As per request, let's start a dream discussion/interpretation thread!

I hold great value in dreams. In fact I have been practicing lucid dreaming - the ability to know you're dreaming, while you're dreaming. This comes from understanding how your mind works when you're in a dream. Usually when a person dreams, they're so confused and disoriented, but the senses are so real, that they assume they're in reality.

If you perform reality checks you can avoid that when you're dreaming. Instead you realize "but warping hands means I'm dreaming.." Once you get this "aha" moment during a dream, you become lucid and can control the dream. You also remember the dream, because a part of your mind is awake that usually isn't. I suggest checking out Google on lucid dreaming for more information because it's worth it.



My first lucid dream, I was in a very creepy room. It seemed like a holo-deck or a computer room, but very dark, and I knew it was possessed by an evil ghost. I wanted to escape. There was no door. Everything was scary and I'm pretty sure I saw a mosquito too. Nightmare mode. THEN I looked at my hands (I had been reading about lucid dreaming for a few nights so I knew the procedure). My fingers looked like I was on mushrooms, warping around, so I realized I was dreaming. At that moment I had a sense of overwhelming power, like a god, and I walked out of the room and down the hall, climbed out a window, then woke up.

My second lucid dream was very short. I was at a friends house in the dream, when I looked at my hands. I realized I was dreaming. Before then, I had been wanting to shoot fireballs in a dream, so when I was dreaming I decided "Fireball time". I shot fireballs for about 1 second then woke up in a cold sweat...

Another dream in the same room of the same house, I realized I was lucid, then I literally spun in a circle as I fell to the floor. And fell back asleep. It was strange. Apparently, it happens a lot to people who get lucid dreams to get dizzy and/or 'spin'.

More recently I had a dream where I became lucid, so I began 'gliding' down a hill (like a paper airplane). Then I "woke up", only it was a false awakening, and I was still dreaming but no longer lucid. I distinctly recall climbing out of my bed and heading to my computer, in my dream, then everything faded into oblivion. I should have looked at my hands again (always do a reality check when you first wake up). From then on, I lost memory like a normal dream and woke up a couple hours later going "wtf was that"


My interpretation of lucid dreaming? Awesome! But after twenty lucid dreams, I always have the same problem. I get excited and wake myself up. It's simply too.. overwhelming. Like you're a god of your own imagination, but it applies to your senses. If we could do that all the time, people wouldn't want to exist in a physical form



Your turn

Ooooh, you got here first! My bad, heh. My off-screen quest for caffeine resulted in failure, but I've returned now with a full mug and (perhaps more importantly) full inspiration. Since you're a practitioner of Lucid Dreaming (online high-five) I can't really give you a 'full' interpretation of your dreams, only the bits that seem less influenced by your consciousness. And with all interpretations; they are only idle musing and nothing more. With that being said...

Thoughts/Eliskan

Dream 1): This sounds eerie. Did it start out with a complete lack of control? In reality I'm pretty superstitious, so *knowing* that an evil spirit was about'd completely creep me out. Mosquitos are an unpleasant fact of life where I live though, so I've grown used to the little bloodfiends.

Dream 2): Man, I wish I could into fireball time.

Dream 4): Fading in my dreams tends to accompany a fading sense of consciousness, and with it, an unshakeable paranoid fear. Oblivion, however, is sometimes comfortable by comparison. What about for you?

- Prelude -

I've tried to lucid dream, and done so a few times before; however, it leaves me exhausted and feeling a heightened sense of paranoia and confusion, the former being a problem I suffer from a little already.

That and the fact the powerless tended to result in me re-making my dreams to remove the things I found most interesting led me to abandon the process in favor of something kind of similar to remote viewing. I force myself to write down a dream the moment I wake, no matter how sketchy and how insane my ramblings. Some go on for pages of spidery handwriting that I'm sure are even more frightening than my siblings collage-wall! But they give me great inspiration for stories, so even if most of my dreams frighten me a lot, I prefer it this way.

