How do you dream?

[unregistered]

 

[graceanne]

I also struggle to remember anything past 5 minutes or so after waking. I know that I dream and I'm certain the dreams are in color, but I rarely remember details. It's quite frustrating to wake up certain that I've had the best dream only to forget the details. I wish I could remember them.

I do remember that my pregnancy dreams were very realistic and alarming. Once I dreamt that I lost my baby (not miscarried, actually lost/misplaced her) and I woke up and frantically searched the house for her. Inside of low cabinets, under the sink, through the doggy door...only to finally come to my senses and realize I was still pregnant.

I used to remember all the details of all my dreams. I've come to realize that as weird as my dreams are, that it's just cause they're weird and are rarely worth the effort of remembering.

I've also had dreams where I woke up that confused. A few months ago I dreamed that K got food poisoning over in Iraq, and died. I woke up literally thinking 'oh, shit, i didn't tell his mom' and was looking for her phone number when I woke up enough to realize that it was just a bad dream. LOL

 

[Lizzie_Borden]

I rarely remember mine, the ones I do remember are either recurring, or are ones I've had in that dozey, half asleep period.

The weirdest aspect of them is that sometimes the people in my dreams don't look like they do in real life... some random unknown person appears, but that's someone I know, and I know that I know them, and it doesn't seem weird that they look like someone else... until I wake up.

 

[sb2009]

I HATE that I remember I'm married about 1/3 through some cool erotic dream. Just last night, I dreamed Jake Gyllenhall was crazy about me. I even sucked his cock - which was great, it was so reall, I could taste that for sure ;-) We were all set to run away together on some sort of yacht and I remembered I had a husband and family at home so I couldn't go. Robin Williams popped up to say that I made the right choice.

So sad.

 

[rida]

I have dreams so vivid that I open my eyes and wake up to check (when little, I dreamed our house got flooded and my little sister got washed away and I ran to check her crib, as a teen I dreamed of kissing my crushes and the kiss would be so real that I opened my eyes to see if he was really kissing me, most of my (very rare though) sex dream feel so real that I wake up just when I start to orgasm and I do have a real orgasm).

I've dreams that I don't remember, until some real life event triggers the memory and a small piece comes back (mostly absurd dreams).

I've dreams of fights/arguments that make me so pissed off with the person (mostly Hubby) that I wake up mad at him.

I've dreams of running where I wake up with tired muscles.

I've dreams that are like movie, including the narrating voice explaining pieces of back ground stories. One of such movie was an end of the world kind of situation: people started to get suddenly thirsty, rush to drink water but the more they would drink the thirstier they would get and you could see them actually drying up until they would die. I was par of some sort of resistance/scientist group that was trying to find the origin and it had to do with the fact that the water had been contaminated by radioactive waste from the French. The dream ended with everybody died, an empty world and the narrator voice saying something about the cause being those carelessly discarded radioactive waste cans.

And I too sometime get in that half awake/half asleep state in the middle of a dream where I'm aware of my body but cannot move it. Depending on the dream I've been having, it can be kind of scary.

Some are color, some have dialogues some seems to be more as if reading people's mind, other are images, sounds and emotions. The dialogues can be in any of the languages that I speak. And sometime more than one language. They say that you can tell that something is a dream because you cannot read in dreams. Since hearing that, I've been trying to read in the dreams but cannot say if I've ever been successful.

And the best way not to lose the memory of a dream is to tell it to someone right away, possibly a couple of times. Poor hubby gets to hear my crazy dreams first. And then my colleagues at work.

(once, after a nice spring day, I woke up and told hubby that I had a weird dream and it was snowing outside. he laughed, got up, opened the window and said "can you dream of money falling down from the sky, please?". Yep, ti was really snowing outside. LOL)

But I don't think I dream every night.

 

[neci]

i wish i could remember my dreams. i remember a few, and i think they are in color. i have had some where i wake up and am still dreaming. others i dream i am falling, then i begin to fly. during those i tend to wake up suddenly and find my arm hanging off the bed.

i had crazy dreams when i was younger. crazy. i don't have the crazy dreams anymore.

