MetaTalktail Hour: ✨I Dreamed a Dream✨ June 8, 2019 7:04 AM Subscribe
For this Euro time shift edition of Metatalktails we want to tiptoe into your dreams and ask you to tell us something you feel like sharing about your adventures with Queen Mab. Have you ever had repetitive or serial dreams? Do you have special themes that recur in your dreams? Have you ever solved a problem or puzzle by dreaming the solution? Have you ever been a different person in a dream? Ever had a dream come true?
Is there a single dream that stands out to you for some reason (best, strangest, most convoluted or elaborate, most surprising?) Are you a lucid dreamer? Can you prompt yourself to have certain types of dreams? Do you usually remember your dreams, or do you struggle to grasp at their gossamer shreds as they melt away with the dawn? Have you ever kept a dream journal? What did you learn? Do you have dream companions, or do you mostly fly solo? Do you fly — do you ever have super powers or skills in your dreams? Do you ever recognize symbols or clues in your dreams? Have you ever written, painted, created or built something that came to you in a dream? If your dream were a film, who would be the director?
Tell us what the sandman has whispered in your ear ... or just share what's been happening with you lately!
Is there a single dream that stands out to you for some reason (best, strangest, most convoluted or elaborate, most surprising?) Are you a lucid dreamer? Can you prompt yourself to have certain types of dreams? Do you usually remember your dreams, or do you struggle to grasp at their gossamer shreds as they melt away with the dawn? Have you ever kept a dream journal? What did you learn? Do you have dream companions, or do you mostly fly solo? Do you fly — do you ever have super powers or skills in your dreams? Do you ever recognize symbols or clues in your dreams? Have you ever written, painted, created or built something that came to you in a dream? If your dream were a film, who would be the director?
Tell us what the sandman has whispered in your ear ... or just share what's been happening with you lately!
My very favorite dreams are the ones where, as part of the plot, I dream I’m watching a movie or play or tv show—and then I dream the show within the dream! Bonus dream! I have these a couple of times a year.
My recurring stress dream is the typical “I’m in grad school but haven’t gone to any classes past the first week and I’m supposed to graduate soon and how am I ever going to pull this off” saga. Good times.
In other news—it’s a gorgeous morning, I got up early and did the only thing I absolutely had to do today, and I’m spending the rest of the day reading, cooking something yummy for dinner, and playing with my lovely cat. A nap will probably slide in somewhere. Things are really good right now.
posted by bookmammal at 7:18 AM on June 8, 2019 [10 favorites]
My recurring stress dream is the typical “I’m in grad school but haven’t gone to any classes past the first week and I’m supposed to graduate soon and how am I ever going to pull this off” saga. Good times.
In other news—it’s a gorgeous morning, I got up early and did the only thing I absolutely had to do today, and I’m spending the rest of the day reading, cooking something yummy for dinner, and playing with my lovely cat. A nap will probably slide in somewhere. Things are really good right now.
posted by bookmammal at 7:18 AM on June 8, 2019 [10 favorites]
Cameron Esposito is going to be in Toronto this month but all the shows were already almost all sold out when I tried to get tickets. I guess I was more disappointed by this than I realized because that night I had a dream that I met her in a hallway and she said "oh, i can get you tickets and we can hang out!" And I was very confused and said "like...a date? But you will be on stage?" And she said "No, really it will be fun!"
In summary: my dreams are often vignettes featuring celebrities.
posted by janepanic at 7:39 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
In summary: my dreams are often vignettes featuring celebrities.
posted by janepanic at 7:39 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
When I have a problem to solve I'll dream about it until I have a solution. Problem could be anything from a literal math problem to interpersonal issue that needs to be addressed. I used to even dream about organizing a papers back in school. If it's a stressful problem and I come up with a solution, I can actually feel the stress drain away and I then fall into a restful sleep.
My just general stress/ anxiety dream is that I've forgotten to do homework, sometimes for the whole term. I've never had the taking a test without studying dream or missing class. It also always seem like it's just barely possible to finish whatever it is, so I'm scrambling to do so.
Weirdest dream: aliens destroyed the world, but then brought everything back because someone didn't file the correct paperwork on time. The Earth is then occupied by alien forces while they figure out what to do. Some people (including me) have to work on their space station. I help lead a revolt and then win the super bowl somehow. I'm not sure where playing football came in, and even my dream self was so "WTF?!" it literally woke me up and I was very confused.
posted by ghost phoneme at 7:56 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
My just general stress/ anxiety dream is that I've forgotten to do homework, sometimes for the whole term. I've never had the taking a test without studying dream or missing class. It also always seem like it's just barely possible to finish whatever it is, so I'm scrambling to do so.
Weirdest dream: aliens destroyed the world, but then brought everything back because someone didn't file the correct paperwork on time. The Earth is then occupied by alien forces while they figure out what to do. Some people (including me) have to work on their space station. I help lead a revolt and then win the super bowl somehow. I'm not sure where playing football came in, and even my dream self was so "WTF?!" it literally woke me up and I was very confused.
posted by ghost phoneme at 7:56 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
I like to keep dream journals because they make the dreams of the nights following more elaborate, with better story structure. I don't know how this works. I will base stories on images and concepts from dreams, although I work them up according to the actual rules of narrative, of course. In fact, I've just gotten a short story accepted that was inspired by a dream.
Once I was stalled on a story I was writing, and before I went to bed, I thought very seriously: dream, tell me the next part of this story; let me know how it goes. In the dream, I met William Faulkner, dressed as an old-time postmaster behind the counter of his post office. He carved me an egg. It was a wooden egg with a cutaway, like a section lifted from a diagram of the planet to show the core. The wood was in pressed layers; the core was black rubber. The surface of the egg was smooth, dark violet, with the words Vermont Maple carved on it in script.
This did not help in the slightest.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:05 AM on June 8, 2019 [37 favorites]
Once I was stalled on a story I was writing, and before I went to bed, I thought very seriously: dream, tell me the next part of this story; let me know how it goes. In the dream, I met William Faulkner, dressed as an old-time postmaster behind the counter of his post office. He carved me an egg. It was a wooden egg with a cutaway, like a section lifted from a diagram of the planet to show the core. The wood was in pressed layers; the core was black rubber. The surface of the egg was smooth, dark violet, with the words Vermont Maple carved on it in script.
This did not help in the slightest.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:05 AM on June 8, 2019 [37 favorites]
I have dreams where something happens that should kill me, but instead I sort of POV shift into another person at the last second. Like, I'll fall from a building and just before I hit the ground, I'm suddenly a bystander watching someone else getting a drape put over them by paramedics on the sidewalk. Or I'm about to crash my car, then am suddenly a block away looking at some wreckage. (I never see the actual death.)
I have a suspicion this is a common thing, but I've never really come up with a search term that would help me look for it.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:10 AM on June 8, 2019 [11 favorites]
I have a suspicion this is a common thing, but I've never really come up with a search term that would help me look for it.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:10 AM on June 8, 2019 [11 favorites]
My dreams are like someone took ten second clips from a bunch of movies, strung them together via some weak commonality (e.g. this clip has actor A, so the next clip is another completely different clip with actor A, but that clip takes place on a train so the next clip is a different movie set on a train with a completely different actor), and called it a story. I don’t think people truly comprehend what I mean when I say they make no sense. I read SFF, I can handwave a lot of nonsense but there literally is no coherent plot, cast, or setting for longer than 30 seconds.
My partner, on the other hand, basically dreams full novels with fucking foreshadowing and Chekhov’s guns and shit. There’s themes and character arcs. The plots all make sense. It’s incredible. They’ve literally turned dreams of theirs into short stories with minimal plot and character tweaking. And the thing is they’ll wake up in bed and turn and tell me all about this dream they just had, so it’s not like they’re mulling over it and making it make sense before they tell me. No. They just DREAM LIKE THAT. I’m so jealous.
posted by brook horse at 8:17 AM on June 8, 2019 [12 favorites]
My partner, on the other hand, basically dreams full novels with fucking foreshadowing and Chekhov’s guns and shit. There’s themes and character arcs. The plots all make sense. It’s incredible. They’ve literally turned dreams of theirs into short stories with minimal plot and character tweaking. And the thing is they’ll wake up in bed and turn and tell me all about this dream they just had, so it’s not like they’re mulling over it and making it make sense before they tell me. No. They just DREAM LIKE THAT. I’m so jealous.
posted by brook horse at 8:17 AM on June 8, 2019 [12 favorites]
Oh! I do have the power to rewind time in all of my dreams, though. It’s a little shaky, sometimes, but I can always get to before the horrible thing happens and make it go a different way (before I lose the plot/character/setting entirely).
posted by brook horse at 8:20 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by brook horse at 8:20 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
When I was a kid, I lost my favorite stuffed tiger when I was visiting a neighbor’s summer cabin, and for ages I had a recurring dream about being reunited with him. One day about a year and a half later, the neighbor popped his head over the fence and said he had something for me. In the box - the tiger. He’d been found in a hedge when prepping the cabin for the next season. I still have him.
As an adult I had a recurring dream about reuniting with an ex. This did not happen! I’ve been happily partnered with my spouse for fifteen years now. But it was strange to me how long those dreams lasted.
The other night I had a dream that one of my teeth was coming loose - different in character from that weird crumbling-teeth dream that is straight out of the dream cliche book, which I’ve had many times - and this morning Little eirias told me she has her first loose tooth. :)
posted by eirias at 8:22 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
As an adult I had a recurring dream about reuniting with an ex. This did not happen! I’ve been happily partnered with my spouse for fifteen years now. But it was strange to me how long those dreams lasted.
The other night I had a dream that one of my teeth was coming loose - different in character from that weird crumbling-teeth dream that is straight out of the dream cliche book, which I’ve had many times - and this morning Little eirias told me she has her first loose tooth. :)
posted by eirias at 8:22 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
I've had a recurring dream in which I am in a very familiar house. It is never my own, it's always a relative or friend's house. I open a door to do something mundane like hang up my coat. The door instead leads into an area of the house that I did not know existed. Sometimes it's just an ordinary room, in keeping with the rest of the house. Other times it's been a dusty attic full of strange things covered in cobwebs, or a series of rooms. Only once that I can remember was there anyone in there, an old woman sitting at a loom or a quilting frame. The real house of that dream was only a few years old so it wasn't a ghost of a former inhabitant and I don't believe in ghosts anyway.
When I wake up from the dream I spend a few moments trying to figure out how it's physically possible for there to be a space I didn't know about, sort of drawing blueprints in my head to figure it out, until I remind myself that it's a dream.
posted by mareli at 8:23 AM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
When I wake up from the dream I spend a few moments trying to figure out how it's physically possible for there to be a space I didn't know about, sort of drawing blueprints in my head to figure it out, until I remind myself that it's a dream.
posted by mareli at 8:23 AM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
My dreams are very important to me. Multiple times in my life, I’ve had a dream that prepared me for something I was about to face unexpectedly—not in any way predicting an event, but clarifying my own feelings for me in a strong way right before something happened that would have muddled them. My dreams let me know when I’m finally ready to let go of an ex-boyfriend (sometimes years after I’ve thought I was over it), or the stress from a project. I take my dreams seriously.
I have never been another person in my dreams! But I often fly—not like a bird, but as a way of walking, almost, with ease. I just push off and move through the air.
posted by sallybrown at 8:52 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
I have never been another person in my dreams! But I often fly—not like a bird, but as a way of walking, almost, with ease. I just push off and move through the air.
posted by sallybrown at 8:52 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
Also, I definitely have the problem of letting go of dream feelings—like when my dream involves someone I know doing something cruel, I have trouble shaking it off the next day. Even though I know it isn’t real!
My most stressful dream was the one in which I was pregnant with a family member’s surrogate child and somehow forgot about it for months, while doing all kinds of carousing and drinking. If you thought the dreams about forgetting to drop a class were bad...
posted by sallybrown at 9:02 AM on June 8, 2019 [8 favorites]
My most stressful dream was the one in which I was pregnant with a family member’s surrogate child and somehow forgot about it for months, while doing all kinds of carousing and drinking. If you thought the dreams about forgetting to drop a class were bad...
posted by sallybrown at 9:02 AM on June 8, 2019 [8 favorites]
I used to have a recurring dream of tornados approaching. They were always in the distance, but heading this way– the dream was about the dread of the impending chaos. I used to be drawn to situations where I was working for/under the thumb of wildly chaotic people – so the dreams emerged when I was feeling the world about to spin out of control.
I've had some premonition-type dreams– usually they are very matter-of-fact. Also one very vivid one which I thought might be some sort of premonition as well. This dream woke me out of a sound sleep at 3:00 am. It was a non-English word I didn't recognize, in large white type against a black background, large and intense as though someone really wanted to break through to me with this word.
I woke up, rolled over and grabbed the iPad and googled the word. It was a European family name, of some mid-level nobility, in a part of Europe near where my father's forebears had emigrated from (but not any name that I'd ever seen connected with his ancestry.) To my knowledge it wasn't a name I'd seen or read before.
So: fast forward two years and I was divorced and unexpectedly living and working in Europe. For a milestone birthday, I decided to try and research the name a bit more. I discovered that there was a castle by that name– so I made plans to travel to that country and hike to the castle. I made the trek via many trains to the village near the castle, and on my birthday set off through the fog to reach it.
It's a minor tourist destination, and wasn't crowded on that misty, rainy day. I kept expecting to turn a corner and see a portrait that looked like a relative, or to have some other transcendent experience. Nothing so striking happened. But, on that birthday, it did feel like I was connecting with part of my history, even though I don't know exactly what the connection is. I feel like there's more to the story to be discovered. (AND discovered that there are TWO castles bearing that name. I still haven't traveled to the other...)
posted by profreader at 9:02 AM on June 8, 2019 [9 favorites]
I've had some premonition-type dreams– usually they are very matter-of-fact. Also one very vivid one which I thought might be some sort of premonition as well. This dream woke me out of a sound sleep at 3:00 am. It was a non-English word I didn't recognize, in large white type against a black background, large and intense as though someone really wanted to break through to me with this word.
I woke up, rolled over and grabbed the iPad and googled the word. It was a European family name, of some mid-level nobility, in a part of Europe near where my father's forebears had emigrated from (but not any name that I'd ever seen connected with his ancestry.) To my knowledge it wasn't a name I'd seen or read before.
So: fast forward two years and I was divorced and unexpectedly living and working in Europe. For a milestone birthday, I decided to try and research the name a bit more. I discovered that there was a castle by that name– so I made plans to travel to that country and hike to the castle. I made the trek via many trains to the village near the castle, and on my birthday set off through the fog to reach it.
It's a minor tourist destination, and wasn't crowded on that misty, rainy day. I kept expecting to turn a corner and see a portrait that looked like a relative, or to have some other transcendent experience. Nothing so striking happened. But, on that birthday, it did feel like I was connecting with part of my history, even though I don't know exactly what the connection is. I feel like there's more to the story to be discovered. (AND discovered that there are TWO castles bearing that name. I still haven't traveled to the other...)
posted by profreader at 9:02 AM on June 8, 2019 [9 favorites]
Reading these is so interesting!
I’ve never had a flying dream, or the “undiscovered rooms in the house” dream. But I used to have what I called “novel dreams”—full stories with plot twists, lots of characters, etc. Now that I have more trouble sleeping I don’t have those dreams anymore and I miss them.
posted by bookmammal at 9:05 AM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
I’ve never had a flying dream, or the “undiscovered rooms in the house” dream. But I used to have what I called “novel dreams”—full stories with plot twists, lots of characters, etc. Now that I have more trouble sleeping I don’t have those dreams anymore and I miss them.
posted by bookmammal at 9:05 AM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
Who's Queen Mab? Never heard of her.
Anyway, here goes. This peculiar, very detailed dream is one I had several years ago.
Funny is that the dream leaves open whether I am a man or a woman here. Furthermore you can see that I don't in reality know all kinds of details about the different branches of Christianity; in a dream, of course that's no problem, then you can get away with vagueness and a general awareness of 'I know this, at least in this dream'.
I was standing with my small suitcase in a soberly decorated room with table, chair and bed. There was a window that looked out onto a steeply sloping field, consisting of strips of smooth rock alternating with green. There was also a window next to the door, but there was frosted glass in it. I was happy about that, because it gave me some privacy and this would be my room for the near future.
I had just arrived and I was the new pastor* of the church.
An undergarment and upper garment (a kind of robes) were laid out for me, my official clothing; I knew the French names of the garments and how they should be worn. I put them on. They fitted.
I looked outside again at the sloping rocky field, and thought something like, "If that is God's field, God's water will be at the bottom very quickly"**.
A tall, pale man in a black robe entered the room. He put his hands on my shoulders, as if to feel how the garments fitted. I considered how I would address him: "My son" was the right form, but for that it was perhaps a little early and he was quite a bit older than me. "Brother" was probably too congenial and did not radiate authority. I decided to leave the matter open by omitting the title.
'Was that you who assessed me so correctly?' I asked, referring to the clothing. He answered 'no'.
We each sat down on a chair, and he made a comment about the one I was succeeding, by which he seemed to want to inquire about the course that I wanted to take.
'I strive to encourage people to use their own conscience as much as possible.'
After a short silence he said: 'I will have to resist that with all my might'.
I had not expected this quick and forceful rejection. In an effort to profile myself as a moderate preacher, that no one could object to, I said, 'I have no intention of preaching hell and damnation every day. But I'm not going to tell people that everything in the world is nice, sweet, and good, either.'
~~The End~~
* Pastor/vicar/minister/priest/preacher... what do I know. One of those.
** After the Dutch expression to let God's waters flow on God's fields which means: to let things run their course. Dream-me was probably trying to make a little joke here.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:40 AM on June 8, 2019 [11 favorites]
Anyway, here goes. This peculiar, very detailed dream is one I had several years ago.
Funny is that the dream leaves open whether I am a man or a woman here. Furthermore you can see that I don't in reality know all kinds of details about the different branches of Christianity; in a dream, of course that's no problem, then you can get away with vagueness and a general awareness of 'I know this, at least in this dream'.
I was standing with my small suitcase in a soberly decorated room with table, chair and bed. There was a window that looked out onto a steeply sloping field, consisting of strips of smooth rock alternating with green. There was also a window next to the door, but there was frosted glass in it. I was happy about that, because it gave me some privacy and this would be my room for the near future.
I had just arrived and I was the new pastor* of the church.
An undergarment and upper garment (a kind of robes) were laid out for me, my official clothing; I knew the French names of the garments and how they should be worn. I put them on. They fitted.
I looked outside again at the sloping rocky field, and thought something like, "If that is God's field, God's water will be at the bottom very quickly"**.
A tall, pale man in a black robe entered the room. He put his hands on my shoulders, as if to feel how the garments fitted. I considered how I would address him: "My son" was the right form, but for that it was perhaps a little early and he was quite a bit older than me. "Brother" was probably too congenial and did not radiate authority. I decided to leave the matter open by omitting the title.
'Was that you who assessed me so correctly?' I asked, referring to the clothing. He answered 'no'.
We each sat down on a chair, and he made a comment about the one I was succeeding, by which he seemed to want to inquire about the course that I wanted to take.
'I strive to encourage people to use their own conscience as much as possible.'
After a short silence he said: 'I will have to resist that with all my might'.
I had not expected this quick and forceful rejection. In an effort to profile myself as a moderate preacher, that no one could object to, I said, 'I have no intention of preaching hell and damnation every day. But I'm not going to tell people that everything in the world is nice, sweet, and good, either.'
~~The End~~
* Pastor/vicar/minister/priest/preacher... what do I know. One of those.
** After the Dutch expression to let God's waters flow on God's fields which means: to let things run their course. Dream-me was probably trying to make a little joke here.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:40 AM on June 8, 2019 [11 favorites]
Last night I dreamed that I was watching a bad movie with an old friend I haven’t seen in a while. I like that even my dreams are unambitious.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:47 AM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:47 AM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
I never remember my dreams, I’m having a sleep study next week as I’m sleeping really badly, definitely linked.
In other news it’s my birthday today! It’s a long weekend in France so I will celebrate with most of my friends next weekend when everyone is here, but I had a nice lunch with a couple of friends.
posted by ellieBOA at 10:07 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
In other news it’s my birthday today! It’s a long weekend in France so I will celebrate with most of my friends next weekend when everyone is here, but I had a nice lunch with a couple of friends.
posted by ellieBOA at 10:07 AM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
As a sober person, my worst dreams are dreams where I'm drinking. Often the dream just starts and I realize I'm already drinking and it's so upsetting. The worst was when I was drinking and trying to hide it from everyone around me (as I always did), but the bottom of my glad was convex so I couldn't put it down. The feelings it brings up of guilt, shame, dissapointment, etc are so crazy strong.
