What do you dream about... do you dream?

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Great topic! Dreams are interesting things.
Yes, I dream always when I sleep (even if I only fall asleep for a minute, and how long I sleep doesn't seem to have much effect on how long a dream is, and sometimes my dreams are VERY long), but usually I forget my dreams shortly. Now when I woke up I tried to type down my dream but by the time I was finished with the first part I had forgotten all the rest. A shame. At least the interesting atmospheres remain.
I know my dreams are more absurd than some people's, my father's dreams make much more sense than mine. His are like science fiction adventures and such, with plots that make sense and all, and he even has lucid dreams. My mother's dreams are more like mine when it comes to the absurdity factor, but hers seem centered around regular life stuff, only with weird twists, while my dreams can be about pretty much anything. Most of my dreams are nightmares, the rest are neutral.
I don't really have 'good dreams' that are pleasant while I'm in them, but dreams can be very enjoyable when remembered afterwards.

These are some features my dreams have;
- Shifting perspective - perspective habitually shifts from first person to third person and back
- Things suddenly being something other than they were earlier and it somehow being completely natural like 'ahh, that's what it was all along' even though earlier it clearly wasn't (for example, in one dream I saw a few metres away what was clearly an action figure of a video game character, but when I got close to it I was dissappointed to find it was just a toothbrush)
- I'm only myself in about half of the dreams, often I'm either some completely different person or it's completely unclear who I am. This can also change during the dream.
- This one's kind of a combination of the above, but sometimes suddenly the whole earlier part of the dream was supposedly just a book, movie, video game or such when it clearly wasn't earlier, OR the dream suddenly turns into what seems to be a video game as if it had been that way earlier
- My thought process makes no sense in dreams, I make obviously awful decisions
- I'm definitely never aware I'm dreaming, only a couple of times it has happened that I realized it was a dream and then as a result I automatically woke up to a state of sleep paralysis against my will. So, no lucid dreaming for me (and I don't think that whole 'getting into the habit of testing if my hand goes through walls' would work, since I don't recall myself having any habits I have irl in my dreams)
- Fictional characters, things etc. I know make appearances in my dreams, but it isn't as frequent as I'd like it to be since I really find dreams with such the most entertaining of the bunch
- I've never had reccurring dreams, I can have dreams with similar things happening but I never have the same dream twice.
- My dreams often feature things (places, events) from previous dreams as things that are then fact/exist in the current dream. At one point there was always a part in my dreams where when it was midnight, everything would turn black and white for an hour and there would also be no sound, complete silence. It was creepy as hell, but it hasn't happened in my dreams anymore.
- If I wake up from a nightmare and go immediately back to sleep the dream continues so I have to get up and do something else for a short time before trying to sleep again.

Common themes in my dreams are:
- Nuclear war or disasters, radiation
- Horrible diseases spreading
- Natural disasters
- Apocalyptic scenarios in general
- Being lost or otherwise unable to go home, trying to find my way back but I keep ending up in the wrong place and actually have no idea how I'm to get home but still keep going, I'm in some really far away place, often there's a lot of getting around via buses and trains but I'm always really far away and sometimes, rarely, I end up where it's supposed to be home but the place is different
- I black out a lot and then find out that I've done something horrible while I wasn't aware of it and have to face the consequences or spend the rest of the dream trying to avoid it but still getting black outs, OR I'm having some sort of seizures OR it's impossible to think, am very confused and have no idea what's going on and can't figure it out (I put these three together because they all feature the same kind of overwhelming confusion and anxiety)
- I find a lot of interesting items, or rediscover items I supposedly had sometime previously, or even they were things I already had (in the dream) - but I have to leave the place these things are in but it's somehow very difficult to collect all the items together so I can take them with me or it's taking me a lot of time to find them, etc.

