Not sure. The only repetitive dreams I can ever recall having were when I was quite small. Vietnam was playing out on the television night after night, and I constantly dreamt I was leading people into battle knowing they were going to die. I was a grownup man/general type in the dreams, whereas in reality I was a 5-10 year old girl, so that may count.
I was still ‘me’ enough in the dreams that it all carried over quite strongly into real life; still can’t watch war movies, lol.
I very rarely remember my dreams and when I do they are confusing and nonlinear in a very mundane way.
Sometimes, although it’s usually no one in particular - I just have a vague sense that it’s not me. In some of them I’m a man.
I do remember one dream where I was Archie Goodwin - specifically, Timothy Hutton’s Archie Goodwin. I ended up chasing someone through a flophouse, and stumbled on a roomful of men and boys sleeping off a hot night of man-boy love. (Something tells me this was not part of the Nero Wolfe canon…)
Flying. In my dreams, I can usually fly. The other night I dreamed that I was flying around some picturesque old English cathedral city and I bumped into Matt Smith, who was amazed that I could fly, and exclaimed “We’re making a new series of Doctor Who right now and there’s an episode called ‘The Flying Man’ - you could be in it! Do you want to be The Flying Man?”
Yes! Me too, and often!
Yes; this is, in fact, most common with me. I less often dream that I’m the real me, but more often am, instead, some other persona. A sea-captain, or a gypsy, or a soldier, or priest. Now and then, I dream that I’m female.
Typically nightmares. Vague, dark things…usually around themes of loss, failing people, being completely powerless, being in trouble and no one will help me. Sometimes I’m just being chased by things.
Occasionally, I start to have semi-lucid dreams—but, usually at the point I’m trying to semi-consciously explore an interesting environment, or accomplish some task, things start falling apart. The world starts contradicting itself, or I can’t get my hands to work, or I generally start to notice the dissonance between my becoming-more-alert mind and the hazy dream world. At which point I start waking up, transitioning to a nightmare, or get to feel my consciousness start to drain away as the world collapses around me, and I fall back deeper asleep.
It is not a pleasant experience.
Occasionally, though, I get to see truly inspiring dreams, immensely settings or stories. I had one the other night that was showing the forms of life discovered on the moons of some of the gas giants—one had reed-like trees growing to heights of more than a thousand feet, discovered when a probe lander’s altimeter stopped registering decent, well above the surface, and it was realized that it’s parachute had hung up in branches a quarter mile up; the seas of another (Europa?) were soupy with algae and bacteria, the former congealing in colonies so large and massive that they resembled cumulus clouds.
Other times, I’ve seen new stories, characters, and snatches of plots, some for worlds of my own works of fiction, and which I’ve since adopted back. Other times it might just be a building, or an impossible landscape…a couple of times I’ve heard melodies, little bits of songs, that I know I’ve never heard before. I still remember a couple of them, something I’m utterly grateful for, but also bemoan a little—I’m not a musician, or musically inclined, so I have nothing to do with them. They’re just orphaned pieces of music, probably never to be heard by another human being, and will probably eventually die with me.
I’ve got dream journals spanning 30 years. My dreams fall into several categories:
I dream in color, but other senses come into play rarely, sometimes touch, rarely sound or odor. My dream persona is rarely my waking self, and can be male, female, young, old, of varying ethnicity or social status, switch from dream character to dream character, or, more rarely, be more than one character at once. Usually enjoyable and entertaining, sometimes intensely erotic. I haven’t had nightmares or anxiety dreams in decades, that I recall. I have recurring dream locations, and just last night had a dream that concluded a story line begun years ago. I have awakened from one dream into another, and have become lucid in dreams, usually just before waking. I love my dreams and dreaming, and one of the worst things about aging is that I don’t remember as many dreams now as I did when I was younger.
Frequently. Getting to be different people is one of the fun aspects of dreaming.
I do believe your precognitive dream about the tsunami.
I go through periods of several weeks where I recall my dreams in vivid detail, and my dreams are of unusual circumstances and visually intriguing. One example from a few nights ago I was dancing with Samuel L. Jackson at a costume party and we were trading lines from assorted Shakespeare plays. I don’t know why I recognized it as a costume party and not “I was starring with SLJ in a costume drama and we were speaking lines from a script.” but that’s not what my brain made of it.
The next night I was dreaming of a fairly mundane day but I was terribly sunburned and was pulling at my peeling skin. (Haven’t been sunburned like that since the late 70s. No reason to be concerned that I will be.)
My complaint is that my alarm never goes off during the yucky skin peeling scenes. It’s always during what I perceive to be the most interesting bits.
