The Science of Dreams

In My Humble Opinion
1

(I assume IMHO is the proper place for this. For as you shall see, I am expecting some replies to be subjective and based on your opinion.)

I have been studying dreams for some time now, i.e., my dreams. And there is a lot of interesting phenomenon I have noticed.

One, to cut to the chase, is what can be best termed as ‘dream memory’. Simply put, there are some memories that I have only in my dreams. To use a purely hypothetical example, I will dream that my family is descended from European royalty. And as I am just waking up, I think, Yeah, that’s true, we are descended from royalty. Then moment I wake up I realize it. My family isn’t descended from European royalty. Where on earth did I get that from?

Outside of that, there are what I might call (for lack of a better term), many different levels of lucidity in my dreams. There’s a restaurant that only exists in my dreams. Again, as I’m waking up, I believe it’s real. I even wonder why I question it. Then when I wake up, again it dawns on me. And there are many other places that only exist in my dreams.

One time, it was even poignant. I dreamt my grandfather’s house wasn’t really on Drexel Street in Detroit like I had grown up believing. But actually, it was two streets over. But you know, in a way that’s true. The house isn’t in its present location. But the house of my memories is now some place else (but not two streets over–but humor me on this one :slight_smile: ).

Then there are serial dreams. I will start a dream one night, then start right where I left off the next night.

Now surely all the aforementioned information must be of interest to someone. No? And although this is IMHO, I just have to ask. Has any scientist somewhere ever offer an explanation for what I just said? Because surely I am not alone in experiencing it.

Thoughts? :slight_smile:

2

MISSED EDIT WINDOW: And please share your own unique experiences (that was implied :wink: ). :slight_smile:

3

There’s a movie theatre only in my dreams that I often visit. The same movie theatre. I go there for all kinds of things, never to actually watch a movie though,

I also lucid dream a couple times a month. It’s always after long nights of sleep in the morning. I wake up, look at the clock, see I still have some time to sleep, go back to sleep and straight into a dream then realize I’m dreaming and then try to fly. I have found my ability to fly lies in the confidence that I have that I am actually asleep and just dreaming and thus able to fly and not really awake in Nebraska eating pancakes with Bigfoot and Santa Claus and trying to fly.

4

Definitely throughout my life there have been recurring locations in my dreams that don’t actually exist.

5

Interesting. You got me thinking about my own dream patterns and categories. Here is how it stands with me:

  • I get a lot of location-based dreams (as in your dream about your grandfather’s house). Most of these are dreams in which I was roaming a house I had lived in some time in the past. There are four such houses considering I’ve moved out of four cities in my life so far, and each time I only went back and visited the city I’d left many years after leaving. This gave these houses or locations a bit of a ‘ghostly’ presence that was more dream than reality. It is always dark when I see these houses in my dreams, and I get the interior/plan right, as well as the general location of the house, but the reality inside the dream is different. Do you remember watching a film called Artificial Intelligence? About that kid robot that ultimately gets to live one more day with his mother in the family house, but in a manner that was entirely disconnected from any timeline? This is a lot like that

  • I get the Academic Anxiety Nightmare a lot. I have many anxiety issues and these manifest themselves in this type of nightmare. You know this, right? You’re back on campus, it’s exam day, you’re stumbling through the corridors of your real-life school or college, vaguely aware you have an exam for a course you’ve never attended a class of. Everyone knows what they are doing and where they are going except for you. I get this nightmare about once a month

  • A series of vague nightmares in which I know there is a woman in distress somewhere, and I have to save her, but I always fail to do so. This is based on my own personal history, in which three women I knew and loved (grandmother, mother, and sister) have died in tragic ways one after another and I’ve failed to save them or be there for them (in reality). They appear in my dreams individually as the general idea of a woman somewhere in a house or in no location at all. I know there is a woman in distress close by, either in a coffin under the bed or hovering nearby. I am not always sure which one it is until I’ve woken up. I get this nightmare on a fairly regular basis (at least once or twice a month)

  • Strange landscapes. These are magical or fantastical places that appear in my dreams pieced together from places in reality, but not recognizably. I’ve found that I retain these dreams longer than any other type, and I remember the landscape - sometimes fondly - for years

I do not experience a recurring fanciful status or dream (such as being descended from European patricians in your case), and usually all situational realities inside a dream are reset as soon as I wake up. I hope this makes sense and responds to a point or two in your post. Thanks for this mentally stimulating exercise.