That said, they're just dreams! And there are fewer and fewer each year. :)
posted by kinsey at 10:16 AM on June 8, 2019 [14 favorites]
That said, they're just dreams! And there are fewer and fewer each year. :)
posted by kinsey at 10:16 AM on June 8, 2019 [14 favorites]
I obviously read too much as a kid, as I have weird, fantasy based dreams. Dragons, monsters, quests, romance, all that jazz. So I guess put me down as "novel" dreams too. Sometimes from the point of view of multiple characters. Once going backwards in time. It's rare that I dream about people I know, it's more common to have a full cast of strangers. I've had dreams that I'm a god twice, which I'm sure says something about me, although hell if I know what.
I can have superpowers / guns as long as I strongly believe I do - the second I have any doubt that I can make fire shoot from my hands, it won't. I can never fly - at best I achieve video-game esque low gravity where I can jump very, very high.
What is weird though is that dream me is not particularly attached to my gender. Sometimes I'm a man and it feels perfectly normal. I'd love to know how common this is, as it doesn't happen to anyone else I know in real life.
posted by stillnocturnal at 10:29 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
I can have superpowers / guns as long as I strongly believe I do - the second I have any doubt that I can make fire shoot from my hands, it won't. I can never fly - at best I achieve video-game esque low gravity where I can jump very, very high.
What is weird though is that dream me is not particularly attached to my gender. Sometimes I'm a man and it feels perfectly normal. I'd love to know how common this is, as it doesn't happen to anyone else I know in real life.
posted by stillnocturnal at 10:29 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
Most of my dreams that I remember are stress dreams: the classic stress dream of being late to an exam I didn't study for and for a class I didn't take and I am not able to graduate unless I pass this exam; my childhood dog is alive and looking for me at my childhood house where I no longer live, and I have to get to him in time before he disappears again; missing my flight and being unable to navigate airport/airline bureaucracy; being at a store and not having the money to buy something I have in my hand and need at that moment (usually tampons).
But the most laughable stress dream I had in the past year was one where I was some sort of codebreaker and everyone was counting on me to break a code, like surrounding me as I was doing it, crowded but organized like a NASA control center during a moon landing, and for some reason, part of the cipher involved inputting the name of my favorite character from the Babysitter's Club, which meant I would have to admit publicly that my favorite had been Mallory, which is apparently the least coolest thing a person could ever admit, and I. Just. Couldn't. Do. It.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 10:36 AM on June 8, 2019 [8 favorites]
But the most laughable stress dream I had in the past year was one where I was some sort of codebreaker and everyone was counting on me to break a code, like surrounding me as I was doing it, crowded but organized like a NASA control center during a moon landing, and for some reason, part of the cipher involved inputting the name of my favorite character from the Babysitter's Club, which meant I would have to admit publicly that my favorite had been Mallory, which is apparently the least coolest thing a person could ever admit, and I. Just. Couldn't. Do. It.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 10:36 AM on June 8, 2019 [8 favorites]
I once dreamed I ate a giant marshmallow. When I woke up, my pillow was gone.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:39 AM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:39 AM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
I dream maybe four or five nights a week. Sometimes multiple because old and do that wake up in the middle thing. And I think the old sleep when tired and wake when not thing helps things along a bit. Too many dreams. The thing I've noticed (and have a theory about) is the topology of the territory. There are recurring shapes of places with different set dressings so I can usually pin the landscape down to paths that I know. I think it's the waking up without an alarm clock or whatever that helps in remembering. It's more of a "what was I thinking about before this" almost like I went to sleep at the beginning of the movie and lost interest and woke up at the end and spend a few minutes trying to fill in the pieces.
+++
I'm in total high-anxiety mode because tuesday morning I head back to visit home for my nephew's HS graduation for a long overdue trip with a worrisome mom and neurotic aunts and it's just weird being the one who lives on the other side of the continent and only shows up on occasion. Arrgh, I should start to think about packing and calling the over zealous fraud detection department at the bank and AAARRRRGHHH how the hell am I going to deal with two weeks of AAAARRRRGGGHHH.
But I have a bit of a plan of things... I want to hit the library and check out old yearbooks and take pictures and find names of recurring peeps that I've almost forgotten. I'm thinking about knocking on the door of the old house I used to live in to see if they just might have come across some lost things. And OMG AAAAAARRRRRGGGG. Wish me luck.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:43 AM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
+++
I'm in total high-anxiety mode because tuesday morning I head back to visit home for my nephew's HS graduation for a long overdue trip with a worrisome mom and neurotic aunts and it's just weird being the one who lives on the other side of the continent and only shows up on occasion. Arrgh, I should start to think about packing and calling the over zealous fraud detection department at the bank and AAARRRRGHHH how the hell am I going to deal with two weeks of AAAARRRRGGGHHH.
But I have a bit of a plan of things... I want to hit the library and check out old yearbooks and take pictures and find names of recurring peeps that I've almost forgotten. I'm thinking about knocking on the door of the old house I used to live in to see if they just might have come across some lost things. And OMG AAAAAARRRRRGGGG. Wish me luck.
posted by zengargoyle at 10:43 AM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
I dream of plants. Or of whatever book I'm reading. Considering the book I'm reading lately... my dreams have been ultra weird. Think little shop of horrors.
Earlier this week I got some work done, putting the last of my cucumbers in the ground and tut-tutting over my tomatoes. The borage is beautiful, and so is my little pot sunflower. In wacky SF weather news, on Monday it drizzled rain, and today it is forecast to hit 86 degrees. I... hope my tomatoes like it- because I DO NOT. On Wednesday I finally got the soil I've needed for a while... and some more plants of course. An employee discount is a dangerous thing! Then it was work time on Thursday! I ripped out the carrot bed and re-sowed, and filled up my potato bags with dirt. One of the greatest things about my job is all the knowledge I'm accumulating. I knew you can't use conventional fertilizers with carrots or potatoes- you'll get too much top and not enough root- but I finally figured out the right fertilizer- neem seed meal. Same plant that makes that merry aphid killer neem seed oil. Then it was onto the hard work, fixing up the herb bed, planting my late season tomatoes, and trying out my two new experiments.
I added three more types of oregano (Mexican, Greek, Syrian) to the herb bed, along with some marjoram. The two late season tomatoes are funny colors, a yellow "Lemon Boy" and a blue cherry "Dancing with Smurfs." Yeah how could I pass that up? I also sowed that bed with borage seed and chive seed in a vain attempt to keep the aphids from my new babies. My experiments are both in ten gallon fabric pots, a pink lemonade blueberry plant, and a tree collard! We'll see if they take. I am very tired, and work is very hard. But very worth it!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:43 AM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
Earlier this week I got some work done, putting the last of my cucumbers in the ground and tut-tutting over my tomatoes. The borage is beautiful, and so is my little pot sunflower. In wacky SF weather news, on Monday it drizzled rain, and today it is forecast to hit 86 degrees. I... hope my tomatoes like it- because I DO NOT. On Wednesday I finally got the soil I've needed for a while... and some more plants of course. An employee discount is a dangerous thing! Then it was work time on Thursday! I ripped out the carrot bed and re-sowed, and filled up my potato bags with dirt. One of the greatest things about my job is all the knowledge I'm accumulating. I knew you can't use conventional fertilizers with carrots or potatoes- you'll get too much top and not enough root- but I finally figured out the right fertilizer- neem seed meal. Same plant that makes that merry aphid killer neem seed oil. Then it was onto the hard work, fixing up the herb bed, planting my late season tomatoes, and trying out my two new experiments.
I added three more types of oregano (Mexican, Greek, Syrian) to the herb bed, along with some marjoram. The two late season tomatoes are funny colors, a yellow "Lemon Boy" and a blue cherry "Dancing with Smurfs." Yeah how could I pass that up? I also sowed that bed with borage seed and chive seed in a vain attempt to keep the aphids from my new babies. My experiments are both in ten gallon fabric pots, a pink lemonade blueberry plant, and a tree collard! We'll see if they take. I am very tired, and work is very hard. But very worth it!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:43 AM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
I have very vivid dreams and I remember them. Recently, most of my dreams have been nightmares, mostly thematically similar in ways that are highly unpleasant. Last night I had a new one!
I took some students to the field (in the rainforest) with me, and we were out in tall grass and I could tell there was a big snake, but before I could get my students out of there, she got bit several times by a king cobra. I brought her into the field station (which was my parents' house) and while she was lying on the floor I was in the other room trying to call 911 to get an ambulance, except that number wouldn't connect and so I was googling other ways to reach emergency services but every number I called was for a subscription-only robocall emergency services thing. And I didn't want to tell anyone I didn't know how to get the ambulance to come, but the student (who had just been screaming, and also doing crossword puzzles) came in (with snake jaws sticking out of her leg) and told me the correct number. We finally got her to the hospital and one of the professors who took me to the field for the first time got her hooked up to this suction cup machine but they decided they actually would need to amputate her leg, and that was when I woke up.
All sorts of anxieties wrapped up in that one, but it shook me up more than a lot of the dreams I've had recently, and I'm in an airbnb and had nobody around for me to hug when I woke up. But I calmed down and made it to ballet class and now I'm going to take a nap before a wedding!
posted by ChuraChura at 10:59 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
I took some students to the field (in the rainforest) with me, and we were out in tall grass and I could tell there was a big snake, but before I could get my students out of there, she got bit several times by a king cobra. I brought her into the field station (which was my parents' house) and while she was lying on the floor I was in the other room trying to call 911 to get an ambulance, except that number wouldn't connect and so I was googling other ways to reach emergency services but every number I called was for a subscription-only robocall emergency services thing. And I didn't want to tell anyone I didn't know how to get the ambulance to come, but the student (who had just been screaming, and also doing crossword puzzles) came in (with snake jaws sticking out of her leg) and told me the correct number. We finally got her to the hospital and one of the professors who took me to the field for the first time got her hooked up to this suction cup machine but they decided they actually would need to amputate her leg, and that was when I woke up.
All sorts of anxieties wrapped up in that one, but it shook me up more than a lot of the dreams I've had recently, and I'm in an airbnb and had nobody around for me to hug when I woke up. But I calmed down and made it to ballet class and now I'm going to take a nap before a wedding!
posted by ChuraChura at 10:59 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
My dreams are about American urban landscapes. These days there are usually people living and working in the dreams, though prior to a few years ago the cities were usually empty except for the people passing through them. The relative decrepitude of the environments has been more or less constant, though. There aren't malls and hotels and shiny office complexes. Instead there are mom-and-pop groceries and appliance stores, narrow, two-lane streets paved with pitted, drooping asphalt and malfunctioning railroad crossings, and the empty old factories whose administrative buildings have been turned into flats. Nothing horrible happens, nothing exciting happens. The places are vivid and tactile, always different, and sometimes after I wake up I can re-navigate the areas to the extent of being able to map them.
As dreams go, they aren't all that odd, I don't think. It's just that I don't often have memorable dreams about anything else.
posted by Subaru drwxrwxrwx at 11:20 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
As dreams go, they aren't all that odd, I don't think. It's just that I don't often have memorable dreams about anything else.
posted by Subaru drwxrwxrwx at 11:20 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
I have a recurring dream where I'm driving in a car over a curvy bridge, or sometimes on a curvy mountain road, and in the dream I'm a little drunk or impaired somehow and am having trouble keeping the car on the road/bridge. Invariably, in the dream, I'll steer the car off the road and then, with the kind of dream logic that makes perfect sense at the time, open the car door and catch the side of the road/bridge with my hands. So now I'm holding myself and my car on this bridge and if I let go, the car will fall but I can't lift the car back up onto the road. So I'm just kind of stuck. Then I panic and wake up. I actively avoid driving on curvy mountain roads because of this dream. My palms get all sweaty and I'm convinced I'm not going to make the curve (something that I have no problem with on flat ground).
posted by Weeping_angel at 11:33 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by Weeping_angel at 11:33 AM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
My recurring dream: I am living in my dorm in Israel (which I left 30 years ago). I am packing to leave but I have accumulated so much in my time there that it won't fit into my 4 (!) bags. I leave a bunch of it there and somehow when I come back a year later, there is no resident living in my dorm and all of the stuff I left behind is still in the closets, but more has accumulated! This one is not hard. I grew up in a hoard house. I moved out of that house into my dorm in Israel.
In garden news, the pickles I'm making have only gotten better and all of the pumpkin seeds I planted have taken, so I'll be taking half of the seedlings to our neighborhood garden food swap next weekend.
Also, in other news, I got to visit Star Wars Galaxys Edge at Disneyland this week. I flew the Millennium Falcon twice and the whole thing exceeded my every expectation. AMA.
posted by Sophie1 at 11:45 AM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
In garden news, the pickles I'm making have only gotten better and all of the pumpkin seeds I planted have taken, so I'll be taking half of the seedlings to our neighborhood garden food swap next weekend.
Also, in other news, I got to visit Star Wars Galaxys Edge at Disneyland this week. I flew the Millennium Falcon twice and the whole thing exceeded my every expectation. AMA.
posted by Sophie1 at 11:45 AM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
My dreams are pretty nutty. I have an “alternate hometown” serial dream in which I have a different apartment, a gym membership, the roads are different, the public transportation is a little different, and the overall layout of the metro area is arranged differently. But it’s consistent from dream to dream, and funnily enough, the real-life development of the light rail and rapid transit lines are being built to match the routes they have in my dreams.
My stress dreams typically involve tornadoes. Like, if I’m feeling particularly stressed about something in real life, I’ll dream that I’m in my house or somewhere, and there will be a tornado warning and I’ll see tornadoes around. These used to be nightmares, but now it’s like “Oh hey, tornadoes, just be careful” and the tornadoes usually don’t do anything.
In falling dreams, I used to wake up before I hit the ground, but started hitting the ground sometime in my early 20s. It’s basically like the world’s biggest OOF feeling, and then I lay there for a while, and then get up and crutch around, and then I’ll be fine.
Over time, my flying dreams have become serialized to the point where I’ve improved my flying skills considerably. I used to be all over the place, crashing into things, flying too high and then crashing to the ground (see above about actually hitting the ground in my dreams), stuff like that. But my motor control and stability have gotten to the point where now I can fly at a level altitude and control my descent. I usually only fly about 20-30 feet above the ground.
I’ve had many dreams that came true, but they’re typically about events that only concern me and which happen in the fairly immediate future. For example, I’ll dream that I’m at a party with someone, and then a few days later, that person will invite me to a party. These dreams have a very distinct “feel” than regular dreams: they’re not just vivid, they feel exactly like real life, and I remember EVERY detail in them as though they are reality-based memories. Regular dreams have surreal elements and fade a little while after waking. I call them “true dreams”, and all the ones I’ve ever had came true, no matter what I did in real life to “defeat” them.
And the worst “true dream” I’ve ever had was this. I was walking on the main road near my house. All the roads were empty of traffic, and I knew that it was because martial law had been declared. The reason was because the president, who was a Republican who had run on a populist/everyguy platform, turned out to be a crazy nutjob, and he was either allowing a terrorist attack to be perpetrated on my city by a foreign country, or having some kind of false flag event. The reason he was doing it to my city was because we were a large enough city for the destruction to grab worldwide attention, but we weren’t strategically important enough (not a major port city, not a hub for any critical infrastructure or industry) such that our destruction would wreck the country’s economy.
In this dream, there had already been one wave of bombs that had leveled downtown, and martial law had been declared because a second wave attack was imminent. These were fuel-air bombs that had incredible destructive force but weren’t nuclear.
So in this dream, I’m walking along the road and I see a coworker of mine drive up in a truck (which would have been extraordinarily unusual, he lives nowhere near me) and we talked and just spent some time in each other’s company for a bit (nothing sexual, just more like taking comfort having another person around). After a few hours, my coworker decided to head out of town to see if he could get to safety, and I decided not to go along because I had pets that I didn’t want to just abandon. I went back to my house. There were some “known” elements in this dream, like the fact that my coworker’s wife and child were out of town, and he had the pick-up as a second vehicle largely to haul around musical equipment and stuff because he was in a band, and that our mutual acquaintances had moved to the West Coast a few years before.
None of these things were true in April of 2012, of course. My coworker wasn’t married, did not have a kid, was not in a band or as far as I knew, even musically inclined, our mutual acquaintances had just bought a house a few months prior and had no intentions of moving.
The last scene of the dream was being in the basement, trying to clear out space to take shelter, when the emergency broadcast tone sounded on the television. Suddenly, a bright light filled the window and I felt the temperature of the room become unbelievably and unbearably hot....and then I woke up.
I had that dream on April 9, 2012, and every single bit of it has come true except for the attack. My coworker got married, had a kid, started playing in a band a couple years ago, our mutual acquaintances moved to the West Coast only 3 months after I had the dream after a surprise job opportunity. All of it.
Of course we haven’t been blown up (yet), and I feel like the window for the actual attack passed in 2017, when Trump was escalating with North Korea and then suddenly the crisis fizzled out. But I had no idea that the kind of bomb in my dream was real, until a couple years ago (and the technology was perfected by the Russians). Needless to say, the last few years have been surreal as hell, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for the last few details from my dream to show up in real life. I feel like 2017 was the point at which the timeline diverged...but as long as Trump’s in office, I suppose I won’t feel safe.
posted by Autumnheart at 12:29 PM on June 8, 2019 [13 favorites]
My stress dreams typically involve tornadoes. Like, if I’m feeling particularly stressed about something in real life, I’ll dream that I’m in my house or somewhere, and there will be a tornado warning and I’ll see tornadoes around. These used to be nightmares, but now it’s like “Oh hey, tornadoes, just be careful” and the tornadoes usually don’t do anything.
In falling dreams, I used to wake up before I hit the ground, but started hitting the ground sometime in my early 20s. It’s basically like the world’s biggest OOF feeling, and then I lay there for a while, and then get up and crutch around, and then I’ll be fine.
Over time, my flying dreams have become serialized to the point where I’ve improved my flying skills considerably. I used to be all over the place, crashing into things, flying too high and then crashing to the ground (see above about actually hitting the ground in my dreams), stuff like that. But my motor control and stability have gotten to the point where now I can fly at a level altitude and control my descent. I usually only fly about 20-30 feet above the ground.
I’ve had many dreams that came true, but they’re typically about events that only concern me and which happen in the fairly immediate future. For example, I’ll dream that I’m at a party with someone, and then a few days later, that person will invite me to a party. These dreams have a very distinct “feel” than regular dreams: they’re not just vivid, they feel exactly like real life, and I remember EVERY detail in them as though they are reality-based memories. Regular dreams have surreal elements and fade a little while after waking. I call them “true dreams”, and all the ones I’ve ever had came true, no matter what I did in real life to “defeat” them.
And the worst “true dream” I’ve ever had was this. I was walking on the main road near my house. All the roads were empty of traffic, and I knew that it was because martial law had been declared. The reason was because the president, who was a Republican who had run on a populist/everyguy platform, turned out to be a crazy nutjob, and he was either allowing a terrorist attack to be perpetrated on my city by a foreign country, or having some kind of false flag event. The reason he was doing it to my city was because we were a large enough city for the destruction to grab worldwide attention, but we weren’t strategically important enough (not a major port city, not a hub for any critical infrastructure or industry) such that our destruction would wreck the country’s economy.
In this dream, there had already been one wave of bombs that had leveled downtown, and martial law had been declared because a second wave attack was imminent. These were fuel-air bombs that had incredible destructive force but weren’t nuclear.
So in this dream, I’m walking along the road and I see a coworker of mine drive up in a truck (which would have been extraordinarily unusual, he lives nowhere near me) and we talked and just spent some time in each other’s company for a bit (nothing sexual, just more like taking comfort having another person around). After a few hours, my coworker decided to head out of town to see if he could get to safety, and I decided not to go along because I had pets that I didn’t want to just abandon. I went back to my house. There were some “known” elements in this dream, like the fact that my coworker’s wife and child were out of town, and he had the pick-up as a second vehicle largely to haul around musical equipment and stuff because he was in a band, and that our mutual acquaintances had moved to the West Coast a few years before.
