Ask Lemmy

It's like having thoughts, but weirder.

I have incredibly wild and vivid dreams, a handful of times a year.

My most recent one is one that has repeated a handful of times. I am in Portland for some reason and there is a restaurant with a large gravel lot.

I park and I walk up to the restaurant to order a hot dog and Colin Melloy from the Decemberists shows up. His hair is about shoulder length, he's wearing cut off blue jean shorts and a plaid shirt. And he puts on an open air concert out in the gravel lot for free for everyone who just happens to be stopping by this particular hot dog stand.

He played songs from the Crane Wife album, which was pretty cool.

I've had other dreams where I've led choirs of priests and nuns on a musical rampage throughout New York City, singing a song I've never heard before and have not heard since as like this massive musical number.

I've had dreams where I Fight evil villains on spaceships with laser swords only to find out that the villain was my cousin.

I've had dreams where it's the 80s and I am a white guy that wears white suits and sunglasses and I'm rich and I drive a red sports car that's a convertible and I have a lot of money and that dream. I told myself, oh yeah, I've got to make that big purchase in the morning. I better put $50,000 under my bed so it'll be there when I wake up. And then I woke up in the real world and immediately looked under my bed to realize that it was a dream and I've never been more upset to wake up in my life.

I've had dreams where I'm in a dark room being assaulted by demons, being told all the horrible things that there are about me, and I'm trapped to a chair, and like I'm praying to get out of this situation, and the demon laughs at me, and he flicks his finger, and while I'm stuck to the chair, it lifts up onto one leg and starts spinning around and around faster and faster and faster, trying to get my hands to unclass from prayer as the demon laughs in the darkness.

And I've had a recurring dream throughout most of my life, well two recurring dreams throughout most of my life, one of which is where I'm standing in an infinitely large black room on a small little pedestal, and there is a glowing, blue, thin strand of string that serves as a tightrope between here and the end of infinity, and i become aware that I am supposed to walk this tightrope.

Somewhere out beyond the darkness are a tribunal of judges who are watching me and watching my performance, as I take one step onto the string, and then I take the second step, and I realize I have to balance, and I immediately fall, and as I'm falling and I'm plummeting through infinite darkness, I hit the ground, and in real life I wake up, and my entire body convulses and bounces on the bed.

The other one that I have is there is a town, and the town has rolling green fields and sunflowers and wooden fences and white houses and paved roads intersecting through it that wind back and forth and I am driving in an old beat up blue Ford truck with the wooden slats on the truck bed. And, as I drive through the town people stop and wave at me and I wave at them because I am making a delivery and they know me and I know them and I get to drive back and forth in this beautiful, serene, peaceful, perfect town full of happiness.

Check out the Twin Peaks series. For me that’s the closest I’ve ever seen on screen

You dream every night, everyone does. You just don't remember the dreams on waking.

IDK about windows to the subconscious but if I have an interesting or recurring dream, sometimes I try to interpret it, and have gotten some things out of doing that.

Maybe there is some gadget that can detect when you are dreaming. You wouldn't want to have it wake you automatically on a regular basis (disrupting sleep isn't always avoidable, but it isn't good). But you could try it once or twice and see if you remember the dream then.

Dreaming is also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, because people's eyeballs jerk around during that sleep phase. Usually the jerking is pretty random. Once during a sleep study, a guy's REM suddenly changed to very rhythmic, repeated side to side movements. That was weird enough that the researcher woke him and asked him what he had been dreaming about. The answer: playing ping pong. The eye movements had tracked the ball going back and forth.

Everyone dreams, FYI. It's an integral part of sleeping. You just don't remember it.

It's like being awake except more entertaining things are happening. It's a window to the subconscious in the sense I can tell problems from the day appear in them, but not in a Freudian way where they mean things.

I have a personal hypothesis, born out of studies I read a long time ago and haven't kept up with nor really bothered to research more (so take it with a grain of salt), that dreams are two things happening at once:

•Your brain organizing your memories of everything that happened that day, including every thought you had even if it doesn't have a physical event attached to it.