 

[subish2009]

As any neurologist can tell you, dreams are the detritus that gets tossed around when part of your brain is doing housecleaning. Apparently the brain needs down time to process all of it's experiences. When you dream, your brain is essentially taking out the trash.
<snip>

I'm curious what your neuro background is, BR. According to the neurology I've learned, this is partially correct and partially incorrect. It's true that your brain does a lot of new memory processing while you sleep and dream. But it's less like taking out the trash and more like filing, sorting, organizing, labeling. And that only accounts for some dream activity. Other dream sleep is widely accepted by both neuro and psych researchers as serving the purpose DGE mentioned: your "subconscious" (for lack of a better and broadly understood term) trying to draw your attention to conflicts, problems, and issues needing your conscious attention. This is why people often go to bed thinking about problems, the answers to which come to them in their sleep. I was a classics major and used to translate Greek and Latin in my dreams. Literally, just seeing a page of text and translating.

Anyway, not trying to pick a fight. I just think you're oversimplifying the facts to suit your obvious opinion that this thread is a waste of time.

 

[Shrubbery]

as far as I know, there's still a huge amount of argument over what dreams are and what they are for. They must be important, because if you sytematically deprive someone of REM (dreaming) sleep, they will start to enter dreaming states during other types of sleep or when awake to compensate. They also seem to have something to do with learning, as skills that do not improve with hours of practice get better after dreaming sleep and not other kinds of sleep. There's theories about it being a way of clearing out short term memory and storing important stuff in long term memory.

My own opinion is a bit less sciency. I think it's when we weave the narrative that makes up our past life. Sartre says (and I agree) that we have two selves or existences. There is one that lives in the continuous present moment, all experience being a random assortment of lights, colours impressions and sensations that are essentially meaningless. The other is the constructed self, created from stories, affirmed by other people, given meaning by us but never actually existing.

I think dreams are the time when the second, constructed self is born, woven from the assorted fragments of each day like a quilt.
Dreams are the act of becoming.

By the way, my background is postgrad psych researcher. Sleep isn't my area though, so my ideas on this are based on an undergrad level knowlege of the literature and my own anecdotal experience.

 

[Shrubbery]

But I don't think I dream every night.

you dream on average 5 or 6 times every single night, you just don't remember

 

[Netzach]

I'm one of the only visual arty people I know that remembers about 10-20 dreams from her entire 36 year existence total. I know that stuff is going on, but normally I have no idea what. The ones I remember are fucking scary apocolyptic or really really good.

 

[Lizzie_Borden]

Seems the worse the sleep I'm having, the more likely I am to remember my dreams.

Must be because I'm having more in that hazy between awake and asleep phase.

The other night involved base jumping (or cliff diving, not sure exactly which) from impossibly high places. And I wasn't scared. But it *was* highly technical in the 'you can't be lazy about this or you'll splat' kind of way.

 

[Shrubbery]

Seems the worse the sleep I'm having, the more likely I am to remember my dreams.

yup, this is true. It is because in normal sleep you cycle between deep sleep and dreaming sleep on roughly a 90 minute schedule. In uninterrupted sleep, before you wake up you go down to deep sleep then back all the way up to awake without dreaming again, so when you wake up it's been like 45mins since you last dreamed, so you've forgotten it. If your sleep is disturbed you are more likely to wake up in the middle or just after dreaming and remember it all.

If you want to help someone remember their dreams, watch their closed eyelids to see if their eyes are are flicking about underneath. If they are, they are probably dreaming. Wait til this has just stopped, then shake them. Also, sensory stimuli does make it into your dreams, like if you make seagull noises in someone's ear while they're dreaming they'll dream about walking on a beach. Can be fun to give someone you're sleeping with, erm, nice dreams, shall we say, then wake them and ask how it was.

Of course, none of this explains why I dreamed of an angry red dragon putting down roots like a tree in order to give birth the night before last.

 

[unsettled]

I have had the same basic nightmare all of my life, I am being chased and/or tortured and I am really terrible at hiding. In a recent one I was shot through the chest with two cannonballs connected with a chain. I woke up thinking my chest had exploded. Crazy that I can remember many of those in great detail, even ones from when I was five.

I also have that deja vu time when I am watching a previous dream being acted out in real life. It used to freak me out, now it is just surreal and makes me giggle.

 

[Homburg]

I'm one of the only visual arty people I know that remembers about 10-20 dreams from her entire 36 year existence total. I know that stuff is going on, but normally I have no idea what. The ones I remember are fucking scary apocolyptic or really really good.

Pretty much the same boat here. Occasionally, I remember the dream vividly for a short while, then it all flutters away.

The ones I remember are usually because of the sheer horror, the incredibly strong imagery, or some other equally potent factor. And I only have on recurring theme, and that is zombie apocalypse. Oddly enough, the scary part is not the zombies. They rate about as highly as a bad hurricane, which is to say "dangerous", but I'm not shitting myself. The horror comes when I am in the dream and realise, VERY clearly, "The kids aren't here," or "MIS is in New York," or somesuch. It's never about me. The horror is because I realise that someone that I care about is not where I can protect them.

