I had a dream, actually more of a nightmare, where I was a muffler on a 1957 Chevy. There was the noise and the smell and the heat and the vibration. It kept me tossing and turning most of the night.
I awoke exhausted.
I’ve been lucky in life and had never felt pure terror until I dreamed one night I was being chased by something that I didn’t even dare look at. The terror I felt for a brief moment was with me for weeks and even now I can still feel it simply by thinking about it. Just horrible.
My strangest dream occurred when I was a young teen.
In my dream, I was sleeping in my bed, laying on my side. There was a large metal plate standing vertically in front of my chest, about 18" square or so.
For whatever reason my dream cooked up, there was a large - maybe 24" long - metal rod or pipe swinging towards me on a rope. Imagine a huge nun-chuck swinging pendulum-style. I knew it was very heavy just by the size and swing of the thing.
Well, this huge nun-chuck type weight swung from the ceiling towards the plate in front of my chest, knocking me out of bed and on to the floor.
That’s where the dream ended. Getting knocked out of bed was real, but I don’t know how it happened. I’ve had sounds permeate my dream - the phone, dogs, kids, but never had this kind of reaction.
The mind is a strange thing.
Sorry for resurrecting this thread but I was reminded of it by something that happened a few days ago.
I was lying sound asleep in bed when in my left ear I heard with perfect clarity an official sounding male voice with a local accent speaking loudly, quickly and tensely, “Police incident…garbled…coming from over there…garbled…SHOTS FIRED!!!”. I woke up startled and instantly awake, for a second I could have swore there were blue emergency lights flashing outside the window but there weren’t. It was so realistic I checked the news reports the next day but there was nothing relevant.
Years ago I had an extraordinarily vivid dream, I was a partisan/resistance fighter in a vaguely Eastern European country occupied by Soviet like forces (they had different symbols and markings).
I was part of a four-man team tasked with assassinating a local collaborating mayor, but as three of us approached the front door of his house shortly before dawn we were startled by shouted voices and bright lights demanding we surrender, I turned and saw the fourth man, our driver, taking off quickly from the scene, the bastard had betrayed us!
We exchanged shots with the security forces and ran for it, out of the small town and up into the fields behind it. We were being chased but were running for our lives and making good progress, we could hear the sounds of those behind us getting more distant.
We reached a plateau when one of these suddenly roared over the crest of the hill and over us: http://red-stars.org/IMG/jpg/Mi-24P_Hind-F.jpg
We panicked and split up, running in different directions, the helicopter circled around and came back, opening up with its chin-turret cannon and cutting one of my comrades to pieces. My other colleague had managed to make the shelter of a small copse of trees but the helicopter came around again and destroyed the copse with a volley of rockets, the thin watery scream of my friend could be heard even over the detonations.
I was running in blind panic and leapt for the nearest shelter, a small but deep stream that had cut its way through the peaty ground, I was waist deep in water and pushed myself under an overhanging lip of ground out of view as much as possible.
I hid there for hours as the day got brighter and troops and helicopters searched the area, I was just beginning to hope I might get away with it when a soldier came down the opposite embankment, he almost walked past but spotted me, as he turned towards me shouting in alarm and fumbling with his rifle I jumped forward, grabbed him by the legs and dragged him into the stream before pulling myself up and out and running desperately for the evergreen forest that was a few hundred meters away hearing shouts and shots behind me but not daring to look past.
The forest was surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire and as I leapt in a panic to get over it my foot and leg slipped between the strands, I was tumbled over and hanging awkwardly, I could see a soldier approaching, raising his rifle, a flash from the barrel and…I woke up in my own bed, I had a few moments of confused panic while my mind tried to sort out what was actually reality.
I have a long-standing interest in Cold War history so its no big mystery where my mind came up with that scenario however it was so extraordinarly real and vivid a part of me can’t help but feel that I was actually experiencing something that was happening to an alternate version of myself in another reality or time, as crazy as that sounds.
I think that would be a very disturbing dream to have, how do you feel about it now?
Some great stories in this thread!
Dusting the house or cleaning the desk.Very confusing when I wake up and the place isn’t clean.
(Very mundane, especially as I frequently dream urban guerrilla terrorists are coming over for a visit.)
Similar experience here.
Real back story: I often fall asleep on the couch while watching TV with cwSpouse. He’s learned to just turn off the light and leave me there if I’m still sleeping when he decides to go to bed. Most of the time I wake up and come to bed shortly thereafter, but sometimes I sleep on the couch until morning.
One night, after falling asleep on the couch, I woke up. cwSpouse had turned off the light and gone to bed. I made my way into the dining room (have to pass through there to get to bedroom), feeling my way in the dark. I put my hand on the back of one of dining room chairs to steady myself.
Then I woke up, still on the couch. OK. I closed my eyes, stretched out, and decided to join cwSpouse in bed for real. I got up, headed into the dining room as before, putting my hand on the chair as I groped my way through the dark.
