I still have remarkably realistic dreams of being a family member on Hello Larry.
I have Harry Potter dreams and Shakespeare dreams fairly often, but on one memorable occasion, I had a Harry Potter AND Shakespeare dream. I dreamed that I found Shakespeare’s first drafts of Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, and a major character in all of them was … Severus Snape.
He had to get the chop, of course, because he kept running around brewing potions to resurrect all the people who got stabbed or poisoned, and giving tactless-but-excellent advice to all the other characters (“Duncan, you Gryffindor dunderhead, you DON’T name somebody else your heir when you’re staying in the castle of your most ambitious subject.”) Which kind of defeated the point of writing a tragedy.
That was a great dream 
I haven’t had a dream that I was a character in a Shakespearean play, but I’ve had a recurring nightmare that I’m an actor who is starring in a Shakespearean play. It’s very similar to the “final exam for a class you never attended” dream in that I had completely forgotten I was supposed to do the play but I’m the star and there’s no understudy so I’m desperately looking up King Lear’s soliloquy off-stage and then running onstage and doing as much of it as I can remember. I remember one time in the dream I totally choked on the dialogue, so I started making stuff up in Elizabethan dialogue (“oh heretofore forsooth saith I this shall be our dancing trough anon…”) and the audience was absolutely fine with it, they didn’t know the difference… except for one. It was my least favorite teacher from high school, an absolute idiot of a history teacher who detested me and the feeling was mutual (IRL) but it turns out the one damned thing in all of the past she was an expert on was King Lear, and she starts heckling me and saying the real dialogue. Always wake up in one of those “oh my god how do I get myself into these messes? Why did I ever say I’d play King Lear and then miss the rehearsals when… I… King Lear? I’ve never agreed to… ah, dream.”
I started the thread when on the same day two friends, neither of whom knows the other, both told me they had been having zombie dreams since watching 28 Days Later. With one friend the Zombies included most of his family and with the other the Zombies were various people from high school 20 years ago.
OK, don’t point and laugh.
I dreamed I was Mr. Spock. We all beam down to some standard TOS rocky planet, and we’re all fighting these vampires. We defeat the vampires, but all the away crew are turned into vampires in the process.
Captain Kirk and some of the others are getting into it. “Hey, we’re vampires now, cool. We’re immortal, superstrong, this is gonna be great”.
Then I get all logical on them. “Captain, you realize we’re now bloodsucking soul-less monsters. We cannot continue our existance without draining the life-force of innocent people and damning them to a hideous unDeath. Logically, the only ethical action for us to take would be to kill ourselves.”
Kirk kind of deflates, but he agrees. We set a phaser on overload and wait for the end.
Damn I hate vampires.
I regularly dream of a cemetery that, in the waking world, reminds me strongly of cemeteries described by HP Lovecraft.
Yeah, my standard (not Snape-infested) Shakespeare dream is like that. I’ve always figured it was a subconscious guilt thing (“You call yourself a Shakespeare scholar and you’ve never been onstage IN YOUR LIFE? Well, take that!”)
And I had a dream once where I was working at a bagel bakery and everybody started speaking in lines from The Merchant of Venice for no discernable reason. I’m still trying to work that one out.
The Buffyverse has been playing a prominent role in my dreams lately. Probably because I’ve been watching 2-3 episodes a night for the past several weeks.
I haven’t dreamt up an entire episode yet. Just bits and pieces. I’m always a good guy, and I’m always helping Buffy and her friends fight evil in some fashion.
I have a reoccuring nightmare involving the HR Greiger aliens from the movie series. It’s generally the same outcome. I fight them only ending up losing and dieing at the end. The setting changes occasionally. The last time I was in the wild west.
Just this weekend, my boyfriend downloaded all the episodes of Lost for me on on his iPod because I’ve never seen it before and wanted to start watching. So I had a *Lost * cramming session, watching 35 episodes in three days. Yeah, it invaded my dreams, but for the life of me I can’t remember them. That’s probably a good thing.
I had a great zombie dream a few years ago: it started at night in a back alley in downtown San Diego, with me and dozens of cops and citizens battling it out with the zombies. Next thing I know it’s daylight, and me and a few other people are running up a mountain outside of the city. We make it to some sort of abandoned resort, where about fifty people are hiding out. So as night falls we set up watch shifts, and on my watch I see a single zombie emerge from the tree line. I blow him away (I somehow have a shotgun now). Then two more emerge. Then three. Ever so slowly our outpost is overwelmed. The last thing I remember before waking up is whacking the zombies with the butt of the shotgun because I can’t reload it fast enough.
Of course as a kid, I had Star Wars dreams all the time. The best one: I was in command of the Death Star and just went around blowing up planets for the hell of it.