Normally, I don't dream much. If I do, I rarely remember it at all, and it certainly doesn't leave me shaking in a cold sweat. Today though... good lord, I have no idea what is up with my head. Sleep, ~4:00am: Walking through a residential area. The buildings are long two-story dormitories, multi-home hulks of cinderblock and brick, with concrete sidewalks in front and a narrow strip of lawn between each. If you've seen military base housing, you know the type. Passing by the end of one building, I note a group of people clustered around one home. There's some lawn chairs, a cooler, general party atmosphere. On the roof of the tiny porch is a signboard, somewhat in the style of old movie theaters, that advertises a live broadcast of some kind. I recognize the name and weave my way through the crowd, hoping to get a closer look. Not about to stand in front of them however, so I pass by and think to circle around to the back. The last people, on the far side, are two policemen chatting idly. Didn't think much of it, I excused myself politely and attempted to step around them - big mistake. The area beyond is a nondescript alley, with a T-intersection in the back. Brick walls all around, with a minor amount of litter in the corners. I only catch a glimpse of it before the nearer officer grabs me roughly - by pinching the clothing & skin of my chest. "Trying to sneak by a federal officer?" he says. His voice is cordial but carries an undertone of menace that makes my throat clench. "I wasn't sneaking, just trying to walk," I manage to stammer out hoarsely. "That area is restricted, son." "I didn't know, I've never been here before. I'll leave." He doesn't let go, but instead tries to say something else. He speaks very quietly and the background noise of the crowd and music drowns him out. I ask him to repeat himself, making it clear I can't hear a word of whatever it was he said to me, and he holds up the mic for his radio, speaking into it. Somehow, it only makes the music louder and clearer, but his voice hovers just on the edge of inaudible. I explain a half-dozen more times, I cannot hear him, he has to speak up, please. A cold fear sinks in, that this isn't a police officer at all. Whatever he's pretending to say, it's for show, but he has no intention I hear the actual words lest I try to bolt. My fear is confirmed when I try to speak up even louder, and he clamps a hand over my mouth. Moments later, a tall black man holding a large news-style video camera walks up to his side, saying nothing. He points the camera at me, and I mouth the words "what did I do?" as I look directly at the lens. As I turn back to the fake officer, I see he is also now holding a small camcorder - the display on it is turned back towards me. My image is surrounded by what look like news-tickers, and though I haven't said anything in the presence of the cameras yet, a subtitle in white scrolls underneath my chin. Then I note the news tickers are all in Arabic. A quick glance behind - everyone on the lawn has left. Horror settles over me - this begins to look much like an ISIS execution video. ... Consciousness returns slowly, leaving fragments of the last situation frozen in my mind. With my newfound lucidity, I try to imagine a way out of that scenario and let my mind rest easy, but no amount of quick reflexes, daring grabs for the fake-officer's gun, or armored robots crashing through the walls can shake that icy feeling that, if the dream had continued, I'd have been killed. Waking up, 9:30am: I get up out of bed. The cats are being rambunctious and I need to use the bathroom anyway. If I were smart, I'd have stayed up and gotten breakfast, started the day - but I took vacation time, and I don't work today. I can be lazy. So I go back to bed, browse EMC and the KSP forum a little, put Pandora back on, and try to catch up on some of my sleep. Sleep ~11:00am: The first part of the dream is nice. I'm with my first real crush, a cute blonde named Amber I knew in 4th grade. We're walking along a sidewalk, chatting, laughing, sharing stories and generally catching up on twenty years of life. At one corner, she waves her hand over a square of sidewalk, and causes a sign-pole to appear - a narrow post of black pipe with a white square on top depicting the two of us. Odd, but charming and sweet. We find a bench nearby, and sit to chat. She snuggles into me, and says she loves me. I remember I have a girlfriend, and her admission makes me suddenly feel very awkward. After a while, she leaves, and the "magic" sign is gone too. I decide to see if I can manage the same trick, and indeed more signs appear. They aren't the same ones however, with black sign panels on top and odd red marks. Some have tops that look like flower buds, instead. My final attempt doesn't bring about a sign at all, but rather flourescent neon vines that grow frighteningly fast. They're like brightly colored snakes shooting over the sidewalk, trying to grow into every crack and crevasse. Something tells me I shouldn't let them spread, so I began tearing them up and throwing them in a waste bin. It's a futile effort, they cannot be contained. Even the torn-up parts continue to writhe and grow in my hands as I throw them away. At my