remembering dreams

[m1469]

yes, yes, I know there have been threads about dreams before.  Well, anyway this is just something specific that I am finding to be a little ... strange.

Maybe for all of my life I have times when I will remember later a dream that I had a little while ago, or a part of a dream.  But recently, I have been having a bunch of parts of dreams coming back to me all "at once" (within a few days).   And dreams that I have had years ago and had not consciously remembered since. 

Part of it will come back to me and I think "oh yeah, I know that".  I guess it would be one thing if it were just one dream or so, but it is a whole bunch of them.  A lot of life changing ones, too.  It's just a bunch of stuff that has been around sub-consciously, suddenly coming to the surface.  Kinda strange and cool at the same time.

Does that ever happen to you ?

m1469 

[maul]

Yeah, all the time. Sometimes it's useless (or I think it is) and other times it's vital information that helps me with situations. The subconcious is constantly working and when you are trying to figure something out or solve an issue it will search it's database of resources, arrange them, and present them to the concious mind when it's ready. It will also bring in new creative resources as well if they are needed. I've trained myself to be able to remember a majority of my dreams upon waking so it seems like I get more of these "episodes" now that my concious mind is involved in the process. Lucid dreaming (controlling your dreams) is also another great way of figuring out stuff. I have vivid ones where I actually compose (by playing on my virtual piano) crazy technically extensive pieces which I can't even play in real life. This also applies for practicing pieces in repetoire. I get a lot of creative ideas and inspiration this way. It's cool stuff.

[ted]

It happens to me often too. Another peculiar dream phenomenon involving memory is when you dream you remember previous dreams as if they were reality. In such a dream I am conscious of having visited dreamscapes and seen dream people before. A couple of decades ago I went through a phase of visiting a completely imaginary landscape and city many times in great detail. Each time I returned I dreamed I remembered all the previous visits and deliberately sought out new areas to see. The geography of the dream city, its streets, surrounding seacapes and landscapes were consistently identical at each "visit". I even went to the extent of seeking out people and places and "revisiting" them. Usually there is a certain physical or visual inconsistency and incongruity about dreams - it's how we sometimes "know" we are dreaming - but this particular bunch of dreams, which went on for several years, had complete internal consistency of imaginary detail from one episode to the next. I haven't the least idea of its significance. The whole thing was essentially visionary, and completely unrelated to life events or anything even vaguely resembling them.

[rc]

I get quite a bit of these too. Usually just the dreamscapes though, I can't think of recurring dreampeople. Very rarely am I even me in the dreams, I'm often in the shoes of some random character or just an observer.

Most of my dreams are actually varying shades of nightmare. Even the most tame ones have some chaotic element of nightmare in the atmosphere. My subconscious is out of its mind.

When my dreams decide to tell me something, they can be pretty blatant. Just last night I got to be myself, I was doing some grocery shopping. But I was taking too long; night was falling, people were waiting for me, the building began to decay, vines growing up the walls, others in the store were growing old and giving me impatient looks. I finally got what I needed, a cart full of veggies (explicit view of veggies)...

...Woke up thinking about how I don't eat healthy enough .

[chopiabin]

I've been having weird and vivid dreams lately, and I've found myself remembering them really well, which is somewhat unusual for me. One of the weirdest involved Phillip Seymour Hoffman asking me to go on a roadtrip with him and then being really "rapist-y". Then we ran into Sarah Jessica Parker (henceforth SJP) ata coffee shop and I tried to hint to her that I needed help. Then somehow I got away from him and ended up in some apartment with a bunch of people including SJP and I explained to her why I had been so weird earlier.

Another one involved my being in the navy and Johnny Depp was there talking to me about something.

The other involved me and my boyfriend sexing it up in my bedroom closet.


What's so weird about them is that I never have dreams about or involving celebrities OR sex. And then in one night I had dreams about 3 celebrities AND sex. And for some goddam reason SJP keeps invading my dreams...she was at a local play opening in my dreams another night. what??? 

[m1469]

Okay, I just remembered a dream that I had last night that is making me come in here and type about it.  I have been having strange dreams lately... not sure why.

Anyhoo, this one was (whoa, this is triggering other dream memories) about a volcanoe that was going to errupt and put acid and bad things into the air.  It was also going to rain acid down on the town I was in (not my home-town, I don't think... but I am not sure where).  Anyway, everybody was being asked to seek shelter.  For some reason it was as though there were no shelter around and people had to start making things or finding things they would not normally "live" in.

I found this old place that looked like nothing from the outside, but lots of it was underground.  When I first went in, it seemed only to have one main space with a kitchen, living room and so on all in one area.  And for some reason, although this place were not being used for living in, there were living plants inside of it.  And it was all fully stocked with cooking utensils and so on.  Anyway, there was a door that ended up leading to another room that was similar to the first (though it was lower).  So, I found my brother and had him look at this place so he could have shelter, too.

Well, somehow we ended up across a big field where we were exploring another shelter.  This structure was once used for a different purpose, but like the other structure, it had been converted to a fall-out shelter.