I suppose I could tell a dream I remember more than usual about, from earlier this year:
---
First part I remember was something about me being some vampire-like being or something. Most of the dream took place out in the countryside with a lot of abandoned farm buildings and in weird dusty tunnels under the area. In the dream the night always lasted for a very short time, felt like I never had time for anything and then the sun would rise so fast it was hard to get to inside to safety fast enough. There were others like me and we were hiding in these abandoned buildings and I don't actually remember anything about that happened there, just the setting.
---
Second part I remember I was in some unfamiliar area in the middle of nowhere (at night) with my parents, we were trying to get home. So we had stopped at this small town place, we had first been going via bus trying to get to places but then we had to get off the bus in this town. We didn't start waiting for another bus though, my parents decided we should explore a little, to get to a shop or something. Then when we were walking around we got to this weird run-down apparently abandoned factory/castle place (it was red-bricked and reminds me of those older buildings I find creepy irl) we were sort of above it, on a hillside but there was the wall of the place (it had tall walls, but in that portion the walls were pretty much useless? You could just step on it) beside there and we then started walking on the wall.
My father said that the weird castle area reminded him of a place he knew in his childhood but then my mother said that it was nothing like it (apparently she had seen that place) and they argued about it a little. Then there was this small uphill part on the wall and there were some sort of spike things in the middle of the wall walkway thing preventing us from going up safely and also the whole part was kind of slippery and apparently that part of the wall was supposed to keep invaders from getting in and they could withdraw the spikes remotely from inside to allow passage. I don't remember how we got through there. But then there was after all some small area of the place that wasn't abandoned, there was a pub there and some grocery store I think.
So then we went to that pub, it was called 'Molly's flagon' and was supposed to be irish or something. But the building was very strange and creepy, also it was wooden and it kept shifting and turning dangerously. There were gray wooden walkways (held there by ropes or something) leading to the place (below there was a small pit on the ground, you could go down there via walkways also) which also shifted around. It was scary and seemed very unsafe, but no one had a problem with it apparently. When we were about to go in the whole pub turned so it was almost vertical but again, no one reacted to it. Well we went in anyhow and then I was at the bar and I got some drink and it actually tasted good. I don't remember anything else from then but later I was down at that pit below the pub and there was a lot of dry greyish sand there. I shifted some of it with my foot to find that there were naked women under - they had been on the ropes that supported the walkways and pub and somehow had been the cause of the whole shifting and turning of the place. The women weren't dead, I don't know how they were able to breathe under the sand but they just got up.
I went back inside the pub and many of the people from inside went outside to see the women. So then I was back at the bar and the bartender asked me if I'd like another drink. I felt very anxious then and asked what drinks they had, then he pointed to a small part on the bar that listed all the available drinks, it had the pictures and prices. Somehow they only had coca-cola, beer and that drink I had earlier. They also had an option that was coca-cola AND beer, not as one drink but in separate glasses. They also sold some very small candies that were way too expensive, just one of them cost half an euro. I decided to have coca-cola and then the bartender seemed angry at me.
---
Third part of the dream I remember happened at daytime in another countryside place, but it was like a small community or something, not abandoned or run-down.
I was walking down a path with someone to this area with some wooden buildings. We were supposed to take some item to a person who was a relative of ours or something.
The path was very long and when we at last got to our destination we saw some man in the distance sitting on some bench near an old wooden house. We were on higher ground than the buildings at that point still. Then I don't remember what happened, but later on in the dream the same scenario repeated itself - we went back to the place and the man was again sitting on the bench.
There was then also a man closer to us who was fixing a car or something. The person who was with me gave the package to this man but then the dream got really weird;
Some voice-over (like in a documentary) started explaining how the two men were in the process of slowly morphing into some kind of human-animal hybrids, the man fixing the car was to become some half-dinosaur or something. It was creepier than it sounds.
Later on I was in one of the houses in the area. In the backround was playing a song that was obviously by my favorite band, but it was no song that was familiar to me and had the feel of their oldest songs. It had elements from a couple of their other old songs and then I thought for some reason that some of the elements used in the song (and in those other actual songs) were sound loops the band had found online. Then I found out that the main member of the band had lived there and I got really excited about it, wondering if there were more unheard old songs waiting to be found there.
For some reason the people that lived there allowed me to look through all the drawers and such in there, but while I did that I found a lot of drawings by me and my brother, and so this place kept shifting between being some place this band member had lived in and a place I had once lived in.
I found a few more old songs but then I came across some horrible embarassing drawing by myself that portrayed some human-animal hybrids but they were very poorly drawn and naked. I then felt very embarrassed and tried to quickly put it in my backbag, but someone noticed and asked me what I put in there. I had to then show it and they proceeded to tell how they were always creeped out and ashamed of that drawing.
Then there came another creepy voice-over part, but this time it explained something weird about deer going to give birth near water. These deer were supposed to be pregnant with four but only give birth to one, but later on three three full-grown deer of creepy unknown species are seen near the normal deer. When the voice-over part ended, one of the people who lived in the house said "Guess we know now", implying that somehow the men morphing into animal hybrids were connected to it even though that made no sense whatsoever. It was really damn creepy, though, and it had a sort of Lovecraftian vibe to it.
I don't remember what happened next but then at some point I came across some old school reports of mine (I had also apparently been going to the school that was in this weird area) and I had done really well on everything.
That's all I remember of this dream.
---

