Several novels, plays, movies, and other works involve dreams in which the character relives something from their past. I don’t mean that they have a dream with elements from their past, but it’s more like a movie of actual events from their past.
I’ve never had one of these to my knowledge. I’ve had many dreams- probably most of them- that have people or places or dogs or cars or whatever from my past- but it’s not a relive. I might be at my grandfather’s house for instance, but I’m the age I am now and my grandfather’s house is three times bigger than it really was and somehow I never noticed it’s next door to a Sea World on one side and now its on stilts. Or I might dream that I’m afraid of my third grade teacher because I don’t have my homework, which actually happened, but the thing is she’s coming by my workplace and she has a flame thrower- that type of stuff. To my knowledge it’s not like just watching a movie play of something that happened but a surreal, often mundanely surreal, interpretation.
Which is why I’m curious whether others do, or if this is just an exposition device.
Most often it’s a few of my old jobs, and I’ll relive a shift or something. They usually don’t go according to plan as they would have in real life, but the basic gist of that part of my life is there.
No. I seem to be the same age as I am now in all my dreams, come to think of it. People and places might be from the past, but I’m always the current model.
I voted “yes,” but none of my dreams recollects reality as it actually is, even those that take place in the current timeline. There’s always something a little off or different. But, yeah, I’ve had plenty of dreams where I relive times of my life with about as much accuracy as I can expect from a dream.
Nope. I’ll have dreams where I’m back in school, and I’ll be younger than I am, but they never completely match up. And it’s never about events that actually happened to me.
Heck, if people are alive that are normally dead, they’ve somehow come back to life, or their death was a misunderstanding. And if I’m back in school, I’m undercover pretending to be a kid.
Do sex dreams count? Not that uncommon to dream about having sex with ex-girlfriends in places we usually had sex, and I used to have a recurring dream about a japanese punk I had a one night stand with. Spoiler for slight TMI that made it an ambiguous sex/anxiety dream:Cowgirl style, she hauled off and punched me in the chest hard enough to bruise when she came, in a way that seemed involuntary and which neither of us commented on afterward.The only significant way the dream differed from the actual event was that I had some consciousness that the “surprise” was coming and found it distracting… “Oh, geez, she’s gonna…”
My dreams about the past usually start off like it happened, but usually diverge from what actually happen very early on. So, no. I don’t relive the past in my dreams.
