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Dream journal thread
I don't know about you, but I love reading about other people's dreams and occasionally sharing my own.
Let this be a place to share your dreams, whether they're super mundane or absolutely wild. Reply any time you feel like sharing to your last comment, so we have a thread where each top level comment is a different individual.
last night... I had a dream that I was Tom Cruise in a strange and intense Mission Impossible movie. I remember at one point a guy gave me a crossbow to use, found a spot to take a practice shot, bullseyed that shit, and gave crossbow-giver a nod of approval. And this happened near a beach shore. I eventually used this crossbow on the main baddie's two big henchman as they headed towards me on catwalks in some kind of factory (see: end of Terminator 2). The henchmen were huge, and the crossbow bolts didn't faze them. I don't remember if I kicked their asses or got my ass kicked, but that was near the end of the dream.
The night before, I had a dream where me and my brother were both in some kind of barracks/tent in a WW2/Korean War -era situation. A young Kyle Maclachlan was our commanding officer. We weren't infantry, though we wanted to be. Kyle Maclachlan kept reminding us we didn't have what it takes. Despite his reminders, I kept thinking I was an infantryman. Hmm..there was also a storage cupboard with 3x2 doors that opened, somehow revealing 2 or 3 layers of more doors that opened. There were old pictures of us on the internal doors.
I sometimes have dreams where previous dogs we've owned are alive again. I had one last night. We had a whippet who passed away about 8-10 years ago. Last night I dreamt I was riding her like a horse. No idea where we were going but it was night, and possibly snowing. We were on a road, but I think the surrounding area was wooded. Don't remember much else. I do miss her in real life, but I tell her younger sisters stories of her glory days, and she seems to like that.
I once had a "waking" dream in which the only sign that it was a dream was that a dog that hadn't been with us for some time was sleeping at my feet. It was a very disturbing dream, otherwise. A sleep-paralysis type situation where some gnomish dude in a brown-robe & hood (very Jawa-esque) passed by my bed and brushed his finger across my face. Which, of course, freaked me the fuck out. As I couldn't move, I tried to yell at my dog to chase this damned demon thing. Woke up, remembered that I didn't have that dog anymore, and was relieved to know it was a dream.
I don't get them as often as I used to, but my spouse would frequently wake up in the middle of the night to me moaning. In almost every case, I was dreaming that I was alone somewhere (usually my house, but could be just about anywhere), and there was someone sinister hiding nearby. I could tell they were there, and I'm trying to call them out. I'm trying to yell, "Hey! Stop! I see you there!" or something along those lines. But in the dream, and apparently in real life, I can't form the words and it's mostly just "aaaayyyy! aaaaa! oooooo!" It really freaked her out the first time it happened! Now she thinks it's kind of hilarious.
Yea! I experience that too often. It's so fuckin disturbing. Feels like you're trying to yell while experiencing this. Sleep paralysis is definitely no fun.
I had a dream the other night where I met back up with the girl I asked to my senior prom and apologized to her for potentially leading her on because, being ultra gay but ultra closeted at the time, I had no romantic interest in her and just wanted someone fun to hang out with for the evening. Also I had to ask someone because, based on the norms of the culture I was in, a guy not asking a girl to the dance would look, well, ultra gay, and I was desperately trying to avoid calling attention to that sort of thing at the time.
It's funny because in real life she definitely knew already, but in my dream she accepted my apology very graciously and it was a beautiful, touching moment. Then we drove around and a bunch of stuff happened that I can't remember (most of my dreams are like sandcastles that get washed away from my memory as the tide of daytime comes ashore), but I remember the apology part pretty vividly because up until she accepted it I was absolutely mortified that all these years I'd broken her heart or pissed her off or something (again, not true in real life but it felt VERY TRUE in the dream).
Had a COVID anxiety dream last night: pretty much went through a school day where everything bad that could happen did. Kids were coughing like crazy and some were passing out, the power went out so the fans venting my classroom stopped working, people's masks kept breaking so they couldn't keep them on, everything was in crisis so people weren't distancing because everybody was trying to help everyone who was sick, kids and teachers were openly crying, my inbox was full of angry parent emails -- half because I hadn't done enough to protect my students and half because I'd scared the students about something that "isn't real".
It was genuinely awful, and I feel like I did an entire extra workday, in my sleep, during my weekend. So much for relaxing.
I know this topic is over a year old, I probably missed the dream boat... I'm wondering if we could make the dream thread reoccurring since they keep happening? Maybe dreams aren't all that unique and the thread would get old from dream tropes.
