Dreams

[tree_and_leaf]

weymss has got me thinking about dreams: specifically, he noted that he dreams in colour, which is allegedly unusual.

Which made me think about my dreams, and I came to the conclusion that my dreams aren't generally visual. Often they seem to consist solely of dialogue, and sometimes just of an emotion. For instance, I remember waking crying over the summer, and remembering nothing of the dream other than a strong conviction that a particular unpleasant event had taken place. It hadn't, although it did about a month later, which is either rather freaky, or a complete coincidence, or evidence that the subconscious mind spots patterns which allude the conscious mind (and in this case still do).

So... am I really weird? How do you dream?

Comments

[ellid.livejournal.com]

I always dream in color, with dialogue, and often with plots. I don't remember them when I wake, but I know that they're stories, not just random stuff.

Didn't know that was unusual. Interesting.

[tree_and_leaf]

Hm... this totally unscientific sample seems to suggest that it may not be as unusual as all that. Interesting, though, to hear about how other people dream.

[rustica.livejournal.com]

I, too, dream in colour. My dreams can be either very weird or completely mundane, and this seems to go in phases; there's also a nightmare phase too, but fortunately I only ever have one of those per night during this phase. Each phase lasts 2 - 3 months. My dreams always have a lot of detail and are long and involved. There is sound in my dreams but it's not normally a major feature - I only became really aware of this last weekend when I had a rather nasty Hannibal Lector dream with lots of screaming and a really cheesy music track on top!! I've never before had a dream from which I woke with my head ringing from the noise.

So, yes, colour, plots, dialogue, sound; primarily visual.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Same here.

[tree_and_leaf]

The Hannibal Lector dream sounds particularly unpleasant...

Sound is much more important in my dreams. Too much Radio 4?

[sammee42.livejournal.com]

I have those kinds of very emotional, visceral dreams sometimes, too. I won't remember anything that happened, but I'll have a strong sense of panic or fear or what have you. What was the particular unpleasant event? Is it the event we've corresponded about over e-mail??

[tree_and_leaf]

Yeah...

[sammee42.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. That is very bizarre that you dreamed about it first. Maybe your subconscious was receiving hints that weren't being passed on by your conscious mind or that your subconscious wasn't allowing your conscious mind to pick up or your conscious mind chose to ignore. Are you with me? Ha.

[tree_and_leaf]

I'm with you - but the whole thing is still pretty confusing.

Maybe your subconscious was receiving hints that weren't being passed on by your conscious mind or that your subconscious wasn't allowing your conscious mind to pick up or your conscious mind chose to ignore

That sounds superficially plausible, except then one would have thought that subsequent events would have led me to look back and think 'So that's what that was about' rather than continuing to mutter 'Where did that come from, in a confused manner... But then, the subconscious mind is an odd place.

[sammee42.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm definitely no sub-conscious expert!!!!

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Colour, definitely. Sometimes quite long and intricate plots. Sometimes music. Conversations. Railway stations, trains, buses (or waiting for them) and the London Underground (airports not so much, very occasionally ferry-boats). Strange architectural edifices. Mutated versions of the town where I grew up. Other recurrent dream places. Occasionally nightmares.

[tree_and_leaf]

I dream about stations and airports a lot - of course, there's the classic 'trying to catch a train' anxiety dream, which I certainly get at times.

[sacred-sarcasm.livejournal.com]

I hardly ever remember my dreams - I'm a far more vivid day-dreamer than sleep-dreamer. When I do dream, I don't think that it's often visual... I have a sense of place, and sometimes there's music and often dialogue and conversations (often with people I know, or sometimes with people from book - I rarely 'invent' people).

As for colour... it's not full-colour, but tends to be shades of grey or sepia, with some very intense patches of colour - a leaf, a stream...

I've seen places in my dreams very occasionally, and I'm convinced they're real and I've been there (maybe when I was much younger) - but after asking parents/friends who might also have been there, I can never place them. It used to creep them out so I don't mention it anymore. I still don't know if these places are real or not.

[tree_and_leaf]

Dreaming of specific places which may or may not be real is an interesting phenomenon... I seem to remember that John Buchan became mildly obsessed with a particular place/ configuration of landscape which he dreamed about, and later saw from a plane in Canada (I think). He gives this sort of experience to at least two of his characters, Dick Hannay (in Greenmantle) and Edward Leithen (in Sick Heart River, and possibly also in The Dancing Floor) - of course Leithen is obviously quite close to Buchan in a lot of ways, though I wouldn't call him a Mary Sue.

