Tell us about your dreams

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I mean your REM dramas, not your ambitions and aspiration. Do you often remember them? Are the ones you remember more likely to be pleasant or nightmarish? Do you have recurring dreams? Dreams that seem part of a sequence? Or are they generally one-offs? Do they generally have a clear meaning, or are they Greek to you?

Answering my own question:

I have two or three dreams a week that I remember. This may seem a lot, but I make a definite effort to record them (I compose a journal entry first thing in the morning, and any dreams get recorded therein), so it’s likely I’ve trained myself to recollect them. About half of my remembered dreams are of the recurring variety. In my twenties I dreamed of flying a lot. After my bad car wreck in '06, I dreamed of being at the wheel of a car I couldn’t stop.

Lately I’ve been dreaming about my son, who would have turned 18 this year had he not died in '96. In the first dream (which was depressingly easy to interpret), he was a baby and had swallowed some poison; I was in a hospital that looked like a mall, and I carried him from shop to shop trying to find an antidote; each shop was staffed by nurses who told me that they were fresh out, but insisted that the next one had it. In another, I went to visit my son’s mother, who, though answering to her right name, looked like my wife, Kim. In that dream my son was alive and hearty; he had been exercising quite a bit and was anxious to show me how strong he was.

Anyway…that’s me. Anyone else care to share the plots or themes of their sleeping cinemas?

2

I had a hell of a dream last night, although I’m not sure it’ll come across in print. At the beginning I was in an elevator or some kind of tank that was filling up with water. The only people inside were me and an Asian man who was some kind of repairman, and he was trying to stop the water. He couldn’t, and instead he threw me out of the elevator to save me. I fell into darkness. It was an impossibly long fall and I was surprised I survived. The only apparent injury was that some of the buttons on my jacket had been driven very hard into my hand when I hit the ground. It looked pretty nasty. But aside from that, I was alive and found myself in a long labrynth of tunnels and pipes. I didn’t have a clue how to get out and just started walking. Eventually I came above ground in Toronto, although the road signs were in a foreign language. My girlfriend found me on top of a bridge over a river.

This is a pretty regular pattern in my most memorable dreams: long walks from one area to another in ways that aren’t physically possible, like the dream I had where I was watching a baseball game in the SkyDome (Toronto again, hmmm), went outside to the parking lot, then downstairs into an apartment building and finally outside into a suburb.

3

The other day I took a nap with the TV on, so my dreams incorporated the plots of the shows that were playing. I was reclining on the couch, with my hands behind my head.

And then my GF was in the room. She brought her brother with her, whom I have yet to meet. He was speaking with a high voice, like a woman, and he would not shut up. He just kept talking and talking about some drug. “Goophitol may not be right for everyone. Consult your doctor. Goophitol may cause stomach upset, runny nose, loose stools, and heart attacks. Never take Goophitol with antidepressants. Patients who take Goophitol for more than six weeks should not handle pregnent women or women who may become pregnent. Goophitol may be right for you.”

He just. Wouldn’t. STOP. Then he can over and tickled my armpits.

4

More often than not, horrible. I won’t go into detail, but when I awake from them I’m usually ready to destroy shit.

I’ve tried meds but they only make them last longer.

5

My dreams are usually very vivid, with color, sound, and sustained plots (which make no sense upon waking). There is a steampunk type of city that has reoccurred a few times, though I don’t remember anything specific from it right now. Last night’s was a real doozy:

My parents, my little brother, and I were all at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, which was a small wooden jungle-gym structure in the midst of a large, shallow, muddy pond full of hippos swimming around. I complained that it was lame, and that we should go somewhere else. For some reason, we couldn’t go to any other Disney parks, so I suggested we go to this restaurant on the way back (to Indiana) that was known for being a haunt of lots of major celebrities.

We go to the restaurant. I have this feeling that it’s in Ohio, and that the name starts with an “r”. It’s very crowded, and I get separated from my family.

