Dreams

[Skozat]

I frequently have some pretty wild dreams. Usually adventurous and doing something that I think would be fun. I usually can't remember the beginning but what I do remember of the one I had last night was amusing.

I'll start at the point where things actually make some sort of sense. Basically, I had arrived in this big complex at some fancy soiree with a woman who I was working with. We both had superpowers of some sort. I forget hers but I remember mine was to be able to clone myself instantly (like multiple man or billy numerous). We were there to take down this AI at the core of the building. We slipped away from the party to find the superpowered director who had access to the AI, but we ran into a hulked out version of Oprah Winfrey. Take the hulk, turn him brown, and give him Oprah's head. I stop to do battle with Oprah so that my associate can get us access. A raging battle ensues in which eventually my clones manage to pin Oprah's arms behind her back and then push her off a higher floor. The clones ride her down and then I make them disappear just before she hits the ground face first.

We get access to the AI and our backup arrives in the form of a bunch of soldiers but the AI summons up vast legions that we had not anticipated. It also turned all the walls transparent inside so we could see it. We start making our way towards the giant mainframe when the leader of the AI's forces who looks like a brightly glowing Megatron blocks us from getting to it.

Then I decided that it was better to not sleep past noon. I had stuff to do and didn't want to ruin my sleep schedule. What's kind of odd is that the dream continued through the 2 times that I woke up and reset or turned off my alarm.

So, you guys have any interesting dreams to share?

[SilentDemon]

Can I have your dreams? That one is much better than my more recent ones.

Since I was ~7 years of age or so I have had nightmares about being a ninja of some sort. Eventually I sneak into this house and walk right infront of all of the house residents who were watching tv. After that I make my way outside, there is a large wooden fence with some sort of animal... or thing in it. For some reason I jump in and am eaten alive by this big monster. It devours my feet and I slugishly slide down its throat.

Bam, I'm awake and slightly terrified.

[Sykomyke]

Dreams tend to manifest themselves from childhood memories and stick with us throughout our entire life.

Originally Posted by Proffessional Dream Information Stuff

Recurrent dreams are most often reported to begin in childhood. Adolescence is also a frequent time of onset, with only a few beginning in adulthood (D'Andrade, 1985; Robbins and Houshi, 1983). The affective tone of recurrent dreams is negative in 60-70 percent of the cases, making them in that sense very reminiscent of traumatic dreams (Cartwright and Romanek, 1978). Two content analyses find that recurrent dreams are much more likely than ordinary dreams to contain only the dreamer (D'Andrade, 1985 LaRue, 1970). The most frequent content theme of recurrent dreams is being attacked or chased, accounting for 43 percent of recurrent dreams in one study. A content analysis of recurrent dreams reported by students revealed that only one type of dream occurred with any frequency, an anxiety dream in which the dreamer was being threatened or pursued. The threatening agents were wild animals, monsters, burglars, or natural forces such as storms, fires, or floods. The dreamer was watching, hiding, or running away. (Robbins and Houshi, 1983, p. 263).

My dreams, silly as they sound, involve Velociraptors. Ever since I saw Jurassic Park as a kid I have been afraid of them. Even though now I know that bones prove they never reached that tall (Realistically they reached roughly 2.07 meters, about half the size of a human, not the 5.0 meter tall ones we have to come to know in the cinema).

[Periwinkle]

I don't get cool dreams but apparantly I can see the future in them. Everything I dream tends to become a reality (a moment where i go hey dejavu?)

[liffi]

My dreams usualy have ninjas or some kind of killing in there. Other than that I dunno.

[Sithius]

I don't have recurring dreams, but when I was much younger this was the strangest dream I've ever had:

1. My fourth-grade girlfriend and I are walking together in the middle of the desert.
2. It's like we blink and are instantly in the middle of a ghost town with this feeling that we're being watched.
3. We walk all the way through the ghost town without incident.
4. We are walking through the desert again and turn around to see a giant mob of demonic Santa Clauses (complete with red eyes and fangs) chasing us.
5. The mob runs us off a cliff, and I wake up like you do when you think you're falling.