And, well, on the topic of weird sleep-related experiences...
When I was in my mid-to late teens, I experienced sleep paralysis often. Then it just didn't happen anymore, a few times I felt like I was about to enter the state but managed to wake myself up before it even really began. Just early this month though, it happened to me again, for real. This time was less frightening than the previous times, but unpleasant none-the-less.
So, I was trying to sleep but I kept ending up in a state of sleep paralysis instead. As it wasn't as horrible as the previous times, I kept trying.
All but one of the times, hallucinations were restricted to the general weirdness of thinking/feeling like I had just moved a limb then looking at my body and finding I really hadn't.
But in this one that had more than that, it featured a different sort than I had experienced earlier in my life - there was some person with a weird exaggerated grinning face like the Joker’s who had a top hat and red clothes. First he stood next to my bed but then he moved on top of me. I know it's very common to hallucinate such a thing during sleep paralysis, it just hadn't happened to me before so it was weird.
As to what kind of things I -did- experience when sleep paralysis happened to me earlier in my life;
- Sounds (usually a buzz or beep or a scream-like continuous sound) usually gaining in volume and/or pitch
- Intense fear
- Trembling like in some seizure, or once the same feeling but it was like the bed was shaking very violently, even heard loud clanking sounds
- The aforementioned feeling like I had moved a limb when I hadn't
- Strange visual things, like numbers flashing in the air over me or objects in the room morphing slightly
- Once I felt a lot of pressure and pain in my jaw, I felt as though it was going to explode
I'm just going to give advice - if you ever find yourself in a sleep paralysis episode, try to concentrate on moving one finger or toe. It will feel impossible at first but once you get it moving just a bit the state dissolves.

i often dream about the house i lived in for 21 years (23 now)

i have like 8 cars in the driveway/lawn

i take them out and drive them in my dreams....

each has their own little quirk....

well...thats one of my most common dreams though there are others.

i dont much go inside the house....mostly takes place on the outside in the town/neighborhood....

Last night I was dreaming that I was swimming. I managed a length of the pool in seconds and I was obviously a top class swimmer (this is definitely only in my dreams). I didn't recognise the pool and didn't know most of the characters. I have very vivid dreams like that quite often. Sometimes they don't make sense and are hard to explain, like when there was this man who was my husband, but he was Patrick Swayze (I wasn't married to Patrick in my dream, he and my real life husband seemed to be the same person, but his face changed regularly and he didn't look like either of them - as I said, hard to explain). A recurring 'nightmare' I have is when I'm trying to make an urgent phonecall and I keep getting a digit wrong and never manage to get through to the person I'm needing to speak to.

One of my favorite theories is that when we dream, we look through the eyes of our alternative self, who lives in an alternative Universe.

If this were true, then my life in this Universe must be pretty boring compared to the crazy things that happen to my other selves




Same here - in fact, I am never able to realize that I am dreaming, it all looks and feels so real. On several occasions I needed 10 - 15 minutes after waking up to realize that the things I had done or seen were just a dream.