Despite that, I'm still going to describe my horrid nightmare I had 2 nights ago. I felt bitter-sweet after waking up since it was the best sleep I had gotten in a while, yet it was plagued by the picture show ouchies.
I was in some sort of island resort promotional thingy with my siblings. We were all sitting in the large dinning hall, my brother faced me with his entire body, knees together, and disclosed to me that he likes feeling a rush and is feeling anxious (insinuating he wants to do drugs/ excessive drinking... which, in real life, I think he has a problem with substance abuse). I told him a suggestion to get a rush by doing an extreme sport or something he's never done before to try and shake the feeling. I brought up surfing, he wasn't interested and wanted to stay in the dinning hall. My other siblings and I went to try surfing, but first, we had to take a safety course.
The safety course was in this large room where all the walls projected a live stream of the ocean at the resort. Out of nowhere, some sort of tsunami came that made the (out of nowhere) "smart" resort into some sort of virus/ rogue thingy.
Somehow we get in contact with my brother, either on the phone or his voice is being projected through the PA system of this rogue resort. He explains the robot in the dinning hall is killing people one by one... but he's sure the robot won't kill him, because the robot loves him. One by one, we hear cracks of bones, squishes of organs, yelps of human bodies, until finally my brother discloses there's 2 people felt, himself and another guy. Then the other guy's death is heard over the PA. My brother won't let up, he says he knows the robot won't ever hurt him, because the robot loves him. And then, I hear his body crack open.
The dream still troubles me.
Couldn't we just make this thread eternal instead? :D
I know psychoanalysis is not very scientific, but I honestly can't think of a better line to help you make sense of dreams like yours. Highly recommend a Lacanian!
But yeah I have so many crazy dreams I could fill a book.
Last night I dreamed that my girlfriend cheated on me. Not sure with who, but I'm pretty sure it was some character from Dawson's Creek because I went to sleep pretty pissed after seeing Joey totally cheat on Dawson with Jack and manage to invert the situation and make Dawson feel guilty for some reason lol.
I'm 100% sure this has nothing to do with our relationship, but I spent the day kinda "pissed" as a joke lol
I wrote more than I was expecting. TLDR: I dinned and old lady
In one of my dreams of today, a fortune teller told me to find a quiet and solitary place to read something and relax, I immediately knew where, somewhere in a small mountain near my house, but I rapidly disregarded the idea because in my mind the chances of meeting a random person there where quite high, even though is not true in real life. I didn't know where to go but I felt adventurous and eager, so I decided to as far as I could possible go.I decided to climb to the top of them mountain and then follow the east road, while walking I had the sensation or more precisely I knew that the world was smaller than it is in real life, somehow Canada was only a few hours away and also there weren't any oceans, every continent was connected.
I didn't realized at the moment but I was walking through lands that I've visited in previous dreams, in my dream it felt as if I've walked for hours, but I'm sure that only a few minutes or even seconds had passed in real life, suddenly I found myself if front of a giant mall, I was also very hungry for all the walking, I decided to enter the mall and look for something to eat but it really that easy, you had to pay in order to enter the mall, at the entrance there was some sort of ticket machine but it only accepted credit card, something that I didn't have with me.
Here's a crazy thing, somehow I knew that I was in South Korea and somehow I knew that in SK is legal to cheat the system if you find a way, and it wasn't that difficult to find a way, you see there where to electric staircases in front of me, one to enter the mall and one to exit the mall, and only the staircase to enter the mall had the ticket machine... but I didn't had to think much, while this thoughts were flowing through my mind I saw somebody entering to the mall through the other staircase, I just followed him.
Despite of how impressive the mall was from outside there wasn't a lot going inside, a shitty internet caffe and a shitty convenience store. I was really hungry, but somehow I also knew that using dollars in SK was illegal. I don't remember if tried to talk with somebody in order to get some food, but I remember that I left still hungry and sad.
I went my way, but now below the mall as it seemed that there was metro station under it, once there I saw a scene taken out of Kowloon, a poorly lit alley with a long but narrow house at the side, outside the house was a big man peeling potatoes and inside there was a young and an old woman watching tv. I decided to try my luck once again, I entered the house and went directly to the old woman, I asked if she knew english and also toll her that I was really hungry and that I had some money with me. Everyone looked at me as if I were crazy, it was obvious that they didn't understand a single word, I was about to left the house disappointed when the old lady stopped, she understood me perfectly.