None of these things were true in April of 2012, of course. My coworker wasn’t married, did not have a kid, was not in a band or as far as I knew, even musically inclined, our mutual acquaintances had just bought a house a few months prior and had no intentions of moving.
The last scene of the dream was being in the basement, trying to clear out space to take shelter, when the emergency broadcast tone sounded on the television. Suddenly, a bright light filled the window and I felt the temperature of the room become unbelievably and unbearably hot....and then I woke up.
I had that dream on April 9, 2012, and every single bit of it has come true except for the attack. My coworker got married, had a kid, started playing in a band a couple years ago, our mutual acquaintances moved to the West Coast only 3 months after I had the dream after a surprise job opportunity. All of it.
Of course we haven’t been blown up (yet), and I feel like the window for the actual attack passed in 2017, when Trump was escalating with North Korea and then suddenly the crisis fizzled out. But I had no idea that the kind of bomb in my dream was real, until a couple years ago (and the technology was perfected by the Russians). Needless to say, the last few years have been surreal as hell, and I’ve been keeping an eye out for the last few details from my dream to show up in real life. I feel like 2017 was the point at which the timeline diverged...but as long as Trump’s in office, I suppose I won’t feel safe.
posted by Autumnheart at 12:29 PM on June 8, 2019 [13 favorites]
I should add that when I had that dream, I told every one of my friends, and again when Trump was predicted to win the primary in 2016, and again when he was elected. So we’re all kind of on low-key alert and have a lightly sketched plan to meet at my place in case of shit hitting the fan. Just in case.
posted by Autumnheart at 12:31 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Autumnheart at 12:31 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
One of my most frequent recurring dream themes is of wandering lost somewhere, looking for someone or something. In my dreams I've been lost in schools, airports, a hospital, the streets of a strange city... always wandering through the hallways, up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, searching for something or someone.
So one time I was at the mall and somehow got separated from my husband. I started walking around the mall, up and down the escalators, in and out of stores, and finally I started to get really frustrated that I couldn't find him. I thought to myself "this reminds me of those dreams I have" and no sooner did I have the thought than I woke up in bed. That was weird.
I have a recurring dream of being in church, but each time it is a different church, and never the one I actually attend. Sometimes I'm in the congregation participating in whatever is happening in the service, other times I'm lost and wandering the building as in the dreams above.
~~~
Another weird feature of my dreams is that my husbands past and present are often interchangeable. Sometimes they sort of morph into one another during the course of the dream, or the guy in the dream looks like one but is actually another. Thankfully, I only have sex dreams about the current one.
~~~
I've had dreams of dead relatives that feel like actual visits. Once I spent some time walking around a huge mall with my mother (deceased) and my grandmother (living), having a nice chat. Another time, I was in DC for my father-in-law's burial at Arlington. I fell asleep in the hotel room and dreamed that he came to hug me goodbye. He never spoke but just hugged me and then left.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 12:51 PM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
So one time I was at the mall and somehow got separated from my husband. I started walking around the mall, up and down the escalators, in and out of stores, and finally I started to get really frustrated that I couldn't find him. I thought to myself "this reminds me of those dreams I have" and no sooner did I have the thought than I woke up in bed. That was weird.
I have a recurring dream of being in church, but each time it is a different church, and never the one I actually attend. Sometimes I'm in the congregation participating in whatever is happening in the service, other times I'm lost and wandering the building as in the dreams above.
~~~
Another weird feature of my dreams is that my husbands past and present are often interchangeable. Sometimes they sort of morph into one another during the course of the dream, or the guy in the dream looks like one but is actually another. Thankfully, I only have sex dreams about the current one.
~~~
I've had dreams of dead relatives that feel like actual visits. Once I spent some time walking around a huge mall with my mother (deceased) and my grandmother (living), having a nice chat. Another time, I was in DC for my father-in-law's burial at Arlington. I fell asleep in the hotel room and dreamed that he came to hug me goodbye. He never spoke but just hugged me and then left.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 12:51 PM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
I have been binge watching Supernatural and I’m also sick, so I just had a fever dream that G-d is Chuck Tingle.
As far as I know, I always lucid dream. At least, all the dreams I remember are lucid dreams. They tend to be formatted as movies or sitcoms, or, in one notable case, a painting. That was awesome. The camera of my mind zoomed in and out on different parts of a very elaborate painting. I’m the director, so if I don’t like a particular scene, I’ll redo it.
I definitely work real life shit out in dreams. I practice upcoming situations, have uncomfortable conversations over and over until they become less uncomfortable, etc. My dreams are my my own personal training grounds.
I’ve had prophetic dreams before but less often since I’ve learned to trust my own intuition. Things like that person really isn’t honest, not like lottery numbers or anything.
posted by Ruki at 1:02 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
As far as I know, I always lucid dream. At least, all the dreams I remember are lucid dreams. They tend to be formatted as movies or sitcoms, or, in one notable case, a painting. That was awesome. The camera of my mind zoomed in and out on different parts of a very elaborate painting. I’m the director, so if I don’t like a particular scene, I’ll redo it.
I definitely work real life shit out in dreams. I practice upcoming situations, have uncomfortable conversations over and over until they become less uncomfortable, etc. My dreams are my my own personal training grounds.
I’ve had prophetic dreams before but less often since I’ve learned to trust my own intuition. Things like that person really isn’t honest, not like lottery numbers or anything.
posted by Ruki at 1:02 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
I have recurring dreams of places I know but that are completely different to their reality. So, our house is a different size and shape and the garden backs onto wasteland, not other gardens; my university is now a sprawling country house on the outside and gleaming glass and metal on the inside, with weird lifts that don't all go to the same places, sometimes turn into strange roller coasters, and I can never find my way across the campus from one side to another; I'm in Birmingham city centre but it looks nothing like Birmingham (which to be fair, is not far from the truth in terms of what I was familiar with when a regular visitor compared to nowadays) or I am walking from the estate I grew up in to Bromsgrove (a place I visited once, many years ago and which you couldn't really walk to easily from my childhood home - about 20 miles away) along bucolic country lanes in about half an hour.
A much worse recurring dream, the one that gives me a sickening feeling (and which has occasioned the dream within a dream within a dream waking mini-nightmare, "oh, it was a dream! Oh no, I'm awake and it's real! Oh now I'm actually awake, thank dog") is a very quick one - I'm looking at a filing cabinet with a number of planning application case files on it that I have completely forgotten to deal with and they have gone over their eight week deadlines. I have been in this profession for 30+ years now but can't decide what to be when I grow up ...
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 1:28 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
A much worse recurring dream, the one that gives me a sickening feeling (and which has occasioned the dream within a dream within a dream waking mini-nightmare, "oh, it was a dream! Oh no, I'm awake and it's real! Oh now I'm actually awake, thank dog") is a very quick one - I'm looking at a filing cabinet with a number of planning application case files on it that I have completely forgotten to deal with and they have gone over their eight week deadlines. I have been in this profession for 30+ years now but can't decide what to be when I grow up ...
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 1:28 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
A couple nights ago I fell asleep listening to an audiobook about someone being held captive. I dreamed I was being held in a dark room, parked in my wheelchair, in front of a computer where a picture of Merlin, my big tabby cat, was displayed. A voice asked me repeated if this a picture of my cat and it insinuated that they would go and take my cat prisoner too. I told them, no, that is not what what my cat looks like and used Photoshop to rearrange the stripe patterns so it looked nothing like Merlin. They left to go look for a nonexistent cat.
Meanwhile, I escaped, and opened the curtains in the room and found out it was the house I had grown up in. I got up (magically didn't need my wheelchair) went out the backdoor and out behind the fence where my mother used to have a garden, were all three of my cats, Merlin, Baby Goat, and Jasper (who has been dead for 3 years.) I was so happy to see the cats, I picked up Jasper and we escaped the area.
In about half of my dreams, I am in a wheelchair and in the other half I'm not. This dream was odd since I was in both states.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 1:32 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
Meanwhile, I escaped, and opened the curtains in the room and found out it was the house I had grown up in. I got up (magically didn't need my wheelchair) went out the backdoor and out behind the fence where my mother used to have a garden, were all three of my cats, Merlin, Baby Goat, and Jasper (who has been dead for 3 years.) I was so happy to see the cats, I picked up Jasper and we escaped the area.
In about half of my dreams, I am in a wheelchair and in the other half I'm not. This dream was odd since I was in both states.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 1:32 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
I had a MetaFilter dream once and posted about it here.
I used to have a lot of flying dreams, but not in a long time. I have a lot of dreams that revolve around houses -- houses I've owned, my parents' house, my grandparents' house, etc.
I also have dreams that are sometimes very weird. One night this past week, I dreamt I was in a public bath with Winston Churchill and a couple of other historically-famous guys (whom I can't recall now), and we were all talking about the benefit of giving yourself a cleansing with mayonnaise. I can still envision the image of slathering mayonnaise all over my leg and scraping it off. Similarly, years ago, I had dreams that featured Francois Mitterand and Yuri Andropov (but not at the same time).
posted by briank at 1:43 PM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
I used to have a lot of flying dreams, but not in a long time. I have a lot of dreams that revolve around houses -- houses I've owned, my parents' house, my grandparents' house, etc.
I also have dreams that are sometimes very weird. One night this past week, I dreamt I was in a public bath with Winston Churchill and a couple of other historically-famous guys (whom I can't recall now), and we were all talking about the benefit of giving yourself a cleansing with mayonnaise. I can still envision the image of slathering mayonnaise all over my leg and scraping it off. Similarly, years ago, I had dreams that featured Francois Mitterand and Yuri Andropov (but not at the same time).
posted by briank at 1:43 PM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
Just last night I had a dream that reminded me of something I'd forgotten. Long ago, when I had a just-above-entry-level Data Entry job, the company subsidized me for a series of computer programming classes at UCLA's Extension. My favorite class was the one on Documentation, because I preferred writing in English. And after I finished the classes, I was reassigned to System Documentation and when finished with that project, I had written my way out of a job and was laid off. That's what happened in REAL LIFE that I had intentionally forgotten. But in last night's dream I was writing User Documentation for a weird video game. It was terribly complicated, alternating between a wartime shooter and a hunting game and you had to change weapons to shoot ducks and enemy soldiers, and when the beta testers had problems I had to do rewrites so my POV alternated between the game and a Word document and at one point I flashed back to the job where I was writing Documentation, except the beta testers were shooting at ME. My dreams are often "busy" but not nightmarish, but that was.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:34 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:34 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
I lay down this afternoon worrying about my health and dreamed my father outside in a truck in the dark waiting to take me home. He is long dead and I am old enough to die.
posted by pracowity at 3:34 PM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by pracowity at 3:34 PM on June 8, 2019 [7 favorites]
I... don’t like dreams. I had this realization recently that, regardless of the overall content of my dreams, they always feel overall unpleasant - like there’s a storm or tragedy looming, just stressful. I don’t have recurring dreams, I don’t think, but I do have recurring themes. One theme is trying to scale an unclimbable hill/mountain, frequently in a car. Like trying (and failing) to drive up a nearly vertical mountain. The other is spaces from my real life that are so huge they’re practically extradimensional, like a single-family house that’s like twelve stories tall with numerous grand staircases and each level has a footprint that’s like 10000 square feet.
Oh, and sometimes I dream about my teeth all falling out. Just LOVE that shit. Thanks, brain.
posted by obfuscation at 3:34 PM on June 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
Oh, and sometimes I dream about my teeth all falling out. Just LOVE that shit. Thanks, brain.
posted by obfuscation at 3:34 PM on June 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
My mother told me that when her father died (they had been extremely close), she had a dream of him coming to talk to her shortly afterwards, which she found comforting. She herself was agnostic in terms of religion, but told me that if it were possible, she would try to come also after she died. (We were also close, and she loved my husband as well).
So, not long after she died, my husband had several dreams of her. In his dreams, she would be in our bedroom just looking at me while I slept; once she was sitting on the end of my bed. Once she had a black cat with her (and I only told him after the fact that her favorite cat growing up had been black).
I myself had two dreams of her. In the first one, she came towards me in our bedroom. She did not speak, but the room (which only has one window with a closed curtain) suddenly filled with glowing light (think bright sunlight on a beautiful morning.) In the second dream, she again did not speak, but this time she came towards me and placed her hand on me, and her hand where she touched me was warm/hot, and though she didn't speak, she communicated somehow that she was doing that so I would know the dream was true (as she had with the light in the other dream). I began to cry in the dream, and said, "but you're dead!", and the dream ended and I woke up crying.
She has slipped in and out of other dreams since then, but in most of my dreams I know it is not her, that she is essentially just a puppet character in my dreamscape. The only recent dream that "felt" like her was a quick check in, interrupting another dream, in which I felt she was worried about me, and shortly after that I got fairly sick.
So, wish fulfillment? Who knows ... (I'm also agnostic when it comes to religion and the possibility of an afterlife.)
posted by gudrun at 4:28 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
So, not long after she died, my husband had several dreams of her. In his dreams, she would be in our bedroom just looking at me while I slept; once she was sitting on the end of my bed. Once she had a black cat with her (and I only told him after the fact that her favorite cat growing up had been black).
I myself had two dreams of her. In the first one, she came towards me in our bedroom. She did not speak, but the room (which only has one window with a closed curtain) suddenly filled with glowing light (think bright sunlight on a beautiful morning.) In the second dream, she again did not speak, but this time she came towards me and placed her hand on me, and her hand where she touched me was warm/hot, and though she didn't speak, she communicated somehow that she was doing that so I would know the dream was true (as she had with the light in the other dream). I began to cry in the dream, and said, "but you're dead!", and the dream ended and I woke up crying.
She has slipped in and out of other dreams since then, but in most of my dreams I know it is not her, that she is essentially just a puppet character in my dreamscape. The only recent dream that "felt" like her was a quick check in, interrupting another dream, in which I felt she was worried about me, and shortly after that I got fairly sick.
So, wish fulfillment? Who knows ... (I'm also agnostic when it comes to religion and the possibility of an afterlife.)
posted by gudrun at 4:28 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
I also have a consistent reality-adjacent geography that semi-consistently figures in my dreams, always set around where I grew up in New York and New Jersey. Something that I've inferred to be abnormal after talking about it with other people is that I'll sometimes die in my dreams and then continue on dreaming in a third-person perspective.
A recurring thing in my dreams lately is that I'll be trying to go and just can't. This seems to be independent of the mode of transportation: usually it's just that I'm walking and and feel something similar to a debilitating build-up of lactic acid in my legs, but it happens when I'm driving, too, and the car just can't respond to my opening up the throttle. I'm also often tired in my dreams recently. These things are vaguely concerning, but I don't see much value in worrying about it too much.
posted by invitapriore at 4:41 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
A recurring thing in my dreams lately is that I'll be trying to go and just can't. This seems to be independent of the mode of transportation: usually it's just that I'm walking and and feel something similar to a debilitating build-up of lactic acid in my legs, but it happens when I'm driving, too, and the car just can't respond to my opening up the throttle. I'm also often tired in my dreams recently. These things are vaguely concerning, but I don't see much value in worrying about it too much.
posted by invitapriore at 4:41 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
I would say the most vivid dream came to me in June of 1988. It was shortly after one of my brothers had died, very suddenly, so I was coming down from that, from April of that year.
In my dream I was flying, and saw below me some sort of military installation, and bombers of the sort from WW2 flying and circling over an air base. I was very high above the Earth.
Then, all of a sudden, an airplane exploded, and body parts were raining down around me. I then understood that I was there to help people, and one of my distant co-workers from Seattle was also there, we were floating along, reassuring people who had just died, that was our job when we were sleeping.
A little girl, wearing red overalls and she had black curls, came to me, and I told her it was okay, she would be fine, just wait, someone will come and help you.
This was several months before Lockerbie, and I looked it up, and there was a record of a little girl like that on the record. I visited the area years later, and spoke to a woman at the B&B I stayed at, how horrible it was. It was just such a sad thing that affected everyone in the area.
At the time, I couldn't explain it, I was working near O'Hare Airport, so I was ducking every time I drove to work, but I think later it made sense to me. Maybe I slipped through time or something, due to my heightened stress from my brother dying, IDK. It freaked me out for a long time.
posted by Marie Mon Dieu at 5:04 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
In my dream I was flying, and saw below me some sort of military installation, and bombers of the sort from WW2 flying and circling over an air base. I was very high above the Earth.
Then, all of a sudden, an airplane exploded, and body parts were raining down around me. I then understood that I was there to help people, and one of my distant co-workers from Seattle was also there, we were floating along, reassuring people who had just died, that was our job when we were sleeping.
A little girl, wearing red overalls and she had black curls, came to me, and I told her it was okay, she would be fine, just wait, someone will come and help you.
This was several months before Lockerbie, and I looked it up, and there was a record of a little girl like that on the record. I visited the area years later, and spoke to a woman at the B&B I stayed at, how horrible it was. It was just such a sad thing that affected everyone in the area.
At the time, I couldn't explain it, I was working near O'Hare Airport, so I was ducking every time I drove to work, but I think later it made sense to me. Maybe I slipped through time or something, due to my heightened stress from my brother dying, IDK. It freaked me out for a long time.
posted by Marie Mon Dieu at 5:04 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
Reading through this feels like a bingo card for my dreams. I forgot and started drinking again (I really really hate those), I forgot about homework/that class/etc, I forgot and ate some gluten, etc. I have the recurring can't find a bathroom dream.
I went to a boarding high school, and when I'm really stressed, I dream that I've had to go back to high school despite my insisting to them that no, really, I have degrees, plural, and I'm most of the way through a third.
I've dreamt about getting assaulted a couple of times, and boy howdy, that's good times (not).
The best/worst dreams are the ones about my mom, who died three years ago. It's still a little unreal (typing that sentence was weird). Sometimes in my dreams I know she's dead and no one else does and I play along to keep everyone else happy; sometimes dad and I know she is and no one else does. Sometimes we all know she's a ghost. Sometimes she's alive and while I know something's off, I can just enjoy the dream. It took awhile for the dreams to start up (6 months after she was gone, maybe?) My father in law hasn't started walking through my dreams yet, but I'm sure he will soon.
posted by joycehealy at 5:12 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
I went to a boarding high school, and when I'm really stressed, I dream that I've had to go back to high school despite my insisting to them that no, really, I have degrees, plural, and I'm most of the way through a third.
I've dreamt about getting assaulted a couple of times, and boy howdy, that's good times (not).
The best/worst dreams are the ones about my mom, who died three years ago. It's still a little unreal (typing that sentence was weird). Sometimes in my dreams I know she's dead and no one else does and I play along to keep everyone else happy; sometimes dad and I know she is and no one else does. Sometimes we all know she's a ghost. Sometimes she's alive and while I know something's off, I can just enjoy the dream. It took awhile for the dreams to start up (6 months after she was gone, maybe?) My father in law hasn't started walking through my dreams yet, but I'm sure he will soon.
posted by joycehealy at 5:12 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
... we were all talking about the benefit of giving yourself a cleansing with mayonnaise. I can still envision the image of slathering mayonnaise all over my leg and scraping it off.
I imagine that even now Gwyneth Paltrow is feverishly writing her next GOOP blog entry based on that detail from your dream.
Soon it captures the American consciousness, and the trend takes off. Miracle Whip, Duke's, Kraft, and Hellman's stock goes through the roof...as does the incidence of cardiovascular disease. New medical studies quickly confirm that cholesterol absorbed through the skin is twice as unhealthy as ingesting it. The bottom falls out of the mayonnaise market. Roving bands of rabid hummus fanatics roam the land, burning all dairy farms in their path. Chaos ensues. Vegans take advantage of the turmoil to seize power. Dark days indeed for humanity.
Or so my dream goes, anyway.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:51 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
I imagine that even now Gwyneth Paltrow is feverishly writing her next GOOP blog entry based on that detail from your dream.
Soon it captures the American consciousness, and the trend takes off. Miracle Whip, Duke's, Kraft, and Hellman's stock goes through the roof...as does the incidence of cardiovascular disease. New medical studies quickly confirm that cholesterol absorbed through the skin is twice as unhealthy as ingesting it. The bottom falls out of the mayonnaise market. Roving bands of rabid hummus fanatics roam the land, burning all dairy farms in their path. Chaos ensues. Vegans take advantage of the turmoil to seize power. Dark days indeed for humanity.