All of a sudden, I’m hanging out in a room that is apparently the basement of a restaurant, though it looks like any furnished basement, all done in red and orange and yellow. I’m chatting with David Bowie, and I’m kind of starstruck. He’s very nice, but my brain decides that I have to go back to my family.

I join them at our table. We get served huge portions of fish and it doesn’t taste very good. We leave.

The “next day” we come back. At the entrance to the restaurant I see David Bowie again. He’s wearing a very nice black suit. He grins mischievously at me and walks into the crowd of people. My family is seated and we get served fish again. I wonder aloud why are all these people here if the food is so bad. They tell us that we didn’t pay enough to sit in the celebrity section. Oh. So we pay a little more, and are seated at a booth on the other side of the restaurant.

My mom starts waving and saying hi to all these celebrities that I don’t recognize, and I am very embarrassed. We get menus and order. This time we are served steak, also in very huge portions that aren’t very good. A waiter offers my dad a dessert menu and refers to my mom as his “trophy wife.”

At this point I just want to leave, but it becomes apparent that there’s going to be some sort of show in the restaurant. Apparently The White Stripes are going to play “Seven Nation Army”. I agree to stay for this, but it turns out that they are singing a song about lesbian marriage, acted out with puppets.

The scene then switches to a house with this very evil woman who I think is supposed to be my teacher/private tutor (I’m now suddenly about ten years old). She is yelling at me to do the dishes, which are in a totally disgusting state. The injustice of it all starts to get to me, and I think “I can’t stay here with my brother. This woman is awful. She’s going to tell me to go live with the Dursleys.” At this point I started realizing it was a dream and woke up.

If anyone can interpret that, I will be extremely impressed.

6

My dream that I had the most recent involved a band memeber of Korn getting in a serious accident and noone could get ahold of his family or work associates (mostly because they didnt know who he was).

Anyways, I work at the hospital and I overhear the conversation between some nurses and I immediately know who they’re talking about and i tell them that i know someone we can call. I call that person and when they answer they tell me they cannot talk at the moment, it wasnt a good time. I let them know it’s an emergency and started to tell him what was going on but he interrupts me and tells me what his situation is - which happens to be why I am calling him and come to find out he is in the ER room at the moment, so I walk down the hall and sure enough, he’s in there! I remember telling him i was confused as to why he was there - and why the band member was in town - afterall, we’re talking a regular town in NE TX and how in the heck did he get to the hospital so fast?!

7

I have always had a very active, bizarre dream life, and I still remember dreams I had when I was a child. I dream every night. My earliest recollected dream was at age 3, when a man was trying to break into my house and I was a small infant too weak to prevent him from coming in. I have had vivid nightmares for as long as I can remember. I have dreamed about floating whales trying to take over the world. I once dreamed I was standing in my grandparents’ hallway fending off a goat from biting a small child, and the little girl turned and looked at me and jerked her head around in a complete 360 reminiscent of The Exorcist. I have dreamed of small dogs eating me while I stood paralyzed (actual sleep paralysis.)

From the age of about 13-16 I used to dream, nearly every single night, that I died. Most of the time a tornado came and swept me away, but sometimes I fell down an elevator shaft, or was pushed into traffic–but every dream contained the same element–the realization that I was dying. First came acceptance, then everything would fade to black and I realized I was still having thoughts.

Then I would wake up, completely confused and relieved to be alive.

Starting at age 16, the death dreams started intermingling with lucid dreams which I would manipulate and interpret at the same time. I’d be walking by bathroom sinks filling up with water, analyzing the symbolism and its relevance to my life while I dreamed. Sometimes, in waking life, I would have an experience that I was nearly certain I had dreamed about the night before. There were times that feeling happened daily as well. I don’t believe in prescience, but something must have been going on with my neurons during that stage of life to give me the consistent impression that I dreamed things before they happened. I mean as complicated as the Olympic Park Bombing to as simple as eating fish sticks for lunch. My mother, weirdly enough, reported the same symptoms.