I had a really nasty dream once - I helped some kind of shadowy creature transform my hometown into a hellish place (with blood on the walls of buildings, piles of bones on the street, etc.). I didn't even notice when the dream ended and I woke up.

I have very realistic dreams,and very interesting dreams too.

I have three re-occurring themes in many of my dreams;
1. Zombies.
2. Losing my teeth.
3. Murdering my childhood friend.

I don't dream every time I sleep, but most. I dream in color.. 'technicolor' is a good description. Everything is way more vivid.

I don't remember most dreams, just sort of a feeling of having been somewhere doing Something. Exceptions are a few really good ones, a few really bad ones. I wrote out one complicated dream about six years ago. There are three handwritten pages, every detail. I still have that and when I read it, I feel all the same... as though it were a real day I spent.. as though it was an actual memory of real events. It was sad, makes me sad writing now..

Dreams come to me four ways.

When I'm sick I have the nightmares. Bizarre scary stuff that goes on ForEver and makes me think "if I ever wake from this, I'll never go to sleep again." When I do wake I can just shake the dream off and it's fine.

When I'm life-stressing the dreams are those that mirror, but the struggle is worse than RL, way more annoying, more helpless to solve problems. These aren't scary, just a pain in the a**.

The third dream category comes when something happy is in RL.
Very vivid sharp clear pictures, last a long time. The kind when you start to wake up, you say to yourself, huh-uh, I'm staying here and you fall back into it.

The fourth is not something I know as a dream, but as a vision. Still happens when I sleep, but these are being brought to me, usually to teach, or advise, or warn. Almost always it is myself and a person I trust. I may not know the person, but I know I trust the person. Also, some of the most lucid and meaningful to me after sleep come when a specific person from 138years ago talks to me. We sit and smoke (I don't smoke..(cigs)), or we are riding horses talking, or just on a small wooded mountain. The things he has told me has guided me when I get back to this side. I always remember the visions.

I usually don't dream, when I do, it's usually a nightmare that leads to night terrors... not fun...

Rarely ever do I have a good dream.

With me it is weird is sometimes I will dream about a new game that I play contsantly like when I first got World of Warcraft before I gave it up I dreamed that I was personally in world of warcraft. I did the same thing with battlefield bad company 2 and I think even Minecraft when I first got it. Other then that my dreams will include my senses and even color. I was getting more detailed dreams back when I was makeing maps for like Counter-Strike Source and Call of Duty 4.

Contrary to what my alexithymia should apparently predict, I tend to have rather fantastic dreams with horror, science fiction, and fantasy elements.

The most common theme in all my dreams is that I am either living in or moving into a house and no matter what, somehow my bedroom ends up being a main traffic area for the entire house and I have no privacy.

But beyond that, I've had dreams with fairly coherent plots and stories, ranging from piracy on the Sunless Sea of the dead and using technomagical chainguns to shoot up ghosts of Godzilla-like beasts to trying to unravel the mysteries behind a malevolently haunted house. I also recall one involving time travel. Actually, more than one. One I recall involved my presence in roughly the same time and place in the dream twice, but the second time trying to conceal my presence from my other (past) self, who did not notice what was going on the first time.

I have a lot of dreams that have nightmarish imagery, but such things - corpses, for example - do not frighten me. However, last week I dreamt that I was banned from one of my favorite forums and woke up with a shot of adrenaline and a pounding heartbeat.

I suspect that these dreams are derived at least partially from the fact that I read a lot of fiction and take an SSRI.

Those are the best kind of dreams! Of course for me still the ever-present eerie, uneasy atmosphere of dreams is still there, but somehow the presence of these elements from fiction I enjoy make it enjoyable.

For an example, once I had a dream in which I had some sort of terminal illness but I still was trying to desperately search a cure for it, since there was some doctor who was rumored to possibly be able to help and I tried to look for him and was lost and all the usual nightmarish stuff from my dreams, I actually ended up dying in the dream, too then there was some weird crap about being a ghost or something. But, there were some characters from Mass Effect in this dream, and somehow that alone made the dream such that when I woke up I wished I could return to it.

