Dreams

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What kind of dreams and nightmares have you had?

What did the dreams mean to you?

Many of my dreams these days seem to be little more than garbled thoughts from a sleeping brain - not quite the usual drama with characters and events that usually characterise dreams.

But some of them are still fairly normal. I have a recurring dream where I'm back at work, and after some challenge there to my well-being I remember that I've been working for them as an unpaid volunteer for a year, and so I realise that the management's main means of coercion (ceasing to pay me) no longer exists and I can do what the hell I like with impunity. When I wake up it has sometimes taken me a few minutes to grasp that there never was a time when I worked for them for free. And it's always a year.

I hardly ever get nightmares but I've had unpleasant dreams. One common theme is losing my luggage, getting lost, or missing a plane or train, while travelling. That's actually a fear I often have to live with in real life when I travel between the USA and the UK, and it's certainly unpleasant. But I wouldn't call it a full-blown nightmare. Another used to be that my partner would lose all sense of duty to our relationship.

In both those cases they seem to be expressing significant anxieties that I have or used to have, but they're of little use to me because I already knew I was scared of those things, and they don't help me to make things any better or worse. I don't go along with theories about dreams being prophetic or of any great use in psychotherapy. My best guess is that they're just what we experience when our brains do some kind of defragmenting process overnight, and that there's nothing much to understand about them. If they do have a function, the fact that we're never consciously aware of the vast majority of them strongly suggests that their main value has nothing to do with studying them.

But I still find them fascinating even if it's materially useless to record and ponder them. When I'm dreaming, I nearly always believe the dream is really happening, though it's pretty clear when I wake that it was just a hallucination. I recently heard this idea: A man dreams he is a horse, and then wakes. How does he know whether he's a man who has just woken from a dream about being a horse, or whether he's a horse that's dreaming it's a man? All of which supports my strong feeling that we don't absolutely know anything, and that all we can do is to carefully make maps of what we think is reality, and to hope that they're accurate.

What's always bothered me about my dreams is:

I often have dreams where there is a person who I think is someone, but then it turns out to be someone else.

As a totally made up, easily understandable example:
I meet a person in my dream who is Madonna, we talk or work together then it turns it is actually Bill Gates or someone.

I've never met anyone else who dreams about a person who turns out to be another person.

^
The identities of some of my dream characters are pretty vague at times. They seem to be composites of more than one person. And sometimes a character will change to a different character during the dream, but I'll not be aware of any change at the time, only when I've woken up and recalled the dream.

One theory I have about my dreams is that they might be parodies of my experiences with (usually) people in waking life. So my dreams might often resemble cruel lampooning and caricaturing of people who in real life have annoyed me. A lot of my dreams seem to fit that idea, though not all. Well, it's no worse than Freud's theory of dreams.

^^ My characters switch identity sometimes.
They aren't usually famous people, but my everyday relatives or people I know from the community.

Most common dream themes:

Seeing and talking to my dad (deceased). I'm never remotely surprised to see him. Sometimes he's doing mundane things like fixing a toilet. Sometimes we're dancing at a wedding. Sometimes we're just sitting talking under a tree.

Something about a shopping mall from when I was little - waiting inside the glass doors knowing I have to walk home alone, being in the pet store with a big area of kittens playing on the floor - driving there but it's moved to a weird made-up location and there's futuristic ramps, and a cinema with mirrored walls.

Being back at work but realising I'm in my PJs or I'm almost naked, and I can't remember what my job is or which room to go to. Trying to remember why in the world I stopped being on Leave.

Guns. I have a lot of weird dreams about people on a commons with guns, or taking me hostage with guns.

My weird thing is that I can read and write books in my dreams. Apparently that's not normal and some people say it's impossible but I've done it all my life. When I'm writing in a dream I watch my hands typing and creating poetry or prose. Sometimes I wake up and remember it. That's how I wrote my thesis statement in Uni. I woke up and transposed the whole thing. It was a topic slightly different to what I'd intended, but it was much better.

Sometimes I hear unfamiliar music in dreams too, and I wake up to hum it. Sometimes there are lyrics but other times not.

Oh that's a relief to hear! It's not just me. Usually when I tell people that people in my dreams switch identity or turn out to be someone else, they look at me as if I'm insane.

Yes, as I said, that was just a made up example to make it understandable for readers. I generally dream about everyday people I know, not famous ones.

I've also never had the apparently common dreams of: being naked in front of people; falling; being chased. I never have dreams like that.

Nearly all of my dreams, when I can remember them, are about architecture, usually the interior spaces of houses, apartments, and of large complexes like airports or malls. Also the interiors of theaters, usually while there is not a performance, just the strange space that the seats make, since they are on an incline and arranged in tiers. Sometimes there are people too.