I sometimes have recurring locations in my dreams. I also dream in color.
Lately I’ve been having weird dreams, not dreams that are internally inconsistent, but ones which are weird when taken in context of my waking life. e.g. The other night I had a dream where I had to give a piano concert, something I haven’t had to do in twenty years.
Sometimes there are people in my dreams, and they’re usually people I know, except that the people (probably) don’t know each other. It’d be like having a party with random Facebook friends.
I glad someone else does this, too. My apartment in my dreams is nothing like the one I have in real life, but it’s always the same or at least has a similar layout. Likewise, I’ll dream that I’m visiting friends, and their residences will be nothing like their real world counterparts, but they’re always consistent.
I have some recurring locations which I’ve probably dreamt about over a hundred times each, sometimes several of them in the same continuity of one dream. I revisited an old location in a recent dream, where there are usually demons in the basement. It’s a half-built house (no walls or ceiling) in a location where I used to live (horrible days - the house was not 100% finished, but not as extreme as the dreams). This time I was just walking around the ground floor, looking for ghosts. Then I was attacked by one, which flung me across the room. That’s all I remember.
There’s also a series of flying dreams I keep having, situated around some tall apartment complexes. They look like a place my grandparents lived, except there are no people living in them and no signs of a city around them. The place looks a bit like Pripyat, but the buildings are whole.
I noted several dreams I remembered on my blog during a period in which I recalled them fairly vividly upon awakening. Here’s one that qualifies as weird:
I am on what appears to be a movie set but they are not shooting at the moment. Or perhaps it’s just a ranch because there are horses. And a Spanish galleon. It makes sense, because it’s a dream.
I am on the galleon with someone who is showing off a little swordsmanship. He recites a line from the script that I can’t precisely recall but it was a taunt something along the lines of, “Do you want to brown your pants?” Colorful, as they say. The part was being played by Brian Doyle and while there are a number of Brian Doyles on the Internet Movie Database, I don’t think this guy was any of them. No idea where the name came from.
After the swordfighting demonstration, I then look over to another man, this one holding the reins of a horse. In retrospect I think it was supposed to be Johnny Depp and this was the set for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie but instead it was Heath Ledger, my first dead dream celebrity.
Heath was going to show off something or other but the horse’s reins got tangled up and it began freaking out and thrashing violently. Heath was standing beside it and could not extricate himself from the reins. By the time he was freed he was laying prone on the ground and making unpleasant facial expressions, a waving hand indicated possible back injuries. When next I looked he was propped up against a nearby fence with two girls looking over him. One was about ten, the other in her teens.
I distinctly recall one of them saying to him, “Please don’t bleed like that” at which point blood started oozing from his nose and mouth. This, understandably, upset the girls and they began wailing as Heath Ledger expired. Again.
I was taking my buddy Wanderlei Silva to a UFC show but we got separated in the lobby and then, through the magic of dreams, I somehow ended up on the outside of the building unable to get back in. Outside I met a bunch of carnies who were on no help at all, but I ended up inside again. Only this time I was at the top floor of the arena which housed a high school and kept trying to find the right stairs down to get to the fights while I kept hearing the audience cheer.
The subject matter is just random crap I’ve thought about but the disconnects in space and time where there was no connection between what I was doing and where I ended up really freaked me out.
I’ve had very consistent flying dreams before – that is, all the dreams had the same method of flying. I had to like start with a double jump, and catch the air properly with my arms so I could flap and get myself in the air. After that, it was gliding.
Come to think of it, it was like Super Mario + Joust. Hrmmm…
My most recent weird dreams have involved women that are not my wife - women known and unknown. Not really weird except for the fact that I almost never remember a dream. Lately and with these dreams, though, I have.
But I’m sure every former graduate student here can relate to the dream that their degree was awarded in error because they didn’t write an exam for a field not in their specialty. It’s always biology for me. So I have to go back and write some exam or dissect some frog.
I get something similar from time to time. Most often, I’m wandering around campus and stop, stunned, as I suddenly remember that I’m signed up for a class that I’ve totally forgotten about for the entire semester. There’s a few minutes of panic-stricken “surely there must be a way I can fix this” thinking before it sinks in that, no, I’m just totally screwed.
I get bizarre dreams a couple times a week, and always tell myself I should remember them, as they’d be hilarious in retrospect. I never do, though. Within 15 minutes or so, all I can remember is the general emotional impact of whatever it was. I should write stuff down or something.
Nightmares are a whole 'nother thing. I get them pretty bad when I’m stressed out, to the point that I can gauge my stress level pretty well by how I’m dreaming. Most of the time they’re run of the mill stuff, but when they’re dark, they’re freaky. For a long time, when I’d wake up from a nightmare, my wife would ask me what I was dreaming about that freaked me out so badly, and I’d mumble something vague. Eventually, she pushed enough that I told her details (mistake). She hasn’t asked since. She’ll still do the cuddle-and-make-it-all-better thing, though, so it’s all good.
This one. 12 years later, STILL THIS ONE. I blame my sudden resurgence of this dream on my girlfriend going back to school: I hear about her education plan and BAM, this graduation anxiety thing turns up in my dreams.
I used to have night terrors and would sleepwalk when I was younger. My parents would find me in various parts of the house and I would never have any recollection of how I got there. I still do it but not very often, and nothing bad seems to happen. It’s just really weird waking up in a completely different room with ALL of my blankets and pillows without a clue as to how or when I got there. In my early 20s I woke up in our detached garage in the dead of winter, coat and all.
I still have night terrors as well but they aren’t quite as bad as when I was a kid. According to my parents, I used walk out of my room, eyes wide open, screaming bloody murder. They would yell at me and shake me but nothing would wake me up. After 20-30 minutes I would stop, walk back into my room and go back to sleep. No idea what I was dreaming about back then, but now I have dreams about dark figures (sometimes human, sometimes not) whispering to me, trying to touch me or do something to me. The worst part about it is how real it feels when I wake up. And even though my mind says nothing is there, it FEELS like something is. Sometimes I swear I can see something in the corner. Most of the time I have to get out of bed and turn the lights on, and occassionally I find myself looking in odd places with a flashlight, not remembering why I’m awake or what I’m looking for.
I get some pretty nutty dreams occasionally. They’re usually bizarro world situations where I’m a completely different person than I am in real life and everything around me is nowhere near reality. Trying to think of specifics, but I always forget them so quickly.
I do remember pretty vividly a night about 8 years ago where I was having a nightmare about being chased by aliens in some dark spaceship. I woke up just when they were going to catch me, and after realizing it was a dream, said to myself “fuck them, I’m going back to kill those fuckers.” A moment later I was asleep again and this time I was a badass space marine with kickass weapons and was wiping the floor with them the rest of the night. One of my more awesome interconnected dreams.
Yeah. I would really like it to go away now. You’d think 17 years later would be far enough removed. Not like I was hurting to graduate or anything. The mind is a strange, strange place.
Ok, you know the bad dream everyone is talking about forgetting to take a class or not graduating because of a class?
My friend from college lived that one. He never officially graduated from college because he never bothered to take the Speech 101 final. So he gets his first job out of college (while in college) by interviewing, showing his existing transcript in process, etc. He gets that job, works there for a while, and then on the strength of that job (and a headhunter) moves on to another. A few years out of college he finally gets to a job where they actually want to see his transcript. So he has to track down the professor, fly back to the small town we went to college in, and take the final, getting rid of his Incomplete and earning the degree.