The latest dream I remember was like this, actually. It was something about a bunch of krogan and it had some night elf priestess in it too (I haven't even played WoW for years), also there was Kirrahe in the style of Minecraft (I don't even know).
Here's what I typed down back when I woke up from it;

"Four krogan lay in ambush at a ledge at end of a long bridge (under the bridge was a deep chasm, on both ends of the bridge was a small ledge and from there it continued to a pass) , they were left there by some army or something in an attempt to kill some important enemy leaders who would at some point go down the bridge or something
Two of them were apparently female but they had male voices. (There was a point, when they were attacking these folks at the bridge, when two of these krogan charged up there and started fighting, we were watching this other krogan from behind a bush who then charged there too just a little later, he remarked on the females' battle prowess, apparently turned on or something and laughed a little.
Some night elf priestess at some point came there
They weren't going to kill her
They were telling something to her about what they were doing there and the overall status of the whole war going on, she seemed very oblivious, seemed she did not know the opposite point of view at all. At some point she was disgusted that these krogan were technically her allies, I don't know, I don't actually remember any of the details of what the whole war thing was about there. Also the krogan started talking to her about protective armor she could/should be wearing (the priestess was wearing a long skirt and a bra-like top)
Also there was something about some Minecraft-like Kirrahe but with a weirdly long, pointy chin"

I don't remember anything about the parts of the dream that were in first person anymore.

Hmmmm,

I tend to dream about impossible situations that I will likely never find myself in and deal with them in the most odd ways. Many of them are social in nature. I also tend to code in my dreams. Even more odd, Im sure.

One dream I had , the abupt end of the world occured, and all I could do was watch it happen. In the dream sequence it was strangely quite painless.

I sort my dreams into three categories: Action, Suspension, and Alternate Reality

An Alternate Reality dream can range from boring to slightly unnerving. These are the most common sorts of dreams I have. I am usually doing homework or going to work or talking about something. I can be actually productive in these dreams, sometimes even doing my math homework or setting up an essay.

Suspension dreams are the weirdest. I usually dream of being weightless, suspended in either water or space. These dreams are very peaceful and vivid. Nothing at all happens in them.

An Action dream is the rarest type of dream for me to have. These usually involve zombies, aliens, or the apocalypse. I think I've only ever had three of these in my life.

I dream, but not very often as I don't always get enough sleep. Though, I prefer to 'lucid dream', as it's more enjoyable.

I dream quite a lot but not as much as I used to sadly, I usually look forward to dreaming but I'm not always happy with the results. Some dreams have stuck in my memory for years and a few have disappeared within minutes. I've attempted dream diaries before but don't have the motivation or attention span to carry on past 3 or so entries.
My most common dreams are:
Males from the past that I've fancied or gone out with fighting for my affection.
My dad vomiting, especially in the car. (This is more of a recurring nightmare.)
Being in a really fun (sometimes romantic) situation, and just as it reaches its peak I wake up.
Dreams with ape characters.
Really long, film like things that seem to span days and have soundtracks and stuff.
Failing at a task I've been planning to do in waking life.
Going to school during christmas holidays or when I'm not supposed to be in school.
Running away from a place for no reason other than the feeling of freedom of movement, a feeling that I hold dear to me in waking life.

I do lucid dream sometimes, and a few times I've successfully controlled something. It's very hard to keep concentrated on staying in the dream once the "secret" is revealed, but I have managed. Most of the time though I do end up waking up. But when I want to wake up it's nearly impossible to do so.

My dreams are generally weird mashups of movies that I've seen or books I've read, presented in a movie format. Occasionally I'll bolt out of a dream for no reason.

The position of my body generally dictates the tone. Sleeping on my left side results in darker dreams, while sleeping on my right side results in wild, upbeat dreams. Sometimes I can change the tone by switching sides in the middle of a dream. When I was younger, I would push my mattress half off the frame and sleep hanging off one side, with my head almost to the floor. This resulted in wild, crazy dreams. Only a couple of my dreams have been prophetic.