Or so my dream goes, anyway.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:51 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
I have recurring flight dreams. It’s more like floating with a little bit of motor control over where I’m going. Every time I have the dream, I’m like “oh yeah, this is so simple I know how to do this. How come I can never remember how to do this the rest of the time?” There’s a little bit of a knack to it, it’s almost like treading water up into the air. I can get up above the trees, maybe 400 or 500 feet. Usually I’m too focused on staying aloft that I’m not paying attention to where I’m going and I kind of drift down wind. There’s often one or two people in my dream who have figured out flight as well.
I used to dream about swimming with whales but I haven’t had that one in a while.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 6:41 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
I used to dream about swimming with whales but I haven’t had that one in a while.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 6:41 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
I rarely remember my dreams when I wake up. Of course, I'm a lifelong insomniac with a terrible sleep cycle, so that might have something to do with it. I know that for most of my life, there was no sound in my dreams; that just started happening a few years ago. If any words were used, they were in writing. I've also started flying in dreams, but slow and pretty low to the ground.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:43 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:43 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
Oh, as for content, most of the dreams I remember are of the trying to do something/go somewhere/find something but not being able to variety. Oh, and I'm told I occasionally wake up screaming.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:45 PM on June 8, 2019
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:45 PM on June 8, 2019
I am told everyone has stress dreams wherein you find yourself in a situation for which you are unprepared and are consequently stressed out. This never once happened to me for the first several decades of my life: never once for me these apparently ubiquitous dreams of having a test you forgot to study for or being called upon to deliver a speech for which you are totally unprepared.
That is, until a couple of years ago when I dreamt that I was about to leave in a week-long space shuttle mission and I needed somewhere to stash my backpack while I was gone. I walked around Mission Control, searching for a console I could toss it behind where it would be out of the way. Even my subconscious tends to be unrealistic about my aspirations.
Least explicable dream on a different level: some years ago I travelled for a while with a Swiss woman who was an architecture student when I knew her. Her English was not that great, but my French was okay, so we spoke in French 95% of the time. A couple of years after I had last seen her, I dreamt I called her at home in Geneva. Her brother, whom I knew of, but had never actually met, answered the phone. I asked in English to speak to Karine, and he said, "Elle ne peut pas venir au téléphone en ce moment parce qu'elle fait ses devoirs." I replied that I was sorry but I did not speak French, so he said in heavily accented English, "She cannot come to the telephone right now because she is doing her homework." I thanked him and left a message. When I woke up I realized, Hey I do speak French, and how exactly did my brain supply me grammatically correct French which my brain was then unable to understand?
And on a related note, my indifferent command of Japanese once led to a private name for a very recognizable IP, as well as a new way to greet newly met cats.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:53 PM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
That is, until a couple of years ago when I dreamt that I was about to leave in a week-long space shuttle mission and I needed somewhere to stash my backpack while I was gone. I walked around Mission Control, searching for a console I could toss it behind where it would be out of the way. Even my subconscious tends to be unrealistic about my aspirations.
Least explicable dream on a different level: some years ago I travelled for a while with a Swiss woman who was an architecture student when I knew her. Her English was not that great, but my French was okay, so we spoke in French 95% of the time. A couple of years after I had last seen her, I dreamt I called her at home in Geneva. Her brother, whom I knew of, but had never actually met, answered the phone. I asked in English to speak to Karine, and he said, "Elle ne peut pas venir au téléphone en ce moment parce qu'elle fait ses devoirs." I replied that I was sorry but I did not speak French, so he said in heavily accented English, "She cannot come to the telephone right now because she is doing her homework." I thanked him and left a message. When I woke up I realized, Hey I do speak French, and how exactly did my brain supply me grammatically correct French which my brain was then unable to understand?
And on a related note, my indifferent command of Japanese once led to a private name for a very recognizable IP, as well as a new way to greet newly met cats.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:53 PM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
I forgot! for years, I occasionally had a horrible dream that for some reason I had to go and live with my father in the second-to-last house we lived in as a family. I mentioned it to my mother and sister and found out that they had the same recurring dream. I stopped having it shortly after that.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:57 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:57 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
The best/worst dreams are the ones about my mom, who died three years ago. It's still a little unreal (typing that sentence was weird). Sometimes in my dreams I know she's dead and no one else does and I play along to keep everyone else happy; sometimes dad and I know she is and no one else does. Sometimes we all know she's a ghost. Sometimes she's alive and while I know something's off, I can just enjoy the dream.
My mother has dreams about her twin, who died a few years ago, that she describes in a very similar way.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:02 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
My mother has dreams about her twin, who died a few years ago, that she describes in a very similar way.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:02 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
I have three recurring dreams:
1. I'm driving and I'm taking an off-ramp or an on-ramp to a highway. The brakes go squishy and the steering gets really, really hard, and I careen off the ramp. I inevitably wake up or change dreams before something awful happens. In real life, I've never had anything worse than a fender bender.
2. I'm a child in the car with my parents and my three half-brothers. We're driving over a bridge and the car runs off the bridge, plunging into the river. Everyone dies except me. I haven't had this one in a while, but had it at least once a week from the time I could remember (so, three or four?) until well into my 30s. The funny thing, I guess, is that I'm not that close with my family of origin and my relationship with my father is complicated at best. So even with shitty parents, I guess a person can have a fear of abandonment?
3. I'm me, in the here and now, but I have to go back to college because for some reason my transcript is incomplete. But I can't just take classes wherever, I have to go back to my university AND I have to live on campus, in the dorms, so I'm always missing my husband and kids. I end up just leaving because I want my life back and I don't care anymore about my degree.
I used to be able to change dreams mid-stream, but I don't seem to be able to that anymore.
posted by cooker girl at 7:26 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
1. I'm driving and I'm taking an off-ramp or an on-ramp to a highway. The brakes go squishy and the steering gets really, really hard, and I careen off the ramp. I inevitably wake up or change dreams before something awful happens. In real life, I've never had anything worse than a fender bender.
2. I'm a child in the car with my parents and my three half-brothers. We're driving over a bridge and the car runs off the bridge, plunging into the river. Everyone dies except me. I haven't had this one in a while, but had it at least once a week from the time I could remember (so, three or four?) until well into my 30s. The funny thing, I guess, is that I'm not that close with my family of origin and my relationship with my father is complicated at best. So even with shitty parents, I guess a person can have a fear of abandonment?
3. I'm me, in the here and now, but I have to go back to college because for some reason my transcript is incomplete. But I can't just take classes wherever, I have to go back to my university AND I have to live on campus, in the dorms, so I'm always missing my husband and kids. I end up just leaving because I want my life back and I don't care anymore about my degree.
I used to be able to change dreams mid-stream, but I don't seem to be able to that anymore.
posted by cooker girl at 7:26 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
I recently had an extremely pedestrian but pleasant dream where my girlfriend and I were out somewhere playing pinball together and it was fun. I woke up trying to remember what table it was - it was like almost Theatre of Magic but not quite?
posted by aubilenon at 7:39 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by aubilenon at 7:39 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
I don’t think people truly comprehend what I mean when I say they make no sense...My partner, on the other hand, basically dreams full novels with fucking foreshadowing and Chekhov’s guns and shit.
I'm about 80% like you, so much so that if I have a dream that makes sense it usually sticks with me, like "what the hell was that?" Makes me wonder about a connection to something my wife and I were talking about; I don't really visualize things. I had always assumed when people say they imagine things, "picture" things, it was a figure of speech. She was dumbfounded by this. I try to explain to her that if I try to picture something it's like a glitchy scene on a broken TV with Yellow Submarine and a screensaver mixed in. Only less coherent. That's somewhat how my dreams are. On the other hand I can hear music completely in my head, songs I haven't heard in decades, write whole pieces and imagine them, etc.
I have a LOT of dreams about not being able to do something. Trying to make and edit work, a calculation, doing it over and over and over and it's not working. Getting through tight spaces, and a specific one where I'm crawling through underground tunnels, because I have to go back and forth to get to some place, often a hiding place, and the tunnels just keep getting harder to get through because I'm too big, until I wake up really frustrated.
When I was a kid I had a recurring dream about playing outside and suddenly a dragon appeared in the sky. Only it wasn't a dragon, it was a picture of a dragon, just floating by. People were running and screaming, and I just stood there scared, but watching it. It was just a image, but people acted like it was real. Nothing else ever happened.
Another coherent one that made an impression; I was on a beach and all the dogs we've lost over the years, which is a lot, were suddenly there and we're running around playing and I was so fucking happy to see them. Then they all started playing in the surf and it started sweeping them away and I was screaming and fighting through the water trying to grab them unsuccessfully.
As a sober person, my worst dreams are dreams where I'm drinking.
The worst. This is most of my bad dreams.
I feel like 2017 was the point at which the timeline diverged...
So I had this dream where I'm taking a vacation with some friends. It's to another planet, but that is unimportant because there was nothing weird about it, it was just like flying to another city and the destination looked like any nice city. It's an unusually mundane and coherent dream for me, we walk around shopping and eating, hanging out, and finally we're sitting in a park on the grass just looking around, talking about what a beautiful day it is and what great day we had. I nonchalantly say "Do you ever feel like none of this is real?" and everyone stops and sort of looks away uncomfortably. Then one of them looks me right in the eye and says very slowly and pointedly "Yes, I do" and I immediately woke up. I had the weirdest, most intense Neo wakes up in the Matrix feeling (I actually sat up and gasped) and it took quite a while to get my head together.
It’s basically like the world’s biggest OOF feelingg
I spent way too long trying to figure out what OOF stood for. Out Of Focus? Out Of Frame?
posted by bongo_x at 7:40 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
I'm about 80% like you, so much so that if I have a dream that makes sense it usually sticks with me, like "what the hell was that?" Makes me wonder about a connection to something my wife and I were talking about; I don't really visualize things. I had always assumed when people say they imagine things, "picture" things, it was a figure of speech. She was dumbfounded by this. I try to explain to her that if I try to picture something it's like a glitchy scene on a broken TV with Yellow Submarine and a screensaver mixed in. Only less coherent. That's somewhat how my dreams are. On the other hand I can hear music completely in my head, songs I haven't heard in decades, write whole pieces and imagine them, etc.
I have a LOT of dreams about not being able to do something. Trying to make and edit work, a calculation, doing it over and over and over and it's not working. Getting through tight spaces, and a specific one where I'm crawling through underground tunnels, because I have to go back and forth to get to some place, often a hiding place, and the tunnels just keep getting harder to get through because I'm too big, until I wake up really frustrated.
When I was a kid I had a recurring dream about playing outside and suddenly a dragon appeared in the sky. Only it wasn't a dragon, it was a picture of a dragon, just floating by. People were running and screaming, and I just stood there scared, but watching it. It was just a image, but people acted like it was real. Nothing else ever happened.
Another coherent one that made an impression; I was on a beach and all the dogs we've lost over the years, which is a lot, were suddenly there and we're running around playing and I was so fucking happy to see them. Then they all started playing in the surf and it started sweeping them away and I was screaming and fighting through the water trying to grab them unsuccessfully.
As a sober person, my worst dreams are dreams where I'm drinking.
The worst. This is most of my bad dreams.
I feel like 2017 was the point at which the timeline diverged...
So I had this dream where I'm taking a vacation with some friends. It's to another planet, but that is unimportant because there was nothing weird about it, it was just like flying to another city and the destination looked like any nice city. It's an unusually mundane and coherent dream for me, we walk around shopping and eating, hanging out, and finally we're sitting in a park on the grass just looking around, talking about what a beautiful day it is and what great day we had. I nonchalantly say "Do you ever feel like none of this is real?" and everyone stops and sort of looks away uncomfortably. Then one of them looks me right in the eye and says very slowly and pointedly "Yes, I do" and I immediately woke up. I had the weirdest, most intense Neo wakes up in the Matrix feeling (I actually sat up and gasped) and it took quite a while to get my head together.
It’s basically like the world’s biggest OOF feelingg
I spent way too long trying to figure out what OOF stood for. Out Of Focus? Out Of Frame?
posted by bongo_x at 7:40 PM on June 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
Everyone in my family has different ways of flying in their dreams. I use my arms to sort of swim through the air. To get off the ground I have to beat my outstretched arms, pushing against the air as if it were water. My daughter usually has to drop from a height to get airborne, a method I have never used. She steers by tilting her arms, not stroking against the air like I do. And she says kicking her feet is important. I don't think I use my feet at all. She flies high and fast, while I'm usually at about ceiling height and going fairly slowly. A lot of my flying takes place inside. My husband is more like a kite, floating up with little control. My son says he doesn't remember ever dreaming of flying.
Sometimes I dream of skating by sliding my feet on a hard, slippery floor and it's fast and nearly effortless, tremendously fun, maybe as good as flying.
My daughter sometimes dreams she can breathe underwater. If I'm underwater in my dreams I'm generally in a panic trying to get to the surface before I run out of air. Often I get so scared I wake up.
posted by Redstart at 7:42 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
Sometimes I dream of skating by sliding my feet on a hard, slippery floor and it's fast and nearly effortless, tremendously fun, maybe as good as flying.
My daughter sometimes dreams she can breathe underwater. If I'm underwater in my dreams I'm generally in a panic trying to get to the surface before I run out of air. Often I get so scared I wake up.
posted by Redstart at 7:42 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
The vast majority of the time, when I get a brilliant idea in a dream, within about 30 seconds of waking up I realize it's actually incredibly stupid. I think I've gotten about two worthwhile ideas from dreams.
posted by ckape at 7:45 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by ckape at 7:45 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
Whenever I started or ended a new school thing (eg graduation from my Master's) I get this dream that I'm being stopped from doing The Thing because I'd somehow forgotten to sit for my SPM (a national exam sat by Form 5 students in Malaysian secondary schools, think O-Levels/pre SAT) and have to sit that again before I can proceed even though it's been over a decade.
I know this is because I got diagnosed with panic disorder & depression that year and got on meds that were pretty intense, ended up taking half the year off, and sat the exam in a daze. Only thing I remember was that we had an external student join us for some of it, and I also got told that I earned High Distinction in a separate English competition (THEY OWE ME MY MEDAL). So likely the rest of the exam didn't register in my brain, even if I have the paperwork to prove it (I did ok, considering).
Sometimes I feel like sitting for that damn exam again just so my brain can stop stressing about it!!
posted by divabat at 7:47 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
I know this is because I got diagnosed with panic disorder & depression that year and got on meds that were pretty intense, ended up taking half the year off, and sat the exam in a daze. Only thing I remember was that we had an external student join us for some of it, and I also got told that I earned High Distinction in a separate English competition (THEY OWE ME MY MEDAL). So likely the rest of the exam didn't register in my brain, even if I have the paperwork to prove it (I did ok, considering).
Sometimes I feel like sitting for that damn exam again just so my brain can stop stressing about it!!
posted by divabat at 7:47 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
I used to have the "teeth falling out" dream the night after dental checkups where the teeth cleaning stuff was a bit aggressive, so that is pretty understandable. I used to have the nightmares where something is pursuing me and suddenly my legs get so rubbery I cannot move, or I sink into the ground like it is quicksand. I haven't had one of those in a long, long time. I have had the "forgot I had this class and suddenly find myself having to take the final and cannot find my locker..." dream many, many times. I kept a dream journal for a while, and experimented with lucid dreaming and pre-sleep suggestion. Many nights, the dreams I have are weirdly re-hashed versions of the movie I watched before I went to bed. Flying dreams mostly end up with me not being able to control the flying very well, unless I realize I am dreaming and can then take control, but that somehow deadens the sensation, and I end up back on the ground walking or running. I remember a quite pleasant dream where I turned into a tiger. I remember a deeply strange dream where I was with a nature documentary crew filming raccoons (ok), migrating (no, they don't) north (this isn't right), in the winter (come on, now...) by going up stream under the ice (so very wrong, and cold). The combination of sheer absurdity and cold woke me up. I had kicked the blanket and sheet off the bed.
posted by coppertop at 8:21 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by coppertop at 8:21 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
I've had occasional dreams vivid and coherent enough to become story seeds (which doesn't mean I've actually written the stories, unfortunately; mostly they're buried somewhere in the "might make a good story" part of my diary). I also dream about work pretty often, not people or even stress-dreams, just endless lines of the software we use, pink tags and all, scrolling on by.
Later this week (in waking life, that is) I'm getting ready to ask for something I really want; I may get turned down flat, or after consideration, or it may work out somehow, God knows. I'm excited and also pessimistic. Watch this space. (Sounds dating-related when I write it that way but isn't, my marriage is just fine as far as I know.)
Oh, Serene Empress Dork, yesterday I tried your black beans and rice recipe from the "dinner" thread! It was a) easy and b) delicious, so thank you very much for expanding my repertoire. I'm looking forward to various variations--spicy sausage, cubed bell peppers, corn... .
posted by huimangm at 8:54 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
Later this week (in waking life, that is) I'm getting ready to ask for something I really want; I may get turned down flat, or after consideration, or it may work out somehow, God knows. I'm excited and also pessimistic. Watch this space. (Sounds dating-related when I write it that way but isn't, my marriage is just fine as far as I know.)
Oh, Serene Empress Dork, yesterday I tried your black beans and rice recipe from the "dinner" thread! It was a) easy and b) delicious, so thank you very much for expanding my repertoire. I'm looking forward to various variations--spicy sausage, cubed bell peppers, corn... .
posted by huimangm at 8:54 PM on June 8, 2019 [3 favorites]
When I was a child, I used to have a dream that I was very tiny and I was responsible for manipulating the lines of barcodes (which were 3D and much bigger than me) in a certain manner. I was never very good at it and there was always a sense that my boss was going to punish me for what I was doing. The weird part? I only ever had this dream when I had strep throat, to the point that when I was in middle school I could predict that I would need to go to the doctor soon if I had the dream.
As an adult, I rarely remember my dreams. My six year old daughter has been having bad dreams occasionally lately, and they always involve some kind of robots.
posted by Night_owl at 9:55 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
As an adult, I rarely remember my dreams. My six year old daughter has been having bad dreams occasionally lately, and they always involve some kind of robots.
posted by Night_owl at 9:55 PM on June 8, 2019 [4 favorites]
Of course, no nightmare has ever wrecked my day as much as that time I dreamt I was in a great relationship with a wonderful person, and then woke up and remembered that I'm single.
posted by ckape at 9:57 PM on June 8, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by ckape at 9:57 PM on June 8, 2019 [9 favorites]
We're driving over a bridge and the car runs off the bridge, plunging into the river.
My sister has had driving-off-a-bridge dreams all her adult life.
Of course, she didn't tell me this until after I'd made her watch Carnival of Souls.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:22 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
My sister has had driving-off-a-bridge dreams all her adult life.
Of course, she didn't tell me this until after I'd made her watch Carnival of Souls.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:22 PM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]
I remember a goodly amount of my dreams, and ruminate on them. Some themes that interest me:
1. My dreams have a soundtrack--every now and then they are actually about composing music, but usually it's just some random song, often a pop tune from any decade from the 1940s to today. Often that theme song persists for several nights, then gets randomly replaced.
2. I can always tell when I'm falling asleep, because I enter the same dreamscape I left the night before.
3. One night when I was 8 I dreamt I went to the bathroom, and wet the bed, which I really did not appreciate. Ever since then, when my bladder gets full in my sleep I have toilet nightmares. I'm searching for a place to pee, but every toilet I find is totally exposed (like, on the side of a dance floor at a club, or just parked on the top of a hill in a crowded public park) and unspeakably vile (overflowing with turds, seat broken, crawling with insects). Eventually this wakes me up and I say gee, thanks, brain, that was horrible, and trot off to my bathroom.
4. I have interesting somatic experiences that amuse me when I wake up. For example, once I had some classic dream of being chased by bad guys, and to hide from them I melted into a puddle of boiling oil. I had the embodied experience of being a pool of thick liquid, bubbling. Another time I dreamt I was a bird hatching from an egg, and experienced what it feels like to peck at a shell with a beak, the impact dissipating along the sides of my face.
5. Very often my dreamscapes are postapocalyptic. I'm in some ruined city, or mall, or port, wandering around looking for supplies but running into collapsed staircases or deep craters. I often run into eclectic characters, very Mad Max-y, but also encounter neighbors from many years ago, or deceased relatives, living in these postapocalyptic spaces.
