back to sleep/getting a glass of water/pissing/finding something in the fridge.

9

It’s like ten thousand snoops when all you need is a knife?

10

I apologize for misspelling oneiric. There seems to be a spell checker on google chrome as I type my posts here, and I noticed the word was underlined in red but no matter how I corrected it, the red line didn’t go away. So, I just used the simplest form I could think of. Of course I should have used a dictionary, but I initiated the thread during a short break from work and there simply wasn’t time for that.

11

I apologize if it sounded like I was correcting you. For what it’s worth wiktionary lists oniric as an alternate form of oneiric and frankly, I don’t think either spelling would be very meaningful to the general public without a dictionary.

12

I misread it as onanic, as in, related to the sin of Onan. Which may, or may not, be related to interesting dreams,

13

We weren’t making fun of you for misspelling a word–you just used an word that wasn’t in my (and I’m assuming the other posters) vocabulary at all. You used the word correctly, but it seems to be very obscure.

14

Which is not a bad thing.

Have you ever had a dream that broke for a commercial? I once had a dream that broke for a commercial about the book that I was reading at the time.

15

Yeesh, I figured it out from context. What’s wrong with you people? :smiley:

My dreams are, like me, lengthy and dull, mostly me wandering around someplace. And they repeat; there was one series where I learned which stairwells to avoid. Like a rat in the same maze, over and over.

16

Oh, I have dreams alright, let me tell you.

17

I looked it up, too. This was the first hit. Now, is it just me, or is the one thing that cite doesn’t tell you about “oniric” is what the damned word means?

18

I read it to mean, ‘dream like delirium’.

19

I work towards that every night, but I’m stuck using what’s legal. :frowning:

20

They say it’s virtually impossible to know what people are really like, but I think if we learned the characteristics of a person’s oneiric activity and this person’s relation to his/her own dreams, we might get pretty close to finding out what this man or woman is really like.

When I was young, military service was compulsory in my country. Every young man had to go through a so-called training period of 1.5-2 years. Those who managed to enter university as soon as they graduated high school served for only 9 months. The first two months or so were the toughest days of your life. Soon after you joined the army, quite abruptly I should say, you enjoyed tremendous physical exertion, food and sleep deprivation, and pain-inflicting treatment that was supposed to turn you from a naïve and unruly child into a real man (and possibly a dependable private). Sleep was fast and scarce. Since my father was an army officer, I was already used to sleeping little and waking up at dawn. Although there was very little sleep available, we were supposed to be on watch as well. The night was divided into three periods, and about once a week it was your turn to cover one of those night periods. I hated that time, not because I was supposed to stay awake and uselessly watch the dark, but because I had to bear the presence of dozens of dormant but restless bodies that moaned, gasped, sobbed, spoke, screamed, sweated, jerked, trembled, and wriggled uncontrollably. The image of those tortured young men was terrible, but the revelation that the human mind was a bottomless pit scared me the most.

I was born and raised in a communist regime, where religion was constantly advised against and superstition was derided on a massive scale. State propaganda was omnipresent. For me, all those slogans on TV and huge billboards were self-evident truths. I wasn’t aware of the doublethink that ruled everyone’s behavior, including my parents. My mother was deeply superstitious and vaguely Christian, but I never realized it until very late. My father had been raised by an atheist and abusive village chief and grew to be a genuine supporter of communism, but he had retained a wide range of traditional superstitions that he half rejected and half believed in. My parents had numerous siblings and we often dined with lots of aunts, uncles and cousins. They were all superstitious, but their dream interpretations varied significantly depending on the region the lived in and the community they belonged to. Thus, at an early age I understood that dreams and popular dream interpretation was not something I could rely on, but they were an important part of the brain activity and we all knew that the brain had been declared the universe’s most complex structure by Marx, the communist guru that urged people to try and build the perfect society through reason and science. We were taught about Darwin and evolution as soon as we went to kindergarten, where picture books included images of dinosaurs and many other animals in evolutionary order. I figured dreams and the part of the brain that generated them must be a relic inherited from our animal ancestors, something like the appendix that does not play role in today’s human bodies but must be somehow controlled so that it won’t cause problems. Those dreams were probably nothing but trouble.

There were communist activists who came to school to give young students valuable guidance. These activists were intellectual members of the party and were regarded with reverence and faith by those who believed in the society’s betterment through Marxist reason and science. I was in the first grade when I came in contact with one of these experts. I went to school when I was six because I had started reading way before going to kindergarten and I very good at numbers. It was after the winter break, which I had spent at my grandmother’s place in the countryside, where I had had a weird dream about my being stuck in the ground up to my waist and still roaming around and doing the things I was supposed to do, indeed, with difficulty but with relative success. There were few opportunities for me to play at my grandmother’s because those kids didn’t seem to know or enjoy any of the games we city kids played (except soccer), and there were almost no books in my grandmother’s house. I remember a bible. I had read a lot of traditional fairy tales, and the protagonist in one of them (Weightman, who is something like Mighty Man) retrieves the sun and the moon, which had been stolen by dragon-like beasts. Weightman wrestles the beasts (there are three of them), thrusts them into the dirt where they get buried up to their neck, and cuts their heads off with his sword. The typical antagonist in Eastern European fairy tales is not the dragon, but reptilian demon a little larger than a Dwayne Johnson, who can turn into a full dragon if necessary, just like Marceline in Adventure Time transforms into a colossal monster when she gets angry. As a child, it was unclear to me why dragons in Western stories would kidnap a princess as long as they couldn’t really enjoy her, especially if they were female dragons like the one in Shrek. So, back to the activist’s visit to our school, I was so excited I was going to be able to talk to a real communist expert, who was going to clarify the brain’s oneiric activity dilemma once for all. The guy was really knowledgeable, but he was not good with kids. He explained something about the brain in difficult words that I couldn’t understand and ended by insisting that popular interpretations of dreams were nothing but superstitions and we shouldn’t really pay attention to either dreams or superstitions. Especially superstitions were to be rejected at all costs. Just as I thought. I couldn’t wait for the part where we were supposed to ask questions, when everyone began telling their dreams and asking the expert to interpret them scientifically. After two such questions the guy had already lost his patience and gave short and random answers. I became really disappointed, but I still told him about the dream I had had at my grandmother’s place, the one with me being half buried and roaming around. He told me I must have read the fairy tale where Weightman thrusts the antagonists into the dirt and cuts their head with his sword. Not the answer I hoped for. I already knew superstitions were unreliable and the dream could have related to the images in a fairy tale I had read long before, but real question was why did I have that dream on that particular night.

I understood this was something I was supposed to deal with and figure out on my own.