OT (mostly): Do you have strange dreams?

[Jack]

I tend to have really weird anxiety dreams when I'm worried about something. I would describe them, but frankly, they're really not coherent enough to make a decent description of.

LJ sucketh, no? Whenever shall it work again?

[aderyn_du]

I tend to have really weird anxiety dreams when I'm worried about something. I would describe them, but frankly, they're really not coherent enough to make a decent description of.

LJ sucketh, no? Whenever shall it work again?

Poor LJ had a power outage, I was going through withdrawals. It seems to be up now, though. Slowly moving, but up.

I forgot to say something on topic: Yes, I have wierd dreams. No, I will not qualify that further.

[Jack]

I tend to have really weird anxiety dreams when I'm worried about something. I would describe them, but frankly, they're really not coherent enough to make a decent description of.

LJ sucketh, no? Whenever shall it work again?

Poor LJ had a power outage, I was going through withdrawals. It seems to be up now, though. Slowly moving, but up.

I forgot to say something on topic: Yes, I have wierd dreams. No, I will not qualify that further.

Glorious!

[cowtime]

I had to vote" other" because I can only remember three dreams.

When I was little I dreamed of a design. Just this certain design. The main colors were shades of purple and green. I had this dream several times.

As an adult I dreamed of my mare that I had growing up. She came up from behind me and put her head on my shoulder.

After my dad died a few years ago, I dreamed he and I hugged(I can still feel exactly what that felt like) my younger daughter(the drug addict) was skipping in front of us and he told me she would be ok.

Those are my only dreams as far as I remember.

[izzarina]

I used to have the flying dreams too.....I would run really fast then jump up and kind of glide. I suppose it wasn't REALLY flying (I seem to recall thinking that I wasn't really during my dream), but I could go for a long time. And I've also had the "no brakes" dream a few times. I'll be driving, when all of a sudden I discover that my brakes are gone. This is why (along with the other dream from my earlier post) I tend not to watch as much TV. The shows and movies are enough the first time around...I don't need to "re-watch" them again in my dreams
For the record, that really weird dream that I talked about earlier was not the norm for me. Just so you all know that

[rebl_rn]

I don't usually remember my dreams, but I know I wake up from many of them saying, "well THAT sure was a strange dream!" I know that last night I had a dream with Princess Di in it - although I don't remember now what she was doing.

I sometimes have dreams with a recurring theme of a tornado - I'm never in the tornado, but it's close, yet I'm in a safe place, watching it. I'm always with different people in a different place though. I have these probably every couple of months or so.

I also firmly believe that, on occasion, God does speak to people in dreams. I have had a couple of dreams that I know now were God speaking to me - those are some of the rare dreams that I remember.

Thankfully, I almost never have nightmares (even the tornado dreams aren't really scary, though if I ever really were that close to one I know I'd be scared to death). But the couple I have had were awful - my best friend was electrocuted in one, and my brother's entire family (him, wife, and 5 kids) were brutally murdered in another. Very scary.

Beth

[Darwin]

I've always had lots of fairly vivid dreams. I tend to dream in series.

For a long time, from late high school well into my 40s, I had a set of related dreams that came up a lot. They started out as very frightening dreams about witches. Sometimes they woke me up.

They bothered me enough that I started planning my dreams before going to sleep. In the beginning, I was being chased through a big house, like one of those in old mystery movies with lots of secret passages. Before going to sleep, I would think about how I wanted the dream to develop, and it would pretty much go as I had planned. As the dream developed, instead of being chased by witches, I was hiding in secret places and spying on what seemed to be criminals of some kind. When they spotted me, I'd run up to to the roof and jump off, holding onto the top of a limber tree that would then lower me to the ground.

At some point, I just started jumping off the roof and floating down. This gradually developed into an ability to levitate, and dreams about the big house sort of faded away. After that, many dreams involved levitation. In many cases, I would recall (in the dream) that I had previously dreamed about levitating, but this time I was really doing it. I still have those occasionally.

For the past year or two, I've had lots of dreams about traveling along crowded roads. In many cases the location is some small Japanese market area, with tiny streets in complex layouts. There's a lot about finding alternate routes around traffic or obstacles like rock piles or deep puddles. There's a similar dream where I walk downtown from the Presidio into a fantasy Monterey and catch a series of busses that seem to go through the same sorts of areas.

For a long time after retiring from the Army, I'd have anxiety dreams about living in the barracks and getting ready for a big inspection, but I couldn't find my shoes. Sometimes, I didn't even have a room. In many cases, I had my long hair and beard, and was constantly explaining to people that I was permitted to keep them because I had been forced to stay in for over 30 years.(I retired after 20 years. 30 years is the absolute maximum, with the exception of a few Generals.) Over time, the anxiety level has shrunken to pretty much nil, and I spend a lot of time just wandering around doing interesting stuff.

Sometimes I have dreams about places that seem to be from childhood memories during the dream, but which don't match anything I can recall consciously after I awake. I see a lot of a swampy place that has alligators and turtles--just the kind of place I loved as a boy.

However, on the rare occasions when I dream that I'm in the water, I spend a lot of time avoiding sharks and such.

I generally enjoy my dreams, even when they seem a bit bizarre in retrospect. They are rarely troubling anymore, except for the ones that occur when my bladder is full, which I will thoughtfully refrain from describing here.