6. I completely suck at flying in dreams. Like, I'm trying to escape some kind of enemy, but my "airplane" is a slab of concrete, and I can only get it to fly a couple of feet off the ground. Or other people in the dream are bounding into the air and flying gracefully, but when I bound, I just achieve a longer jump than normal, then land like a klutz.
7. Sometimes I wake myself up because I am amazed at what my unconscious brain can do. An example: I had a dream that I had some sort of magic picture frame that could show me family photos I'd seen in the past. And I watched a cascade of such photos I hadn't seen in decades, appearing inside the frame at an incredible rate. I started to try to calculate how many photos I was seeing per second (about 6), then found myself thinking that I can't consciously call images to mind anywhere near that quickly, and so realized that this was an unanticipated dream ability and woke up.
Dreams are cool and brains are weird.
posted by DrMew at 11:46 PM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
1. My dreams have a soundtrack--every now and then they are actually about composing music, but usually it's just some random song, often a pop tune from any decade from the 1940s to today. Often that theme song persists for several nights, then gets randomly replaced.
2. I can always tell when I'm falling asleep, because I enter the same dreamscape I left the night before.
3. One night when I was 8 I dreamt I went to the bathroom, and wet the bed, which I really did not appreciate. Ever since then, when my bladder gets full in my sleep I have toilet nightmares. I'm searching for a place to pee, but every toilet I find is totally exposed (like, on the side of a dance floor at a club, or just parked on the top of a hill in a crowded public park) and unspeakably vile (overflowing with turds, seat broken, crawling with insects). Eventually this wakes me up and I say gee, thanks, brain, that was horrible, and trot off to my bathroom.
4. I have interesting somatic experiences that amuse me when I wake up. For example, once I had some classic dream of being chased by bad guys, and to hide from them I melted into a puddle of boiling oil. I had the embodied experience of being a pool of thick liquid, bubbling. Another time I dreamt I was a bird hatching from an egg, and experienced what it feels like to peck at a shell with a beak, the impact dissipating along the sides of my face.
5. Very often my dreamscapes are postapocalyptic. I'm in some ruined city, or mall, or port, wandering around looking for supplies but running into collapsed staircases or deep craters. I often run into eclectic characters, very Mad Max-y, but also encounter neighbors from many years ago, or deceased relatives, living in these postapocalyptic spaces.
6. I completely suck at flying in dreams. Like, I'm trying to escape some kind of enemy, but my "airplane" is a slab of concrete, and I can only get it to fly a couple of feet off the ground. Or other people in the dream are bounding into the air and flying gracefully, but when I bound, I just achieve a longer jump than normal, then land like a klutz.
7. Sometimes I wake myself up because I am amazed at what my unconscious brain can do. An example: I had a dream that I had some sort of magic picture frame that could show me family photos I'd seen in the past. And I watched a cascade of such photos I hadn't seen in decades, appearing inside the frame at an incredible rate. I started to try to calculate how many photos I was seeing per second (about 6), then found myself thinking that I can't consciously call images to mind anywhere near that quickly, and so realized that this was an unanticipated dream ability and woke up.
Dreams are cool and brains are weird.
posted by DrMew at 11:46 PM on June 8, 2019 [5 favorites]
God, that crumbling-teeth dream, WTF is up with that. Haven't had it in a few years though.
I get the searching-for-a-place-to-pee dream too. Or sometimes a variant of it where I find a toilet, but it starts overflowing and the pee just will not stop coming.
I think the strangest dream I ever had was when Martha Stewart killed my dog. Not personally, she sent her goons to do it--with a chainsaw. I only knew it was her because they left a cassette tape recording on which she claimed responsibility.
Second-strangest: I was a journalist covering alpaca hunt protesters. Alpaca hunting was a thing, and protesting it was the cause of the moment for college students. But the thing was, these protests were really dangerous because people would get too close to the alpacas. Vlade Divac (!) had recently been killed, at a protest, by an alpaca. So anyway, I was riding a bus with a bunch of protesters, heading through rural central California to an alpaca ranch. We arrived and approached a pen, and the alpacas got pissed and started jumping 10 feet in the air. I was like, are you fucking kidding me, and took off running at top speed.
Come to think of it that might be the first-strangest after all.
posted by equalpants at 12:28 AM on June 9, 2019 [11 favorites]
I get the searching-for-a-place-to-pee dream too. Or sometimes a variant of it where I find a toilet, but it starts overflowing and the pee just will not stop coming.
I think the strangest dream I ever had was when Martha Stewart killed my dog. Not personally, she sent her goons to do it--with a chainsaw. I only knew it was her because they left a cassette tape recording on which she claimed responsibility.
Second-strangest: I was a journalist covering alpaca hunt protesters. Alpaca hunting was a thing, and protesting it was the cause of the moment for college students. But the thing was, these protests were really dangerous because people would get too close to the alpacas. Vlade Divac (!) had recently been killed, at a protest, by an alpaca. So anyway, I was riding a bus with a bunch of protesters, heading through rural central California to an alpaca ranch. We arrived and approached a pen, and the alpacas got pissed and started jumping 10 feet in the air. I was like, are you fucking kidding me, and took off running at top speed.
Come to think of it that might be the first-strangest after all.
posted by equalpants at 12:28 AM on June 9, 2019 [11 favorites]
In perimenopause my partner's insomnia suddenly got much worse, and while I could usually put her to sleep with a combination of back and foot rubs, her eyes would pop open in the wee hours, and there was no help for it but to read while I slept next to her so motionlessly she occasionally panicked and had to wake me up to be sure I was still there, which apparently sometimes required prolonged violent shaking.
One morning I woke up, and before I got up to make the coffee, I described a very pleasant dream in which we were making croissants together, mixing the dough and rolling things out, all the layering and folding, etc – which was nothing I knew anything about, never having baked so much as a biscuit, and besides, I'd developed celiac disease five years earlier.
I kind of mumbled to a halt because she was staring at me so fixedly, and without a word she picked up the book she'd been reading in the middle of the night, which I hadn't known was in the house because she borrowed it from a friend earlier in the week, and read aloud a long account of the time the author learned to make croissants after moving to Southern France for a year, and which was the part of the book she'd read in the middle of the night. Some of the phrasing in the book was quite similar to my description of my dream.
posted by jamjam at 1:34 AM on June 9, 2019 [17 favorites]
One morning I woke up, and before I got up to make the coffee, I described a very pleasant dream in which we were making croissants together, mixing the dough and rolling things out, all the layering and folding, etc – which was nothing I knew anything about, never having baked so much as a biscuit, and besides, I'd developed celiac disease five years earlier.
I kind of mumbled to a halt because she was staring at me so fixedly, and without a word she picked up the book she'd been reading in the middle of the night, which I hadn't known was in the house because she borrowed it from a friend earlier in the week, and read aloud a long account of the time the author learned to make croissants after moving to Southern France for a year, and which was the part of the book she'd read in the middle of the night. Some of the phrasing in the book was quite similar to my description of my dream.
posted by jamjam at 1:34 AM on June 9, 2019 [17 favorites]
I have talked before about the recurring nightmares about nuclear war breaking out that I had in my teens and 20s. They weren't all the same dream, but they were all intensely vivid and were all about that topic; and they would all jolt me awake with my heart racing, and I'd end up sitting awake for hours because I was literally too afraid to fall asleep. And they had really, really specific detail, too; in one dream I didn't even see any bomb fall or mushroom cloud or anything, I dreamed I was just watching TV and suddenly Diane Sawyer broke into whatever show I'd been watching with a special news bulletin that this was it, this was war; and what undid me and scared me into waking up was watching her suddenly pause in the middle of a sentence and choke back a sob. Or this one - I've actually had one or two such dreams since Trump became president, and the most recent one was just about me and one of my old roommates in a house basement, building up a wall of sandbags to insulate us from the impending blast, and we were racing to try to pile the bags high enough to reach the tiny window - but then suddenly there was a flash through that window from the bomb falling, and I dreamed he threw himself on top of me to shield me from it, and what woke me up was him telling me over and over "it's going to be okay....it'll all be okay....we're going to be okay...."
(I've also talked about how I wasn't expecting Sarah Connor's own nightmare when I saw Terminator 2, and the sight of one of my own nightmares being suddenly projected on a huge screen with THX sound gave me the one and only panic attack I've ever had and I had to scramble across four people's laps to get to the aisle and flee the theater, where I sat in the lobby for 20 minutes trying to calm down.)
The rest of the time my dreams are about way more random nonsense, stuff like white-water rafting with the cast of Miami Vice.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:49 AM on June 9, 2019 [4 favorites]
(I've also talked about how I wasn't expecting Sarah Connor's own nightmare when I saw Terminator 2, and the sight of one of my own nightmares being suddenly projected on a huge screen with THX sound gave me the one and only panic attack I've ever had and I had to scramble across four people's laps to get to the aisle and flee the theater, where I sat in the lobby for 20 minutes trying to calm down.)
The rest of the time my dreams are about way more random nonsense, stuff like white-water rafting with the cast of Miami Vice.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:49 AM on June 9, 2019 [4 favorites]
All through my childhood, I had dreams about a man with extensive burns on his face and body attacking me. Other people in dreams would turn into him randomly and I would often pull off hats or beards or wigs to prove it was him. When Nightmare on Elm Street came out in 1984, I was in high school, and I slept with my light on for weeks. It was as though my fears were caught in the film.
posted by frumiousb at 4:57 AM on June 9, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by frumiousb at 4:57 AM on June 9, 2019 [4 favorites]
The very last dream I can remember clearly is one I had about...twenty-eight years ago, I think? I remember it, I suspect, because I know exactly what prompted it. My father had called me around 9:30 PM from his department office, and I asked why on earth he was still there. "I gave the students until 10 PM* to turn in their papers," he replied, "and they just aren't bringing them in."
Cue dream. I'm sitting on a bench in the UC Irvine English department office, which, for some reason, is outside. My favorite professor walks in and looks at his mailbox, then looks over at me and grumbles: "No papers! The students just aren't bringing them in!"
All of a sudden, undergraduates carrying huge stacks of papers pop out from under all the benches, from inside the flower pots, from behind the nearest wall, etc.
Probably the only time I ever woke up actually laughing.
*--My father taught at a Cal State, and classes run until 10 PM because so many of their students are non-traditional/have full-time jobs.
posted by thomas j wise at 5:36 AM on June 9, 2019 [5 favorites]
Cue dream. I'm sitting on a bench in the UC Irvine English department office, which, for some reason, is outside. My favorite professor walks in and looks at his mailbox, then looks over at me and grumbles: "No papers! The students just aren't bringing them in!"
All of a sudden, undergraduates carrying huge stacks of papers pop out from under all the benches, from inside the flower pots, from behind the nearest wall, etc.
Probably the only time I ever woke up actually laughing.
*--My father taught at a Cal State, and classes run until 10 PM because so many of their students are non-traditional/have full-time jobs.
posted by thomas j wise at 5:36 AM on June 9, 2019 [5 favorites]
My least favourite/most favourite dreams are INCREDIBLY realistic and detailed dreams that I'm wildly in love with someone and we're having a beautiful intimate moment (often but not always sexual). These have been about nameless dream-strangers, my ex, random celebrity crushes, and friends for whom I have no waking romantic thoughts. I love them because they feel absolutely amazing while they're happening, I hate them because of the harsh comedown on waking.
posted by Balthamos at 6:05 AM on June 9, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by Balthamos at 6:05 AM on June 9, 2019 [6 favorites]
My serial dreams about tornados started when I was around 10. In the dream, the tornado would be way off on the horizon, but still recognizable. I was always able to outmaneuver it. I would have the dream about once a year or so. Each time I had the dream, the tornado was closer. The last time I had the dream was maybe 5 years ago when I was in my late 40s. This time I was shielding my young son in a closet while the tornado raged right over the house.
Now my serial dreams involve elevators on high floors going very fast, both up and down. Anxiety dreams, I suppose.
My dreams tend to be surreal in the sense that (as a real example) a flight of stairs will be on the outside of the top of a skyscraper and we have to go outside to use them like we're climbing the side of a mountain and it's all perfectly normal to everyone but me. Or that someone in my dream look nothing like they do IRL. I had a dream about my college boyfriend (blonde, blue eyed) once and he looked like Gene Simmons, sans makeup. But it was all normal in the dream.
My non-serial, non-anxiety dreams these days are heavy on day residue. A lot of nonsense stuff from throughout the previous day.
posted by sundrop at 7:03 AM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
Now my serial dreams involve elevators on high floors going very fast, both up and down. Anxiety dreams, I suppose.
My dreams tend to be surreal in the sense that (as a real example) a flight of stairs will be on the outside of the top of a skyscraper and we have to go outside to use them like we're climbing the side of a mountain and it's all perfectly normal to everyone but me. Or that someone in my dream look nothing like they do IRL. I had a dream about my college boyfriend (blonde, blue eyed) once and he looked like Gene Simmons, sans makeup. But it was all normal in the dream.
My non-serial, non-anxiety dreams these days are heavy on day residue. A lot of nonsense stuff from throughout the previous day.
posted by sundrop at 7:03 AM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
I just now woke up because I heard my dog initiating the Barf Sequence, only I was dreaming that I was playing with a bunch of big black labs and it took me a second or two to figure out what dog - dream or real - needed to be corralled to a non-carpeted surface. So that's been my Sunday so far.
posted by DingoMutt at 8:08 AM on June 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by DingoMutt at 8:08 AM on June 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
I absolutely love hearing about other people's dreams, so thank you for this topic, taz!
I have several recurring dream series, which are both quite personal to me and quite common. I often dream I'm living back at my parents' house, perhaps in a shed in the garden; these are never good dreams. Other nights, I find myself in my old college buildings, moving in for the start of a new term, or in the department where I did my masters. That building has a distinctive staircase that expands and twists in four dimensions, occasionally joining up with the library where I spent many hours as a child and teenager. The stacks go back for miles and every book you can imagine is there, if you can just work out the classification for it.
I've had a few dreams that amounted to my subconscious taking me by the lapels and saying, "Get your act together and stop lying to yourself about this!" It's always been right. What I enjoy the most, though, are the dreams that are puns. For example:
The other night, I dreamed that my partner and I moved to New Zealand. The house we were meant to move into was a building site, and eventually I ended up in prison, where I made kiwi (fruit) sandwiches for my fellow inmates.
"Kiwi sandwiches?" asked my partner when I told him this the next morning. "No wonder they put you in prison!"
posted by daisyk at 9:02 AM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
I have several recurring dream series, which are both quite personal to me and quite common. I often dream I'm living back at my parents' house, perhaps in a shed in the garden; these are never good dreams. Other nights, I find myself in my old college buildings, moving in for the start of a new term, or in the department where I did my masters. That building has a distinctive staircase that expands and twists in four dimensions, occasionally joining up with the library where I spent many hours as a child and teenager. The stacks go back for miles and every book you can imagine is there, if you can just work out the classification for it.
I've had a few dreams that amounted to my subconscious taking me by the lapels and saying, "Get your act together and stop lying to yourself about this!" It's always been right. What I enjoy the most, though, are the dreams that are puns. For example:
The other night, I dreamed that my partner and I moved to New Zealand. The house we were meant to move into was a building site, and eventually I ended up in prison, where I made kiwi (fruit) sandwiches for my fellow inmates.
"Kiwi sandwiches?" asked my partner when I told him this the next morning. "No wonder they put you in prison!"
posted by daisyk at 9:02 AM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
A favourite dream from ten or fifteen years ago:
My high-school best friend (slash desperate unrequited crush) was in a meeting with our headteacher and her parents about her terrible recent conduct. I was there too, and instead of listening to the bollocking, we were playing with a kitten. After the meeting, my friend yelled at her stepmom, "This is all useless! I'm not staying here anyway — I have to go to Paris, because that's where HE lives!"
"Where who lives?" asked her stepmom.
"The ten-year-old French Sikh boy I agreed to marry!"
Suddenly, a contract flashed in front of me. Indeed, it stated that my friend agreed to marry 'a ten-year-old French Sikh boy', and that New Scientist magazine would pay their cost of living for the first 5.0 years of marriage, after which they were free to divorce.
posted by daisyk at 9:26 AM on June 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
My high-school best friend (slash desperate unrequited crush) was in a meeting with our headteacher and her parents about her terrible recent conduct. I was there too, and instead of listening to the bollocking, we were playing with a kitten. After the meeting, my friend yelled at her stepmom, "This is all useless! I'm not staying here anyway — I have to go to Paris, because that's where HE lives!"
"Where who lives?" asked her stepmom.
"The ten-year-old French Sikh boy I agreed to marry!"
Suddenly, a contract flashed in front of me. Indeed, it stated that my friend agreed to marry 'a ten-year-old French Sikh boy', and that New Scientist magazine would pay their cost of living for the first 5.0 years of marriage, after which they were free to divorce.
posted by daisyk at 9:26 AM on June 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
I'm so heartened to see how many other people have recurring tornado stress dreams - !
posted by profreader at 9:30 AM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by profreader at 9:30 AM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
Oh yeah, I forgot about that recurring dream — and I can’t possibly be the only one — where I’m taking the longest most satisfying piss of my life. Like a garden hose for 10 minutes. Then I wake up in a panic and check the sheets. Dry every time so far, which only adds to the relief I feel when I get up and go take a (relatively normal) piss and go back to bed.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:37 AM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:37 AM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
My favorite dreams are the ones where I'm not completely lucid in the sense that I can control the dream, but I'm aware that it's a dream and just enjoying the ride. I like to call those "good job, brain!" dreams.
posted by emelenjr at 10:56 AM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by emelenjr at 10:56 AM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
You guys. MetaJews. It is Shavuot and I am eating all of the cheese. ALL OF IT. I made cheesecakes yesterday. Plural. Help.
posted by Sophie1 at 11:17 AM on June 9, 2019
posted by Sophie1 at 11:17 AM on June 9, 2019
Yay dreams! Sometimes I'll intentionally take a nap just to have a nice dream.
I'm often able be an active lucid dreamer and can sometimes pick what I want to dream about. My imagination and visualization skills are incredibly vivid and it's probably a developed survival skill and escape mechanism.
I have a lot of flying dreams, many of them fully lucid. Often I'll be in the middle of some mundane social scenario in my dream and realize I'm dreaming and it's like my subconscious just goes "Wait, this is boring. Let's go flying!" and I'll just start hovering and floating. There's a weird move like you're lifting yourself up and a push off the air involved that seems to be common in most flying dreams.
For me it's kind of like lifting myself up on a parallel bar or gymnasium dip bar or something, and I pivot forward and sort of go into the Superman flying position and kind of start swimming and floating. I've had a bunch of dreams where I do this off of some suitable physical object in the dream, like a hand rail.
When I was younger, whatever dream person(s) I was talking to would say something like "Wait, what the fuck!? You're flying! You can't do that!" and then of course I'd crash, but now I can ignore that and even reply with something like "Yeah? Watch me!" as I just float (or even zoom!) away.
I also don't seem to feel any stress about dream flying anymore, because I remember it used to often be terrifying. There would be those dreams where you fly way up into the clouds and find yourself unable to descend much at all without going into an immediate dream freefall. I used to crash (and wake up!) a lot.
Now there's no longer any real fear of falling - outside of the sentiment of "Drat, I forgot how to fly again, oh well."
I do still occasionally fall out of the sky in my dreams, and as is common I often wake up on impact or just before, but increasingly I can manage to not wake up and either catch myself to continue flying, or I just bounce off the ground or go splat and get up and either start walking around or flying again.
Related?: I do often wake right up if I trip while walking in a dream, say, missing a dream stair step. That one still wakes me up almost every time.
So almost any time I realize I'm dreaming without actually waking up I end up flying, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.
I'm also almost always femme/female in my dreams, and I definitely dream in full color, with sound and scents and all my senses including touch. I'm really sensitive and into my senses while awake, so it would make sense I'm that way in my dreams, too. I can remember details like the feel of a fabric, the colors and style of clothes I'm wearing or the people in my dream are wearing. Whole experiences with all the details like I was awake going about my life.
Like others in this thread I have also had a recurring dream lover/partner. It's sometimes so real that it's hard not to feel that I'm dreaming about some cosmic soulmate that I've yet to meet. I actually haven't had this dream in a while but I must have had variations of the dream hundreds or thousands of times. And now that I'm writing about it, I don't think any of these dreams have been lucid. I can't conjure this dream up or revisit it, or re-enter it after waking up like one can with a lucid dream. It feels much less like a subconscious dream or some lucid dream playground and some more real, shared thing that has significance.