And it is always nighttime in my dreams, or dusk at best. Colours are thus always muted, but present.

 

[Primalex]

Rare insight into ~qp~s brain

As a child I had a recurring dream about the closet trying to suck me in. I tried to get away from it and was fighting against the current - and failed and woke up just right before it would have gotten me. No sound, merely video and emotions of fear and struggling.

For some strange reason the closet wasn't scary at all when I was awake. I was more worried about dreaming about the closet than the closet itself. Then one day I was so pissed off that I didn't fight back at all and entered a "Show me what you got"-mood. I was sucked in and in there was just some kind of large space with platforms. Kinda bright place, not at all scary. A little bit like Donkey Kong in dreamscape. I think I talked with something in there, but really don't remember that much. I still had this dream afterwards, but it was getting weaker and weaker every time.

Then we moved and the closet was replaced by a dark utility room. Didn't make sense either, because I wasn't afraid at all to be in total darkness in the utility room. It pissed me off alot that dreams altered my emotions - I wouldn't have minded, if I would have been scared of darkness in real life, too. But this didn't make sense and when I woke up, I was more angry about it than scared.

This dream disappeared, too, then.

Now I have a few rarely (how sad..) recurring sex dreams. I don't remember the details when I'm awake, but when I dream it, I go "Oh great, it's THAT recurring sex dream #x, now xyz happens..yeah, let's have fun." I don't cum though And my wife is completely useless at 3:00am. Some day I will add a (very patient) sub just for the purpose to suck me off between 2:00am and 7:00am.

The dreams about my 88M army time are very..red with sound and more often recurring than the sex dreams (hrpmh).

The rest of my dreams have no remarkable pattern.

 

[Homburg]

I almost never have sex dreams. It's like they're absent from my dream vocabulary.

 

[subish2009]

I almost never have sex dreams. It's like they're absent from my dream vocabulary.

That sucks. I almost only have sex dreams. I also wake up orgasming in my sleep.

 

[DeepGreenEyes]

I have had the same basic nightmare all of my life, I am being chased and/or tortured and I am really terrible at hiding. In a recent one I was shot through the chest with two cannonballs connected with a chain. I woke up thinking my chest had exploded. Crazy that I can remember many of those in great detail, even ones from when I was five.

I also have that deja vu time when I am watching a previous dream being acted out in real life. It used to freak me out, now it is just surreal and makes me giggle.

I used to have similar recurring dreams of being pursued by an assassin. Someone told me to try to remember to confront the pursuer in the dream; to gather your courage and ask him/her what she wants. I did this in a dream not long thereafter: the assassin didn't answer, but slipped away into the shadows and hasn't been back since. I don't know if it's coincidence, or whether my brain decided there were better ways to communicate with me.

 

[DeepGreenEyes]

That sucks. I almost only have sex dreams. I also wake up orgasming in my sleep.

I think we'd all appreciate a subish online dream journal. Thanks in advance for the drawings.

 

[chy_girl]

My sister-in-law has a Vietnam erra protest song that plays in the background of all of her reoccurring dreams and some of the plain unsettling ones. It's always the same song.

Needless to say, it creeps her out when she hears the song in her waking hours.

 

[Netzach]

That sucks. I almost only have sex dreams. I also wake up orgasming in my sleep.

about 2 of the ten I wake up because I just can't....quite...

ugh. I'll take masturbation, thanks.

 

[Lizzie_Borden]

That sucks. I almost only have sex dreams. I also wake up orgasming in my sleep.

I can tell when I have had one, even when I don't remember it. I wake up randy as all hell.


The few that I do remember, wither involve things that I adore, like hair pulling, darkness, whispering in my ear... or situations that *usually* hold no appeal to me at all. The last one was orgy style sex with really, really beefed up muscle men. I usually hate those guys!

 

[TeganBerri]

I only tend to remember the dreams I have during the 'nearly waking up' period in the morning. If I tell someone about it early on I remember it easier. If I dont its hard to recall sometimes later.

 

[Keroin]

A had this awesome, feature film length dream last night about alien zombies.

The protagonist in my dream was a man, someone I don't know. Just made him up, I guess. The whole story was told from his POV. I wasn't present in the dream at all. Interesting.

I often shift POV's in my dreams. Anybody else have that? You're watching the action through one set of eyes and then suddenly you're looking at it through a different character's eyes - sometimes two at once?

 

[missy_me]

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