•Your imagination adding as much of a cohesive story as it can to those often times unrelated memories.

I always picture it like still images that change rapidly one after the other, sort of like flipbooks, and then your "conscious" mind trying to keep up with it, finding no logic, and creating a storyline instead.

I've found myself lucid dreaming before, and despite being in control and knowing it's a dream, I'm still asleep, so I end up making dumb choices or playing along with my dream.

The dreams I remember tend to be strangest/goofiest ones or the ones that had some emotional impact on me. However, when I analyze them while awake, I realize that there was a lot of extra "content" that I didn't add or doesn't fit into the dream. Like how somehow the place and the people I'm with change every "scene".

Sometimes I wake up with a phrase resonating inside my head, with that feeling you get in your mouth when tou want to say something. And since I'm bilingual, I've had dreams with both languages happening at once. Hell, I've even had dreams where I'm speaking Japanese "fluently" (i.e. it feels fluent in the dream but I know it must be gibberish, since I don't speak the language).

Sometimes they help me face subconscious anxieties, sometimes they give me solutions to problems I'm having IRL, but more often than not, it's like I'm watching the randomest movie ever. And I do think they're a "window or the subconscious" but not in the sense I think you're asking. Since they're memories and imagination, it is your subconscious that is choosing to focus on specific aspects or the storyline you create. So, analyzing them can help to see what's going inside that blob of fat we call brain.

Tl;dr: they feel like when you're fantasizing/daydreaming but a lot less cohesive, and can be helpful every now and then.

I don't know how dreams happen to people with aphantasia, and I know my explanation would be wildly different for them, but that's how I see dreams.

I used to be like that, unable to dream/remember dreams. Turns out that was because I had nightmares and terrors and stress dreams and my brain simply didn’t want to remember them.

I took a shaman drug (that I won’t mention, because I absolutely do not recommend it for anyone ever, and regret taking it myself) over the course of many months, and it absolutely gave me the permanent ability to dream and recall, and even consistently lucid dream (I don’t recall dreams every day, but at least once a week now). I now have a whole town that acts as a hub to get to all the places I’ve dreamed about more than once. It’s kinda fun.

However, these dreams are massively emotionally taxing. I often encounter my mother (the point of the shaman drug is to interact with dead ancestors), so I’ve relegated her to a middle floor of “my house” so she’s easier to avoid.. those experiences are.. just so overwhelmingly taxing. They do help with some closure stuff even tho I know it’s just my brain making up both sides of things, but it’s draining all the same.

I had a dream not too long ago (week maybe) where I didn’t dream about an event or a past, but I dreamt about a project I was working on and I invented something for myself that I can actually build right now if I wanted, but it is meant for me a decade or two in the future.

I’m a wood carver and I’m currently carving a gift for my brother in law. The dream was me fixing a lot of the things I had issue with in the project, and a future idea about my parents that I’ll be writing down and brainstorming until the times comes that I’ll probably want to build it.

For me personally it's a bit like... the creation of memories. And the synthesis of what I like to call "ambient feelings" – like vibes or atmospheres people, places or situations give off. A lot of layered emotions, a lot superpositions, where something or someone is multiple things at the same time. "Chimeras", which are blends of people I know for example.

Then the details slip away from me and I can't even talk to anyone about the experience.

That's normal. I swear that my dreams are really detailed sometimes, but the memories become muddy the more I think about them.

Is it really a window to the subconscious for you?

Yes. I take my dreams very serious. They are weird and hard to describe, sometimes they are cruel in a way. I consider myself a pretty reflected person, but from time to time my dreams show me stuff I don't want to admit to myself.

That said, I love dreaming. Reality is rigid and boring. I like to imagine we live and absorb impressions only so our brains can dream. Which is bullshit :D but I enjoy the thought.