In the dreams I am impossibly close to that person and in love. The dreams aren't sexual beyond affecting and cuddling, even sleeping (meta-sleeping?) together. The intimacy is really tame and innocent and G-rated. There's usually a whole lot of laughter, too.
There is a very distinct and memorable dream scent and pheromone kind of thing going on, and it's so powerful I'm suddenly having a hard time even thinking about it much less sharing it and writing about it, because it makes the heart yearn so.
The scent isn't overpowering or funky, but present and pleasant and it's utterly intoxicating, and I am reminded of Jitterbug Perfume. It is a complicated blend of lavender, rosemary, garlic, vanilla, sweet potatoes, cinnamon. Incense, perhaps even a hint of tobacco. Clean laundry and earth and rain. Cut grass and pulled weeds, floral garden notes and a touch of bitter and green.
Lately I've had to ask myself if that dream person might be future me, because I've caught a very close approximation of this dream scent on myself and my own clothes a few times. Or maybe it's just my own pheromones and I'm just dreaming about someone with compatible pheromones.
Whatever it is, it is incredibly real.
For stress dreams I used to have earthquake and nuclear war dreams. I've even had a few tornado or hurricane dreams, though I've never seen either of these. Dreams about nightmare vortexes like tornadoes and storms seem to be pretty common.
Lately my stress dreams are about stuff that resembles refugee camps, diaspora and trying to help feed hungry people. I will note that these dreams started quite some time before I'd volunteered around here at places like a non-profit kitchen and the foodbank and stuff, though I had experiences with stuff like it long before these dreams.
Oh, and I've also had a lot of oddly helpful and prescient dreams. These are hard to enumerate or recount or even account for, but some dreams have definitely prepared me for something coming my way.
Some of my musical ideas have come to me in dreams. My first two ambient albums were partially the results of me reading way too much science fiction and eating too much crappy food and basically ignoring any kind of a normal sleep cycle, and my dreams during that period were - even by my standards - totally bonkers and often dystopian nightmare hellscapes. I was reading a lot of John Brunner and Theodore Sturgeon, and I'd wake up and roll out of a dream to immediately start working on music until I bonked again.
I've also had some good ideas and just prompts from dreams.
Hrm, I think that's it for now. Maybe a news update later. I'm supposed to be doing chores while the weather is nice, heh.
posted by loquacious at 12:02 PM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
I'm often able be an active lucid dreamer and can sometimes pick what I want to dream about. My imagination and visualization skills are incredibly vivid and it's probably a developed survival skill and escape mechanism.
I have a lot of flying dreams, many of them fully lucid. Often I'll be in the middle of some mundane social scenario in my dream and realize I'm dreaming and it's like my subconscious just goes "Wait, this is boring. Let's go flying!" and I'll just start hovering and floating. There's a weird move like you're lifting yourself up and a push off the air involved that seems to be common in most flying dreams.
For me it's kind of like lifting myself up on a parallel bar or gymnasium dip bar or something, and I pivot forward and sort of go into the Superman flying position and kind of start swimming and floating. I've had a bunch of dreams where I do this off of some suitable physical object in the dream, like a hand rail.
When I was younger, whatever dream person(s) I was talking to would say something like "Wait, what the fuck!? You're flying! You can't do that!" and then of course I'd crash, but now I can ignore that and even reply with something like "Yeah? Watch me!" as I just float (or even zoom!) away.
I also don't seem to feel any stress about dream flying anymore, because I remember it used to often be terrifying. There would be those dreams where you fly way up into the clouds and find yourself unable to descend much at all without going into an immediate dream freefall. I used to crash (and wake up!) a lot.
Now there's no longer any real fear of falling - outside of the sentiment of "Drat, I forgot how to fly again, oh well."
I do still occasionally fall out of the sky in my dreams, and as is common I often wake up on impact or just before, but increasingly I can manage to not wake up and either catch myself to continue flying, or I just bounce off the ground or go splat and get up and either start walking around or flying again.
Related?: I do often wake right up if I trip while walking in a dream, say, missing a dream stair step. That one still wakes me up almost every time.
So almost any time I realize I'm dreaming without actually waking up I end up flying, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.
I'm also almost always femme/female in my dreams, and I definitely dream in full color, with sound and scents and all my senses including touch. I'm really sensitive and into my senses while awake, so it would make sense I'm that way in my dreams, too. I can remember details like the feel of a fabric, the colors and style of clothes I'm wearing or the people in my dream are wearing. Whole experiences with all the details like I was awake going about my life.
Like others in this thread I have also had a recurring dream lover/partner. It's sometimes so real that it's hard not to feel that I'm dreaming about some cosmic soulmate that I've yet to meet. I actually haven't had this dream in a while but I must have had variations of the dream hundreds or thousands of times. And now that I'm writing about it, I don't think any of these dreams have been lucid. I can't conjure this dream up or revisit it, or re-enter it after waking up like one can with a lucid dream. It feels much less like a subconscious dream or some lucid dream playground and some more real, shared thing that has significance.
In the dreams I am impossibly close to that person and in love. The dreams aren't sexual beyond affecting and cuddling, even sleeping (meta-sleeping?) together. The intimacy is really tame and innocent and G-rated. There's usually a whole lot of laughter, too.
There is a very distinct and memorable dream scent and pheromone kind of thing going on, and it's so powerful I'm suddenly having a hard time even thinking about it much less sharing it and writing about it, because it makes the heart yearn so.
The scent isn't overpowering or funky, but present and pleasant and it's utterly intoxicating, and I am reminded of Jitterbug Perfume. It is a complicated blend of lavender, rosemary, garlic, vanilla, sweet potatoes, cinnamon. Incense, perhaps even a hint of tobacco. Clean laundry and earth and rain. Cut grass and pulled weeds, floral garden notes and a touch of bitter and green.
Lately I've had to ask myself if that dream person might be future me, because I've caught a very close approximation of this dream scent on myself and my own clothes a few times. Or maybe it's just my own pheromones and I'm just dreaming about someone with compatible pheromones.
Whatever it is, it is incredibly real.
For stress dreams I used to have earthquake and nuclear war dreams. I've even had a few tornado or hurricane dreams, though I've never seen either of these. Dreams about nightmare vortexes like tornadoes and storms seem to be pretty common.
Lately my stress dreams are about stuff that resembles refugee camps, diaspora and trying to help feed hungry people. I will note that these dreams started quite some time before I'd volunteered around here at places like a non-profit kitchen and the foodbank and stuff, though I had experiences with stuff like it long before these dreams.
Oh, and I've also had a lot of oddly helpful and prescient dreams. These are hard to enumerate or recount or even account for, but some dreams have definitely prepared me for something coming my way.
Some of my musical ideas have come to me in dreams. My first two ambient albums were partially the results of me reading way too much science fiction and eating too much crappy food and basically ignoring any kind of a normal sleep cycle, and my dreams during that period were - even by my standards - totally bonkers and often dystopian nightmare hellscapes. I was reading a lot of John Brunner and Theodore Sturgeon, and I'd wake up and roll out of a dream to immediately start working on music until I bonked again.
I've also had some good ideas and just prompts from dreams.
Hrm, I think that's it for now. Maybe a news update later. I'm supposed to be doing chores while the weather is nice, heh.
posted by loquacious at 12:02 PM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
Oh! Oh, this is a good one!
I was way into reruns of M*A*S*H when I was in Junior High, and one night I dreamed up an entire new episode wholecloth and dreamed myself into it as one of the doctors. The running plot was that Radar was somehow missing and everyone was looking for him. It wasn't any kind of worried "oh no has he been captured" kind of thing, more like a "hey, that's weird, I've only just noticed I haven't seen him recently" kind of thing. I had dream scenes throughout the whole of the camp - Colonel Potter telling Houlihan that no, he hadn't seen Radar in his office since lunch, Rizzo in the auto pool saying the last time he'd seen Radar was the day before when they split a Grape Nehi, yadda yadda. And the whole while everyone was getting increasingly more and more puzzled - "that's really weird, where the hell is Radar?"
Finally I dreamed that we got a bunch of wounded soldiers in, and everyone was in the O.R. working on them - and suddenly Klinger came running in with scrubs on and a mask held in front of his face. "Hey guys!" he said, excitedly. "Guys! I found Radar!"
"Really? Great!" Everyone else said. "Where was he?"
"Oh, you're never gonna believe this," Klinger began excitedly. "So Radar was -"
And that was the exact second that my alarm clock went off and woke me up.
My scream of frustration was loud enough to bring my mother in to ask me what was wrong.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:44 PM on June 9, 2019 [12 favorites]
I was way into reruns of M*A*S*H when I was in Junior High, and one night I dreamed up an entire new episode wholecloth and dreamed myself into it as one of the doctors. The running plot was that Radar was somehow missing and everyone was looking for him. It wasn't any kind of worried "oh no has he been captured" kind of thing, more like a "hey, that's weird, I've only just noticed I haven't seen him recently" kind of thing. I had dream scenes throughout the whole of the camp - Colonel Potter telling Houlihan that no, he hadn't seen Radar in his office since lunch, Rizzo in the auto pool saying the last time he'd seen Radar was the day before when they split a Grape Nehi, yadda yadda. And the whole while everyone was getting increasingly more and more puzzled - "that's really weird, where the hell is Radar?"
Finally I dreamed that we got a bunch of wounded soldiers in, and everyone was in the O.R. working on them - and suddenly Klinger came running in with scrubs on and a mask held in front of his face. "Hey guys!" he said, excitedly. "Guys! I found Radar!"
"Really? Great!" Everyone else said. "Where was he?"
"Oh, you're never gonna believe this," Klinger began excitedly. "So Radar was -"
And that was the exact second that my alarm clock went off and woke me up.
My scream of frustration was loud enough to bring my mother in to ask me what was wrong.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:44 PM on June 9, 2019 [12 favorites]
A close friend of mine used to tell me about her dreams, and they were always full of anxiety and social betrayal, and I always felt really bad for her. I didn't have the heart to tell her my dreams are mostly about riding pterodactyls on Mars.
Even my stress dreams are kind of funny, in a cartoonish way. There was a recurring one for a while where the popcorn kettle at my old movie theater wouldn't stop producing popcorn and I had nowhere to put it. More recently I had a dream that I was opening a zoo, but they started delivering the animals before I actually had a facility so my living room was shoulder-to-shoulder with zoo animals like Noah's Ark and I had to crawl over them to make breakfast in the morning.
Recently I've had a series of recurring dreams where my partner and I are private eyes solving nonsense mysteries with no context. Last time we were driving around finding bombs like in Die Hard. Those are pretty great.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 1:00 PM on June 9, 2019 [5 favorites]
Even my stress dreams are kind of funny, in a cartoonish way. There was a recurring one for a while where the popcorn kettle at my old movie theater wouldn't stop producing popcorn and I had nowhere to put it. More recently I had a dream that I was opening a zoo, but they started delivering the animals before I actually had a facility so my living room was shoulder-to-shoulder with zoo animals like Noah's Ark and I had to crawl over them to make breakfast in the morning.
Recently I've had a series of recurring dreams where my partner and I are private eyes solving nonsense mysteries with no context. Last time we were driving around finding bombs like in Die Hard. Those are pretty great.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 1:00 PM on June 9, 2019 [5 favorites]
Dreams have addressed problems, but it's hard to know often I've been too obtuse to figure out what they were getting at — for example (from one of my answers here):
I had sciatica for almost 6 months after being treated for pernicious anemia, and during this time I had a bloody nose most mornings with quite a bit of discharge, and some post nasal drip during the day.posted by jamjam at 1:00 PM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
Nothing really helped, but one night I had a dream about brains crashing into each other, bursting open and then leaking. I didn't think much of the dream, but I thought my nasal problems might be a sinus infection and got some antibiotics for it.
The bloody nose was gone the next morning, and by the end of the day after that the sciatica was also gone, never to return.
My interpretation of all these circumstances is that a sinus infection high in my nose breached membranes thinned by the pernicious anemia and caused a CSF leak; a consequent collapse of the channel full of CSF which runs down the center of the spinal cord caused the sciatic nerve to rub against its outlet from the spine, and that resulted in sciatica.
I'm almost entirely aphantasic when I'm awake, but my dreams are somehow full of visual detail. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by moonmilk at 1:28 PM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by moonmilk at 1:28 PM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
I had some dream companions and we used to travel in underground water. We had a route out in a desertous area. We would go in in a cave and ride this underground river for miles. It was a lot of fun and recurred for a couple of years.
There was another place in a desert area where there was an entire environment underground and I knew a place to dig in and I would travel a long way in small tunnels to get there. Lots of swimming once I reached the place.
(In real life I used to hike into Coyote Wash as often as possible, back in the day. It was 33 miles in on a dirt road, then 8 miles in on foot through Hurricane Wash to where the wash intersected with Coyote and the water came up. Then it was 12 miles down to the Escalante River, and nothing but outrageous beauty in between.)
posted by Oyéah at 1:41 PM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
There was another place in a desert area where there was an entire environment underground and I knew a place to dig in and I would travel a long way in small tunnels to get there. Lots of swimming once I reached the place.
(In real life I used to hike into Coyote Wash as often as possible, back in the day. It was 33 miles in on a dirt road, then 8 miles in on foot through Hurricane Wash to where the wash intersected with Coyote and the water came up. Then it was 12 miles down to the Escalante River, and nothing but outrageous beauty in between.)
posted by Oyéah at 1:41 PM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
I've always had really intense dreams, with periodic bouts of nightmares under stress. This is one of my early memories, a two-week period of stress dreams when I was five. I became aware of my ability to dream lucidly at eight, during a nightmare where a vampire with a sword was coming after me. I decided I wanted a sword too, and suddenly I had one! The dream looked like sketch animation, including my sword. Lucidity didn't continue in quite the same way, if I want something in a dream I can't make it appear in my hand but I can go to the next room and find it.
I can fly in my dreams. There are three methods:
1. Jumping and floating, going higher and for increasingly long periods of time until you don't have to land.
2. Jumping off a trampoline or slingshot. Disadvantage: if this is realistic and I go to high, it turns into a nightmare where I have to wake myself up to avoid leaving earth orbit and going into space.
3. Shapechanging. This started in a dream where I was a werewolf. I spent the early part of the dream in human form, and then managed to shapeshift. Then from there, I shifted to other shapes - a dolphin, and then - a bird. As a bird, flying is easy. Remembering I can shapeshift in dreams is not so easy, but this is the best kind of flying dream because I get to be a bird, and feeling my body take a totally new shape is fun.
Before the police shot me, my dreams were always incredibly vivid and, according to my friends, bizarre. I often remembered them. After the police shot me at age 25, I developed severe insomnia. After I finally got effective treatment, my dreams changed. I have a lot more anxiety dreams than I used to, and I'm much less likely to remember them. I know that they are still vivid because I remember that much, but they slip away from me as I wake up.
I have made art based on my dreams. Here is a comic I made based on a dream about 15 years ago. I've often written about my dreams in my journal. Sometimes something I've been trying to figure out awake will surface in a dream, like one time I lost a bunch of weight and was waiting for a new belt I'd ordered online and in my dream I remembered I could roll my trousers over at the waist.
Dreams are weird.
posted by bile and syntax at 3:02 PM on June 9, 2019 [6 favorites]
I can fly in my dreams. There are three methods:
1. Jumping and floating, going higher and for increasingly long periods of time until you don't have to land.
2. Jumping off a trampoline or slingshot. Disadvantage: if this is realistic and I go to high, it turns into a nightmare where I have to wake myself up to avoid leaving earth orbit and going into space.
3. Shapechanging. This started in a dream where I was a werewolf. I spent the early part of the dream in human form, and then managed to shapeshift. Then from there, I shifted to other shapes - a dolphin, and then - a bird. As a bird, flying is easy. Remembering I can shapeshift in dreams is not so easy, but this is the best kind of flying dream because I get to be a bird, and feeling my body take a totally new shape is fun.
Before the police shot me, my dreams were always incredibly vivid and, according to my friends, bizarre. I often remembered them. After the police shot me at age 25, I developed severe insomnia. After I finally got effective treatment, my dreams changed. I have a lot more anxiety dreams than I used to, and I'm much less likely to remember them. I know that they are still vivid because I remember that much, but they slip away from me as I wake up.
I have made art based on my dreams. Here is a comic I made based on a dream about 15 years ago. I've often written about my dreams in my journal. Sometimes something I've been trying to figure out awake will surface in a dream, like one time I lost a bunch of weight and was waiting for a new belt I'd ordered online and in my dream I remembered I could roll my trousers over at the waist.
Dreams are weird.
posted by bile and syntax at 3:02 PM on June 9, 2019 [6 favorites]
I often reuse “sets” in dreams. I will have a dream where I construct a location, often out of parts of real buildings and places, and then, sometimes years later, I will have another dream in that location. I will often spend the time in that later dream thinking “this place seems familiar,” and then when I wake up I remember the earlier dream as well.
When I was a child, I had many dreams about a faceless man, who was not exactly sinister but was a bit frightening. I wonder what happened to him.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:10 PM on June 9, 2019 [4 favorites]
When I was a child, I had many dreams about a faceless man, who was not exactly sinister but was a bit frightening. I wonder what happened to him.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:10 PM on June 9, 2019 [4 favorites]
Oh, I forgot about my subconscious giving me an actual honest-to-Bog wake-up call.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:26 PM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:26 PM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
I have whacked much trail. I also managed to collect about a pint of salmonberries.
I'm about to make salmonberry pancakes. And maybe take a nap.
posted by loquacious at 5:05 PM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
I'm about to make salmonberry pancakes. And maybe take a nap.
posted by loquacious at 5:05 PM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
What I normally mosr remember from dreams are not events or people, but locations, geographic and architectural. The places I have visited most often in dreams are a tall building in Downtown L.A., cylindrical like the Capital Records "stack of records" building, but all glass windows with escalators going up and down on the OUTSIDE of the building (sometimes an event in the dream involved somebody falling or dangling off the escalator) and a humongous shopping mall with a tall parking structure at one end, multiple shopping levels resembling different malls I've been in, and totally impossibly, a food court at the other end with big windows looking out into outer space. There was a beachfront promenade between L.A. and San Diego in many dreams, often with a road that branched off into the mountains, with several places, lakes and lodges, where the stories occurred. And before I moved from L.A. to San Luis Obispo, some of my dreams occurred on Highway 101 on the way to SLO, but not like it really is. Sometimes it would have the highway closed off into a long hallway, pedestrians only. And sometimes a road branching off the highway would lead to a small building built into the side of a hiil, and going in there would lead to a multi-story structure built into the side of a bluff facing the other way, looking out on the ocean. That building would inevitably be somebody's secret headquarters, sometimes good guys, sometimes bad guys. These were mostly before I moved up here, because when I got an apartment at the Hillcrest Ranch complex, I saw another building with two apartments in it, built into the side of a hill that extremely resembled the dream building... but it was 6-7 miles from the coast. Still, creeeeepy weeeeird...
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:26 PM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:26 PM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
I graduated from high school in June, 1963. I spent the summer partying with my girlfriend--oh, it was love. At the end of the summer I had decided that college wasn't for me, so, in September (when most of my friends went to college) I joined the US Army. My friend and brother Jim joined up with me, on the buddy plan; this guaranteed we'd take basic, AIT, and Jump School together (unless the Army decided otherwise).
Anyhow, when we arrived at Fort Ord in the middle of the night, the roller coaster ride of induction began: haircuts, vaccinations, green suits that didn't fit, endless lectures. On the third day we were cut loose from induction stuff, and, having nothing else for us to do, the Army sent Jim and I to police Intergarrison Road. That meant carrying a gunny sack from the main post, two or three miles, to the MP shack at the back gate to Fort Ord. We were to pick up every bit of trash, "Everything but dead animals," we were told. This was a lark, and we made the trip in about an hour, then reported to the MPs when we arrived. They told us to go over "...to the shade and catch some Z's," until the truck came to pick us up. So we did. We snoozed for at least an hour.
It was great. I was back at the lake with Cory. We lay in the sun on the sandy shore of the lake, my head on her lovely thigh. She fussed with my hair, and one time, she leaned over to kiss me. I fell asleep with my head on her thigh. I dreamed some asshole kicked my shoes and woke me up, and made me get in the back of a goddam truck with a bunch of soldiers. Jim was sitting next to me. My head still buzzed with sleep.
