I’ve been having these bizarre dreams for about 13 years now, none of which have ever been close enough to anything resembling reality to be interpreted, and have had this one at least 7 times. It’s the only one I’ve ever had more than once. I’m interested in hearing some recurring dreams (come on, everybody’s got one), if for nothing else than to reassure me that mine isn’t the weirdest; here’s mine and if anybody can figure this one out, they get a gold star.
Flash beginning scene:
A Flight-of-the-Navigator style UFO hovering in front of me, beckoning stairs, doorhole open. I’m on the ground, can’t see inside.
Flash again:
I’m outside a squat rectangular building in the middle of nowhere, green grass as far as I can see, a sidewalk encircling the building. Someone’s with me; I never see them or figure out who they are. Flash inside the building–it’s a laboratory school of some sort; secret experiments & whatnot, government importance or something. Me & whoever’s with me are apparently being chased or followed, we’re ducking through rooms & running down halls, we end up in this female teacher’s room, she’s in there by herself. She has a rather large closet & after much pleading she lets us hide in there. We go in the closet but I am now watching the scene from outside the closet, police/authority figures come in & interrogate angrily, woman seems extremely frightened but I do not hear specific words, only muffled sounds (like I am still in the closet) and I see the police grab her forcefully and go to open the closet door–then suddenly I’m running around the sidewalk encircling the building, fighting ninja-people who appear out of nowhere and kicking their asses w/ mortal kombat-esque music in the background. This goes on for a while, then flash to the UF0 again. This time it’s smaller, closer to the ground, no stairs, and I see on the ceiling of it inside the teacher who helped us, severely and grotesquely mutilated. End.
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME???
One of my recurring dreams is the pregnancy theme. I know that when I have the first one, the rest of the series will follow, usually over a period of months. I gradually progress through the pregnancy in these dreams, and they occur about once a week or so once they start. I have never given birth in these dreams though. They run through the point at which I am in labor, but stop there. Wierd, kinda freaky, but I think they’re normal.
The other one, which I haven’t had in a while, are the Titanic dreams. I had these nightly back in college for about 6 weeks, and had them occasionally since. This was before the movie came out(I graduated college in '95). I was going down on the titanic, all my friends were there, and each time, some survived some didn’t. Sometimes, I made it, sometimes I didn’t. But it was always the titanic-never just a general drowning dream or anything.
I’m going to try to describe my most common recurring dream, but it won’t be easy because it’s not really a dream, at least not in the visual sense.
It happens when I’m sick with a fever, or sometimes when I’m just stressed out. I have what I call “Rules Dreams”. It’s kind of like hovering between sleep and consciousness, and probably close to delusional hallucinations. What happens in my mind is all these ethereal rules for sleeping race through my mind, and if I break a rule, I wake up. Does that make any sense?
Picture yourself asleep, and racing through your mind is a never-ending spate of numbers, graphs, equations and illustrations, none of which make any sense, but occupy your mind anyway. All of a sudden you twitch and wake up. Now the only thing you can think of is, “what did I do wrong in my slumber to make me wake up?” You try to make sense of what happened, but nothing makes sense. You fall asleep again, and the list returns - at the speed of light. Repeat process.
It’s maddening, but kind of cool in a strange way.
Now, my recurring dreams are ones that repeat over and over again throughout the night. I’m always fighting some sort of supernatural power (demon, vampire, whatever) and I triumph the first time. Then the dream resets and I have to do it over again. And again, and again, until I wake up. The weird thing is that I have to defeat the power exactly the same way each time. I usually hit a time where either I can’t remember what I did the last time, or part of the dream deviates, and I have to figure out how to put it back on track. I’m never terrified, just puzzled. Weird. Dream analysis anyone?
When I’m sick, I always dream that I’m a burger on a grill, and I have to wake up to flip over. That one should be fairly obvious…
Also, when school is getting to me, I dream about math all night. The worst ones are where I combine math and chem, like taking derivatives of chemical equations. Once, I was half asleep when the alarm went off, and I dreamt I couldn’t wake up until I could take an even square root of the time.
When you dream, are you actually participating in the dream or watching yourself in it? I am always watching myself in the dream yet I experience the same emotions as the me paticipating in the dream. I have yet to meet anyone else who sees themself in the dream, and people seem to be most concerned when I tell them this. Maybe I’m just a freak. But it’s cool, like watching myself on television but still experiencing the same sensations as if I was actually there.
