Dreamtime poll

[lagilman]

I actually need some feedback for a story, so if you could help out, that would be great....




[Poll #551252]


And if you want to add clarifications/examples/Weird Dream Stories, go right ahead...

Comments

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

Over a period of time, I had various dreams in which my husband drove my car in a body of water. I used to be angry with him about it for days afterwards. He still jokes about it.

[knitmeapony.livejournal.com]

I had a reoccuring dream, for a while. It was the only dream I remembered for about two years.

[newroticgirl.livejournal.com]

gah, i have weird dreams all the time... just look at my journal! LMAO (i do write the good ones in my journal).

just last night i had a crazy action adventure dream that i was some sort of important person that everyone wanted to kill. i ran away through a bunch of people's backyards and into some kind of furniture store. the owner offered to hide me in a big box of fluffy insulation kind of stuff. then after my pursuers had passed, he took me to his mansion... more like a tower... and had all these people to protect me... but we were attacked repeatedly... there were samurai's in the closets and all the people who were trying to protect me were getting killed.

when my alarm went off, i had no idea why it was set for 5:30am... until i remembered i had to go to work. HAHAHAHAHA :)

[drewshi.livejournal.com]

Last night's dream: I'm Aquaman and I'm captured by a bunch of bad guys on this pier on City Island in the Bronx. I'm knocked out and when I wake up I find I've got this weird pricking sensation in my head. Turns out the bad guy, who I never get to see, has drilled a hole in my head and is slowly eating my brains, layer by layer. I immediately wake up.

I've had quite a few interesting dreams in my day. One could write an entire book on them. I dream most vividly if I eat before I go to bed.

[neutronjockey.livejournal.com]

The one thing about having insomnia and averaging 2-3 hours every 24-36 or so is that I don't enter REM sleep as often as you regular sleepers. When I do get some deep zzzz's ('bout every two weeks or so) I have some pretty outlandish dreams. I suppose the subconscious is trying to make up for all it's missed fun. Consequently I enter beta-wave patterns (day-dreaming, relaxing, reading a book) and even theta patterns (deep meditation, sleepy-sleep) while awake more often that most regular folks do. Quid pro quo I suppose.
-=Jeff=-

[dianora2.livejournal.com]

I checked multiple boxes for some of them because it depends. Sometimes I remember dreams very vividly, sometimes only barely. Last night I had my first dream in which Andrew was only my friend and not my boyfriend. He and someone else -- Karen, I think -- were in a train station waiting room, and I was outside, and my train pulled up, and I didn't want to miss it, so I just waved goodbye to them and got on the train. As I was sitting on the train I thought about how if we had still been a couple, I never would have just waved at Andrew and run like that.

[darkesta.livejournal.com]

My own answers would be boring - I can hardly ever remember my dreams. However, my partner is on the other side of the spectrum - dreams every damn night, remembers her dreams, and her psyche doesn't waste time.

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

I dream most every night, even when I can't remember them in the morning (I think it depends on how tired I am when I go to bed) I still feel the effects of them: happy, sad, feeling like I've forgotten something...

The interesting ones I write down in my journal (especially if they involve internet people I've never actually met, but in my dream I have their cell phone number and I'm calling them from Scotland's past... :D). Only one has actually provided a good twenty-thousand words worth of story, and another the worldbuilding basics for another story.

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

I dream every damned night. The only time I don't remember them is if I've lazed on waking up, which is actually fairly rare for me -- if I jump from the bed to the shower, so to speak, the dream stays with me. Often as not they're fairly obvious reinterpretations of the previous day's events or my recent concers/worries/fears, but sometimes they're just narratives, short films in the theatre of my subconscious, and from time to time I've picked up story ideas, or in fact, entire stories, from them.

[booraven22.livejournal.com]

I usually remember my dreams. And Bri (the fiance) will usually tell me his dreams if he remembers them when he wakes up. I tend to try and analyze them as soon as I get the description down. My friends usually tap me for dream interpretation.

I am not one who automatically thinks dreams are prophetic or psychic revelations. My take on them tends to be that they are a funhouse mirror reflection of some subconscious issues you are not dealing with in your waking life.

I tend to have lots of dreams in dark houses with the knowledge that something is stalking me. I can hear it moving around in the dark. Usually there are several long barely lit corridors lined with locked doors. I usually have an odd shaped key.

The quick and easy interpretation is that something I'm dreading is coming up in the near future. I have several options for dealing with it (the doors) but are not sure which is the correct one (locked doors) and the looming deadline for a decision (the thing stalking me) is making the decision harder.

However, don't think that I don't BELIEVE in dreams of a prophetic or psychic nature. I've seen too many bits of evidence to totally dissuade me from the idea. I just don't think that MY dreams are prophetic.

Sorry about the length here. Love the topic though, Suri!

[karistan.livejournal.com]

I don't usually remember dreaming at all. When I do remember them they don't make any sense at all and are strange and memorable.

For instance, I remember a dream I had about fifteen years ago. I was running on the top of this big rubber ball, you know, the ones like the balance on in the circus, but was about a hundred feet wide. Chasing me on this ball was this monster. I remember he was always about 10 feet away and if I stopped he was going to catch me and eat me.

I don't know where that came from or what my subconscience was telling me. It was just... out there.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I'm synesthetic in waking life, but not in my dreams. And my dream senses are restricted to sight and sound. Not having the sense of touch makes erotic dreams less interesting.

[seachanges.livejournal.com]

Sometimes my dreams are precise and linear, like watching a film. The best (or worst, depending) of these was a nightmare about being on Titanic when she sank. The detail on that one was astonishing. I woke with my pillow soaked with tears and was unable to sleep for the rest of the night. When the Cameron film opened some months later, I had a rather visceral reaction to it because it was so like my nightmare.