There are many kinds of dreams, each with a different sensation.

• There's vivid nightmares which leave you in a state of panic, often unable to go back to sleep due to a hyper focus on every little sound and touch.
• There's action dreams which give you an adrenaline rush and a state of random anger.
• There's emotional dreams which leave you as an empty shell, crying or full of longing for something out of reach.
• There's horny dreams which leave a puddle in your bed.
• And there's also happy dreams which fill you up with joy and leave you refreshed and full of love for life.

Of course there's also the forgotten dreams which can be anything, but don't really matter to you because you can't remember having them. But they often leave behind the feeling you're supposed to be doing something, which can drive you crazy during the day.

For those who don't dream much, I'm curious of your surrounding sleep habits and how much you've looked into changing your habits. This could be a big indicator you're not getting into REM sleep, which is not good.

Do any of you drink alcohol, take other prescribed substances (or not prescribed)?

Have you tried eating foods rich in magnesium or taking magnesium supplements?

To answer out of order, I don't analyze them. I don't think there's really any reason to.
Sometimes it can be a window to the subconscious, but it's mostly just random things.

It's really hard to answer what it's like. I dream very frequently and quite often vividly. What it's like varies so much night by night. Lately, for maybe the past three weeks, I've been having one nightmare after the next after the next. For me, I tend to enjoy the scarier dreams that deal with "monster movie" plots. Zombies, clowns, ghosts, etc. Those are fun for me because they're not real irl, so it's easier to enjoy.

The problem I'm having right now is that these nightmares are too real and too targeted. "Nobody likes you" or bleeding out or being alone or getting cancer. Just all the horrible things my brain can do to make me wake up miserable, I guess.

When I'm stressed, I have a set of reoccurring themes that makes it easier to identify as a stress dream and therefore not be as effected by the events or emotions in the dream. Themes are: tsunamis, bears, brakes failing, or physical abuse.

One of the greatest problems I have after dreaming so vividly my whole life, is that I'm terrified that my brain will flip a switch when certain situations arise. For example, I've often dreamed about drowning. As in I'm in a pool or lake or ocean and for some reason am unable to get air. So I start panicking and doing anything I can. As I finally can't take it anymore, I gasp for the air that isn't there and... Huh. I can breathe water? It takes a bit, but inevitably the dream says look at you, you've always been able to breathe water, you just never tried.. So when it comes to the real world, I'm terrified that if there's a situation where I need to hold my breath for a while underwater, my brain is going to just lean into the many lessons learned and tell me to just breathe and it'll be fine, because I've always been able to breathe water, duh.

So. None of that probably answers your question. But it's such an esoteric and personal and varied thing from person to person. Or from week to week within a single person.

If you do want to dream more, try to keep a little notebook on your nightstand and when you wake up with these dreams you rarely have, write them down. It clues your brain in to start remembering them more and then you will start to truly dream.

I have aphantasia so don’t really have full fledged scenic dreams with a narrative like some people have.

It’s more like I see my daughter crawling and falling into the plug socket so I need to go in after her, and then I’m suddenly in a field full of wasps.

I don’t ‘see’ much, it’s more like flashes of images and emotions; and I’ll often open my eyes and talk or shout but still be asleep mentally.

I'm not sure if I have them and don't remember them or just don't have them. Like you, I may get a little something during short naps but next to nothing during longer sleep.

Related to this, are you able to picture images in your head while awake? There's a phenomenon called aphantasia that I've participated in a couple studies on. I'm somewhere around a 4 or 5 on the picture in the wiki. I recall at least one of the studies exploring the correlation between aphantasia and dreaming.

The type of dream I enjoy the absolute most are called "lucid dreams." It's when you actually recognize you're dreaming and can take control of it. I could be dreaming of walking down the sidewalk and see a cool car, realize I'm dreaming, and then just say ok I'm going to get in that car and drive it lol

Unfortunately they're super super rare so I think I've only had like 4 that I remember.