In real life, I have never held a real gun before. The closest I’ve come is a Super Soaker, a video game, or a stick that looked like a gun. But I fire weapons all the time in my dreams.
How? By pointing my fingers at my target, like a gun, and firing. I actually kill people and blow up targets in my dreams in such a manner. One time my finger-gun turned into a rocket-propelled grenade and blew up a car in such an astonishingly over-the-top manner that I woke up laughing.
Do any of you have common, comedic themes in your dreams?
I have the “can’t find a bathroom” dreams sometimes.
Where I’ll be in some situation and I have to use the bathroom, but every one I find is wrong somehow. Too filthy/disgusting. Or the row of “stalls” is only knee-high and in the middle of an otherwise public/crowded room, so I would be visible to everyone. Or the stall is private, but the seat is just a bench and, while I can’t quite figure out how it’s normally supposed to work, sitting on a bench and peeing on myself doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Then, I wake up and realize I do actually have to pee.
I wear contacts and I have occasional dreams where I’m trying to insert lenses the size of dinner plates in my eye. Sometimes I end up folding them into quarters before I can get them in.
Not particularly comedic but I still have dreams where I am back in college, and realize well into the semester that I have forgotten to go to a class that I’m registered for. Sometimes the dream goes all the way to taking a final exam for that class. Sometimes I show up at the final naked. I graduated from college 42 years ago. I think this is a common dream scenario.
I have these and I think it is also actually quite common. I either can’t find a bathroom at all, or what I can find is disturbingly inappropriate, such as your example of a visible toilet (although in my version it’s a urinal). (Some European cities actually now have public open urinals, which just ratchets up my anxiety.)
Many of my dreams, for some reason, are set at Christmas: if I’m at the mall, it’s Xmastime, if I’m at an office party, it’s Yuletide; back working a high school job I had? Xmas. Dreaming about my first girlfriend/her family? Set at Christmas. None of these dreams have anything to do with Christmas except as a backdrop. I don’t get it.
It’s funny the things that seem perfectly acceptable in dreams and the ones that make you go “wait a minute…”
Like, over the past year, I’ve had dreams that are typical bizarre dream fare- like I’m at a fancy 1920s-style party with Adrian Monk, a large telepathic lobster who is my best friend, and my new baby who is six inches long and sometimes plastic and everyone thinks I’m really cool because I can speak every human language and conjure fire. And I can totally accept all that without question, but then suddenly it’s like “WAIT. How are we all so close together at this party? And without masks? Something smells fishy here and it’s not the lobster.”
My dream world is non-Euclidean. I can never take the exact same route and get back to the same place. I can even turn around and things will be different. I take the time to remember how I got somewhere, try to go back, and I can’t find it. And yet I always think the problem is with me, not the world.
My dreams often wind up with me sneaking back into high school, and doing my best for people not to notice that I’ve graduated. There is absolutely no way I could pass as a high schooler.
I also somehow often can walk the entire way to my home from the city, and that’s just utterly ridiculous. Sometimes, for some reason, I ride a tricycle. It’s still the same size trike I had as a kid, but somehow I fit just fine on it.
And, finally, sometimes I suddenly remember I can fly. It usually takes the form of walking off something tall, and just being able to move. This usually resolves any issue in the dream. It’s like I deus ex machina my own dreams.