So - I'll be posting dreams one/two at a time, so that there's always something weird and wacky happenin' in this thread. Feel free to make Freudian jokes, add links to Yume Nikki sound effects or old numbers stations, or just point and go 'ha-ha'!

- Fermata -

Have you ever immediately woken up with a feeling of weightlessness?

Like you aren't attached to anything and the world is just floating by around you.
But it isn't a free sensation, like flying. First any clothes you have drift off - then your skin, then your senses.
I remember waking up like that, and drifting down a river of consciousness that ended at a small house, near a small brook.

The house was made of clay bricks, unevenly put together. I remember that the back of the house hadn't been completed; the whole thing looked as if it had been made for a movie set. Inside the house were all sorts of tools. Prods and shovels and picks, tweezers and tongs and inkwells. They didn't seem to have anything in common.

As for me, I felt the distinct feeling there was something in the house watching me patiently - wanting me to interact with one of the tools, but even if I had hands or the ability to move things, I don't know if I could. Besides - I felt like moving them would also make whatever it was angry. And though I wanted to see what it might do, what it might look like - even in dreams, I'm a little too cautious for that.

So instead, I 'drifted' along the river, until the water seemed to rise above me up into the sky in aquapillars. They were pretty, so I drifted up along the sky - and then the sky broke, and the pillars broke, and I broke into glistening shards of water and light. The spooky ending is that a certain cat may or may not have attacked me.

My advice to both of you? Lay off the mescaline

I don't know if I've had any lucid dreams. I want to say I have, but I don't really remember any of them.

I do have a constant reoccurring dream where my teeth are rotting away and/or falling out. In some cases I bite down one of my teeth will just break apart and shatter. So, now I get worried when I go to the dentist all the time. lol

Just wait until eliskan and I take bat country, Dystopia! Hahaha - Though, to be honest, the only drug I use is hard cheese. Don't understimate stilton, though, I'm warning you - it's so tasty that it's almost... Addddictive. Iffn' you like cheese. If you don't, eh. And it really does make for strange dreams before sleeping.

Hmn - Memoria, that sounds similar to a nightmare my sister used to have about her fingers being sliced off or something. She eventually managed to diminish it by reading heavily before sleeping, but it sounded/sounds terrifying. I can only imagine what a dream like yours'd be like... Dentists terrify me already, eheh.

Speaking 'classically', I suppose it could indicate a fear of the future, and of powerlessness - and also of gradual decay as opposed to things happening all at once. Most people dream very vividly - but remembering them can be hard, even with lucid dreaming. Generally, like eliskan said - if you check yourself and know you're in a dream, then almost infinite control becomes yours - but it's getting to a place where you reliably do that, that's the hard part... Any good dreams you recall, recurring or otherwise?

I'll probably post another when I return.

Meditation actually led me to lucid dreaming. Thanks to that I haven't had a nightmare in many years. However, my dreams always end up entertaining in many ways. I do feel if my dreams ever had hidden meaning that lucid dreaming removed it.

Madrin - For some people I've known, lucid dreaming has given them more meaning - by allowing them to take control of their dreams, they've been able to find new things about themselves or others. And for some, it's the exact opposite; and still for others, it's the cure for nights of insomnia... Or plain ol' boring dreams. So that's why I try to get most people I know to try it for themselves - I'm glad it's removed your nightmares, though. And though I know I said I'd post another dream when I returned, but I'm tired and it's like 7:00 in the morning...

Actually, here's a short waking dream I had. There was a mound of old boxes - things like packing boxes, tissue boxes, pretty much anything you could find around a store or stockhouse - and trapped inside the center of the mound was a crystal-thing filled with fireflies. I remember wanting to free the fireflies because I felt bad for them - but every time I touched the boxes, my fingers started to burn.

Like an idiot I kept on trying to touch the boxes and then I fell forward into them and I think they grew mouths and ate me. The upside though was that I was able to knock the crystal forward and it split open - my hope is that the fireflies escaped into the badly rendered distance of my dreams, ha.