feet, a newspaper blows by, and I notice a story about a particularly vicious man escaping custody. The article claims he performed horrible and painful experiments on his foster children - electrical and chemical tortures, as well as physical abuse - by all accounts, a violent clinically psychotic monster. About then, an officious-looking woman appears and enthusiastically asks me to accompany her somewhere. She talks in an excited manner, telling me how they've found this man's hideaway and are stripping it for evidence in the criminal proceedings. (My mind skipped over the "escaped custody" part, for now) We enter a tall square flat, empty inside but for support columns and various industrial bits on the wall. The floor is painted and polished concrete, drab green-blue in color. Bits of yellow or red tape mark off squares of it here and there, and a small crew in blue FBI-style jackets is combing the place gathering up whatever loose equipment remains. There isn't much - the building is completely stripped. But the woman leads me up to one wall, above a circuit breaker, and points out a loose wire half-covered by tape. She trips something with it, then rushes over to a different wall and presses a hidden panel. A heavy steel door swings open, vault-like in its thickness, and reveals an equally barren hallway beyond. Bulkhead doors set into the walls remind me more of an aircraft carrier than a city structure, and while she fiddles with more hidden wires and disguised panels, another door at the far end opens up, back outside. We enter to explore the hidden sanctum, and I ask her about shutting the doors. She gives a noncommittal answer, and I leave them be as I follow. The first room to the left is an unnerving medley of "evil mad scientist's lair" and children's room, a long box with white-painted walls and all manner of frightening-looking equipment down the middle. A pair of chairs that vaguely resemble a dentist's, with restraints and oddly shaped stainless steel tools laid out beside them, accompanied by small rolling work-tables with syringes and vials of unidentified substances. Some of them glow. But the worst is the carpeted section just inside to the left, a two-foot wide strip that runs the length of the room. A long white clothes rack is bolted at waist-height to the wall, filled with children's clothes - white button-down shirts and ties for boys, pink frilly dresses for girls. I accidentally bump into it, and knock a couple off their hangars to the floor. It was almost like this was a trigger for the nightmare to kick into high gear. The woman exits the room and sees the door at the end of the hall still open (to the outside), and snaps at me "Were you born in a barn? Get that closed!" As I head down to that end towards it, one of the FBI team pops his head around the other vault door and informs us in a panic that He's here. I suddenly remember the "escaped custody" part. In a rush, I trigger the outside doors to close and run back to the room with the clothes. I already know how this will play out. We'll be locked in here, hiding from the psycho, and he'll spot the ones I knocked down. He'll know someone's here, and it'll be game over. I have to get them hung back up. Even as I do, I hear Him arrive. He laughs, shouting a challenge to the FBI, and something like "all I needed was a drum of [unintelligible chemical]." The screaming starts first, then shooting. But the screaming doesn't stop. The woman is in the room with me, cowering near the first chair. It won't hide her. I look around, but there isn't anywhere to hide in this room. Why did we seal ourselves in here? The screaming finally stops. I hear the heavy motors of the vault door cycling. Wake, 2:00pm I have no idea what's going on in my head right now and I can't say I'm a fan. Dreams tend not to stick with me long enough to write about, but damn this stuff was vivid.
Wow, that really got me! Perhaps I shouldn't have read this so close to going to bed... But indeed, that must've been rough! I dream a lot, but nightmares of this kind... I haven't had for a while.
I can actually honestly say, I don't mind a nightmare now and then, as long as they're interesting, like these ones.
Usually dreams are perfectly fine but all of a sudden there is a trigger and things go down hill from there. The trigger usually is something stupid but as soon as it happens, it is obvious. My nightmares luckily don't go on for long and the trigger is also able to get me realizing that I need to wake up which usually takes only a few (terrifying) seconds. One dream I had though involved these wolves sleeping. I didn't think much of it until the trigger happened and it jumped up and lunged at me. I "woke up" only to see the wolf now in the bed trying to eat me. Most of my nightmares are like that with next to no build up but instead just instantly climaxing with an immediant need to wake up. After a night mare, I never go right back to sleep because unless I fully wake up, I just go right back into the dream. On the topic of dreams, anyone else ever have the ones where you know you are dreaming but are forced to complete incredibly boring and repetitive tasks only to realize you have only been asleep for a couple of minites?