And woke up on the couch, again. I nodded off for a bit, then woke up and decided I was going to get up and go to bed. Got off the couch, headed into the dining room, got to the chair, and…
Woke up on the couch! This finally woke me up enough that I hauled my butt off the couch, got all the way through the living room to the bedroom, and crawled into bed. The next time I woke up I was, in fact, in bed.
I have boring, realistic dreams fairly often. Most are so boring that I’ve forgotten them, but I know I’ve had the “wake up and get ready for school/work” dream several times. I’ve also had dreams about going shopping for some mundane item like a t-shirt.
When I was a kid I once had a dream that I was sitting in my room reading a new Calvin and Hobbes book. Later in the day I was bored and thought “Hey, I could finish that new Calvin and Hobbes book I was reading”, and then I remembered it was only a dream. 
All of my dreams are terribly realistic/vivid, and some have confused me upon waking. Usually those are rather mundane ones because those are the only ones you can truly mistake for natural memories.
A simple one was back in college and I was out walking with some friends. I saw a very specific pot, with a very specific flag sticking out of it, and I “remembered” that the other day we had walked by and seen a very beautiful butterfly there, which I mentioned. My friend looked at me strangely and said, “that never happened”. I was convinced for a minute or two that it was real but also remembered that yesterday we did not hang out together. Combined with my very vivid dreaming and prior confusions from time to time, I concluded one of my memories was simply a false dream.
All my dreams seem terribly real at the time, especially because I operate within dreams with partial lucidity/understanding (I understand I am in the dream but the dream imposes rules upon me so I can’t just do what I want). Upon waking it’s very obvious from context that I didn’t live it, no matter how real it was - i.e. t-rexes do not exist, I am not a spy, there are no giant monoliths near here, etc.
Most of my old dreams are violent and many were painful, so there were some that went far enough to shake me up for a day or two though. You know things are going a bit far when bleeding out from a bullet wound in a dream is normal everyday stuff and it’s only when it goes into House of 1000 Corpses type shit that you’re freaking out.
I wrote a lot of my dreams down back then so I have a bookfull of pretty interesting stuff to reread and reflect on.
When I was a a kid, I had a dream that included the fact that my father was dead. Not that he had just died - just the fact that he was dead. I got up the next morning and was sitting at the kitchen table with my Mom, when my Dad walked in. I was…shocked.
I have these repeating floating dreams. Usually they aren’t flying, per se, but just a sort of bouncing-on-the-moon sort of thing that’s accomplished by lightening my mood. usually they involve other women who are having difficult times and I am showing them how to change their circumstances by changing the way they think and feel about them.
“See, watch. All you have to do is change your heart and you rise.” And then up I go. Sometimes up and down several times. Higher each time. And other women start joining me.
One time we were all floating high above the city holding hands in a circle when one of the women scowled and said, “No, this isn’t possible.” And just like a balloon with a pinhole in it we all slowly sank back down to the ground. Funny.
I guess they’re work dreams.
Another vivid dream I had too many times was when I was sick with thyroid tumors a doctor mis-diagnosed me with depression. He prescribed something that caused hypnogogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis. Those dreams were so awful and indistinguishable from reality. i could see everything in the room and I don’t know if my eyes were open or closed.
There was the goblin sitting on my chest like the night hag and the sensation of being pushed into the bed. People would grab me around the chest and squeeze until I couldn’t breathe. Scared my husband so bad that he wasn’t able to sleep with me for a while.
Husband, sound asleep, bolts out of bed throws open the closet door and steps in.
I hear hangers being pushed aside on the pole and then I hear him thump against the back wall.
Me: “What are you doing?”
Him: In an irritable voice, as though it’s obvious, “Going to the bathroom.”
Me: “Well, try not to pee on your shoes.”
Sheepish spouse comes out, clearly awake, and steps out into the hall.
I now am wondering, “Was it as real for you, Dear, as it was for me?” 
I once dreamed that I was sitting in my car at night in a somewhat-deserted Walmart parking lot when I witnessed a familiar person being robbed at knifepoint and eventually stabbed to death near his car a few parking spaces over. I slid down in my seat and pretended I wasn’t there, hoping the thugs didn’t notice me.
When I woke up, I was so disturbed that I checked Google News for any reports of crimes involving this person. Of course, he was alive and well. Oddly, the main thing that convinced me it was a dream was that there are no Walmarts near where I live and I’ve never even gone to one since I’ve been old enough to drive.
My dreams torment me.
In recent years, I seem to have just a few dream plotlines that play out repeatedly. If I think about them they are identical from one dream to the next, as if it was a videotape playing. I must be very gullible as I almost never question the reality of the events I witness in these things at the time I’m dreaming them.
Lately, I’ve been having recurring dreams about tornadoes. It’s always just a fragment of memory; I’m in a car or a building and out on the horizon there are one, or more usually several, spectacular funnel clouds grinding away, and one can hear the tornado sirens going off. There’s never any payoff, like maybe actually getting caught in one of the tornados; they’re always off in the distance and that’s it.
