Dreams

[Terabith]

Do other people normally have super involved, very detailed dreams?  That might or might not make total sense but that go on at some length?  

[Emba]

Not every night but quite frequently. I have always dreamed vividly. I’ve had dreams that were very cinematic, even including rolling credits.

[Carol in Cal.]

Yes, sometimes.  Not all of my dreams are like that, though.

[I talk to the trees]

I have the kind of dream you describe whenever I wake up very early and then doze/ go back to sleep for a while. Maybe it has something to do with not being in as deep a sleep? Or maybe all of my dreams are like this, and I only recall the ones where I am in a lighter sleep.

[Katy]

Yes, but the most detailed happens maybe once a week, not nightly

[Scarlett]

I do. Very detailed, very intense and feel like they last for hours sometimes telling a dream story that lasts for days. 

[Melissa Louise]

Often, especially when I'm not doing so well psychologically. It's very fatiguing. 

Also a symptom for me when I accidentally miss my meds. 

The mood of a dream can last through the following day. 

Often the most vivid and complex occur as series. 

Regular meditation and yoga help calm them for me. 

I try not to ruminate on the dreams once awake. 

[Amethyst]

55 minutes ago, Emba said:even including rolling credits.

Lol. This cracked me up! 

[Tap]

Yes. And they are usually very stressful because I am trying to solve a problem and new hurdles keep getting in my way.  I will go in and out of the same dream multiple times per night. It seems to pick up where it left off as I go in and out of dream cycles. I can even wake up, go get a drink and end up back in the same detailed dream. They often even have background sights, sounds, skin feeling and smells. Recently part of a dream led me to climbing up a water treatment facility. As I was climbing on the pipes and equipment, I could smell the chlorine, feel the water hitting my skin, and hear the equipment It was very, very loud in my dream.  I was hitting a glass window to get someone's attention on the other side. I could see they were talking and I could hear the reverberation on the glass as I hit it, but the sound of the turbine and water falling muffled it all.  I can even describe the look of the room the people were in, the various pipes I was climbing on and how they connected. Even details like warning stickers on the metal door separating us, and wire grate flooring so the water wouldn't collect. This was probably only 3 seconds of a dream that I went in and out of all night, but my brain gives it all very intense detail.

[saraha]

I do and 1 of my daughters do. The rest, not so much

[SKL]

It is my norm to dream in great detail, color, sound, texture, with some level of plot and logic.

[Terabith]

20 minutes ago, SKL said:

It is my norm to dream in great detail, color, sound, texture, with some level of plot and logic.

Do you have background music?  I do sometimes!  And a couple of times, I've had credits.  

[Scarlett]

1 hour ago, Terabith said:

Do you have background music?  I do sometimes!  And a couple of times, I've had credits.  

No credits but I often control my dreams by changing the direction of what seems like is a video camera like they use on movie sets.  

[Terabith]

So, last night I dreamed that I was at a choir retreat, where we were also going to study religious texts.  The choir retreat was being held on this deserted island, surrounded by brackish water and nuclear sludge.  The water was filled with brain eating amoebas.  And the choir retreat was a mixture of adults and high school kids and pretty little kids, like elementary aged, and none of the people around me knew how to find passages in the Bible.  So I was trying to teach people how to use the Bible, but they all had those One Year Bibles, so it really didn't work.  We were also going to read a Jewish novel.  Exodus, by Uri Somebody.  I think my brain was trying to fill in Uri Geller, but filled in Somebody.  It was printed on the book.  But this deserted island had these ghosts or evil spirits or something that kept stealing things.  Like you'd put down a pen or keys or papers, and the evil spirits would wander off with them.  

We were doing team building exercises in this sensory gym, when Disney princesses came in, and we were like, "Hey!  You guys should join our choir!  You are all really good singers!"  So they did.  

A fair amount of dream time was devoted to figuring out what to serve for lunch, especially since there were no pens to write down what people wanted, and we only had awkwardly sized boxes to pack the lunches into.  