You can learn to control your dreams. Basically all you have to do is acknowledge that you are dreaming, once you are aware of that you can direct what happens. You start by doing work during the time you are awake. Every hour or so while you are awake ask yourself if your dreaming. You can do some reality checks. Try drawing a symbol on your hand and studying it. Often our hands are fuzzy in dreams. You can also try looking at a clock, looking away then looking back. Is time following a normal pattern? Another way is to hold your nose closed and your mouth shut and see if you can still breath. If you make this a habit while you are awake, you will find yourself doing it in dreams. If you can realize you are dreaming you then have control over what happens in the dream. It is a good way to avoid a nightmare. Also a good way to do something fantastical, like go flying or visit somewhere you could only get to in your dreams.
Partially true, but doesn't always help. Once the ISIS connection was made, I knew I was dreaming, but still confined to the "reality" of the situation at hand - none of my lucid direction could alter the fact that, in that circumstance, I'd have been killed. There have been dreams where I knew right off I was dreaming and could do more or less as I pleased (including flying, in one case), but at least for me it doesn't grant control over the other figures in those dreams - they still act in accordance with whatever situation created them.
Sounds interesting... I have actually had dreams where I was a victim in a shooting...Not fun The best dreams are when you can fly, or when you know you are dreaming and take advantage of it.
Yeah. I do remember one dream where I was Mario in Super Mario Galaxy, and I was flying around. Then my spaceship exploded and I died and woke up.
Yeah. But when I'm awake, I'm looking at my watch every twenty minutes or so, while while dreaming, I seem to not look at my watch at all. When I get lucid, it's more often because of something really weird happening by accident. For example, when complicated things need to happen, such as the ignition of a firework. On moments like that the laws of physics often stop working, and I realise I'm dreaming. When I do, though, I'd much rather wake up than dream on, because I'm afraid I'll die in my dream, which still feels terrible. But actually, when I was younger, I was lucid incredibly often. When I would have a nightmare, I'd try to find a way to kill myself as soon as possible. I mean, let's say I'd been running away from some bad guy for minutes, but he seemed to keep following me. Then, at a certain moment, for some reason I realised I were dreaming. I would turn around and let him kill me, just so I would wake up. Nowadays, I do something just a little different. When I notice I'm dreaming and having a nightmare, first I'll try opening my eyes. Often it works, and I see my dark room again. But sometimes it doesn't, even though I know I'm dreaming, I can't get myself to wake. But what I do then, is try to create some sort of shock. For example, throw myself into the water. Just before I hit the water I'll open my eyes again, and it'll always work then, without any bad feelings. I feel like I should really try to once keep dreaming instead of waking, but I'm afraid it'll not give me enough rest. I mean, when you're dreaming, do you really give your brains a rest? I wouldn't think so. And yet I really need that rest, so sometimes I wish I'd dream less.
Me too. Could be the moon phase, spring tide. In my dream, my father informed me that an uncle has died. I cried, and then my father cried. That was weird and very sad. Some dreams have meaning, often they reflect fears and desire for love. I don't need to dream much to realize: nothing is as it seems
Dreaming is a very healthy and natural part of sleeping. Everyone dreams, often. Some people just don't remember them. Dreaming is just a side effect of our brain processing information while you sleep. It is a refreshing process. We start dreaming during the deepest part of our sleep. So if someone is actually not dreaming at all, it means they aren't ever reaching the point of sleep deep enough to start it. They are the ones who will likely not feel refreshed when waking up. I used to have a lot of bad dreams as a kid. So when I got a little older I started really learning about them. I've studied how to increase your chance of dreaming. I've studied how to have better control over your dreams. Mostly I just let my dreams go where they want to now, because they are fun, creative, and often crazy. But if I ever find myself feeling uneasy I am able to stop or alter them as I need to. I don't think I've had a bad dream since I was 9 or 10 years old. A very long time ago. lol. Instead I have a wonderful dream world to relax into every night.
My last dream was over a year ago, and I remember it very well. I usually take them as riddles from the past or hints to the future, because of how rare they happen. I remember the last one, stated earlier, very well and has happened a few times before that last one.
My last dream that I remembered is a reoccurring dream that I usually have around once a year. It's not detailed, as I usually don't remember dreams at all. I simply remember that it consisted of my uncle (who is now dead) holding me off of a bridge over the Don Valley Parkway, in Toronto. That's honestly all I can remember. Whether that was a nightmare, or anything, it was amazingly vivid. I can never remember a dream like that in such amazing detail.