Aldwine wrote:

Actually, here's a short waking dream I had. There was a mound of old boxes - things like packing boxes, tissue boxes, pretty much anything you could find around a store or stockhouse - and trapped inside the center of the mound was a crystal-thing filled with fireflies. I remember wanting to free the fireflies because I felt bad for them - but every time I touched the boxes, my fingers started to burn.

Maybe they weren't fireflies. Maybe they were little fairies! :O Either way, I like that imagery.

Memoria wrote:

I don't know if I've had any lucid dreams. I want to say I have, but I don't really remember any of them.

Well, the thing about lucid dreaming, is if you enter a lucid state your concious mind becomes fully aware. This is why lucid dreaming can produce extremely vivid and easy to remember dreams. So if you have been lucid, you would probably know But don't beat yourself up if you've never been lucid. I had my first lucid dream about a week after reading about lucidity. It takes practice and you need to be consistent with doing reality checks.

It's definitely very empowering. I only wish I was able to keep myself calmer when I become lucid, because I always get too excited and wake myself up.

Quote:

Actually, here's a short waking dream I had. There was a mound of old boxes - things like packing boxes, tissue boxes, pretty much anything you could find around a store or stockhouse - and trapped inside the center of the mound was a crystal-thing filled with fireflies. I remember wanting to free the fireflies because I felt bad for them - but every time I touched the boxes, my fingers started to burn.

Sounds like a representation of your personal desires. You want something from life, but you find that whenever you get too close to this desired object, you get hurt. Maybe it's a relationship? Or maybe you're allergic to fireflies..



I've had a couple very beautiful dreams in the past, I will describe one of them too you. In this dream, there was a lush valley with a river winding up it. Snaking through the river were two enormous sheets - one red, and one orange - that didn't seem to have a beginning or an end. They simply flowed down the entire length of the river. I spoke to someone in the dream (pretty sure he was the Mad Hatter...) asking what was so strange about the river, and he explained that it was God. He then told me that the sheets in the river were God's consciousness. So I decided to swim in the river, aka God, and head up the stream. As I was swimming up the stream, I noticed a massive castle in the distance, on the top of a waterfall. In front of the castle was an enormous bridge that arched across the two sides of the valley. Perched on the bridge was a badass looking black dragon, who I noticed because it was moving one of its wings.

It's worth noting that I don't believe in God (and didn't when I had this dream), but I was a Christian when I was younger so religion is very much a part of my subconscious. In the dream, I simply accepted that the river was God, as it explained why everything was so beautiful.


Dragons are also a common theme in my dreams. I was born in the Year of the Dragon (1988) and as a kid I loved dinosaurs and large reptiles with a passion. In a recent dream concerning dragons, I was inside the core of a volcano. There was air down there, but the lava was rising and I had to get out before I got burned up. But there was an antagonist in the dream, someone else who was trying to stop me, and we were both racing towards the top of the volcano so we could get out. Then, the volcano exploded and the next thing I know, I'm riding on the back of a dragon, soaring out of the volcano (this part of the dream was epicly graphic, with rocks and debri flying around me while I escaped the lava). The dragon and I soared in circles for a few times, but then my fear of heights kicked in and we began plummeting to the ground. I woke up before I hit the earth.

Fear of heights is another thing I see constantly in dreams. For example, another dream I had, there was this beautiful river. I was with five of my friends, and we decided to scale the cliff on one side of the river to go find someone else who had climbed the cliff. On the way, I saw a tree that was really made out of hundreds of interwoven animals, like some Celtic knot in 3d (it was really interesting). Then we climbed the cliff, but halfway up, my footing became worse and I realized my fear of heights was kicking in. In this dream, I had a solution. I jumped off the cliff before I fell to my death, and opened a parachute. Then I glided gently down to the valley floor and spent the rest of the dream looking at the tree-animal. Epic win.


As you can see my dreams are very.. strange.