Now we were showing this structure to more people so they could have shelter, too.  This one was really weird though... it kept going and going and going.  Also, it kept going deeper into the ground.  I never found "the end" to it.  There were seemingly endless twists and turns and hidden rooms and things inside the rooms.... even an art gallery !  It was multi-leveled and though I explored the structure mainly horizontally, there seemed to be many lateral layers as well that I could see but didn't go to.  I would just keep opening door after door and there was always more to the structure.  The only thing was that everything was completely messy and cluttered, and there was a lot of grime in the shelter (I couldn't see the grime, but somehow I knew it was there).  But bedding was there, the fridge was fully stocked with food, cupboards were stocked.  I was showing people that they could live there for a while... but they were not too sure they wanted to because it was not as clean and tidy as they would have liked.

That's all I remember for now.


m1469

[m1469]

oooopsy, double post 

[prometheus]

I used to write down my dreams. Sometimes in the middle of the night or very early in the morning. Most dreams are forgotten. You can remember dreams by trying to recall if you had any just after you wake up. When you recall the dream as soon after you have had it it will stick in your brain.

So at one time I was reading my 'dream diary'. Then I found a very long description about a dream that seemed to have been very detailed and clear. It involved a romantic encounter between me and one of my best friends. Now you must understand who I am to know that this was very soft, innocent and subtle, if you want to call it like that. But when I read that I was shocked and amazed. I did not remember anything of that dream. At first I really really thought someone had found my dream diary and written down this dream as a joke, not because that was realistic but because I couldn't understand that I had actually had that dream. But of course it was my handwriting. I had no 'oh yeah, I know that.'-feeling at all. Which is of course very common to dreams and often the way one remembers them.

Now, I don't add dates so I had no idea how long ago I had that dream. It could have been half a year or just three weeks.


Ted, that sounds amazing. But I would like to point out that dreams, at least to me, are very flexible. They are illusions. My dreams are basically about emotions, that is the fundation. On that my imagination places a concrete structure; people, places, etc.

So that means, if your dreams work like mine, that a place can 'feel' the same without the need for it to be the same. It is about what kinds of emotions and feelings the dreams radiate first and foremost. The details are superfluous; they are there just because you are used to them being there. It can contradict the feeling without you realising it. One is not very critical about ones dreams the moment one has them.


One other curious thing that once happened to me, I don't know how much it has actually got to do with dreams, was that I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night with the urge to write poetry. Not I don't hate poetry, I try not to hate anything, but if I did hate things poetry would probably be one of them. I didn't wake up with a poem in my head, just with the urge to write poetry. The moment I picked up the pen it was clear what would be the subject. Of course I did not use meter or rhyme. If I remember it had both hideous and suprisingly acceptable parts. It also had some creative ideas. I think I tore the page from the notepad and hid it somewhere.

[nicco]

Nightmares suck

[ted]

I too kept a dream diary for many years. I cannot remember whether I described my own classification of them here. For what it's worth, my own dreams fall into three types.

1. Vaguely unpleasant ones, usually involving at least one sequence about grimy lavatories and all matters connected with them, the details of which are thankfully too obvious to go into detail about. These, I have proved, have their origins principally in digestive and other bodily disturbances. Enough said.

2. By far the largest category, wherein the unconscious is, through symbolism and association of every imaginable type, visually thrusting an issue, situation, problem or opportunity at me, which my conscious mind has not realised but which is glaringly obvious to my unconscious mind. These are the classic dreams of the psychologist and , as Jung rightly said, to ignore them is like leaving unopened a letter addressed to oneself. Although innumerable texts on their interpretation exist, from learned psychiatric journals to the pages of the Woman's Weekly, it is my opinion that I am the best person to analyse my own dreams of this type.

In many cases, doing so has saved me considerable upset and bother, not in any precognitive sense, but through highlighting a possible outcome of some life event or decision. A typical case was a dream about a catastrophic computer failure at work, with certain characters appearing on a screen preceeding the crash. The next day, somewhat relieved to find things working, I saved all files and programmes just in case. The day after that, the characters suddenly appeared on my terminal and the system crashed completely, necessitating a disk replacement and complete restore. There was no magic in this. Working with a computer all day, my unconscious probably absorbed normal patterns of activity, on screen and elsewhere. Most likely these patterns changed, but not enough for my conscious brain, however conscientious, to register the fact. My unconscious, however, knew all - the characters to look for (which I had probably read in a manual and forgotten), the general pattern of activity and the fact that the most recent complete save was not adequate. It then couched the lot in the form of a very dramatic dream I could not ignore.

3. The visionary dreams. These, to put it simply, are overwhelmingly beautiful, extraordinary and completely unforgettable. They sometimes, but not necessarily, include "out of the body experiences", lucid dreams (wherein one controls the dream substance at will), "tunnels of light", meeting supernatural beings and all the other commonly described mystical states. I have had these more frequently at certain times of my life than at others. The finest of them have literally shaped my mind for the better and remain a kindly influence simply by thinking about them, even years afterwards. I have a private theory that perhaps all religious experience and myth began with these things. Certainly, I can see how the vivid, "past life" variety, of which I have had many, could imprint on all but the hardiest of rational thinkers a fervent belief in reincarnation. It is a curious fact that, unlike many mystics ( I think it is possible to embed mystical experience in a rational life, but I shan't argue about that here) I have experienced many celestial visions but none at all of hell or even of anything slightly less than the transportingly ecstatic. All my visionary dreams are invariably good and beautiful in the profoundest sense of the words.