6

Very timely thread. Just last night, I had a dream that was set in the house where I grew up. Over the years, I’ve frequently had dreams about that house, even tho I left home in 1973 (age 19) and my parents sold that house in 1979. Still, it has been the setting of strange stories and has often included rooms that don’t actually exist or people who never set foot in the place. Last night, my cats were there - cats that have never been in the same city as the house!

I don’t think I have a particularly strong link to the house - there was nothing special about it - just another suburban row house in Baltimore county. And apart from the dreams, I don’t generally even think about the place or the neighborhood unless conversation turns to childhood.

I think my night brain must be on something…

7

I’ve started keeping a dream journal lately.

What amazes me is the amount of detail that goes into a dream. I remember the patterns on a couch, the dingy-ness of the couch. Completely fabricated people. Their hair styles, color of their eyes. their clothes. The TV hanging on the wall in a restaurant…

All this is being fabricated by me in real time. By a brain that could power no more than a 40 watt lightbulb. Meanwhile, today’s most powerful computers could not fabricate a VR like that in real time.

8

About once a week I take 500mg of B6 three hours before bedtime.

The dreams this produces are incredibly vivid. It not only increases the intensity of dreams, it increases the quantity.

You have to take pure B6, not a complex tablet as there is not enough B6 in that. You need at least 300mg if not more. And you have to take a powdered capsule, not a time released tablet.

But try it. The dreams are insane!

9

But are they enjoyable?

Memory of dreams seems to be suppressed by cannabis use. I use cannabis every day and only rarely will recall a dream, typically because I’m woken mid-dream.

Now once a year I intentionally stop using cannabis as a way of affecting tolerance. Users call this a tolerance break. I actually look forward to the two week period because of the intense dreams that occur. I still think about some of the dreams from tolerance breaks taken years ago, but I wouldn’t call them enjoyable. I wake up freaked out and then think about the dream for days, even years!

10

Interesting, I do cannabis for the dreams. But I have an unusual sleep cycle so perhaps that’s why I remember.

I’ll go to bed sans cannabis, wake up 4 hours later, smoke a bowl, and try to get another four hours in.

It’s that second four hours when the intense, memorable dreams come in.

11

I’ve been keeping a dream journal for several years. Regularly writing them down improves my memory of them. I’m at the point where the underlying meaning of a dream becomes very apparent to me when I awake. It’s also interesting to look back at dreams I had months ago; like reading a trippy short story(though undoubtedly only interesting to me).

The one thing I hate is those “nested” dreams where you “wake up” multiple times but you’re still dreaming. Each time you “wake up” and have a feeling of relief, only to realize you’re still dreaming. You’re desperate to wake up and you think you finally have, and then realize you’re still stuck in the dream, over and over.

12

When a group of stoners sit around talking, dreaming comes up often in the conversation. I’ve noticed that the more someone smokes, the more likely they are to not remember dreams.

13

I’ve only had a nested dream once in my life and it freaked me the fuck out. I honestly contemplated if I was dead or not. And I’m an Atheist. lol

14

Yes. They are exciting, interesting, sometimes weird as hell, sexual, and so real that when you wake up you have to think for a while to decide if you just dreamed that or it was a memory of something that actually happened in your life.

However, I won’t bullshit you. If you have a nightmare while on a mega dose of B6 it will be the most frightening, devastating, mean spirited nightmare you could possibly imagine. The vividness of it makes it worse, so take that into consideration. I kind of enjoy an occasional nightmare. Like a horror movie I didn’t have to pay for.

15

I have a dream city. I have a lot of dreams in the city.
The street by where I live (loosely based on where I once lived).
The east part of town. Bad stuff happens there.
Travelling south from the east part of town. Travelling dreams.
Travelling south from where I live. This usually entails the sidewalk going through people’s houses. Often a maze-like sidewalk and I end up where I don’t belong and seeing things I shouldn’t.

