____twoism

You know, dreams with so much details in it that you wonder, was it really created by your brain? The ones that just are out of this world but yet have such a strong sense of familiarity that YOU KNOW it for a fact that you've been there before, wether it was in another life or not.

and its just not deja vue, its more intense than that, to a point where when you wake up, you just feel out of it and weird for a few minutes, but then after its gone like a distant memory that doesn't make sense.


Anyway, just a little rant after I just woke up from 3 hours of what I would qualify as fever dreams caused by my intestinal problems.

Ordered a couple of African dream beans yesterday. Hopefully I have something worthwhile to report here soon. <3

I tend to wake up from my dreams when I find a hole in the logic, I start questioning a logical error within the dream "Wait, that isn't right. That isn't right at all. What the f**k is going on here?" and eventually the logic hole tears the dream open and I wake up. Sometimes it really tries hard to explain the logic loop to me, for instance my not dying in a nuclear blast because one can't die in a dream despite being close to the epicenter of the explosion. How was it explained to me when I started thinking "This is a logical fallacy, what on earth is going on here?" "Oh it was just a clever arrangement of flood lights coming through your window with well-timed sound effects" and eventually I woke up after calling complete bullshit on its explanation as to why I was still alive.

I feel like I have discussed this before.

The distant memory that doesn't make sense is a good way to put it. It's the strangest feeling when you wake up and remember a dream so vividly, then it starts to fade until you forget the entirety of it and all you're left with is the feeling the dream gave you. Maybe it's the brains way of working through whatever it was trying to process and the residual emotional baggage left over from it is the emotion conscious-you would've went through anyway.

The logic hole. Yes. That gets me, too.

Do any of you find that, as you get older, it is harder to tell if the dreams you had when you were really young were dreams or actual memories? A lot of my earliest memories are just about as hazy as any of those early dreams. The older I get the harder it is to distinguish those things. Starting to get mushy, old person brains apparently.

mechanismj wrote:The logic hole. Yes. That gets me, too.

Do any of you find that, as you get older, it is harder to tell if the dreams you had when you were really young were dreams or actual memories? A lot of my earliest memories are just about as hazy as any of those early dreams. The older I get the harder it is to distinguish those things. Starting to get mushy, old person brains apparently.

Yes! Kind of. It's hard to tell the difference between what you felt in the dreams vs what you felt in reality when looking back in hindsight. Gets even harder if you brought feelings of the dream into reality along with you. Maybe a long-term memory thing?

Now that I'm older my brain will completely do away and forget about the dream after the first twenty minutes of waking up, then if something happens that ends up reminding me of a random moment in said-dream, boom. Entire dream suddenly remembered, feelings, environment, everything. Weird stuff, all it takes is a little reminder.

I've always been under the presumption that the reason we have dreams is some sort of self-preservation-preparation. Basically survival-practice. What would we do in these situations? How would these situations affect us if they were to happen? It is just the brain throwing already-known information right back at ya after all.

The biggest mindfuck ever is that the world as we know it with our senses is also a dream state. Just like in a sleep-induced dream, this dream of Life is experienced from the point of view of a character with sense perceptions. And once way we wake up we see that we were actually not the character in the dream, but rather the dreamer that is dreaming our body and mind. The dreamer is the eternal space in which our dream of the world happens. And it all passes, all experience, just like all dreams will pass. And all that is ever left is the One who is dreaming

I don't think I've had a dream in years.

I have reoccurring shifted reality dreams.
As in, I dream of walking through different areas of my town but parts have drastically changed. Either into trails to beaches or forestry, or I can see countryside wetlands from a cliff-top which would usually be a dead end in reality. There's always a lobby hotel in my local park that feels very real to touch.
In basic, my town is a kind of fragmented, confusing parallel universe in my dreams. Like a hedge maze with the path teetering on the brink of the familiar.
But I don't think I am describing the sensation correctly or giving it enough justice cause I haven't had one of these for a good month or so.