Other dreams make less sense, and have a fluid landscape that shifts and changes depending on which door I open, or way I turn. I can start out on the deck of a ship, go through a door and find myself on a train, and it seems perfectly natural. So do the people I meet, whether they're friends from real life, characters from books or film, or people who've been dead for centuries. A few months ago, it was guest appearances by the cast of CSI. This month, it's tea with Robespierre.

Yes, my brain is a very odd place.

I do have certain recurring themes. Anxiety dreams always involve either water or storms; I classify the Titanic nightmare as an anxiety dream, despite the fancy trappings. The two classic anxiety dreams are trying to drive across a causeway before the tide covers the road, or trying to find shelter from a tornado in a house made of windows.

[isabeau.livejournal.com]

You're missing an option in the last question -- "In the dream, yes. If I think about it afterwards, no." :) Although sometimes, individual aspects of a dream will make sense afterwards, but the transitions won't.

I tend to remember fragments of what I dream, rarely the whole thing. There are some dream-images that will stay with me -- I remember one dream I had in college where I was standing outside the dorm having gotten a package from my grandparents, and the package contained a really pretty pink lace-ish sweater that all of a sudden was a gerbil; I remember a recurring image from dreams as a kid where I would be able to breathe under water if I did it slowly and a little shallowly, and so I would sit crosslegged on the pool floor and breathe and be all excited about it, and then I would wake up. [My dreams as a kid tended to end with me being able to breathe, if I was under water, and with me falling asleep otherwise, and then waking up for real.]

I have had recurring dreams; or at any rate, I have had dreams where, in the dream, I am aware that this is something I have dreamt before, but I'm not entirely sure whether I actually repeat dreams or whether it's just a dream-memory of repeating the dream.

A lot of my dreams, right now at least, tend to be dual-perspective, in that I am simultaneously *in* the dream (as a participant in the action) and "watching" the dream (as a viewer), either like I'm watching (or filming) a movie, or like I'm reading a book. (I often have prose narration of my dreams going on at the same time as the actual dream.) I am aware of both simultaneous perspectives while I'm dreaming (so it's not just that I wake up and think, hey, there was prose in there too), but it doesn't seem odd.

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

My dreams tend to repeat themselves--not reoccuring dreams, but a dream that'll run at least twice throughout the night. And while in the repeat, I'll remember that I've dreamed about it before. Or my dreams run along a plotline, where I'll not remember a previous dream, but remember details from that dream which fed into the dream I actually remember. I can also wake up for a bit then go back to a dream, if I concentrate on it.

It's also weird what sort of...emotions...dreams can bring up. I had a dream once where someone had used a safety pin as a sort of earring, only they stuck it through my temple, into my eye, and back out again. I could see it in the mirror in the dream, a little line of red. It freaked me out when I woke up, but wasn't so bad in the dream itself. I've also had rather innocuous dreams--being on a boat, for instance--terrify me to the point where I don't want to go back to sleep. In that sense, I don't have classic "nightmares."

LJ has several communities devoted to dream recollection, including naked_at_school, for other sorts of details.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

My dreams make sense while I'm having them, but not in the morning.

I also find that I remember fewer of my dreams than I used to. I blame parenthood and the resulting corpse-like sleep state I experience nightly.

Also, you know how people say you can't die in your sleep? Not true. I've been shot to death in my dreams.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, most of what I remember right now is nightmares. Apparently they go with the condition.

I used to have quite intricate dreams--and most of them were in color, or colorized (something important in the dream in full color, the rest subdued or night goggle like.)

[edeevee.livejournal.com]

I am the only person I know who can dream during a twenty minute nap. I usually don't try to make sense of my dreams unless I dream the same thing twice. I really enjoy interpreting dreams for others though. Leave a comment on my journal if you ever want one "done".

Weird dreams

[jennifer-dunne.livejournal.com]

I remember my dreams if I wake up naturally...usually not if I wake to my alarm.

My dreams tend to fall into three categories. The "random association of thoughts accumulated throughout the day" dream. (e.g. the dream incorporates you wearing the sweater you were considering buying, serving tea sandwiches on your mother's china pattern, to the guest on Late Night who is performing in your living room) The "acting out" dream. (e.g. you take the role of a character in a movie/tv show/book) And the "where the heck did THAT come from???" dream.

The last is the category that makes for the most fun when recounting dreams. Like the time the Red Barron confessed that WWI was really faught over a lack of orange juice, which France was hoarding from the Germans. Or Captain Hook explained that he'd become a pirate because he'd attended boarding school instead of public school. My favorite has to be the combination of Animal Farm / Hamlet / The Arthurian legends, wherein Arthur etc. were a troupe of Shakespearean actors -- all pigs -- with Arthur the leading hog, Morgana the older woman, Guineviere the ingenue, Lancelot the stunt pig, and Merlin the stage manager. Mordred, the illegitimate son of Arthur and Morgana, lived under the stage in secret, operating the trap doors (a la the Phantom of the Opera) until he finally confronted Arthur demanding to be allowed to perform on stage, and trying to win the leading hog role. Arthur stabbed him, and as Mordred lay bleeding to death on the rough wooden stage, Merlin rested a comforting hoof on his shoulder, and confessed, "Your father is a pig of deep passions." (You can see why that's in the WTF??? category)

lucid dreamer

[talechaser.livejournal.com]

I remember my dreams every morning, clearly. Most of the time, in the dream, I know that I am dreaming, and I am able to control my dream.