Anyway, m1469, to return to your question, I tend to suggest your dream belongs to the second category. It is trying to tell you something, and the best person to analyse the symbolism is you. Remember that dreams love puns and tricks of language. Also, people and objects in the dreams may not represent themselves but facets of your character, thought or situation. Thus dreaming about dear old Auntie Mary dying may not indicate the actual death of Auntie Mary, past or future, but the possibility of your losing some quality she represents to you.

Quite often, leaving aside traumatic experience or other psychological problems, having a recurring dream indicates that you have not yet completely understood its message, at least that's how it sometimes works with me.
   

[prometheus]

Hmm. I think I would classify them differently. First off, I never have nightmares. Even dreams with the most intense negative emotions are a special experience to have. Actually, I did have some nightmares when I was a child. One of them was reoccurring and was very strange and invoked a lot of pure fear, horror and angush. For the record, it images from walking over a path with flowers intermixed with images of some sort of machine that was put together step by step and when it was finished it would unleash horror. Now that I look back at it it would seem like an atom bomb or some kind of doomsday device. Anyway, the images were very distorted by the fear they invoked.


As for my current dreams. There are two catagories. Those based on abstract symbolism and emotion and those based on concrete experiences. Many of them float somewhere inbetween, switching from one to the other. I am not sure if the abstract dreams seem to be abstract because I fail to remember the details or that I can't remember the details because there weren't any.

Most dreams that I remember well are about concrete experiences. They are stories. Some of them express clear ideas and embody symbolism as well. Often they make me feel unique emotions, emotions I would never be able to experience in life itself.

The majority of my dreams are about my relation with fictional teachers. Teachers that accidentally let me fail tests through Bureaucracy eventhough I master the topic completely. Some of them end into confrontation and conflict but most of them end with me being frustrated and defeated. In some teacher-dreams I have to make a test I know nothing about.

I guess all my dreams fit into Ted's catogary 2.

[arbisley]

I dream very frequently. My brother hates it when I try to tell him what I dreamt, becaue they're always really fascinating, but my brother can't be bothered. It seems that at night is the time my imagination really gets going and just sticks together a whole lot of things. I always dream about things look forward to, as for example going to school in England was a year ago and is again starting to be one that I have. It's always a random mix up of facts that have happened, might happen etc., and I always find it extremely interesting how they get mixed up.

I also get the dreams where I come back to them a few nights in a row, or several times in the same night, and where I try to change somethng by not doing what I had done before. A lot of my dreams involve turning them into computer games, so that might be like replaying a same bit in a game but avoiding, say, the zombie falling out of the cupboard, even though I don't even play computer games that much.

Nightmares are not that frequent, although I used to have more when I was younger. They almost always consisted of the same thing: me trying to control this number, or quantity, and it suddenly becoming incredibly vast and out of control. I was just so scared at the overflow, gigantic aspect of it all. I had others where someone had something really bad happening to him, and I was glad when I woke up.

Sometimes, I have the most annoying fears, like dreaming I failed all of my exams, when in fact I'd already received my marks ages ago.

Then there's a dream I had once which revealed to me a very deep aspect of someone's character, a rather sadistic vision of the "Hyde" in someone I know, also mingled with sex.

One "visionary" dream I had was about my grandfather dying in October of last year. I suddenly knew it was going to happen, and was extremly sad and cried, but my grandfather came to me, and more or less said: "Don't cry, I'm not unhappy, I'm peaceful here [in heaven]" The day after that he died, and I remembered the dream and did not mourn for too lon, because I thought he was allright, and that he went peacefully, having an afternoon nap as it was.

I sometimes feel my dreams make up for my lack of energy or action during the day...

[ted]

Prometheus:

I'm exactly the same - no nightmares - just don't have them. The content is sometimes what other people would term the stuff of nightmares but I am never frightened.And yes, as a child I had nightmares. As I recall, they comprised smooth abstract objects with sharply pointed cusps like rose thorns. I became tangled in them in a manner very difficult to describe and woke up bawling and shouting. They disappeared by around the age of two or three so I have always assumed they had something to do with teeth erupting.

The only adult dream approaching a nightmare was when I dreamed I woke up in the dark, reached for the tumbler of water I habitually kept on my bedside table, and had my wrist grabbed by a powerful hand. Then I actually did wake up in the dark, and it took me every ounce of determination to reach for a drink of water !

[nicco]

The only adult dream approaching a nightmare was when I dreamed I woke up in the dark, reached for the tumbler of water I habitually kept on my bedside table, and had my wrist grabbed by a powerful hand. Then I actually did wake up in the dark, and it took me every ounce of determination to reach for a drink of water !

omg i had the exact same experience! woke up in my dream, was going to reach for the light and felt someone or something grabbing my hand, i really jumped and it made me wake up for real. Man that was so weird