They don't make me question reality though, strangely enough the dreams are quite fun and explorative.

quit weed a month ago, have had some of the most vivid dreams of my entire damn life for the past two weeks. My REM sleep feels like it lasts forever

steeldancer-x wrote:quit weed a month ago, have had some of the most vivid dreams of my entire damn life for the past two weeks. My REM sleep feels like it lasts forever

I know exactly what you mean!

I hopped back on that wagon a while ago and now my dreams are like they were for you in your earlier post. I remember virtually nothing after 30 seconds or so, until some random thing triggers a memory. KABLAMO etc!

Orbited, yes! I also have a dreamscape of sorts. A constantly shifting / swirling / morphing / mixing version of the pacific northwest in the states. I love it! I love the consistencies that occur throughout the dreams.

There is a tunnel that goes into the underground. There is a light down there. A place I know I am not supposed to venture, but the temptation to go there brings it into the current dreamscape, whether that is a friend's house or in the middle of a field.

There is also a mountain or hill somewhere between the coast and Portland. Lotta weird shit goin' on thar!

For whatever reason I have a lot of weird dreams about hotels, universities, supermarkets, and other expansive man-made locations that vaguely resemble places I've been to but aren't an exact match. Most of the time I don't even end up doing anything interesting there, just sort of fumbling around looking for something/someone/someplace and usually the dream ends before I've even found the thing. Sometimes I actually do find whatever it was that I was after (a recent one involved stumbling across a cool retro game shop downtown that I was very disappointed to realize wasn't real upon waking up, several involve delicious food) but that's almost worse because then you have to wake up and realize you never actually got the thing

None of them have made me question reality as such.

Question for any of you 40+ folks. When you have dreams are you you're current age, or a different age? I ask because whenever I have a dream that I actually remember, in the dreams I'm always young. I'm always somewhere between late teens and early twenties. Then, when I wake up, I still think that I'm young. That's when "reality" kicks in and it's like, oh fuck me I'm old.

Can anyone here relate to that? If so, what do you think it means?

Two follow up questions and then I'll hang up and listen. I've heard it's possible to have some control over what you dream about, but I don't know anything about how to do that. Is that really possible? If it is, how do you do it?

Josh wrote:I've heard it's possible to have some control over what you dream about, but I don't know anything about how to do that. Is that really possible? If it is, how do you do it?

It's called lucid dreaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/lucid-dreams-overview
https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/how-to-lucid-dream#What-is-lucid-dreaming?

Lucid dreamer here. Making a dream journal way back when I was in high school has given me extremely vivid dreams for years. Here's an anecdote about one of the first semi-lucid dreams I had:

I was in the middle of a dream, in an airport terminal, and suddenly became lucid and was hit with overwhelming euphoria. I walked towards the end of the terminal into this huge open area and I saw a man in a suit with a briefcase heading towards another terminal. I put myself infront of him to stop him and told him "you're just a part of my dream, you're not real." and he replied "that doesn't mean I don't have a plane to catch." I laughed myself awake from that response.

But on topic, I have extremely vivid dreams and return to certain places over and over and often it almost feels like I'm piecing some kind of dimensional vale. I don't fully believe this, but it honestly feels that way.

NTFMTS wrote:Lucid dreamer here. Making a dream journal way back when I was in high school has given me extremely vivid dreams for years. Here's an anecdote about one of the first semi-lucid dreams I had:

I was in the middle of a dream, in an airport terminal, and suddenly became lucid and was hit with overwhelming euphoria. I walked towards the end of the terminal into this huge open area and I saw a man in a suit with a briefcase heading towards another terminal. I put myself infront of him to stop him and told him "you're just a part of my dream, you're not real." and he replied "that doesn't mean I don't have a plane to catch." I laughed myself awake from that response.

But on topic, I have extremely vivid dreams and return to certain places over and over and often it almost feels like I'm piecing some kind of dimensional vale. I don't fully believe this, but it honestly feels that way.

Interesting. So you think that by keeping a journal of your dreams, that has made your dreams more "vivid" or do you think you were already prone to that sort of thing?