Apologises for the hijack - I just need to see if I’m a disconnected psycho or not.
I start off in my house. Upstairs outside my bedroom. There’s a party in my sister’s bedroom filled with around 50 or 60 people(which is strange because her room is only 11X12ft).
::Flash::
I’m in a room that connects to another room which is basically a ten foot pit with a flat, rectangular, concrete island in the middle. The “moat” is about two feet wide, and I jump it to the island. Then jump it again on the other side to get out that door.
I step out into a “Hylian” filed like area (from the Ledgend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) but it’s flat. No hills or anything. All of a sudden, my school mates appear around me, and these vampires fall from the sky, right infront of me. We are all armed with Nerf guns(tres cool). We shoot the vampires, but no effect. So I upward kick one of them, and it shoots up into the air, like I hit a jelly-ball, and comes crashing down. Dead. ON the other side of the field, I see a rocket ship about to take off.
A timer appears infront of me(this dream is like a video game) to the top left of my vision/screen. It reads “30 scnds” and counts down. By now I have killed around 6 six vampires, and all my friends have made it to the rocket ship. I run my little head off over to the rocket ship with only 10 seconds to spare, try to push the glass door(I know, glass door on a rocket ship) open, but there is my friend Alex on the other side blocking it, while grinning. I shout frantically at him to open it, but no luck. 5 seconds.
Finally I push the door open with all my strength, and the ship takes off.
The inside of the ship was an arcade/fitness gym. Arcade games lined one wall, and stair masters lined the other. I walk around the room, looking around, and … ::FLASH::
I’m in my church’s cafeteria. I don’t know why, because, I never go to church. I’m sitting down eating, and I hear my mom’s voice calling me from a great distance. Like when someone yells to you from the opposite end of a long hallway. I usually wake up there, if I even make it that far.
I love that dream. It’s like I’m playing Doom, when I’m that field.
I think it’s clear that some of the dreams above probably result from playing Doom and the like right before bed.
nadin, I usually participate, but sometimes observe. Sometimes in the same dream.
My recurring series of dreams is very strange.
In every dream there is one significant image or object that the dream seems to be about. At the end of the dream I end up behind the wheel of a car. Only when I wake up do I realize that the car is named after the significant aspect of the dream.
So far I’ve dreamed Spider, Firebird, Lincoln, Mercury, Saturn, Fleetwood, and more.
It took me an hour to figure out that the pickup truck I drove away from Mount Rushmore was a Dakota.
I often experience something very similar, except I call it the “Puzzle-as-Dream.” It’s some kind of a physics problem, usually, much like yours, except that I’m more conscious of being half-awake than half-asleep, and the idea is that if I can just solve the problem, then I can finally fall fast asleep.
I don’t have recurring storylines, but I do have many bizarre images which repeat in various dreams. This one is a recent entry which creeps me out to no end: I am looking over a guy’s shoulder as he is looking into a mirror (sort of like the scene in “The Wall” where “Pink” shaves off his eyebrows), I look closer and a notice the guy is shaving his teeth with his razor. Small white shards are falling in the sink and occasionally I look up and see the guy’s mouth and razor streaked with blood. Needless to say I haven’t been falling asleep easily lately.
I don’t have any issues with my teeth or with shaving, so I’m not sure where this comes from. Although I do hate the fact that I am out of college and still grow facial hair like a 16-year-old.
I don’t have any long-term recurring dreams, but I have a recurring dream type: being late. I have to be somewhere (work, job interview, test, etc.) by a certain time, but things just keep happening to make me late (go back for a forgotten item, detour around some obstacle, start talking with someone and lose track of time). I wake up still thinking I need to be somewhere and I’m hopelessly behind schedule. This probably says a great deal about my personality.
I did have recurring dreams for about 2 weeks after a nightmare of a business conference. My work depended on getting some small, simple piece of information, but my idiot co-workers just couldn’t give me a straight answer. The real scare came when I woke up and realized that my life was really like this. Luckily, I don’t work for NEC anymore.
Whenever I have a fever, my dreams get stuck in a short recurring loop all night long. Once I caught a cold just after reading Stephen J. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man. I kept waking up every 15 minutes thinking “Francis Galton made me sick. I’m gonna kick his ass.”