My dreams often feature celebrities (of differing degrees of luminosity). Some months ago I had a dream that took place in a grocery store. In that grocery store was local new anchor Denise Koch in a sequined floor length evening gown, and Jamie Farr (Klinger from MASH) was there teaching me how to select ripe produce.
People I actually know also feature in my dreams, often in combination with the celebrities, and usually in combinations that couldn’t happen in real life.
After some weeks of these vivid and fascinating (to me) dreams I will go for weeks or months where I wake up aware that I’ve just woken from a dream but not recalling anything about the dream.
Me, too! Once I was a French Jesuit priest in Canada, who had children with an Algonquin woman and became possessed by a wendigo, and eventually murdered his own children. This was a couple years before the movie The Black Robe came out, and before I heard of or read the book. It was a rather shocking dream, and I tried, for a while, to write it as a horror story, but got bogged down in researching the details of that period of Canadian history.
I generally have nightmares. They suck. They seriously suck. I’d just as soon NOT dream.
I thought I was the only one with celebrity cameos! Patrick Stewart as my bus driver, Hillary Clinton as my daughter’s math teacher, Christopher Reeve dressed as Superman performing a marriage ceremony. I swear that if the Screen Actors Guild knew how many of their members had been making appearances in my dreams I’d be in deep trouble.
My dreams are always in color, usually linear with some kind of plot (no matter how surreal it might be). Very rarely do I have serial dreams.
I’ve only had a couple lucid dreams where I knew it was a dream and attempted to control it. The one I remember best was when I was in high school. Our French teacher would sometimes pass around French magazines on Fridays. In my dream I saw that he had handed me a French Playboy and didn’t realize it. Suddenly I knew I was in a dream and knew, dream logic being what it is, that if I got out of the school still holding the magazine that I would wake up and have the magazine in the real world. I ran down the halls with the kids and teachers chasing me. I figured that since it was a dream that I’d be able to fly so I flapped my arms and flew but was only about a foot off the ground. I finally burst through the front doors of the school and woke up. I discovered I did have a magazine in my hand! Unfortunately it was the Popular Science I was reading before I fell asleep.
What I could never understand is how my dreams can build a plot point around something that has not happened yet. The best example is a dream where I was walking through the desert trying to get away from someone. I could see a motorcycle approaching in the distance. Suddenly it burst over the top of a sand dune with a load roar and tried to run me over. I woke up and could still hear the motorcycle. It turns out my neighbor was working on his bike next door.
How could my mind have anticipated the sound of the motorcycle and built it into the plot? Or if I did subconsciously hear it as it started up, how could my mind so quickly create the objects in my dream?
I still have varieties of the Student Nightmare type. Haven’t studied all year and have a test; can’t find the dorm room/admin office/classroom; can’t get to my mailbox and don’t even know there’s email (there wasn’t when I was in school) so letters from the school are piling up; I’m failing and wasting all that money. It’s been 20 years-- you’d think these could stop. [ETA: These have evolved somewhat over the years. I more quickly get through the scary part to the comforting part (Wait, I already have an A.B.!) than I used to.]
Also, the “can’t find a clean toilet to use in this room full of stalls”. Often happens when I have to pee in real life. :o
Back when House was on, I had at least two dreams where I loved Hugh Laurie and he told me he loved me back. Those were wonderful!
And since I am still in denial about my mom being dead, occasionally dreams where it’s not clear she’s dead, or of course she isn’t dead at all.
Dreams of meeting famous people, historical figures, etc.
I have often wondered about this-it seems to me, that if dreams reflect our wishes and desires, then most of us ought to see people of great cultural importance.
Sadly, I have never met anybody important in a dream.
I only noticed one person mention that they dream smells.
I do too, and I heard somewhere that is kind of rare.
I remember one time clearly because I smelled something so putrid that it made me projectile vomit in my dream.
Regarding dreaming that you are someone else–I dreamed once that I was a cat.
Some I remember, some I don’t. There doesn’t really seem to be a pattern to it. The ones I remember are mostly composed of vivid, intense vignettes suffused with implicit knowledge. Some are strange and beautiful, others horrifying. I’ve awakened with phantom pain from dream battles and lingering impressions of scents from dream flowers.
Some dreams repeat over and over, or I dream of the same place repeatedly. Others not only have sequels, but entire series of dreams. The latter usually advance incrementally, rather than being an entirely new “episode” with each repetition.
Usually very “real”. I used to have lucid dreams once in a while years ago, but not since then.
First off, I am most often someone else - not myself - when I’m dreaming. It’s never anyone famous or specific, I’m just a different person in a different place. I’ve been old, young, all races, male and female (and once I was a neuter - that was a weird dream in more than one way tho). Strangely enough, even though I’m a different person, I often have the same life, even if it doesn’t fit (ie - I have been a straight male, but still married to my husband and remember my past boyfriends correctly, even while being attracted to women in the dream. Brains is weird.)