If you haven't listened to Cormac McCarthy's take on the unconscious mind, I highly recommend checking it out. He describes the the unconscious mind as an operating system that works on solving problems when you're asleep, and it only works for you. That's it's job. He also believed that we dream because our unconscious mind hasn't evolved enough to use words, as language is a relatively new thing, so we get pictures or images instead.



Here's the full interview where McCarthy talks about a bunch of interesting stuff.

zeoevil wrote:

Josh wrote:I've heard it's possible to have some control over what you dream about, but I don't know anything about how to do that. Is that really possible? If it is, how do you do it?

It's called lucid dreaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_dream
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/lucid-dreams-overview
https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/how-to-lucid-dream#What-is-lucid-dreaming?

I know what lucid dreaming is, but I didn't know there was a manual for doing it! Thanks.

Josh wrote:

NTFMTS wrote:Lucid dreamer here. Making a dream journal way back when I was in high school has given me extremely vivid dreams for years. Here's an anecdote about one of the first semi-lucid dreams I had:

I was in the middle of a dream, in an airport terminal, and suddenly became lucid and was hit with overwhelming euphoria. I walked towards the end of the terminal into this huge open area and I saw a man in a suit with a briefcase heading towards another terminal. I put myself infront of him to stop him and told him "you're just a part of my dream, you're not real." and he replied "that doesn't mean I don't have a plane to catch." I laughed myself awake from that response.

But on topic, I have extremely vivid dreams and return to certain places over and over and often it almost feels like I'm piecing some kind of dimensional vale. I don't fully believe this, but it honestly feels that way.

Interesting. So you think that by keeping a journal of your dreams, that has made your dreams more "vivid" or do you think you were already prone to that sort of thing?

If you haven't listened to Cormac McCarthy's take on the unconscious mind, I highly recommend checking it out. He describes the the unconscious mind as an operating system that works on solving problems when you're asleep, and it only works for you. That's it's job. He also believed that we dream because our unconscious mind hasn't evolved enough to use words, as language is a relatively new thing, so we get pictures or images instead.

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Here's the full interview where McCarthy talks about a bunch of interesting stuff.

Wow I love Cormac McCarthy, I'll have to check this out, thanks so much for the links!

And I think I've always been a vivid dreamer, but writing down dreams in a journal for a few months one summer increased it rapidly. I also learned that a good way to confirm if you're dreaming is to try to read text or numbers, on a clock, in a book, etc. and that has consistently worked for me as well. It could be a trick in that I "deceived myself" into using these things as ways to wake me up from the dream, like a placebo.

The other two benefits from this is that I have found a way to make "savestates" in my dreams, and even if I'm not lucid, I can go back to earlier parts in dreams to avoid a bad outcome I find myself in. Or if it gets worse, I can manage to shake myself awake. I know it sounds silly, but it does happen very often. The downside is that I constantly wake up from hypnic jerks if I can't get to sleep properly.

For the first time ever about a week or two ago I had my first 'inception' dream.

Had a dream I was going to pick up my S/O from work, there was a sinkhole right before I was supposed to turn and my car ended up plummeting into it. I remember getting out and looking down in the hole and it was the exact size of my car (honestly should've known something was up by this point but im the type to be in lalaland when I dream lol). In the dream I end up borrowing my parents' minivan to see if I can hook my car out, I get to the sinkhole, and as I'm backing into the hole to secure the two vehicles, the minivan ends up falling in as well. I remember the 'weight' of both the cars makes the hole collapse and I'm falling layer to layer into the earth with the walls caving in. I opened my mouth and it was full of dirt and I started hyperventilating, thrashing around and calling for my Dad (which is kind of the fucked up part, my Dad has been dead for 20+ yrs now). I remember blinking my eyes a few time and then suddenly I was in my bed, still calling for my Dad and my hub came over and kissed me on the forehead a few times and telling me I was okay. THEN I actually woke up, no one talking to me, no one touching me or anything like that (hub was in the same room on his computer with his headphones on + he knows better than to wake me up by shaking me awake lol). I asked him if I had talked or moved around in my sleep at all to which he said no, hadn't moved a muscle before I opened my eyes and woke up.

So creepy. Never had that ever happen to me before and I was a bit brain-fucked about it for a little bit.