[eagles-rock.livejournal.com]

In my early teenage years, I used to have dreams about my parents dying; 'practical' dreams about arrangements to be made, where I was going to live etc. I'm an only child, it was all about me, and not about emotions at all. I finally mentioned these to my mother, who reckoned, rather sensibly, it was about planning and processing something that bothered me. Dreams about death have been 'useful' when dealing with my mother-in-law's dementia; I'd covered a lot of the things that needed to be done years ago. In a nonsensical, dream-type way.

Most of my dreams are about being in a prison of some sort, struggling along whilst waiting for a chance to escape, and actually escaping. Sometimes I make up Yeats's poetry to fit into the bits I can't remember (thankfully not remembered the next day); sometimes I escape and I can't speak the local language or read the signs. A reporter on the news a few years ago stood in front of a sign saying 'Republika Srpska' and I knew I'd been there, ran past that sign.) So very little application to RL worries there, I'd have thought, but there is quite a common motif of making plans and waiting for the moment. And action; there's a lot of action, but also a lot of being lectured to, which is not something I've experienced for many years.

[tree_and_leaf]

Interesting.

I used to dream a lot about missing planes, until I actually did miss a flight (presumably at that point my subconscious decided it needed a new symbol for whatever was bothering me).

a lot of being lectured to, which is not something I've experienced for many years.

I know quite a few people (including one academic with a departmental chair) who dream about exams, though it's decades since they had to do one. Maybe things become better dream-symbols once they're safely in the past, and not among the things you consider every day?

[eagles-rock.livejournal.com]

Maybe so; I had worked out one thought about the prison dreams, that they were related to spending ten years with my parents' then-dreadful marriage. I hadn't considered that until your post, and it seemed to fit. But if things are safely in the past, why work over them?

Exam dreams - yes, I've had two of those, but not recently. They are odd and completely without sense - one was about an English A-Level (which I did not do) for which I hadn't read one of the set books with a week to go. Why I couldn't have read it and a set of notes in this week I've no idea. There's also a German A-Level for which I go to no classes. *slaps forehead*. I've been spared remembering dreams about any exam I actually sat.

I do hate haranguing though, and most of my dreams seem to feature it in some form or another - the lectures are not friendly. Maybe that is now safely in the past; you know, I like that idea more all the time.

[mrs-wolf.livejournal.com]

I can never see faces, it's just intuition about who they are, with great dollops of color all around. I used to have alot of nightmares and became a bit of an insomniac. They were horrible dreams, really not worth talking about. So I'd stay awake for days on end and when I'd sleep after so long, it was like I was still awake when I slept, with an inability to move, because it was such a deep sleep. A very strange sensation.

Now I'm a bit of a hypersomniac, with a grayness to the nightmares, where they were bright and vivid before. I, too, dream about what will happen before it actually does. I often dream about my day the night before, sometimes it happens months after my dream. It's very creepy. I'm not sure I like it at all.

[tree_and_leaf]

Ouch. Sorry to hear about the nightmares.

(Possibly) precognitive dreams: well, this is the first time when I've been sure I dreamed of something before it happened, rather than being foggy about whether I had dreamed of it, or if it were merely a variation of deja vu, so I'm not ready to write it down as more than coincidence (or a manifestation of fears which had more basis in reality than I thought) yet! But it is rather creepy - you can say what you like about the faults of characterisation it 'That Hideous Strength' (and I have, at times), but Jane's in-denial-and-quietly-freaked-out reaction to suddenly developing prophetic dreams was dead on.

[themolesmother.livejournal.com]

I don't remember dreams that often but when I do they are epics with very complicated plots and always in colour. I wake knowing there was much more to the dream than the bits I remember.

One rather nasty side effect of the cancer treatment was reliving it all in dreams six months to a year later. Not to be recommended. I've been something of an insomniac since.

MM

[tree_and_leaf]

Oh dear, flashback dreams sound remarkably unpleasant.

I generally only remember fragments of dreams, so I suppose that for all I know I could be dreaming a War and Peace length epic every night, and I'd never know!