We weren't doing a very good job of keeping track of the kids.  They kept disappearing.  I'm not sure if they just disappeared, the way the Disney princesses appeared, or if they wandered off into the snake/ nuclear sludge/ brain eating amoebas beach, or if the evil spirits stole them, or what. But I wouldn't hire us as camp counselors, to be honest.  

But THEN someone cut themselves and decided it would be funny to feed blood to the evil spirits, and I was like, "NOOOOOOO!!!!  DO NOT FEED BLOOD TO THE PREVIOUSLY FAIRLY INNOCUOUS EVIL SPIRITS!"  

But they did anyway, and then I woke up.  

The night before last, I dreamed about going on a cross country road trip with a friend/ math team mate from junior high.  But we weren't stopping and seeing anything; we were literally just driving across the entire country for no reason.  We stopped in Phoenix, and Bill asked me to do some kind of car repair, and I was like, "I have no idea how to do this," but it was extremely stressful.  I was trying to youtube how to fix a radiator or something, and it was not helpful and the wifi kept breaking down.  And we were spending the night in the worst hotel ever.  Bill's entire and very weird family shows up and we're all staying in this hotel room together, and the toilet is out in the open of the hotel room, with a shelf over it so you have to crouch while sitting on it, and really, it was just super awkward, all the way around.  

And I realize I have entirely the wrong clothes for Phoenix, like a parka and fur lined boots or something, even though I own none of these items in real life, and we're eating complimentary (and terrible) breakfast, when my mother comes in and is like, "What are you doing here???"  And then she berates me because my shirt is tacky.  And I'm like, "So, Mom, why are YOU in Phoenix?"  And it turns out that she's moved to Phoenix to go to forensic school, because she got this full scholarship and can take any classes she wants, and in two years, she'll have this forensic science degree, even if she doesn't take any courses in forensic science.  And also they provide, as part of their stipend, 7.5 hours of free cat sitting a week.  I was like, "But Mom, you have no interest in forensic science?  And you don't want to have a job tramping around in the middle of nowhere to find dead bodies with the police in your mid 70's.  You don't like the outdoors, or dead things."  And she says, "Well, true, but your father made me move when I didn't want to move, so now I'm making him move when he doesn't want to."  So, spite moving, I guess?  And then I woke up.  

[J-rap]

I often do, but unless I force myself to think through all the details right after waking up, I forget most of it by the next day.  

Often I think my dreams hold some insight...  But then I don't remember it, so, oh well!

Weirdly, I never see myself in my dreams.  I see other people, places, things, know thoughts, hear sounds, and I'm IN the dream, but I'm still me in that I can't actually see myself...  I'm just seeing things looking out.

[Drama Llama]

My dreams are very short, but I know a lot.  So, like once in 2012, I had a dream that started with me using a key to open a door to a kitchen that looked a lot like mine but a little bigger, and I knew that it was the back door to the White House and that the reason I had a key was because I was Bo Obama's dog walker.  And then suddenly there were all these secret service agents pointing guns at me, and yelling at me to get down and put my hands on my head, and they didn't believe me that I was Bo's dog walker, because how could I have missed the fact that Mitt Romney was president.  And I was lying there wondering 1) How I could have missed the entire election and inauguration, 2) How I was going to convince them I was just really stupid and not a spy who was bad at making excuses 3) If Mitt needed a dog walker and 4) When I would see my dear friend Bo again.  

But even though there was a lot to process in the dream when I woke up, the actual dream was only like 60 seconds, because the secret service is very fast and good at their jobs.  