[Showtime]

In all "its" glory =] great dream IMO

[Zeetchmen]

I know I have cool dreams but I never remember them

[Sahaal]

I once had a dream where I was Hadji from Johnny Quest. Sim sim salabim.

Most of my dreams that I can remember are generally me repeatedly trying and failing to do some minor task, like build a house of cards. I guess I don't have any buried phobias or weirdness beyond that.

[Skozat]

Originally Posted by Showtime

In all "its" glory =] great dream IMO

HAHA, thanks showtime. That's pretty much dead on.

Originally Posted by Periwinkle

I don't get cool dreams but apparantly I can see the future in them. Everything I dream tends to become a reality (a moment where i go hey dejavu?)

This is actually a pretty common phenomenon among males (Not the kind of deja vu where you go "I've done almost this same thing before" but rather the kind where you go "I've experienced this before, even though it is happening now.") There are no good explanations for this. Some scientists have called it momentary disruptions in the temporal cortex which cause us to think that we have experienced it before with absolute certainty. This is bunk IMO, as I can occasionally clearly remember the dream in which I experienced it. The 2 most memorable occasions are when I dreamed that I was sitting around a table with a dozen other people in my local gaming store and we were having some sort of communal discussion. The weirdest things were that there was no table that big in the store and I didn't know most of the people around the table. About a half a year later I had let the dream go as an anomaly.
But, in the meantime, I joined a huge D&D game at the store with 14 people in it. To play we pushed together a bunch of tables in the corner of the store and one evening I looked up while we were discussing something for the game and I realized that my dream was coming to pass. I did not know most of these people half a year ago, the store had changed appropriately, 2 people were absent. Even more than that, the experience was the exact same down to my heartbeat, visual input (what my eyes could see), and breathing. It's like looking into an infinite mirror. It lasted about 5 seconds, then the feeling passed as that was all I remembered from the dream.

The most potent occurrence was in elementary school. Similar deja vu experience but lasted hours. I told my friend as we were walking to school about the dream I had that felt so real. I told him what happened and down to the finest detail it all happened that morning. It was kind of disappointing because I 'remembered' that we would be out of chocolate milk that day.

Bizarre stuff, to say the least. Now that I've got my bachelor's in psychology I can offer a couple explanations as to why you can't remember your dreams all the time and why they often seem to slip through your grasping mental fingers.

Behavioral (the kind of psychology that's actually a science) explanation: Associations are formed between stimuli and those associations are what you remember. So, when you see something familiar, you remember past actions in which that stimuli was present. Example: You see a calculator, you are likely to remember math class. In dreams which you experience that which hasn't yet occurred, there are no relevant stimuli because you are not actively engaging in any action, therefore no association is made. You are merely an observer with the best seat in the house. When you wake, those stimuli in your dreams aren't remembered because they aren't relevant, just like if I was to ask you what you had for breakfast a week or a year ago. If it isn't important, the mind doesn't process it and it is simply stored with the other irrelevant stimuli. Similarly for normal dreams, no useful information is being gathered about the world (in terms of associations and the reinforcement of behavior), so the memory isn't processed for the organism to consider for purposes of reinforcement.
The deja vu hits when you receive the exact same stimuli as you did in the dream.

Cognitive (pseudo-science) explanation: Memories function as a cognitive web, with similar things being linked to similar things and memory flows along those links. Things in your dreams usually lack links to anything else in your web, and so can't be accessed until the links being formed by living through your life finally connect to it. Instant deja vu.

Mind you, I have no idea what causes the dreams in the first place. The mind is still a largely unmapped place. It's even thought that we may remember everything and simply lose the information in the retrieval stage, like scooping water with your fingers. No one knows what causes dreams for sure. If what me, Periwinkle, and many others are experiencing (including some of my high school friends) is actually happening, it has incredible implications for both the study of the mind and physics. It may even give us insight into the nature of time itself.
At current, however, none of this is testable. So none can say for sure one way or the other. Seeing as how we can't use it for any useful purposes at the moment, it lies in the realm of odd observations and we must move on to things we can actually use to help people. It's something I'd like to study one day should the technology become available in my lifetime.