Last night I was in the middle of one of those rare dreams that had me going all sorts of strange places when I suddenly woke up and had the heavy thought that I had never been to any of these places. These dreams recur every now and then and after I wake up I realize they’re totally made up, without any relationship to places I have been – or at least they’re so much of a composite that I can’t recognize them.
The one last night was the first one to wake me up with that feeling of how odd the places were, and I spent some little while trying to figure out what real places I have been were being redone by my dreams. I eventually went back to sleep without getting any good answers, but I did get the feeling that by exaggerating various aspects of familiar places my dreams did have some relationships with those familiar places.
In the past I have wondered if maybe these are signs of some previous lifetime’s experiences. Now I’m pretty sure they’re just manifestations of the way dreams distort or pun on the familiar. In any case, I wonder why I keep revisiting the same places in my dreams that (as far as I can tell) I’ve never been to in real life.
Anything like this go on in your dreams? Any idea what’s at work here?
Hey, I’m still trying to figure out this anal probe I found…
My most vivid dreams are indestinguishable from reality, sometimes for several minutes after I awake. It’s the emotions that linger for me, as opposed to the images.
Every now and then I have a dream set in the same location as a series of previous dreams. It’s pretty neat- over the years I’ve filled in the details, and it’s kind of fun to visit it. I haven’t had one of those dreams in a few years now, though.
That thing about dreams picking up where they left off has happened to me a few times. Not so much lately but I can remember periods when it was almost to be expected that as soon as I lay down and closed my eyes I’d be right back in whatever situation I had been in last time I was asleep.
Most of my made-up dream places are a combination of real places. Like, the exterior of one house having the interior of another house. Sometimes I take real places and expand them. One involved an old house I lived in, with some extensions, like a huge ballroom. On the whole, it seemed much bigger like a mansion (on the inside, the outside was still the same).
This one place I’ve been to in a couple dreams is really bizarre though. It’s like a giant bobsled slide floating in the sky, except the sky is magenta-ish purple, and at the end is a huge building of some sort, but I never get a good look at it and never reach it. It was probably inspired by a movie or video game, but I can’t imagine what.
Yumblie, I believe my dream places are pretty much composites as well, but the other night when I tried (in a conscious state) to reconstruct those places into their components I was either too groggy or just plain unable to make the connections. The best I could do was to suspect that my mind/subconscious was trying hard to keep me from identifying its machinations. (Is that being a bit suspicious of one’s own mind or what?)
The places that bug me most are streets, roads, back alleys, etc. The dream the other night had me going on this elaborate route to get someplace ostensibly familiar to me, but it was a very convoluted route. I know I have always enjoyed finding “secret passages” that can work when traffic is snarled, so the back routes are part of how I like to travel. Even so, these dream routes are even more indirect.
As for buildings like houses and offices and such, I am less concerned about the rearrangements and remodelings there. But even some of them make me wonder what schemes my subconscious is going through. Perplexing to say the least.
I often have dreams set in the town where I lived when I was an undergraduate (25-30 years ago). Some of the details are right, and some of them aren’t, but it’s always clear that that’s where I am.
Judging by my dreams, the high school I went to is about 50 square miles and at least 18 floors high. Pretty impressive for a place that was built to hold only a hundred and fifty students or so…