"Am I dreaming?" I asked him.
"I hope so," he said.
I may not yet have awakened, but there's still hope.
posted by mule98J at 6:43 PM on June 9, 2019 [10 favorites]
Anyhow, when we arrived at Fort Ord in the middle of the night, the roller coaster ride of induction began: haircuts, vaccinations, green suits that didn't fit, endless lectures. On the third day we were cut loose from induction stuff, and, having nothing else for us to do, the Army sent Jim and I to police Intergarrison Road. That meant carrying a gunny sack from the main post, two or three miles, to the MP shack at the back gate to Fort Ord. We were to pick up every bit of trash, "Everything but dead animals," we were told. This was a lark, and we made the trip in about an hour, then reported to the MPs when we arrived. They told us to go over "...to the shade and catch some Z's," until the truck came to pick us up. So we did. We snoozed for at least an hour.
It was great. I was back at the lake with Cory. We lay in the sun on the sandy shore of the lake, my head on her lovely thigh. She fussed with my hair, and one time, she leaned over to kiss me. I fell asleep with my head on her thigh. I dreamed some asshole kicked my shoes and woke me up, and made me get in the back of a goddam truck with a bunch of soldiers. Jim was sitting next to me. My head still buzzed with sleep.
"Am I dreaming?" I asked him.
"I hope so," he said.
I may not yet have awakened, but there's still hope.
posted by mule98J at 6:43 PM on June 9, 2019 [10 favorites]
I mostly only remember my unpleasant dreams, and I will not burden you with those.
I finished week 7 of Zombies Run Couch to 5K today, so next week is the week when I'm supposed to run 5K without stopping. This was the first week when every day felt pretty good, so I'm actually kind of looking forward to it? This is a strange feeling! Anyway, I recommend Zombies Run Couch to 5K, because on top of being a fun story, it seems to be a really good Couch to 5K plan.
Not much going on here other than it being Hell Month at work. Hell Month is going about as well as I could hope. Actually, I shouldn't say that, because I'll jinx it. But so far, it has only been the normal amount of hellish. Three weeks and three days until it's over.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:05 PM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
I finished week 7 of Zombies Run Couch to 5K today, so next week is the week when I'm supposed to run 5K without stopping. This was the first week when every day felt pretty good, so I'm actually kind of looking forward to it? This is a strange feeling! Anyway, I recommend Zombies Run Couch to 5K, because on top of being a fun story, it seems to be a really good Couch to 5K plan.
Not much going on here other than it being Hell Month at work. Hell Month is going about as well as I could hope. Actually, I shouldn't say that, because I'll jinx it. But so far, it has only been the normal amount of hellish. Three weeks and three days until it's over.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:05 PM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
one night I dreamed up an entire new episode wholecloth and dreamed myself into it as one of the doctors
I can normally stay up all night reading, but I usually take something so I don't. So I'm often reading and don't realize I've fallen asleep and dream I'm still reading and make up the plot. When it doesn't make any sense I wake up. Sometimes it goes on for a while and I go back and read, and of course it's nothing like the actual book.
I'm almost entirely aphantasic when I'm awake,
I don't know how I never saw that post, must have been taking a break.
posted by bongo_x at 7:27 PM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
I can normally stay up all night reading, but I usually take something so I don't. So I'm often reading and don't realize I've fallen asleep and dream I'm still reading and make up the plot. When it doesn't make any sense I wake up. Sometimes it goes on for a while and I go back and read, and of course it's nothing like the actual book.
I'm almost entirely aphantasic when I'm awake,
I don't know how I never saw that post, must have been taking a break.
posted by bongo_x at 7:27 PM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
I had a dream where I saw two suns rise in the West. Cows flew through the air, and I spit upon all the gods in the night sky that were represented by the stars. It was a dream about the end of the world. There was a gut punch terror about it. I couldn’t look at the bright sunny sky for two weeks. And when I read the news about the climate crisis every morning, the gut punch terror is exactly the same, over and over. The gut feeling of looking at a future of nothing...
posted by MountainDaisy at 7:52 PM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by MountainDaisy at 7:52 PM on June 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
Hey I do speak French, and how exactly did my brain supply me grammatically correct French which my brain was then unable to understand?
Fun fact! There is an area of your brain that is necessary for understanding speech that is separate from a part of your brain which is necessary for producing speech. And when you are sleeping, signals don't propagate as well- within or between different brain areas. So it makes some sense that you might be able to generate language that you can't understand, or understand language that you can't verbalize a response to.
In a dream, I was back working at a department store when a customer that needed help spoke only French (way too fast for me to understand). «Je ne peut pas comprend le francais...» I told the customer. «Parlez plus... [excruciating word-finding pause]... lentement?» "Shit!", I incorrectly thought to my dream self, "I just told them to speak more heavily!".
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:46 PM on June 9, 2019 [4 favorites]
Fun fact! There is an area of your brain that is necessary for understanding speech that is separate from a part of your brain which is necessary for producing speech. And when you are sleeping, signals don't propagate as well- within or between different brain areas. So it makes some sense that you might be able to generate language that you can't understand, or understand language that you can't verbalize a response to.
In a dream, I was back working at a department store when a customer that needed help spoke only French (way too fast for me to understand). «Je ne peut pas comprend le francais...» I told the customer. «Parlez plus... [excruciating word-finding pause]... lentement?» "Shit!", I incorrectly thought to my dream self, "I just told them to speak more heavily!".
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:46 PM on June 9, 2019 [4 favorites]
In my dream last night I won £308,000 on the lottery... but I'd somehow bought the ticket on behalf of a charity, meaning all the winnings would go to them. My dream self vacillated between feelings of noble altruism & wondering if there was any way I could just take the money & not tell anyone about it.
posted by misteraitch at 12:17 AM on June 10, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by misteraitch at 12:17 AM on June 10, 2019 [2 favorites]
TMI alert:
On more than a few occasions I have had very naughty and vivid sexual dreams about my wife — it’s always my wife — and have “woken up” to find ourselves actually doing the intercourse. We’ve talked about it and neither of us can recall who or how it was initiated but it seems consensual enough and it’s perfectly lovely.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:54 AM on June 10, 2019 [3 favorites]
On more than a few occasions I have had very naughty and vivid sexual dreams about my wife — it’s always my wife — and have “woken up” to find ourselves actually doing the intercourse. We’ve talked about it and neither of us can recall who or how it was initiated but it seems consensual enough and it’s perfectly lovely.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:54 AM on June 10, 2019 [3 favorites]
When I dream I have close friends, lovers, partners, money, success, popularity and other happy adventures that rarely happen in real life. My alarm might go off at 10:00 AM but I'll continue to snooze for hours to keep the story going.
posted by bendy at 3:33 AM on June 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by bendy at 3:33 AM on June 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
I've also had recurring dreams about imaginary places that I explore night after night. For example, a spiral hallway that goes downwards. It's dim with blue lighting in alcoves and ends up in some sort of dorm with bunk beds and aliens or children - all of which need guidance or that I take on field trips.
posted by bendy at 3:37 AM on June 10, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by bendy at 3:37 AM on June 10, 2019 [3 favorites]
Yesterday, I was thinking of posting about the way that I not-infrequently dream that I am a non-human intelligence. I’ve had dreams where I was a program, very aware that my thoughts and reactions were the result of processes and routines, where I was a zombie, thoughts and reactions moving sluggishly through a decaying brain, where I was one of a pair of crystalline beings alien enough that I woke up in a state of unease and panic that lasted for most of that day and the next. Once I dreamed I was an omniscient angel suspended above a vast graveyard on an iron spike. Apparently I like dreaming about cognition. Anyway, I didn’t have time to post, so I didn’t.
Last night’s dreams stared with several scenarios reliving that last day of a convention of vacation where you are partially packed and, therefore, a bit rootless and liminal. Then I got infected by an alien virus and became part of a hive mind where I was connected to 2-3 consciousnesses which were “me, but not me” but also to the “me” portions of similar nodes of 3-4 linked consciousnesses. The nodes started off identical, then changed through experience and observation. I think we checked in with each other periodically to make sure we didn’t drift too far from the “default.” We were engaged in an elaborate set of actions across a wide geographic area that might have been defensive or invasive, I’m not sure. It was very pleasant and collegial, as networked non-human intelligences go.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:09 AM on June 10, 2019 [9 favorites]
Last night’s dreams stared with several scenarios reliving that last day of a convention of vacation where you are partially packed and, therefore, a bit rootless and liminal. Then I got infected by an alien virus and became part of a hive mind where I was connected to 2-3 consciousnesses which were “me, but not me” but also to the “me” portions of similar nodes of 3-4 linked consciousnesses. The nodes started off identical, then changed through experience and observation. I think we checked in with each other periodically to make sure we didn’t drift too far from the “default.” We were engaged in an elaborate set of actions across a wide geographic area that might have been defensive or invasive, I’m not sure. It was very pleasant and collegial, as networked non-human intelligences go.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:09 AM on June 10, 2019 [9 favorites]
More than 20 years ago I had a dream in which a large sign by the side of a highway I was driving on said "Buzzards Will Sit On Streetlights Ahead." And sure enough, shortly thereafter, there were buzzards.
I now live half a country away from the city in which I had the dream, in a town that has such a huge, healthy flock of turkey vultures that one of its nicknames is "Vulturetown." And on occasion I do, in fact, see buzzards sitting on the streetlights, and I think about that dream every time.
Last week a bunch of them were roosting on one big highway light in all their cartoon-buzzard glory (think of what it looks like when you drive past a bunch of these lights and there's a whole flock of small passerines on ONE of those lights and none anywhere else, and then multiply the passerine size by six or eight--it was RIDICULOUS). The next day not only were they still there, but there were a couple more on a light on the other side, thereby flanking an on-ramp and making a decidedly creepy welcome to that stretch of highway.
posted by dlugoczaj at 8:49 AM on June 10, 2019 [4 favorites]
I now live half a country away from the city in which I had the dream, in a town that has such a huge, healthy flock of turkey vultures that one of its nicknames is "Vulturetown." And on occasion I do, in fact, see buzzards sitting on the streetlights, and I think about that dream every time.
Last week a bunch of them were roosting on one big highway light in all their cartoon-buzzard glory (think of what it looks like when you drive past a bunch of these lights and there's a whole flock of small passerines on ONE of those lights and none anywhere else, and then multiply the passerine size by six or eight--it was RIDICULOUS). The next day not only were they still there, but there were a couple more on a light on the other side, thereby flanking an on-ramp and making a decidedly creepy welcome to that stretch of highway.
posted by dlugoczaj at 8:49 AM on June 10, 2019 [4 favorites]
Lots of recurring dreams, but only one set of serial dreams and it involved pastel colored animals. One was a light green iguana shaped like a toy my niece owned; the next was a light blue cat; and the third was piles of pink octopi that had pretty short tentacles.
My recurring dreams used to be one piece of missing clothing in high school, but now they are more like I have taken the wrong bus and then get on a new one and find out it is wrong as well and now it is 10:45 and I am late for work. Another theme is that I am traveling and forgot something, but it's okay because I can just go through this unknown shortcut to stop back home.
posted by soelo at 8:57 AM on June 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
My recurring dreams used to be one piece of missing clothing in high school, but now they are more like I have taken the wrong bus and then get on a new one and find out it is wrong as well and now it is 10:45 and I am late for work. Another theme is that I am traveling and forgot something, but it's okay because I can just go through this unknown shortcut to stop back home.
posted by soelo at 8:57 AM on June 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
The perfect place to share that last night I dreamt that one of my male clients was giving birth to twins and had gathered all his friends and colleagues at the South Pole to attend the birth. Eddie Izzard and Santa Claus were the godparents.
posted by bq at 9:06 AM on June 10, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by bq at 9:06 AM on June 10, 2019 [4 favorites]
Also meant to mention I have an RTHA nesting pair and fledgling right here on the property. The last week has been intensely noisy with calls, cries and chirps. I haven't seen the fledgling flying around yet but I can sure hear it.
The chipmunks and squirrels are all besides themselves about it, too, so on top of the nearly constant RTHA cries there's been a huge racket in alarm calls from the chipmunks and squirrels.
posted by loquacious at 11:37 AM on June 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
The chipmunks and squirrels are all besides themselves about it, too, so on top of the nearly constant RTHA cries there's been a huge racket in alarm calls from the chipmunks and squirrels.
posted by loquacious at 11:37 AM on June 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
When I was 8 I dreamed some cheats to Jazz Jackrabbit 2, along with information about what the cheats did.
The dream gave me no information about how to input the cheats but I figured it out by experimentally typing them in while playing.
While the most likely explanation is that I saw these in a magazine or something, the remarkable specificity of this dream (just what looked like a paper scroll, listing cheats and their effects) has stuck with me.
posted by solarion at 6:08 PM on June 10, 2019
The dream gave me no information about how to input the cheats but I figured it out by experimentally typing them in while playing.
While the most likely explanation is that I saw these in a magazine or something, the remarkable specificity of this dream (just what looked like a paper scroll, listing cheats and their effects) has stuck with me.
posted by solarion at 6:08 PM on June 10, 2019
I remember so many of my dreams, and they are so serialized, that there are several very elaborated alternative personal histories that I've included in dreams for perhaps as long as a decade at a time. This is to the extent that I have a genuine fear that when I become elderly and/if begin dementia, I will no longer be able to distinguish these alternative dream worlds from my actual history.
A particularly befuddling but now-fully-entrenched example is the idea that my hometown, since I've left, had its landscape radically and artificially altered to the point that it isn't flat, but hilly and leafy, with a new lake roughly dividing the town in two. This is the kind of place I'd prefer and which is so much better than the ugly reality; but the narrative is always some form of returning there and feeling utterly confounded and confused by the changes. The lake always serves as a nearly impassable obstacle to my getting from one place to another. There is a freeway and interchange I could describe at length; and the overall effect is that although it is supposedly the same place, it is utterly unlike it. I see the psychological significance, but it's very odd to recall so much detail about a place that only exists in my dreams.
Similarly, I have this thing about houses and other places to live. There was one place I dreamt of for years that was a huge loft-like apartment in a converted mall. It's not as if I'm much cognizant of architecture and design, but I could describe that place in great detail. I love that home. More recently, I dream of a house my parents buy (I'm presumably a child) that is old, large, eccentric, and remained filled with the detritus of the life of the elderly women we bought it from. It's such an interesting house! I also apparently have a thing for industrial-sized and styled kitchens.
For several years until recently, there was this whole thing where I had returned to high school (as a young adult) to do it over and "right", which I never manage to do, but I usually continue for about eight years just because I have nothing better to do and I kind of make marginal progress in being more diligent...and it's oddly interesting? (Which it emphatically wasn't.) The faculty and administration just ignore that I don't actually belong because...they tacitly understand why I'm doing this? There's a lot of obvious stuff in that, too, but it's so odd to dream about this for years.
Lately, I find I'm spending a lot of time in my dreams being around other people and enjoying their company, which in recent years I almost never do and I guess I just miss people. The epitome of this are dreams where I am successfully and very enjoyably flirting with several women. Alternatively, I often dream that I am somehow living with a large family of many children (of which I'm a peer, age indeterminate). This is often either of two large families I actually knew when I was a child. I am (by ten years) the eldest of only two children. The best thing about these family dreams is the sense of simultaneously belonging but not being the focus of attention. That's all sort of obvious, too.
Frankly, I'm certain I have some lifelong sleep-disorder. Always more a night-owl, left to my own devices without commitments as has been the case for almost twenty years, I have no stable sleep schedule, but one that moves somewhat randomly around the clock but, on average, avoids being awake from 7AM to 11AM. I know this with some certainty, as it's both attested by well over a decade of Google search history data, as we as my wearing a Fitbit Alta HR for two years, which detects and records sleep. In conjuction with this, I fall into REM dream sleep almost immediately and spend almost all my sleep in that state. I get little deep sleep. Thus my vivid dream life and probably my ability to recall it.
I rarely dream about actual sex, which is vaguely disappointing.
I fly, or more properly levitate, in my dreams and this has been through my entire adult life to the point that there is a specific set of imaginary, possible mental, "muscles" I use to levitate which in my waking state, right now, I can feel (though, alas, they don't work). A theme is that my ability to do this is exceptional (but not unique) and I tend to both enjoy the fact that I can do this when most cannot while, at the same time, I often get myself into trouble because of it. While I feel sort of "superior", it's also the case that I'm pretty emphatic that I am willing and able to teach others how to do this, if they wish. I have this whole technique I use. And, well, most of that has obviously symbolic meaning, in my opinion.
For most of my life I've had dreams where I am other people, and really more like a characters in films or stories. Stories with often far more continuity than they ought, being dreams. That has dwindled almost to nothing in the last two years -- I don't know why.
And if I never have another dream about not being able to find where I parked my car, it will be too soon.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:11 PM on June 10, 2019 [4 favorites]
A particularly befuddling but now-fully-entrenched example is the idea that my hometown, since I've left, had its landscape radically and artificially altered to the point that it isn't flat, but hilly and leafy, with a new lake roughly dividing the town in two. This is the kind of place I'd prefer and which is so much better than the ugly reality; but the narrative is always some form of returning there and feeling utterly confounded and confused by the changes. The lake always serves as a nearly impassable obstacle to my getting from one place to another. There is a freeway and interchange I could describe at length; and the overall effect is that although it is supposedly the same place, it is utterly unlike it. I see the psychological significance, but it's very odd to recall so much detail about a place that only exists in my dreams.
Similarly, I have this thing about houses and other places to live. There was one place I dreamt of for years that was a huge loft-like apartment in a converted mall. It's not as if I'm much cognizant of architecture and design, but I could describe that place in great detail. I love that home. More recently, I dream of a house my parents buy (I'm presumably a child) that is old, large, eccentric, and remained filled with the detritus of the life of the elderly women we bought it from. It's such an interesting house! I also apparently have a thing for industrial-sized and styled kitchens.
For several years until recently, there was this whole thing where I had returned to high school (as a young adult) to do it over and "right", which I never manage to do, but I usually continue for about eight years just because I have nothing better to do and I kind of make marginal progress in being more diligent...and it's oddly interesting? (Which it emphatically wasn't.) The faculty and administration just ignore that I don't actually belong because...they tacitly understand why I'm doing this? There's a lot of obvious stuff in that, too, but it's so odd to dream about this for years.
Lately, I find I'm spending a lot of time in my dreams being around other people and enjoying their company, which in recent years I almost never do and I guess I just miss people. The epitome of this are dreams where I am successfully and very enjoyably flirting with several women. Alternatively, I often dream that I am somehow living with a large family of many children (of which I'm a peer, age indeterminate). This is often either of two large families I actually knew when I was a child. I am (by ten years) the eldest of only two children. The best thing about these family dreams is the sense of simultaneously belonging but not being the focus of attention. That's all sort of obvious, too.
Frankly, I'm certain I have some lifelong sleep-disorder. Always more a night-owl, left to my own devices without commitments as has been the case for almost twenty years, I have no stable sleep schedule, but one that moves somewhat randomly around the clock but, on average, avoids being awake from 7AM to 11AM. I know this with some certainty, as it's both attested by well over a decade of Google search history data, as we as my wearing a Fitbit Alta HR for two years, which detects and records sleep. In conjuction with this, I fall into REM dream sleep almost immediately and spend almost all my sleep in that state. I get little deep sleep. Thus my vivid dream life and probably my ability to recall it.
I rarely dream about actual sex, which is vaguely disappointing.
I fly, or more properly levitate, in my dreams and this has been through my entire adult life to the point that there is a specific set of imaginary, possible mental, "muscles" I use to levitate which in my waking state, right now, I can feel (though, alas, they don't work). A theme is that my ability to do this is exceptional (but not unique) and I tend to both enjoy the fact that I can do this when most cannot while, at the same time, I often get myself into trouble because of it. While I feel sort of "superior", it's also the case that I'm pretty emphatic that I am willing and able to teach others how to do this, if they wish. I have this whole technique I use. And, well, most of that has obviously symbolic meaning, in my opinion.
For most of my life I've had dreams where I am other people, and really more like a characters in films or stories. Stories with often far more continuity than they ought, being dreams. That has dwindled almost to nothing in the last two years -- I don't know why.
