Seems that most the dreams I have are unpleasant or downright bad dreams. Tell me Dopers, how is it for you? Are you 50/50 on good/bad dreams. Do any of you have lots of pleasant and happy dreams? What is normal?
Thanks.
The dreams I remember the most are the weird ones. The latest being the one in which my lil dog gets turned into a banana somehow.
Mostly detailed good dreams. I’d say 80% to 20%. Last night, I worked on a rescue squad in the arctic, or at least north. We were filming a documentary when we found tunnels, paths in the snow! We found a downed plane, bodies everywhere, and, oh my gosh, two live people! I cradled one in my arms.
I don’t remember many dreams. Of those I remember very few are good dreams.
Yeah, I feel weird posting two in a row, but many of my dreams are neutral. I mean really neutral, like I am a salt shaker and there’s a table, and nothing else happens. Sometimes I am a pen or protractor or eraser, and nothing happens.
Moderator Action
Since this is seeking personal experiences instead of factual information, let’s move it to IMHO (from GQ).
Almost all the ones I remember are generally unpleasant. I don’t know, however, if that is a representative sample of all my dreams. It may simply be that unpleasant dreams are likelier to wake me up.
I very rarely remember a dream. When I do it’s when the dogs wake me up at an unusual time. I remember having an odd dream, think about it a bit, then go back to sleep and in the morning only remember that I woke some time during the night and remembered my dream, but no details whatsoever.
A few times a year I will purposely avoid smoking cannabis for a few consecutive days. During that time I’ll have vivid, incredible dreams. But I still do not remember the details. I’ll just wake up thinking, “holy shit!”.
The content of my dreams depends on my stress/depression level. Back when I was stressed and working my way out of depression, I kept a dream journal because I was having such violent/horrible dreams and it sort of fascinated me. I remembered and recorded a dream about every 4 to 5 days with a final tally of 109 dreams. I did the math and 41% involved my own death while only 8 of them were “good dreams” (the others involved torture, or other people dying violently, the apocalypse, y’know, whatever terrible thing you can think of).
I got used to it, mostly. Some of them were still just really bad. The thing is I lucid dream as well so I would often feel “pain” from them.
These days I still have adventurous dreams and mildly disturbing dreams but not at the frequency or depth that I used to. But I’ll never have simple or good dreams often, I don’t think.
This describes my dreams, too. In my latest dream, my grandmother called and asked me to make a donation to her spiritual adviser. My reaction went from thinking “What spiritual adviser?” to feeling bad because I hadn’t called my grandmother in so long, to realizing that was because she’d died several years back, to deciding to finish up the conversation without mentioning her death. It wasn’t upsetting or comforting, just weird.