I have lots of odd one-shot dreams. A few days ago I dreamed that my older brother (who is now 72) was in a boxing match--and won. (He was a local Golden Gloves champion at some level when he was in high school.) Even during the dream, I thought that it was odd that someone that old should be boxing. I think his opponent was old, too.

If I awaken slowly, I can often remember a lot about my dreams. If there's something that demands my immediate attention, like my wife or the telephone, they'll fade pretty quickly.

I tend to believe that the content of dreams doesn't have a particularly deep meaning. Something I read recently, maybe something by Steven Pinker or the Churchlands, said that dreams seem to be a kind of "insanity". The idea is that our brains are constantly creating our subjective world, and that our waking sensory input sort of "corrects" the brain's tendency to just keep chugging along in any old direction, dragging us back to "reality". When we sleep, our sensory input is cut off or reduced, so there is nothing to keep the brain on track. I think that this is something that's just beginning to be explored. (Our household goods finally shipped from California today. I'll be glad to have access to my books again.)

[Jack]

I tend to believe that the content of dreams doesn't have a particularly deep meaning. Something I read recently, maybe something by Steven Pinker or the Churchlands, said that dreams seem to be a kind of "insanity". The idea is that our brains are constantly creating our subjective world, and that our waking sensory input sort of "corrects" the brain's tendency to just keep chugging along in any old direction, dragging us back to "reality". When we sleep, our sensory input is cut off or reduced, so there is nothing to keep the brain on track. I think that this is something that's just beginning to be explored. (Our household goods finally shipped from California today. I'll be glad to have access to my books again.)

I read it in a book by Sylvia Browne (such a reliable source, eh?) that dreams are "a way to go safely and quietly insane every night of our lives".

[Tak_the_whistler]

In the dream I had yesterday, I, Tak,

...fogot the rest



can't seem to remember.

I do sometimes have a dream that I'm flying or riding in a rollercoaster, but according to Freud it's... nevermind.

Some say it's a very good idea to keep track of the dream you had. Develops your memorisation abilitiy etc. Some others say occasionally God talks to them in dreams, which I also think it true. I remember someone talking to me and he told me he (in his dream) was in a battlefield. Everyone else around him were just dead -- but he found a man who was holding a white flag in his hand, and it read; "God is good".

[Daniel_Bingamon]

I used to have the flying dreams too.....I would run really fast then jump up and kind of glide.

I used to have similar dreams long ago. I've also had dreams about falling from a tree. They used to say that you would die when you land - but that's not true because I have landed on numerous occasions - you feel your entire body sink into the bed deeper - it's so real.

[Jennie]

Once I had a falling dream in which I fell for a long long time, speaking with people who lived in grottoes along the cliff face, as I went. Then I realized I wasn't going to survive unless I grabbed something. I found a small limb and hung on--hard--until I woke up and realized it was my husband's nose. I thought it was pretty silly and had a hard time stopping laughing. But he was fairly grumpy about it.

(He's not my husband now. Vince, the one I married afterward, knows better than to get grumpy when I grab his nose !)

Jennie

[jbarter]

Dale, lock this thread before Amar sees it. You really don't want to know about his dreams.

[Nanohedron]

Aren't all dreams strange? Mine are, and in color. When I'm flying, I always seem to wind up far in outer space, usually tumbling around with weird extraterrestrial creatures.

Come to think of it, it actually makes some sense when I consider who's doing the dreaming...

[Sunnywindo]

Used to have a lot of strange dreams when I was younger.

Got a recurring thing going... dreams typically involving the house I grew up in, or a grandparents house, with a paticular involvment of old, dusty attic full of interesting stuff I want to get to but can't. The stairs are falling apart, lack of stairs, lock on the door, door nailed shut, etc. The strange part about the attic thing is that finally, about two or three years ago, I dreamed that I was finally able to get to the attic and it was all clean and open and empty, new and remodeled like a place that's all ready for someone to move in... except for one little tiny one windowed room that was as cluttered and dusty as the old attics had been, just very small. For some reason, that room didn't bother me and I didn't feel like I needed to get in there, being just happy with the vast and newly remodeled part of the attic. I haven't dreamed of attics since. (Did figure the what and why of that one out.)

Then since graduating high school, an added dimension of dreams involving different aspects of school (like not being able to find my class, being late, losing homework, can't find locker, etc) or the school building itself (completely unrelated things happening inside the boundries of the school building, like going to church or shopping for a car or going to a movie). Yet another reoccuring theme is beach/ocean related dreams... but those are usually pleasent, like picking up fun things washed in by the tide.

But over the last year or so, I'm doing good to recall having dreamt anything at all. Get the a very vague impression of having had a dream, but that's about it.

Did a research paper on dreams once, and am of the opinion that dreams really do have meaning and purpose but as to the meaning I think that's best left up to the dreamer to figure out. All the saying that dreaming of ABC means XYZ like some kind of cookie cutter just doesn't ring true... people are as varied as the sands of the sea and cookie cutters don't always work.

Sweet dreams...

Sara

[aderyn_du]

Aren't all dreams strange? Mine are, and in color.

Are there really people who in dream in black and white? I don't think I've ever had that happen...