Lucid dreams. Not so often at the moment. I usually begin lucid dreams as flying dreams, realize I’m dreaming, and then spend the rest of the dream “drifting” or “gliding” slowly back downward as I try to figure out how my dream-self flew, because my awake self knows I can’t. These are usually peaceful and fun, if slightly frustrating because I can’t figure out how to fly.
Lots of stress dreams. I forgot to go to school; I didn’t study for the final; There’s a natural disaster happening; I’m stuck at work (any of the workplaces from my life, and sometimes even jobs I haven’t ever had) and it’s overwhelming but I’m on my own; I missed my alarm and am running late; my car won’t function correctly; I get in a car wreck; my teeth are falling out or rotten or disfigured… all of those are stress-related. **They suck. ** I rarely ever realize these are dreams, because I’m too emotionally worked up and stressed out to think things through - even when I have a moment realizing that I don’t work there, or that I’m not in high school - I just dismiss it in the dream and keep right on stressing out.
Story dreams. I often get sequential dreams - not nightly, but every month or so I’ll get a new set of “scenes” from a dream that seems to feature a regular cast of characters and be in a consistent (although not real) location that I have actually managed to map out. My character changes, but others in the dream stay the same month to month and year to year. These are very nice dreams, and a bit complicated - like a smush between a soap-opera and a really long chase-action sequence. Although very rarely lucid, they are vivid, and I remember them clearly months or even years afterwards. Dreams about my real family members or friends are likewise vivid, but they aren’t usually connected to a larger storyline.
Nightmares. I have trained myself to recognize the changing “tone” of my dreams (think of it like soundtrack and lighting cues) and I wake myself up from dreams that are turning dark by killing myself in the dream. If I don’t manage to suicide before the dream turns completely into a nightmare, I lose the ability to recognize the signs, forget that I’m dreaming, and am stuck until the conclusion of the nightmare, whereupon I wake up into a full-bore panic attack. Needless to say, I’m very motivated to avoid that. I have not “finished” a real nightmare in about 7 years now. I’ve gotten very creative about killing myself quickly, with limited resources.
Hypnagogic dreams. I purposefully set my alarm to go off one morning a week WAY the hell before I have to wake up (like between 2 and 3 hours before), so it interrupts my sleep at about 9 minute intervals for the entire time. I wake slightly, hit the alarm, and fall back asleep quickly. That way I can think about my dreams as I drift back off, and guide them when I fall back into REM for the next little while. They’re not LUCID because I don’t guide them when I’m actually sleeping, but I do wake enough to decide what I want to happen next, and think about what I’m going to do. Those are my very favorite kind of dream, they’re very fun and engaging, and I often wake up from ridiculously fun or just plain silly situations, or with fun new ideas for my stories that I write.
My dreams, are for lack of a better word, fucked up. I’ve never had a ‘normal’ dream about myself or my life. I always dream I’m either someone else, or I’m observing someone else. They’re always in color and always surreal. I don’t have reoccurring dreams so much as dreams that happen in the same environment as others. There’s a specific house layout that I’ve had multiple dreams in. Sometimes I’ll remember them, sometimes I won’t.
Last night’s dream I remember. I was in a huge school, with long, windy hallways. I was with Edward Scissorhands for some freakin reason and we were roaming the halls. Finally we came to a grocery store inside, and saw a rack of canned fruits. They began to talk and I realized they were canned souls. I backed away, and I heard a man’s voice telling me to go open the box. I don’t know what box but damn if he wanted me to open it. But Edward Scissorhands was like NO! You can’t open the box! It’ll kill us all!! So I listened to the man with scissors and suddenly the jars of fruity souls exploded. Suddenly Edward Scissorhands was driving a car and it crashed into the walls of the grocery store and he died. I ran out of there and headed outside, where I saw a squirrel trying to eat a cat. The cat got away but was severely injured and I was afraid I was going to have to do the ‘right’ thing and end its suffering. But luckily for me, the cat exploded. All over me. For some reason my brain was stuck on explosions last night. There’s a lot more to the dream but I can’t remember any more details. But that’s pretty much how all my dreams go.
My dreams are often wonderfully surreal. A is Not A (while simultaneously being B). I am other people. etc
Recurring Themes
Flying on bat wings or becoming a bat
Returning to my childhood home
As a ghost
Or finding the whole area covered in water
Or finding that Mom’s daycare center has been made into a huge facility
Seeing my father with much more severe Alzheimer’s than he ever had in life.
Realizing I’m dreaming and manifesting lots of yummy food
Finding a lost house left by my maternal grandmother, or finding a lost treasure in the house she did have.