[Scarlett]

28 minutes ago, Terabith said:

So, last night I dreamed that I was at a choir retreat, where we were also going to study religious texts.  The choir retreat was being held on this deserted island, surrounded by brackish water and nuclear sludge.  The water was filled with brain eating amoebas.  And the choir retreat was a mixture of adults and high school kids and pretty little kids, like elementary aged, and none of the people around me knew how to find passages in the Bible.  So I was trying to teach people how to use the Bible, but they all had those One Year Bibles, so it really didn't work.  We were also going to read a Jewish novel.  Exodus, by Uri Somebody.  I think my brain was trying to fill in Uri Geller, but filled in Somebody.  It was printed on the book.  But this deserted island had these ghosts or evil spirits or something that kept stealing things.  Like you'd put down a pen or keys or papers, and the evil spirits would wander off with them.  

We were doing team building exercises in this sensory gym, when Disney princesses came in, and we were like, "Hey!  You guys should join our choir!  You are all really good singers!"  So they did.  

A fair amount of dream time was devoted to figuring out what to serve for lunch, especially since there were no pens to write down what people wanted, and we only had awkwardly sized boxes to pack the lunches into.  

We weren't doing a very good job of keeping track of the kids.  They kept disappearing.  I'm not sure if they just disappeared, the way the Disney princesses appeared, or if they wandered off into the snake/ nuclear sludge/ brain eating amoebas beach, or if the evil spirits stole them, or what. But I wouldn't hire us as camp counselors, to be honest.  

But THEN someone cut themselves and decided it would be funny to feed blood to the evil spirits, and I was like, "NOOOOOOO!!!!  DO NOT FEED BLOOD TO THE PREVIOUSLY FAIRLY INNOCUOUS EVIL SPIRITS!"  

But they did anyway, and then I woke up.  

The night before last, I dreamed about going on a cross country road trip with a friend/ math team mate from junior high.  But we weren't stopping and seeing anything; we were literally just driving across the entire country for no reason.  We stopped in Phoenix, and Bill asked me to do some kind of car repair, and I was like, "I have no idea how to do this," but it was extremely stressful.  I was trying to youtube how to fix a radiator or something, and it was not helpful and the wifi kept breaking down.  And we were spending the night in the worst hotel ever.  Bill's entire and very weird family shows up and we're all staying in this hotel room together, and the toilet is out in the open of the hotel room, with a shelf over it so you have to crouch while sitting on it, and really, it was just super awkward, all the way around.  

And I realize I have entirely the wrong clothes for Phoenix, like a parka and fur lined boots or something, even though I own none of these items in real life, and we're eating complimentary (and terrible) breakfast, when my mother comes in and is like, "What are you doing here???"  And then she berates me because my shirt is tacky.  And I'm like, "So, Mom, why are YOU in Phoenix?"  And it turns out that she's moved to Phoenix to go to forensic school, because she got this full scholarship and can take any classes she wants, and in two years, she'll have this forensic science degree, even if she doesn't take any courses in forensic science.  And also they provide, as part of their stipend, 7.5 hours of free cat sitting a week.  I was like, "But Mom, you have no interest in forensic science?  And you don't want to have a job tramping around in the middle of nowhere to find dead bodies with the police in your mid 70's.  You don't like the outdoors, or dead things."  And she says, "Well, true, but your father made me move when I didn't want to move, so now I'm making him move when he doesn't want to."  So, spite moving, I guess?  And then I woke up.  

I laughed so hard reading this that Dh wanted to hear.  I could barely read it to him for laughing so hard.  😂😂

Edited December 13, 2020 by Scarlett

[Drama Llama]

3 hours ago, Terabith said:

Do you have background music?  I do sometimes!  And a couple of times, I've had credits.  

When the credits start do you realize it's a dream?  
 

[Terabith]

Just now, BaseballandHockey said:

When the credits start do you realize it's a dream?  
 

Sometimes?  

I've also definitely had dreams that I knew were dreams even as I was dreaming them.  

[Scarlett]

31 minutes ago, Terabith said:

Sometimes?  

I've also definitely had dreams that I knew were dreams even as I was dreaming them.  

With the camera in my dream, I say, no I don’t like this dream, I want to go this way.  

[Terabith]

8 minutes ago, Scarlett said:

With the camera in my dream, I say, no I don’t like this dream, I want to go this way.  