Here's the craziest par of my dream, at some point during the last scene the old lady became a sentient pig (similar to Porco Rosso) the old lady (now pig) felt so moved about me that she decided to sacrifice herself, in that moment I saw a very anime-like montage: a close-up on lady's face, she nods and now her body moves back until it occupies all the frame, intermediately parts of her body start to became food, one by one, until all is left is his head, all in front of an animated background showing different food stills. So yeah, the lady is dead now.
Here's another crazy thing, while I was walking a became a girl, I don't mean that I acquired a female body but that I completely stopped to being me and became a different person, a late teens or early 20's woman. This is important because once the montage finishes I'm (or the girl) still on the house, but now with plate of food in front of me, and if a very anime and exaggerated way I said: "Wah! I can't believe the old lady sacrificed herself just so I can had something to eat" . I wake up in that moment.
When covid happened I started having really vivid dreams, and started writing them down:
https://tilde.team/~dozens/dreams/
I had a particularly hilarious one that made me want to start this thread. I only got ~3 hours of sleep and couldn't get to sleep after waking up and typing this out because I was laughing so hard.
Warning: Gross, some silly sexual stuff I guess, and references to racism
dreamt that a podcast did a 32 hour episode which they prepared for by having everyone involved shit and cum at the same time and then they watched this same 30 minute video about mumble rap over and over
[a friend] posted it in [a community I'm in] and i didnt believe the shitting and cumming part so joe rogan wAlked over and handed me a laptop with an old collab they did with him where they all shat and came
oh and my family got a new oven
the people who made the mumble rap video were these guys who I watched making a video in my yard which had this character who i think was supposed to be an antisemetic parody based on how they were dressed but in the video they just did exaggerated italian stereotypes and walked around being like EHHHH SPAGHETTI. When they were done I asked about if it was supposed to be antisemetic or what the fucj and they were like yea that's the bit but also in one episode he says the n word and then i went back in my house and my mom had mailed my high school teacher my assignment but it wasnt done and i didnt know what was and wasnt done so then i yelled at her for touching my shit and she tried to blame me too but i didn't touch her shit oh and the podcast from before was a new version of thr worst idea of all time podcast where they just did it all at once
This topic makes me kinda sad, since I think I fucked myself over by learning to lucid dream at a such a young age, and at this point none of my dreams (at least the ones I can remember) really seem to have any poignant, hidden meaning behind them like they seem to for other people. For me, they're all essentially just rehashes of stories, ideas, fantasies, and tropes I have borrowed from movies/shows/books/videogames, that I consciously manifest into being and explore.
The only time I have "normal" dreams, with any unpredictability or strangeness to them, is when I go to bed absolutely exhausted from not having slept for 24+ hours, or when I have the occasional nightmare, but even then I usually pretty quickly become aware that I am dreaming and that stops. And unfortunately every time I have actually made a conscious effort to give up control in my dreams, and just let them flow freely from my subconscious instead of guiding them, they always inevitably end up becoming just a flurry of random images, shapes, colors, and sounds, with no cohesive narrative elements to them. It's just chaos and noise until I get bored of that and let myself slip into being fully unconsciousness again.
At the same time, lucid dreaming is pretty damn fun so I can't complain too much... though I honestly do wonder how healthy it really is for me. Not just from a recuperation aspect, but also from a psychological one, since real life doesn't conform to the same standards and so it can seem rather boring, and unfair/frustrating, by comparison. :(
Anyone else a lucid dreamer here? If so, do you find yourself in a similar predicament?
This is such an interesting perspective to me, as I feel like most people look at lucid dreaming as the ideal, whereas you feel that regular dreaming is more desirable!
Also, for what it's worth, my "dreaming" is hardly what it's cracked up to be, I think because I lack imagination to a degree that might be somewhat neurological. This thread made me think I might have aphantasia, but that doesn't quite capture it, as I have the ability to imagine things but it's really only limited to pre-existing things. I imagine what I know, and pretty much nothing outside of that. Writing fiction is near impossible for me since it always becomes me rewriting my own experiences and just changing the names, for example.
This manifests in my dreams in that there's never anything extraordinary, otherworldly, or inventive about them. Other people talk about flying and visiting amazing or surreal worlds with interesting characters and landscapes and physics and whatnot. Dream worlds are always portrayed as these fantasy lands where one forgets everything they know about the real world. By contrast, the vast majority of my dreams are mundane to the point that they are largely indistinguishable from real life.