I’ve had a number of dreams (not nightmares) in which I’m in a museum just before closing time and I’m hurrying around trying to see all of my favorite exhibits. Most of the time I’m in the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago. The dream has the usual distortions, including slightly distorted medical exhibits, and vague images of exhibits that were there when I was a kid. Once I was in the Adler Planetarium, and once in the Exploratorium in San Francisco (which I have visited IRL a number of times).
Laurence Olivier had a recurring dream. He would dream he was backstage in the wings, waiting for his cue in a lay. When he heard his cue, he would start to go onstage but for some reason couldn’t find the way. He would hear the cue repeated again and again, and would still be unable to find the way onstage. Then he would wake up.
It’s never quite the same, but the general idea is. I’m always being chased by intelligent snakes with the gift of speech and some kind of personal vendetta against me. If there is more than one of them, they cooperate with each other, with the exception of the large black one which dominated all the other ones; they didn’t seem disposed to helping him out either. Incidentally, that’s the only one I ever actually killed - yes, I am active in my dreams. I had these dreams every night for a week, and it was unbelievably odd because aside from them I have remembered only 2 dreams in my life. Wierd? - maybe. Oh - with these dreams, if I woke up and went back to sleep they started back where they were, but I could bring extra stuff in, like the sword I used to kill the black one.
Well, that was more than i’ve said at once for a while. I’ll go now.
Mine is pretty cool, actually. I’m a secret agent chick. I’m always dressed in something tight and black, and I’m heavily armed. I also somehow know that I can kick ass, if the situation should call for it. The typical scene is a construction site, and I spend most of the dream trailing a couple of guys around this site. Invariably, I eventually find myself hiding behind a huge, fallen concrete pillar of some sort, watching those two guys strike some kind of deal with some other fellow.
I’ve had this dream every so often for the last ten years or so. It’s a shame, though, that I’ve never remembered enough of the dream to know any more details.
AudreyK, sounds like a cool book. Maybe you should keep a pad of paper by the bed. Oh, wait, isn’t that Charlie’s Angels? Just kidding! Really, write it down.
I’ve had lots of recurring dreams in my life. The one that is most vivid is the oldest one that I can remember. I was about 5-8 years old when I would have this dream. In the dream, I would sneak out of the house after everyone was asleep and my dad had left for work (he worked nights). I would climb in the driver’s seat of my mother’s car and turn the keys. Even though I couldn’t see anything out of the windshield, I would get the car backed out of the drive-way and put it in drive. We lived on a corner of a cul-de-sac and there was a house across the street from the cul-de-sac. I would hit the gas and the car would crash into that house. I would always wake up right before impact. I don’t know why I had this dream.
I also had two different recurring dreams during my two pregnancies. During the first one I always dreamed that I lost the baby. I mean, misplaced the baby after it was born. I think that’s a pretty common pregnancy dream though. During the second one, I would dream that the then 5 year old and the baby and I were outside on our front porch. An alligator would be in the street coming toward us. The 5yo would be oblivious to the danger and be running around like her usual extremely active self and I would turn to look at her to explain the situation and when I turn back the baby is with the alligator on the front porch across the street. Then I’d wake up in a sweat. It’s funny, but except for the alligator in the street, this could have been a preminition of how it was going to be raising those two.
She woke me up at about 2am last night and I was having a really good dream about her. Was I ever pissed off when I discovered that she wasn’t waking me up to help me finish what she had started in my dream…
And then I dream of work…I’m always happy to be awakened from these no matter what the reason is…
I dream about sleeping and having people wake me up… bizarre…
When I was 4 or 5 years old, I kept having the weirdest recurring dream of my life.
There was a carnival and outside the tent, in the parking lot, a crowd was gathered around an enormous bloated elephant. The master of ceremonies had a tiny straightpin that he was going to stick in the elephant’s foot. A deadly hush fell over the crowd as he began.
As he was holding the pin and its point approached closer and closer to the foot, time dilated slower and slower. The feeling of dread and foreboding increased unbearably; I got a sense of vertigo watching it as though I were floating weightless but with oppressive pressure all around in the absolute silence.
When he finally stuck the pin into the elephant’s foot, all pandemonium suddenly broke loose; it instantly flew into a rage and stomped the hell out of everyone there until I woke up.
That was over 35 years ago but to this day when I recall it I still get the weird floating vertigo feeling in my spine.
Just kidding! Really, write it down.