I'm jealous.  Even when I have known I'm dreaming, I can't change them.  I've heard about other people who can though!

[Scarlett]

10 minutes ago, Terabith said:

I'm jealous.  Even when I have known I'm dreaming, I can't change them.  I've heard about other people who can though!

I can’t  always. some of my dreams are amazing and some are just stupid.  Like last night I dreamed my best friend...who like me is 55, was single and interested in my 19 year son.  First of all.  No.  Lol.  She would never be that kind of woman. And in the dream we all had to sleep in the same bed and I said I needed to sleep between them.  🤷🏻‍♀️ 😂 all I can think is that she and I were texting late just before I went to sleep and somehow that became my crazy dream.,

[Junie]

I remember something that happened with my parents regarding their dreams.

My mom was telling my dad about a dream that she had, going into details about the way someone was dressed.  My dad asked her, "How did you know that the jacket was brown?"  "Um, because I saw that it was brown." "You dream in COLOR?!?!"  My dad dreamed in black and white -- until then.  After that conversation he dreamt in color.  I thought it was very interesting.

[Scarlett]

26 minutes ago, Junie said:

I remember something that happened with my parents regarding their dreams.

My mom was telling my dad about a dream that she had, going into details about the way someone was dressed.  My dad asked her, "How did you know that the jacket was brown?"  "Um, because I saw that it was brown." "You dream in COLOR?!?!"  My dad dreamed in black and white -- until then.  After that conversation he dreamt in color.  I thought it was very interesting.

Very interesting!

[Farrar]

I do, but they come and go. Last night I dreamed that a mega-billionaire had printed a symbol on a dollar bill and hidden it somewhere. If you found it, you got to become his heir and get all that money. I was driving a bus or an RV or something from one city to another and stopped to use the restroom in a... library? And I looked up at the light fixture and was like, huh. And there it was. But by the time I got out of the building, I was being chased by people who knew I had it and wanted the money and I had to fight them off to get back to my bus RV thing where my family (some rando dream family) was waiting for me and didn't believe I had the dollar bill.

So. Sometimes.

[Scarlett]

Does anyone watch the sitcom Mom?  Last night's episode I only caught part of but she had a dream that her late husband visited her and she worked out some things with his help in the dream.  That is exactly the kind of dreams I have.  

[Pam in CT]

On 12/12/2020 at 9:12 PM, Terabith said:

So, last night I dreamed that I was at a choir retreat, where we were also going to study religious texts.  The choir retreat was being held on this deserted island, surrounded by brackish water and nuclear sludge.  The water was filled with brain eating amoebas.  And the choir retreat was a mixture of adults and high school kids and pretty little kids, like elementary aged, and none of the people around me knew how to find passages in the Bible.  So I was trying to teach people how to use the Bible, but they all had those One Year Bibles, so it really didn't work.  We were also going to read a Jewish novel.  Exodus, by Uri Somebody.  I think my brain was trying to fill in Uri Geller, but filled in Somebody.  It was printed on the book.  But this deserted island had these ghosts or evil spirits or something that kept stealing things.  Like you'd put down a pen or keys or papers, and the evil spirits would wander off with them.  

We were doing team building exercises in this sensory gym, when Disney princesses came in, and we were like, "Hey!  You guys should join our choir!  You are all really good singers!"  So they did.  

A fair amount of dream time was devoted to figuring out what to serve for lunch, especially since there were no pens to write down what people wanted, and we only had awkwardly sized boxes to pack the lunches into.  

We weren't doing a very good job of keeping track of the kids.  They kept disappearing.  I'm not sure if they just disappeared, the way the Disney princesses appeared, or if they wandered off into the snake/ nuclear sludge/ brain eating amoebas beach, or if the evil spirits stole them, or what. But I wouldn't hire us as camp counselors, to be honest.  

But THEN someone cut themselves and decided it would be funny to feed blood to the evil spirits, and I was like, "NOOOOOOO!!!!  DO NOT FEED BLOOD TO THE PREVIOUSLY FAIRLY INNOCUOUS EVIL SPIRITS!"  