When I first started teaching I used to literally go through entire days at my job in my dreams. I remember one week where I was convinced I'd given my students an assignment and they were baffled when I brought it up. I legitimately thought I was subject to some sort of class-wide prank, where they all agreed they would pretend not to know what I was talking about, until I realized that I had given the assignment during dreaming.
Almost every dream I have involves a location I know, people I know or used to know, and some everyday event or task so ordinary that it's not even worth noting. Grocery shopping. Clipping my fingernails. Talking about work. Occasionally dreams will rise above this (such as the "meaningful apology" one I shared here), but not by much. The most "exciting" my dreams ever get are when people who don't know each other in real life interact with one another in the dream, or when a physical space I know isn't where or what it's supposed to be (e.g. I'll be in my "house" but it's really a hotel room I once stayed in). How gripping!
It's also probably worth mentioning that I occassionally I get nightmares as well, and these do rise above my usual humdrum moments, but in a pretty bad way. They almost always involve me trying to run away from something threatening but being unable to move my arms and legs in the dream (in the dream it feels like I am trudging neck-deep through the thickest molasses). I assume this is my brain being aware of my body paralysis during sleep and manifesting it in the dream itself, but I could be way off. Either way, they range from unsettling to terrifying, and, given the choice, I'd much rather have my mundane ones.
I don't know if I would necessarily say that regular dreaming is more desirable, per se... it's just that I haven't had a really cool, strange, totally unpredictable or even a truly pulse-pounding scary dream in so long that it sounds like that would be a nice change of pace, is all. Everything I dream these days results from me recognizing pretty quickly that I am dreaming, and then exerting conscious control over it. And I unfortunately often find myself dreaming basically the same dreams over and over again with only slight variations to the "story" running through my mind, most of the modified elements of which I clearly just ripped off from whatever the latest movie/show or book I consumed.
I have had the occasional totally unique and really interesting lucid dream too, which have inspired some of my story/game ideas and world-building/RPG settings, but those are generally few and far between; The majority wind up feeling like I am simply watching remixed reruns of a somewhat tired, trope-laden TV show... which is probably a lot less romantic than most people assume lucid dreaming will be like. Although maybe that's just due to my being generally pretty lazy, or lacking imagination too though, I dunno. :P
p.s. No offense, but the way you describe your dreams makes me think I should be careful for what I wish for, and stop complaining so much about my own situation though. ;)
p.p.s. Have you ever thought about giving lucid dreaming a try yourself? You say you lack imagination, or perhaps suffer from aphantasia, but who knows... maybe it will unlock something for you if you manage it. I can provide some tips on how to achieve it if you want to give it a go for yourself some time.
This could be hormonal. When I was in my late teens and early 20s I had incredibly vivid, incredibly bizarre dreams and would often wake up with my heart pounding, full of adrenaline. I got fewer and fewer of those as I aged, until recently when I started taking hormones for medical reasons. I still don't get them nearly as often as I did when I was younger, but I get them from time-to-time now. (Although these days, there's not as much adrenaline, either. More just vivid and interesting.)
Hmm, I never considered that as a possibility, but it makes sense. Thanks for the insight!
No worries! That's pretty much why I wrote my comment -- not to demotivate you or anything but just to point out that you're not the only one who finds dreams a bit unsatisfying. I saw in your comment a wistful desire for more that matched my own. :)
Lucid dreaming does sound neat, but I'm not particularly interested in exploring it. I've had long-standing sleep issues in general and consider a night where I even get to a dream-state to be an achievement in and of itself.
The trigger that I found worked best for me, back when I was trying to learn to lucid dream, was looking at clocks and watches. They were always totally unintelligible to me in my dreams, so I intentionally built up a habit of checking the time rather frequently throughout the day in real life, and after a few months that eventually started happening in my dreams too, which finally allowed me to start consistently recognizing that I was dreaming.
NP, I hope it helps your friend!
p.s. Another one that worked for me on occasion was building up the habit of asking myself, "am I dreaming right now?" during my waking hours. It's a bit weird to do that, I know... but once that finally triggered while I actually was dreaming it was like a door swung wide open for me and I was able to transition into fully conscious lucid dreaming more smoothly and completely than I ever had previous to that. It didn't work nearly as consistently as the watch/clock checks did though, and I suspect that every person will probably be different. So your friend will just need to keep experimenting until they find something that works best for them... and who knows, that may even be keeping an eye out for strange staircases. ;)