What form do your dreams usually take?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was interested seeing people talk about totally fantastical and surreal dreams, with totally random elements that follow no logic. Like being in a flying car eating cheese and talking about economics with Einstein etc.

Every single dream I have ever had or can remember if it isn’t just a true to life dream, is a kind of strange alternate reality with nothin really fantastic, just odd details that differ from reality. Like I can remember a dream where I owned a farm in what looked like Australia and I had an infestation of dog lizards that were eating all my crops. Other than the few odd elements everything else is totally realistic.

2

My experiences are quite similar to yours.
There are fantastic elements to them, but, in general, my dreams appear to be a somewhat poorly edited SF movie.

3

Funny you mention the poorly edited thing because that is something commonly mentioned that people will have dreams that shift suddenly, like one moment they are ice skating and then they are fighting aliens etc.

I can’t remember anything like that, I mean usually I am dropped into the middle of a dream with no history or motivation(but that only even is an issue when I wake) when I’m in the dream it all makes sense. But there is no random shifting, the dream itself is pretty sensible and linear.

4

I have a lot of what you describe.

but sometimes I have dreams that are like watching TV: I’m not “in” the story, it’s just happening in front of me. now & then I have those but I am directing the action - I love those and wish I had them more often.

have you heard of lucid dreaming? it sounds interesting but I am too lazy to try it.

5

All sorts! From full-length, logically scripted stories with real beginnings, middles, and ends – all the way down to momentary little flashes, or absurd images, or even a single word that I hear, just the once.

I’ve dreamed music – and then woken up and actually written the music down. (An actual song-writer listened to what I had and said, “Hm… Not too awful…”)

I’ve had sex dreams – the kind I wake up from and have to change the bed-sheets.

I’ve had “problem solving” dreams. In one, for instance, I figured out a solution to a computer-programming problem that had been puzzling me.

My favorites are “companionship” or “teamwork” dreams, where I’m part of a team of people who are loyal to each other, cooperate intelligently, get along with each other, and are emotionally supportive. (Obvious wish-fulfillment dream, given that my real life is not like that at all…)

I very much hate all-night single-theme repetitive anxiety dreams – like, say, dreaming about changing a tire, where every single detail is depicted in nauseating detail. Every lug-nut, ever turn of the jack-screw. Bleah! The very opposite of “restful!”

Okay, wait: no: my least favorite are hypnogogic nightmares, the kind that have absolute hallucinatory realism. The “night hag” phenomenon. Gawd, I hate that!

I also love having a “dream landscape,” a whole separate world that is similar to the real world, but just a little bit off. Buildings that are taller than they really are, or houses with extra wings of rooms, or streets that go where no streets actually go.

6

Yeah, my dreams are pretty hum-drum like the OP describes. The only three dreams I remember are the one where I was walking on the moon - that was so much fun - one where I was flying an ultralight just over the trees - another fun one - and a dream where I was laughing really hard at something someone sad. The last one stands out because my dreams never have laugh out loud moments.

Trinopus:
Have you heard how the sewing machine needle was invented (possibly anecdotal according to Wikipedia)? Elias Howe was stumped until he dreamed he was surrounded by spear wielding savages, only their spears had holes in the pointy end. It led to the breakthrough he needed. Also, Keith Richards awoke from dreaming up the riff for “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, recorded it on a tape player by his bed, then drifted off. He tells the story that he played the tape the next day to the rest of the band and realized he had ten seconds of music and forty minutes of him snoring!

7

My dreams always seem to involve some long complicated repetitive task that I can never quite get to the end of, some new obstacle arises just as the end is in sight. Which feels exactly like my life.

8

I wish I could say I have fantistic sci fi based dreams where I save the world from aliens and then have wild Monkey sex with Jennifer Connolly but in reality all I have is the standard "I’m late for work/Meeting/High School Football practice and I can’t find my Car keys/Notes/Shoulder pads " type dreams.

9

Some of my dreams are extremely realistic and even have a coherent plot with a beginning, middle, and end – you could film them and make them into a movie pretty much as-is.

Some are so surreal that I can’t even tell you about them because they make no sense in the waking life, and there’s no way for me even to articulate them into language. Sometimes I’m simultaneously doing two things or being in two planes of existence that are completely mutually exclusive yet make sense at the time. Somehow I’m swinging on a porch swing on a front porch and climbing a wall made of books at the same time, or somehow I’m on a train looking for my stop and walking down an alley and trying to avoid being in the crossfire between two fighting cats, at the same time (that was last night’s dream). The details will be completely incoherent or in disarray, or there will be magical or physics-defying elements.

But the best dreams are the ones that combine the two flavors. Extremely vivid and coherent, and have fantastical imagery that seems to come from a brain far more creative than mine. Those happen only a few times a year and they’re so enthralling that they almost seem mystical or prophetic. I’ve even had one such dream about the Second Coming of Christ – I had it when I was 14 and can still remember it vividly 20 years later.