Another, oddly convoluted one is that I’m somewhere in Scotland and need to get back to London by train to take a plane back to, er, Pittsburgh, PA. Always Pittsburgh. That’s the whole plot, getting to the airport and going to Pittsburgh. I always end up getting back to the city the night before, but instead of London it’s actually Paris, and the hotel I’m staying at is some fleabag walk-up that I can remember in great detail but does not actually correspond to any place I’ve ever stayed. Then I get out to the airport, which is something like CDG but with a single huge, windowless, barnlike terminal, and there is some sort of hassle with my passport which ends up being resolved, and I just barely make it aboard, ending up in a first-class seat in a lounge in the nose of a 747, which in the dream is the size of, and decorated like, a ballroom, with gilded pilasters and chandeliers, and a rich persian carpet on the floor. At this point I usually wake up, no doubt with a sort of “WTF” look on my face.
I have a long history of dreams like this, so much so that I’m quite used to it. By which I mean, I have several “memories” now that I’m not sure if they were just dream memories or real memories or what. The most recent one was a couple nights ago and it involved me being inside some video game, that I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually exist, but in my dream it was a real video game. Now, upon awakening, I realized that I wasn’t actually inside the video game, because that’s impossible. But was the video game itself real or just made up? For a while I was really debating it, now I’ve settled on it probably just being a dream game and not real, but I can’t 100% be sure.
I am very envious of people who say they never remember their dreams. I relish the rare nights I have when I go to sleep and wake up feeling like no time had passed at all, but refreshed and alert. Most of the time my nights feel very long because my dreams are so long and complicated and so very real, and usually stressful.
Bumped to describe a particularly vivid dream I had last night.
I’m inside a model railroad hobby shop in a strip shopping center, location unknown. In the middle of the floor is an undecorated Christmas tree. Under it there is an H0-scale track running around the perimeter of an oval wooden platform, with beveled edges, painted dark green. The wood platform is a bit warped and the track is hanging out over the edge. Running on the track is a model of a Chicago & Northwestern 4-6-0 steam locomotive, numbered 1328, towing a tender and two dark green passenger cars. The train gets hung up on a switch and I give it a little shove to get it going again. It makes a couple of circuits, then speeds up and derails. The female shop attendant accuses me of derailing the train, and I say it sped up on its own.
I look outside through the window of the shop and see a couple of vintage cars pull into the parking lot: a '60 Ford sedan in black with a white top, followed by a '62 in the same color scheme but with red wheels. The '62 is dirty and the sides are rusty and dented. Both cars are full of heavy-set hispanic-looking guys. It’s a sunny day but the light is weak, as though shining through a light overcast. I then notice an area of the parking lot has been roped off and people are lining up inside it, dressed in what looks like Halloween outfits, among them animal costumes and, er, Nazis. One of the Nazis is wearing an absurdly oversized helmet with an SS symbol on the side, kind of like DarK Helmet from Spaceballs.
A little farther down are more vintage cars parked side-by-side. I recognize a metallic green Chevy Vega and a '58 Rambler. Beyond that there are what look like a half-dozen European-style fishing boats lined up on trailers; each one has a vintage car sitting on the deck ahead of a stern-mounted wheelhouse.
Back inside the shop, it seems I am staying in an apartment there but I don’t have my key, and the shop lady won’t give me a spare because I don’t have ID with me. I need to get in because I need to change my clothes; I’m only wearing trousers but I’ve got four or five shopping bags full of clothes sitting in front of me. I’m mentally debating whether I can change my trousers in the shop without anyone noticing when a noise draws my attention back outside: It’s a couple of beat-up old hot-rodded Camaros, engines revving and belching oil smoke, being loaded into a trailer. At that point I wake up.
OK, so I’m pretty sure the engines sounds of the Camaros were me snoring and I recognized a few other elements, like the model locomotive, from things I’ve read or thought about in the past few days, but still, when I examine these things, the level of detail is astounding: all the needles on the Christmas tree, the color and texture of the wooden platform, the character of the daylight, the rust and dirt weathering the vintage cars and even the grain of the asphalt and visible oil stains in the parking lot. If my mind can effortlessly accumulate this much extraneous detail and fabricate a whole world with it, why do I have such a hard time with, say, math?
Thats a common dream for women I think. When I was working in OB I dreamed I gave birth to a cat! Like, the whole shebang with smells of antiseptics, analgesic for episiotomy (the taste and smell), sounds of clanging equipment and sensations (Ill spare you those) and hearing cri du chat.
I recall asking the delivery nurses if it was a boy or a girl and getting a weird horrified look. Jeez. Its all about the humans isnt it.
Once, when I was in junior high, I dreamed that I got up and walked to school and went to classes like I normally did. Now, my elementary school had already covered most of the information in the first year and a half of junior high, so during that time it was not necessary for me to pay much attention during class. In the dream, I zoned out as usual, thinking my own thoughts, walking from class to class on automatic.
At lunch time, I woke up and had to do the whole thing over again. It’s one of the few dreams I remember in which I didn’t know that I was dreaming. It’s also one of the rare dreams that kept the shape of the buildings the same as in real life. Usually, I know which building it’s supposed to be, but it looks nothing like the actual building.