16

I used to be a much more active dreamer. I had lucid dreams, and I even experienced astral projection a couple times. (it never occurred to me that it was real, I can’t imagine people astrally projecting and then believing they were actually remotely viewing things… I didn’t leave my condo though, but I was able to float right up into the corners at the ceiling and see cobwebs, very strange)

Many of my dreams are structured like sitcom episodes, where there is something slightly unusual at the beginning, and then the story just moves on, and then there’s a big payoff at the end that links to the earlier unusual occurrence. I find this intriguing, because it indicates the mind is not just making it up as it goes along, it actually builds a narrative ahead of time.

I also find it fascinating how easily dreams fade from memory. It’s like, even if you wake up remembering the dream, and can walk through the steps in your own mind, later in the day it will be hard to recall. And a few days later, you’ve probably forgotten it completely. If you write it down, or tell it to someone else, it helps it stick, but only because you remember the writing, or the telling, not the actual dream. I find that really interesting, how the dream stays in your brain’s “temporary cache” and is easily dumped, even if you spend a lot of time thinking about it.

17

The memories aren’t only in your dreams, after all, you’ve just told us about them. What you’re experiencing is that it’s only in your dreams you think they are actual memories, and that is easily explainable by a core feature of dreaming, the repression of disbelief. We accept all kinds of things as “normal” during dreaming that if we still recall when waking up makes us go “WTF?”

18

I doubt there is any greater feeling in the world than the relief I feel a few minutes after waking up from one of those dreams where I’m running from the police because I killed someone. During that half awake state for a few minutes, I’m still convinced that I’ve just woken up in a world where I’m wanted for murder and the overwhelming feeling of calmness that follows the realization that this was just a dream is indescribable. It’s like a deus ex machina in real life.

19

I have several houses/apartments that I visit in my dreams that don’t exist in real life. I had one of those dreams last night. This house doesn’t belong to me. I’m always visiting someone there. A friend I knew 40 years ago lives in the house next door. Before last night, I had only seen her through the windows in her house. Last night I was on the porch and she came outside to greet some guests. I called to her and we spoke for a few minutes. I told her that I was going back home to Seattle the next day. (I don’t live in Seattle.)

I usually remember at least one dream every day. But the ones I don’t remember often “haunt” me. I get flashes of them throughout the day. When this happens, I see the entire dream at once. But it’s too quick to hold on to. Sometimes, I can grab just a piece of it and if I focus on that, I can rebuild the dream. This has happened all my adult life.

20

I’ve been writing my dreams down for several years but a lot of them never get recorded because they fade too fast to recover more than scraps. If I’m lucky I may get one down once a month or so. Very frustrating.

From what I have recorded:

  1. I almost never seem to have dreams set in my current physical location. Now that I live in Texas, my most common dream location is Paris, France. When I actually lived in Paris, however, as near as I can recollect, my dream location was almost always somewhere else in Europe, back in the States or wherever. These days, if not set in Paris, they are in an altered version of the town in PA where I grew up, or places I’ve never been: Poland, Serbia, China, Australia and one time, the Moon.

  2. Almost the only recognizable persons who ever show up in my dreams are members of my immediate family (parents and siblings), and the woman I lived with when I was in Paris. If not any of the above, sometimes various celebrities show up who I don’t normally think about much when awake. For example, I once had a dream where I was involved in some sort of contest to build a radio-controlled car, competing against the cast of the British version of Top Gear.

  3. A lot of my dreams seem to involve transportation of some sort; most specifically trains, which is understandable because my family goes back through four generations of railroaders, including myself for ten years. One common item I can’t explain, however, is that I have had numerous dreams involving travel aboard a white tour bus. That’s something I pretty much never consciously think about, and I have no idea where that is coming from.

Lastly, I’ll just mention that many of the dreamscapes in the movie Inception bear a remarkable resemblance, at least thematically (trains, Paris, the details of building interiors) to my own dreams. OK, I haven’t stormed any winter palaces or fought guys on the ceiling of a hotel corridor, but still.