But they did anyway, and then I woke up.  

The night before last, I dreamed about going on a cross country road trip with a friend/ math team mate from junior high.  But we weren't stopping and seeing anything; we were literally just driving across the entire country for no reason.  We stopped in Phoenix, and Bill asked me to do some kind of car repair, and I was like, "I have no idea how to do this," but it was extremely stressful.  I was trying to youtube how to fix a radiator or something, and it was not helpful and the wifi kept breaking down.  And we were spending the night in the worst hotel ever.  Bill's entire and very weird family shows up and we're all staying in this hotel room together, and the toilet is out in the open of the hotel room, with a shelf over it so you have to crouch while sitting on it, and really, it was just super awkward, all the way around.  

And I realize I have entirely the wrong clothes for Phoenix, like a parka and fur lined boots or something, even though I own none of these items in real life, and we're eating complimentary (and terrible) breakfast, when my mother comes in and is like, "What are you doing here???"  And then she berates me because my shirt is tacky.  And I'm like, "So, Mom, why are YOU in Phoenix?"  And it turns out that she's moved to Phoenix to go to forensic school, because she got this full scholarship and can take any classes she wants, and in two years, she'll have this forensic science degree, even if she doesn't take any courses in forensic science.  And also they provide, as part of their stipend, 7.5 hours of free cat sitting a week.  I was like, "But Mom, you have no interest in forensic science?  And you don't want to have a job tramping around in the middle of nowhere to find dead bodies with the police in your mid 70's.  You don't like the outdoors, or dead things."  And she says, "Well, true, but your father made me move when I didn't want to move, so now I'm making him move when he doesn't want to."  So, spite moving, I guess?  And then I woke up.  

Yeah, I have dreams more or less like this about once a week. I remember them when I first wake up, but if I don't do something RIGHT AWAY to keep on holding on to them, like tell my husband or write down a few jog-the-memory images, I usually lose them by the time I'm in the shower.

 

re being able to change the course of a dream mid-stream

On 12/12/2020 at 11:17 PM, Scarlett said:

With the camera in my dream, I say, no I don’t like this dream, I want to go this way.  

When mine get tense -- I often dream that someone is chasing me or stalking me -- I can change the course of the dream by "remembering" oh yeah, I can FLY!! (because turns out, in my dreams, I can fly).  And then as soon as I remember POOF I fly away and all is good, and then usually I wake up.

Dreams are awesome.

[*Jessica*]

7 minutes ago, Pam in CT said:

I can change the course of the dream by "remembering" oh yeah, I can FLY!! (because turns out, in my dreams, I can fly). 

Oh how I miss flying in my dreams!  In my teens I frequently had vivid dreams where I could fly.  They were so real it was always hard to convince myself that I couldn’t do it IRL.  I don’t think I’ve had a flying dream since I had kids.  

I also had a recurring dream about being near a train trestle over a creek.  Someone I knew would be walking on the trestle and not notice a train coming.  I would be yelling and waving and running to get their attention, but they always got hit by the train and shattered like glass.  The days after those dreams were always hard to get through, because I would feel like grieving even though there was nothing to grieve!  I am happy to say I also haven’t had that one in years.  

And I have a recurring sick dream whenever I’m feverish.  Always the same realistic dream of me being small enough to walk a guitar string like a tightrope.  If I fall off, I always wake up puking.  I try reaaaaally hard not to fall, because I hate throwing up. 

I dream of peeing frequently, too, and thankfully have awoken to use the actual bathroom instead of, for an example from last week, peeing the bed because I think I’m peeing in a 5-gallon bucket in my aunt’s dining room?!  🤣 

The ones my husband hates the most are ones where in my dream I’m mad at him for some reason.  My annoyance with him carries over into real life when the dream is that real, and it’s not fair because he didn’t actually do anything!   

