Tell me something about how you dream

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I always dream in color.

I’ve had 2 or 3 “lucid dreaming” episodes in my life, but these are the rare exception.

I never feel pain in dreams - even in nightmares I’ve had where I’m getting shot or stabbed, there’s never any (perceived) physical pain.

When things get too scary in a dream, I usually wake myself up. This feels like sitting up from a reclining-on-back position, even though I still often awake lying down.

I have one recurring dream, and one recurring theme. The recurring dream is me, as a small child. I’m in a hospital, though not hurt or sick. I’m trying to find my mother. The hospital always has underground corridors - usually the city the hospital is in is in crisis - on fire, black sky, smoke, etc. I run through the different underground corridors, occasionally popping up to street level to see the chaos, always looking for my mother.

The recurring theme is always the ex who broke my heart. Probably not worth talking about.

42

The strip ran from 1905 to 1914 and McCay died in '34. They’re all long since public domain and, in fact, available for download online.

I’ve torrented your nightmares.

43

Wow, someone else who has this. Either my fingers keep hitting the wrong button or the phone has some wacky non-standard interface that I can’t figure out.

I’ve been able to do the rewinding thing. Not often- maybe 4 or 5 times ever, than I can remember.

The only times I’ve felt pain in dreams was real pain making its way into the dream in strange ways. One time leg soreness/cramps became some life-threatening bone disease in the dream.

Every now and then I get the desire to start doing the dream journal thing again. Most of my dreams are so surreal, and out-there impossible that I could probably sell them as Twilight Zone scripts or something. I’d actually gotten to where I could recall enough to write a page, sometimes two, about a dream.

44

I’m frequently amused at the lengths my subconscious will go to to tell me, “You need to pee, just don’t do it here.” In dreams I find bathrooms that are too dirty to use, or they have no doors, or someone else is in the room. Once I dreamed that I finally found a bathroom, but the toilet paper had been unrolled and draped all over everything. I really had to go, so I began collecting it all up. I fully intended to enjoy my pee and use that paper…then I found I had dragged it through a puddle and it was all wet.

As a child, I used to have a recurring dream which was a precursor to migraine. It was always in black and white (the only time I ever haven’t dreamed in color). It consisted of an arena, like a circus ring, and I had to look at what it contained, which was always either very very tiny, or so huge and close I couldn’t see it. I would wake from this dream feeling nauseated from my efforts, very sensitive to the texture of my sheets, and dying of headache. In fact, just thinking about it long enough to describe it makes me feel queasy.

45

I’ve had something similar - a dream about a face that “bounced” repreatedly from being too tiny to see and too enormous to comprehend. The effect was always nauseating.

46

Last night I had a dream that my brother and I had gone to a gun shop and he decided to buy a gun while I didn’t.

Sounds Freudian as all hell but my brother really is an avid gun collector while I’m not so this was actually a very realistic dream. I even dreamed I was getting bored walking around the store while my brother was filling out the paperwork.

47

I don’t know why, but it’s somehow cheering that someone else has had a similar experience. :slight_smile:

48

I dream in color, but occasionally, it’s nighttime in my dream, so it’s very dark and the colors are muted. I’m not sure if there’s sound in my dreams. I know I communicate with other people, but when I wake up I can never remember if they spoke to me or if we communicated telepathically. I don’t know if I can taste or smell anything in my dreams; I don’t remember ever doing so. Sensations of touch are usually quite vague, if they exist at all, but sometimes they can be disturbingly acute. I once dreamed that I had to remove a pearl necklace that had grown into my skin, and for days afterward I was creeped out by the remembered sensation of pulling the necklace and feeling the pearls pop out of my flesh one by one.

I dream in first and third person. Often, I’m watching me at the same time I’m being me.

I used to dream of flying quite frequently. When I was a child, there was a time when I believed that I could fly, or that I’d been able to fly when I was younger, but I always kept my ability secret. I have a distinct memory of floating down the stairs to breakfast once.

I don’t dream lucidly, but in recent years, I’ve found I can sometimes affect my dreams through force of will. If I really, really want something to happen, it probably will, although I’m not conscious of having that control. Similarly, I’m sometimes aware of reality but not always affected by it. I once had a dream that was leading up to me having sex with my stepsister boyfriend, but at the last minute I remembered that I shouldn’t have sex with him and didn’t; another time, I dreamed that I met a really cute guy that I wanted to sleep with, and I was aware that I shouldn’t because I would be cheating on my fiance, but I did anyway (and feel horribly guilty the next day). If a dream ends badly and I wake up scared, I calm myself by imagining what I should have done to give the dream a better ending; frequently, as I fall back asleep, I reenter the dream and change it.

I have one recurring nightmare - I’m in the bathroom, usually getting ready to go to a big event, and I suddenly realize that I’m going bald. (I’m female, and my hair is the physical feature I’m most proud of.) I think of these as my hubris dreams.

There are many recurring places in my dreams that don’t exist, or exist in an altered state, in real life. Some of these locations have occurred so often in various dreams that it seems odd to have never visited them in real life. I’ve considered drawing out a map of my dream-world, but there are some significant gaps. (I can connect dream-Milwaukee to the vast dream-suburbs, but I don’t know where the dream-forest is located in relationship to them, or whether the dream-river and dream-marsh are part of the dream-forest or a separate area.)