And if I never have another dream about not being able to find where I parked my car, it will be too soon.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:11 PM on June 10, 2019 [4 favorites]
In college I had an otherwise unremarkable dream in which my father was dead. He didn't die in the dream, or even appear in the dream, his death was not a factor in the "plot" of the dream, it was just a background fact that he had at some earlier point passed away.
The next day my reality was that my father had passed away at some point far enough in the past that it was not a fresh memory. I didn't have any second thoughts about this state of affairs - it was just a fact of my existence - until about 4:00 in the afternoon, when I started to think about it and could not recall when he had died or of what cause. It took me until about 6pm to finally realize that he was still alive.
In the earlier part of the day, if someone had asked me if my parents were living I would have told them that my mom was alive but my dad wasn't, without hesitation or doubt.
We were never especially close, he was reserved and judgmental, but it made me sad that our relationship was so distant that I had to really think hard to figure out if he was still alive.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 9:14 PM on June 10, 2019 [3 favorites]
The next day my reality was that my father had passed away at some point far enough in the past that it was not a fresh memory. I didn't have any second thoughts about this state of affairs - it was just a fact of my existence - until about 4:00 in the afternoon, when I started to think about it and could not recall when he had died or of what cause. It took me until about 6pm to finally realize that he was still alive.
In the earlier part of the day, if someone had asked me if my parents were living I would have told them that my mom was alive but my dad wasn't, without hesitation or doubt.
We were never especially close, he was reserved and judgmental, but it made me sad that our relationship was so distant that I had to really think hard to figure out if he was still alive.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 9:14 PM on June 10, 2019 [3 favorites]
Dreams are awesome and weird!
I mostly remember my dreams, and often write or draw them when I wake up.
There are standard-issue flying-dreams, trying to find a bathroom dreams, anxiety about having missed all the classes and now there's a test dreams, losing teeth dreams...
Also driving dreams: trying to nonchalantly drive a vehicle but steering from the back seat, or sitting backwards, or the vehicle Im driving is a big ship, or a bar stool, or a plastic bowl, or a huge stack of mattresses- or a giant semi where I had to lean way far out the window when turning left to keep balance the way you do on a motorcycle.
My internal dream-production-team must be on a bit of a budget because they often keep using the same location (my childhood home) for scenarios. So for example if the dream has to do with a kitchen or food, its in my childhood kitchen; if theres a bathroom scene- its my childhood bathroom. Outdoor stuff? the lawn or fields of my childhood home. Its not 'presented' as my childhood home, and doesn't involve my family- its just a convenient location.
posted by cabin fever at 10:40 PM on June 10, 2019 [2 favorites]
I mostly remember my dreams, and often write or draw them when I wake up.
There are standard-issue flying-dreams, trying to find a bathroom dreams, anxiety about having missed all the classes and now there's a test dreams, losing teeth dreams...
Also driving dreams: trying to nonchalantly drive a vehicle but steering from the back seat, or sitting backwards, or the vehicle Im driving is a big ship, or a bar stool, or a plastic bowl, or a huge stack of mattresses- or a giant semi where I had to lean way far out the window when turning left to keep balance the way you do on a motorcycle.
My internal dream-production-team must be on a bit of a budget because they often keep using the same location (my childhood home) for scenarios. So for example if the dream has to do with a kitchen or food, its in my childhood kitchen; if theres a bathroom scene- its my childhood bathroom. Outdoor stuff? the lawn or fields of my childhood home. Its not 'presented' as my childhood home, and doesn't involve my family- its just a convenient location.
posted by cabin fever at 10:40 PM on June 10, 2019 [2 favorites]
...aand I was just about to take a huge bite out of this glorious. glistening, chocolate-covered donut when I woke up. Nuf said.
posted by Namlit at 1:01 AM on June 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Namlit at 1:01 AM on June 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
I'm another one who has vivid dreams, which is at least part of the reason I don't want to carry on a conversation immediately after waking, i.e., I'm still processing the events of the previous night's dreams. And god forbid someone wake me up mid-dream and expect me to engage in this world. As I once told my ex-husband, "just because I was asleep doesn't mean I wasn't busy".
posted by she's not there at 4:20 AM on June 11, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by she's not there at 4:20 AM on June 11, 2019 [8 favorites]
I have two major recurring dreams. In one, I have gone back to a place where I used to live or have visited. I am always on the main street or in a market area and it seems much more magical than it did in reality. I start walking through it, marveling at all the richness and variety.
In the other, I am by a body of water. Again someplace I have lived or visited. Although I have spent time in tropical areas and ones with fabulous coastlines, in dreams I am often in a lakeside suburb of Chicago or a somewhat grubby beach area a little way from a major city on the US east coast. Only the water—the water is really fantastic: a very clean blue, and billowing.
The market dream and the billowing water dream seem transparent to me, reminding me to look for more transcendent ways of living.
I dreamed a novel once and have actually written it. The name of the main character, in particular, I dreamed and it’s not something I would have remotely come up with awake. Unlike most ideas in dreams, this one didn’t seem silly on waking and the character is sort of a real person to me. I workshopped the novel around one time and realized I was way too invested in whether people liked her.
posted by BibiRose at 6:16 AM on June 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
In the other, I am by a body of water. Again someplace I have lived or visited. Although I have spent time in tropical areas and ones with fabulous coastlines, in dreams I am often in a lakeside suburb of Chicago or a somewhat grubby beach area a little way from a major city on the US east coast. Only the water—the water is really fantastic: a very clean blue, and billowing.
The market dream and the billowing water dream seem transparent to me, reminding me to look for more transcendent ways of living.
I dreamed a novel once and have actually written it. The name of the main character, in particular, I dreamed and it’s not something I would have remotely come up with awake. Unlike most ideas in dreams, this one didn’t seem silly on waking and the character is sort of a real person to me. I workshopped the novel around one time and realized I was way too invested in whether people liked her.
posted by BibiRose at 6:16 AM on June 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
My most recurring dream, since before the age of 10, is of living in a city of zombies/undead. I have magic gloves and mask that protect me, for awhile and I move and work among them. Then of course one day I'm discovered, and flee the city/village/neighborhood. I find a new home, where zombies haven't taken over, and try to warn the residents . . . just as the Undead arrive, and I begin again, with new gloves and mask. I don't know how many times I've had this dream, but it's well into the hundreds I would guess.
As an adult, my most recurring (and annoying) dreams are of jobs I used to have, mainly restaurant gigs or ornamental plastering, or mailrooms, or back when I was on tour in punk bands 80s-early 2000s. Nothing special happens, I'm just back at work there.
posted by Harry Caul at 9:25 AM on June 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
As an adult, my most recurring (and annoying) dreams are of jobs I used to have, mainly restaurant gigs or ornamental plastering, or mailrooms, or back when I was on tour in punk bands 80s-early 2000s. Nothing special happens, I'm just back at work there.
posted by Harry Caul at 9:25 AM on June 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
DOT Jr. gets onto a plane to go to Transylvania for the summer in about eight hours, as an unaccompanied minor*. Previously, my thoughts on this were headlined What an Amazing Opportunity and also maybe I Am Jealous. But right this minute, I am hip deep in Oh My Gawd I Won't See My Kid for Two Months. So it's looking like a two Xanax day.
*Lot Airlines has a service where you pay extra and your kid is accompanied by staff constantly until they are handed off formally to your designated approved person on the other end. So it's not like I'm shoving him out into the departures lounge and wishing him well or anything.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:48 AM on June 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
*Lot Airlines has a service where you pay extra and your kid is accompanied by staff constantly until they are handed off formally to your designated approved person on the other end. So it's not like I'm shoving him out into the departures lounge and wishing him well or anything.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:48 AM on June 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
I have consistent locations in dreams, like a dream version of a real place where the real place is substantially different, extra rooms or just a different setup. I will have dreams that kind of – iterate? Like, I'll have the dream once, and then my brain will run through a slightly different version of it. Sometimes I wonder if I'm having multiple dreams at once because of the way they interact, like a strange mix of simultaneity and time travel.
I have had dreams in nearly every language I've studied, and a few dreams in languages that don't exist, that were wholly a product of the dream.
The most intense dreams I've had have been after my cat Samantha died. She visits me occasionally, in this way that doesn't feel like a dream, but like she's back for a little bit. My mom came back like this once too, shortly after she passed, but has (thankfully) left me alone since then, I think she got what she wanted out of that. The visits from Samantha have continued, though they're quite rare – I had one this year after years of no visits. These are always the same, she's not back but is able to visit, I drop everything to be with her, we get a little time together and then she vanishes. The vanishing is unique, it's not something other characters in my dreams have ever done.
I've been all kinds of genders in my dreams and often dream I'm other people - I recall one dream where I was, in sequence, both Gomez and Morticia Addams, though sadly there was no tangoing.
I have rheumatoid arthritis and dream about the associated loss of mobility. Sometimes it's stuff like trying to climb stairs and having my joints refuse to work, but occasionally I dream that I can somehow ride my bike again and that's amazing. The most vivid time of this was a couple of years ago, on a night when I woke up around 3 and had trouble falling asleep, then fell asleep without realizing. I dreamed that since I couldn't sleep, I would go on a bike ride. I rode ten miles from St. Paul to Minneapolis in the early morning darkness. Unfortunately the lucidity kicked in and I started questioning how I could ride my bike when I hadn't been able to do that in years, and how I was going to get home if suddenly I stopped being able to ride since it was like 5am and no one I knew would be awake.
I do have dreams about eating foods I'm either allergic or sensitive to, like gluten and oranges. I also have the standard “oh no, I have to take a test” dreams, though recently these have shifted to dreams about doing an LLM (this is like a PhD for lawyers) while working full time and having a class I didn't go to or read for all term. Sometimes I dream about being back in college or high school and similar things, but those are much less stressful now for whatever reason and they often go in directions other than test anxiety now because I'm too lucid to be concerned about junior high algebra. I also have dreams about the day I was shot, and about sitting through my criminal trials with my prosecutor screaming that I was a terrorist (he did this, the judge eventually had to make him stop) and those are rough.
posted by bile and syntax at 5:40 PM on June 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
I have had dreams in nearly every language I've studied, and a few dreams in languages that don't exist, that were wholly a product of the dream.
The most intense dreams I've had have been after my cat Samantha died. She visits me occasionally, in this way that doesn't feel like a dream, but like she's back for a little bit. My mom came back like this once too, shortly after she passed, but has (thankfully) left me alone since then, I think she got what she wanted out of that. The visits from Samantha have continued, though they're quite rare – I had one this year after years of no visits. These are always the same, she's not back but is able to visit, I drop everything to be with her, we get a little time together and then she vanishes. The vanishing is unique, it's not something other characters in my dreams have ever done.
I've been all kinds of genders in my dreams and often dream I'm other people - I recall one dream where I was, in sequence, both Gomez and Morticia Addams, though sadly there was no tangoing.
I have rheumatoid arthritis and dream about the associated loss of mobility. Sometimes it's stuff like trying to climb stairs and having my joints refuse to work, but occasionally I dream that I can somehow ride my bike again and that's amazing. The most vivid time of this was a couple of years ago, on a night when I woke up around 3 and had trouble falling asleep, then fell asleep without realizing. I dreamed that since I couldn't sleep, I would go on a bike ride. I rode ten miles from St. Paul to Minneapolis in the early morning darkness. Unfortunately the lucidity kicked in and I started questioning how I could ride my bike when I hadn't been able to do that in years, and how I was going to get home if suddenly I stopped being able to ride since it was like 5am and no one I knew would be awake.
I do have dreams about eating foods I'm either allergic or sensitive to, like gluten and oranges. I also have the standard “oh no, I have to take a test” dreams, though recently these have shifted to dreams about doing an LLM (this is like a PhD for lawyers) while working full time and having a class I didn't go to or read for all term. Sometimes I dream about being back in college or high school and similar things, but those are much less stressful now for whatever reason and they often go in directions other than test anxiety now because I'm too lucid to be concerned about junior high algebra. I also have dreams about the day I was shot, and about sitting through my criminal trials with my prosecutor screaming that I was a terrorist (he did this, the judge eventually had to make him stop) and those are rough.
posted by bile and syntax at 5:40 PM on June 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
+++
And the travel anxiety came to fruition. I was on the shuttle to the airport at 2:30 am, got to the airport at 3:30 and the 6:00 flight was canceled and I was stuck there because it was so early in the morning. I managed to catch a shuttle back to a nearby part of town, walked half-a-dozen block to catch a bus back home. I get to try again at 2:30 am this morning and cross my fingers or I'm going to miss my nephew's graduation and maybe loose the whole trip. Oh how I hate flying home.
The one plus thing was that I did manage to wrangle one of the few early am shuttles going close enough and to a place where I knew the bus that would take me home. So I didn't have to wait hours and hours for daily operations to start up.
Hope me some luck that I get there this time as I'm waiting for that next 2:30 am shuttle to the airport.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:47 PM on June 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
And the travel anxiety came to fruition. I was on the shuttle to the airport at 2:30 am, got to the airport at 3:30 and the 6:00 flight was canceled and I was stuck there because it was so early in the morning. I managed to catch a shuttle back to a nearby part of town, walked half-a-dozen block to catch a bus back home. I get to try again at 2:30 am this morning and cross my fingers or I'm going to miss my nephew's graduation and maybe loose the whole trip. Oh how I hate flying home.
The one plus thing was that I did manage to wrangle one of the few early am shuttles going close enough and to a place where I knew the bus that would take me home. So I didn't have to wait hours and hours for daily operations to start up.
Hope me some luck that I get there this time as I'm waiting for that next 2:30 am shuttle to the airport.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:47 PM on June 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
I'm a lucid dreamer. It sucks because I relive my last awful job in a very toxic place. I was fired after five years of pretty grueling work. A total shock! Anyway, I dream about that job 3-4 nights a week. It's been 7 years. I have an awesome job now, so I wish those dreams would stop.
I spend time with my deceased father in my dreams. It's nice.
One thing I've noticed... I will dream about many situation various homes in my past. I never dream about my current home .
posted by kiwi-epitome at 9:53 PM on June 11, 2019
I spend time with my deceased father in my dreams. It's nice.
One thing I've noticed... I will dream about many situation various homes in my past. I never dream about my current home .
posted by kiwi-epitome at 9:53 PM on June 11, 2019
I dreamed last night that I played a game like The Sims 1, but when you were done you could save your house and print it onto a glossy lightweight cardboard, then punch it out and fold it into a three-dimensional dollhouse. I forgot to save my house and family as separate files, so there were people and pieces of people printed on some of the floors and walls. I spent a lot of the dream painting over them.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:11 PM on June 11, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:11 PM on June 11, 2019 [6 favorites]
I enjoy the nonsensical nutty dreams I have periodically. This is my favourite: I’m wearing scuba gear, walking around the canals of my weird version of London when I come across a burning white Christmas tree at the top corner of a building. The crowd is silent. My friend and I start walking into a shop full of fire irons. He’s also wearing full scuba gear. IRL, I don’t swim.
So i keep a little recorder by my bed, where I recite as I can remember. Sometimes this happens in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the night. I make a point of waiting a few days before listening to my recitation. Man, what is going on in there?
Since my twenties, I have three recurring dreams that keep evolving. One is a dream palace. I love those ones.
posted by lemon_icing at 12:03 PM on June 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
So i keep a little recorder by my bed, where I recite as I can remember. Sometimes this happens in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the night. I make a point of waiting a few days before listening to my recitation. Man, what is going on in there?
Since my twenties, I have three recurring dreams that keep evolving. One is a dream palace. I love those ones.
posted by lemon_icing at 12:03 PM on June 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
I keep a dream diary next to my bed. I don't record all the dreams; just the ones I remember most, or the weirdest ones. In the early days after my ex husband died I dreamed about him a LOT, and he still makes appearances occasionally. When we were in marriage counseling, dealing with his infidelities and his cancer, I had a dream where I was trying to hurt him, but try as I might, I could not. I just stood over him, and said "You are going to die. You are going to die, with no one to love you." And die he did; and the only person who truly loved him was me, and he didn't want me anymore.
Two nights ago, though, I had a fun dream! I was in the ocean, and it was rough, but I was thrilled and having a wonderful time! The ocean was a gorgeous shade of aqua - it tossed me very high into the sky, repeatedly, and I splashed back down with glee each time. I thought to myself that I needed to marry a man with a boat. No idea what THAT was about, as I am not a fan of roller coasters, ha ha.
posted by annieb at 5:25 PM on June 12, 2019 [3 favorites]
Two nights ago, though, I had a fun dream! I was in the ocean, and it was rough, but I was thrilled and having a wonderful time! The ocean was a gorgeous shade of aqua - it tossed me very high into the sky, repeatedly, and I splashed back down with glee each time. I thought to myself that I needed to marry a man with a boat. No idea what THAT was about, as I am not a fan of roller coasters, ha ha.
posted by annieb at 5:25 PM on June 12, 2019 [3 favorites]
How about a ghost story? I have a floor lamp with three LED bulbs each with it's own switch that are basically left on 24/7.
In preparation for a failed trip I turned two of them off and they've been off for days.
Just today one of the off lights just started blinking. I thought it was the on bulb starting to fail but no.
The bulb that is switched off briefly flashes every minute or so.
cue spooky music
FREAKED ME OUT... but I suspect the switch just leaks a tiny bit of power in the off position and the bulb does it's power conversion and charge the capacitors thing until a threshold is reached before it activates the LEDs and then there's not enough juice leaking in to sustain the light. Probably always been that way and I just never noticed because it was always on.
But gah can my week get any more complicated. Hail Eris.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:38 AM on June 13, 2019 [1 favorite]
In preparation for a failed trip I turned two of them off and they've been off for days.
Just today one of the off lights just started blinking. I thought it was the on bulb starting to fail but no.
The bulb that is switched off briefly flashes every minute or so.
cue spooky music
FREAKED ME OUT... but I suspect the switch just leaks a tiny bit of power in the off position and the bulb does it's power conversion and charge the capacitors thing until a threshold is reached before it activates the LEDs and then there's not enough juice leaking in to sustain the light. Probably always been that way and I just never noticed because it was always on.
But gah can my week get any more complicated. Hail Eris.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:38 AM on June 13, 2019 [1 favorite]
Oh and because I'm on a roll it's not a dream as such but a fever sick dream. I argued with God. There was this fly in the dark room that I could hear but not see. It buzzed around and annoyed me for a while. Then that motherfucker flew in one ear and out the other and went BZZT. WTF? and it kept doing that WTF BZZT inside my head until it was a continuous loop like a record stuck in a groove, BZZT, BZZT, BZZT and I was going mad. I called out to God almighty to just kill me now and the buzzing slowed until I could understand it. Still a repeating loop flying in one ear and out the other and it said: "I am not your God, I am the one true God." over and over and over and I'm going mad pleading for death. I say something like "Fuck you imposter" and I'm suddenly in the spiraling tower of angels all Dante like and I argue my way up to the top like going through customer service all "let me speak to your supervisor" like. I eventually get to God himself and we argue back and forth about what happens to babies who die. Or remote islanders who've never even heard that they're suppost to belive in that guy who died on a cross. And what about aliens... and that If he is the one true God it doesn't matter because everyone will figure it out themselves and the may not even speak the same language so it doesn't actually work if you only believe the one true God. And I swear it turned into Monty Python where he said "Yes" and then "No, AAAARRRRRGGGHH" and kicked me out down to the lowest level of angels still spiraling above me in that tower of Babel or Inverno. The angel showed me to a door and said "Here's your guardian angel" and shoved me through. My guardian angel is fucking Elvis WTF? and then I woke up. Like prophets of old I have had my vision and face-to-face with God himself and if not vanishing in a puff of logic I at least pissed him off a bit.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:37 PM on June 14, 2019
posted by zengargoyle at 1:37 PM on June 14, 2019
And just for cortex... When my grandfather was in hospice and I was back home sleeping on my sisters couch with the dogs the ceiling fan went "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha" Laurie Anderson - O Superman [Official Music Video] and that one ended up with Laurie Anderson popping up behind the bar asking me what I wanted. Wish I could remember the whole thing. A dream with Laurie Anderson was OMG crush worthy bliss that that thing happened.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:54 PM on June 14, 2019
posted by zengargoyle at 1:54 PM on June 14, 2019
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Because of course being a teenager in the world isn’t already hard enough, my brain had to make it intolerable on both sides of my skull.
posted by mce at 7:16 AM on June 8, 2019 [2 favorites]