This morning I was on a water slide.  That was a weird feeling!

 

[Garga]

I never remembered my dreams for my entire life, until just in the past couple of months. And now when I wake up, I can remember them.  They’ve all been fun dreams, nothing scary.  They are very detailed, lots of color, lots of jumbles of stuff in the setting. 

I’ve been enjoying it while it lasts.

[DawnM]

Yes, sometimes.

[Shoeless]

On 12/12/2020 at 10:26 PM, Terabith said:

I'm jealous.  Even when I have known I'm dreaming, I can't change them.  I've heard about other people who can though!

It's called lucid dreaming. I can do it a little bit, but I have yet to convince my sleep-brain that I have full control in dreams. Like, if I have a nightmare, I will wake myself up by yelling "NO! Wake up!", which gets the job done, but also scares the heck out of DH because I'm yelling in real life, not just in my dream. I know I'm doing it, and in the dream I tell myself to start yelling to wake up.  I wish I could figure out how to handle this differently! 

I can control a little bit of the plot in pleasant dreams, too, but sometimes I choose not to do so. I'm curious to see where my brain will take me. 🙃

[Guest]

I do sometimes have very vivid, detailed and seemingly long-lasting dreams. I also sometimes have dreams in which I have a strong emotion about the circumstances of the dream and it is very hard to shake it off once I am awake. (Numerous times, I have been furious with dh, which I find hard to shelve when I wake; i.e.,“You were so horrible in my dream!”) It’s most upsetting to me when I have a bad dream (usually about something tragic happening) and I cannot go back to sleep because my brain wants to re-enter that story. So I stay up for a few hours to divert my thoughts. 

[Scarlett]

12 hours ago, StillJessica said:

Oh how I miss flying in my dreams!  In my teens I frequently had vivid dreams where I could fly.  They were so real it was always hard to convince myself that I couldn’t do it IRL.  I don’t think I’ve had a flying dream since I had kids.  

I also had a recurring dream about being near a train trestle over a creek.  Someone I knew would be walking on the trestle and not notice a train coming.  I would be yelling and waving and running to get their attention, but they always got hit by the train and shattered like glass.  The days after those dreams were always hard to get through, because I would feel like grieving even though there was nothing to grieve!  I am happy to say I also haven’t had that one in years.  

And I have a recurring sick dream whenever I’m feverish.  Always the same realistic dream of me being small enough to walk a guitar string like a tightrope.  If I fall off, I always wake up puking.  I try reaaaaally hard not to fall, because I hate throwing up. 

I dream of peeing frequently, too, and thankfully have awoken to use the actual bathroom instead of, for an example from last week, peeing the bed because I think I’m peeing in a 5-gallon bucket in my aunt’s dining room?!  🤣 

The ones my husband hates the most are ones where in my dream I’m mad at him for some reason.  My annoyance with him carries over into real life when the dream is that real, and it’s not fair because he didn’t actually do anything!   

This morning I was on a water slide.  That was a weird feeling!

 

I used to have a lot of dreams that focused on me trying to go pee before a trip.  It was always so stressful!

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Scarlett said:

I used to have a lot of dreams that focused on me trying to go pee before a trip.  It was always so stressful!

I’ve had a lot of school-focused dreams throughout my life where I’m trying to find my class for just hours and hours, yet never actually finding my class. 

[Stacia]

Yes, I've always had vivid dreams (whether dreams or nightmares). Some are long, some have continued (sometimes years later), some revisit things, and sometimes I've had an almost perfect repeat of a dream. There are a few that were so striking that I still remember them clearly, even though they were from years & years ago.

All day I've been thinking about all the weirdly specific details from a dream I was having last night.

[Terabith]

I don't remember the details of last night's dreams, but I was murdering people all over the place.  Like blowing up buildings and stuff, and kind of gleeful about it?  Then there was an epic trip through hell and heaven, collecting people named Heather.  And Greek salads featured prominently.  Maybe because it was hell, with all that disgusting feta cheese and olives?