I remember a particularly vivid dream when I was 19, in which I made the active choice to run after a hideous zombie ghost with an umbrella in order to protect my now-husband (then new boyfriend.) This was a lucid dream in the most extreme sense. I knew it was a dream. Initially I was too afraid to go into the house. I reasoned with myself that the zombie represented something terrible I was afraid to confront, and that for my peace of mind it was important for me to go and face it. I walked in, and I looked at its hideous face, and my fear vanished. Then I saw my boyfriend wander down the hallway and the zombie gave me this evil grin and started after him. That’s when I grabbed my umbrella and started whaling on the bitch. When I woke up from that dream, I was exhilarated and filled with complete joy.

(I’m very good at interpreting dreams–this one was clearly about not allowing my fear to sabotage what was a new and terrifyingly beautiful relationship.)

I still have tornado dreams, but most of the time I escape the tornadoes and at this point I’m so used to dying I recognize almost immediately that I’m dreaming.

I still have occasional PTSD nightmares based on actual events in my life. I prefer not to describe them because they are more than just dreams. In general I suspect that the majority of my bad dreams over the years have had to do with difficult experiences in real life. It’s just that some are more literal than others. Let me just say I’d rather dream about being devoured by small dogs than dream about the things that really happened. The dreams are almost worse than the experiences themselves. They usually wreck my morning.

I have had some pleasant dreams, mostly involving meeting a man and falling in love and/or screwing. Looking back on a lifetime of dreaming, the only pleasant one not related to boys involved jumping into a vault full of mashed potatoes. I love mashed potatoes. It was a good dream.

ETA: Jesus. No wonder I’m an insomniac!

8

I tend to remember them, at least when I wake up. They tend to be fairly realistic in some aspects but contain a central element of the absurd. Nightmares are incredibly rare for me, and the last dreams I considered bad enough to call nightmares happened around the time I had my panic attack, triggered by (for all intents and purposes) a caffeine overdose, and mostly involved my own mortality. The most memorable one is an OP here on this Board somewhere. Another one involved dying at IHOP while my friends were off in a super-long line to pay the bill. (That one was REALLY creepy–a waiter came to my table and said “Sir? Are you alright?”, and then a little boy pointed his finger at me and said “Isn’t your heart beating a little fast?”–then I noticed my heart rate shooting up exponentially until my arteries burst and I died. Then I woke up, scared shitless.) The only other unpleasant dreams I’ve had as an adult involve my dad meddling in my life and screwing things up, or my former students telling me I’ve abandoned them. Issues, yeah, I know.

In the long term, though, I’d guess over 95% of my dreams are pleasant. I enjoy REM greatly, and I’m the only person I know who has had chronic hypnagogia and hypnopompia and enjoyed them. (That’s where you start dreaming before you fall asleep, or keep dreaming after you wake up, respectively. For most people they’re dark and scary affairs with demons and evil horned beings, but for me they were a lot of fun and usually focused on such mundane hallucinations as foamy soap or tissues.) I used to make an effort to write down my dreams and analyze them, but now I just kind of enjoy them in the moment and when I wake up.

There are some recurring themes and images, most of which I can’t recall. One of them is some type of specific building I keep ending up in (I wish I could be more specific), and another one that pops up fairly frequently is getting lost. Getting lost is a fretful thing for me in waking life, but in my dreams I regard it the way I’d like to: as a serendipitous opportunity to explore a new environment. Some of my favorite dreams involve being lost in cities I’ve never been to, riding the elevator around (say) Seattle. I can’t make this stuff up.

My dreams are always vivid. Lots of color, lots of sound, intricate plots (usually centered around goals), interesting characters, and it’s all in English, clear as day. Of course, the English words may not be assembled in any logical way. That’s another thing I used to get a kick out of during my bouts of hypnogogia: I knew I was going to sleep soon when I’d start thinking in absurd yet profound statements that meant nothing at all. That would be my last fully conscious moment; then came the visual hallucinations and then sleep.

One more interesting dream note: Until I was about 15, I dreamed lucidly every single night.

How is that different from your waking life? :wink: