[HN Gopher] The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports
___________________________________________________________________
The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports
Author : herbertl
Score : 158 points
Date : 2021-02-19 16:05 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dreambank.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dreambank.net)
| lqet wrote:
| I would like to know what small children (1-2 years) dream, but
| we can of course never really know for sure. My daughter (2
| years) definitely seems to have nightmares. She also seems to
| have conversations in her dreams, as she often speaks answers to
| questions while sleeping. Personally I very strongly remember
| some wild dreams when I was _very_ young, probably around the age
| I started remembering things at all, so around 2,5 years. These
| dreams were often synesthesic, I could see sounds in extremely
| saturated, moving, three-dimensional colors, and could "taste"
| geometric forms like pyramids and cuboids. I have never taken
| LSD, but I imagine the experience to be quite similar. The
| closest (but not very close) thing I have seen to these dreams is
| the stargate sequence in 2001.
| Solid_Applaud wrote:
| Synesthesia is incredible. You haven't lived to the fullest
| until you felt colors as emotions and emotions as geometric
| shapes.
| bregma wrote:
| I would really like to know what my dog dreams. Whatever it is,
| it sounds like he has a far more active life when asleep than
| when awake.
| Pentamerous wrote:
| This website is actually part of a bigger one called
| DreamResearch.net where you can find interesting info such as
| some investigations into what children dream.
|
| It seems that there are some "cognitive prerequisites for
| dreaming", which are mostly developed around the age of 5-7,
| which might explain your dreams being so crazy and full of
| colors, as in those ages you are still developing "the ability
| to produce mental imagery" and "narrative skills".
|
| https://dreams.ucsc.edu/Library/domhoff_2020b.pdf - Chapter
| "Dreaming Is a Gradual Cognitive Achievement"
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I remember a few vivid dreams from around kindergarten. One
| even had _music_ that, I kid you not, I remember to this day.
| My working theory is that I actually heard that music somewhere
| and the dream just cemented it in my memory.
| Pentamerous wrote:
| This website is part of another one called Dream Research -
| https://dreams.ucsc.edu/ full of interesting info with a
| scientific approach into the world of Dreams, including analysis
| of the Dream Bank itself.
|
| You can find some studies on what is the current thinking
| regarding dreams, and their purpose and meaning.
| mtippett wrote:
| I've often wondered if dreams are fully constructed stories
| during REM or REM is more or less random vignettes of cognition
| that are assembled into a constructed story upon awakening.
|
| Rewriting memories seems to be reasonably well understood, and if
| the recall mechanism for waking memories reconstructs a plausible
| story from memories, is it reasonable that the same is happening
| with dreams?
|
| We always _remember_ dreams, have there been experiments where
| the paralytic effect of sleep has been blocked? I remember seeing
| a cat video (ironic) of a cat having that part blocked by drugs
| or surgery and it jumping like it is catching a bird.
| thydun wrote:
| All my real dreams have been stories, however I've had a few
| dream like displays after waking up, but keeping my eyes
| closed. It's usually been repeating patterns of objects that
| change every 5-10 seconds, e.g fir trees, chairs, cars, hot air
| balloons etc. However, at least once, it was more akin to a
| film with people doing something in it like talking, driving
| vehicles etc. The display only appears in a small rectangular
| area on the right side of my vision, when I have my eyes closed
| and disappears when I open my eyes.
| lrossi wrote:
| Do you ever dream about programming?
|
| I sometimes dream about code or debugging, especially when my
| team is working on a deadline. A few times I dreamt of solutions
| to problems we had. It felt good on the spot, calming and
| relaxing. Unfortunately, after waking up, they don't make any
| sense.
| drusepth wrote:
| I actively try to fall asleep every night working through a
| problem or designing some intricate/problematic code in my
| head. I'm not sure if it's that cognitive work right before
| falling asleep or the dreams (where I'm usually working through
| and/or coding that problem a few different ways, often for what
| feels like hours in my sleep), but I almost always wake up with
| enough of an idea to get started and/or some revelation that'll
| help in some way with the high level design.
| enricozb wrote:
| In the vaguest sense possible. Dreams for me feel very concrete
| but definitely aren't. If I was debugging something in a dream
| and became lucid, and attempted to read the "code" on the
| screen, it would be impossible. Just a swirl of letter-like
| things that made no sense whatsoever.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| (Note: I consider interests, waking dreams (ideas, meditations,
| & imaginations), and dreams to be on a sort of subjective-
| metaphorical continuum.)
|
| Anyway whenever I "dream" about programming it's almost always
| a scheduling cue. The exact type of programming, technique,
| language, etc. will provide details as to the type of
| scheduling that needs to be done.
|
| For example, an interest in lisp seems to point to high-level,
| conceptual plan-making/life-design which leads toward a
| schedule. BASIC interest seems to point toward making a simple
| schedule / zeit-plan and working up from there. Getting with
| the program, metaphorically.
|
| I mention this in part because you brought up the
| deadline...and that is related to schedules and timing.
|
| If I dream about debugging, there's almost certainly a timing
| issue in my schedule, something unrealistic or problematic.
|
| Just my subjective experience...
| timonoko wrote:
| I have solved various unsolvable issues in a dream.
|
| And I actually remember one solution because I constructed a
| mental model so I would remember the unique groundbreaking
| solution I have just invented.
|
| Thus I now remember a ball with curved arrows coming in and
| out, but I do not understand what it means and what problem it
| solves.
| eternalban wrote:
| You're in good company:
| https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/08/mendeleev-
| periodic-...
| joshspankit wrote:
| I feel like there might be a link between the different
| awareness during exhaustion, and dreams.
|
| Like, if you're on deadline and pushing through with a few
| hours of sleep a night, both panicked and not quite sure how
| you're getting done what you're getting done, then you might
| have foggier dreams, or feel that background panic while in the
| dream environment.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| This is cool. Where can we download the entire corpus?
| johnisgood wrote:
| Oh that would be cool! I hope it will become downloadable.
| crancher wrote:
| Doesn't seem to be available.
| splittingTimes wrote:
| How else has this?
|
| I sometimes remember dreams from easily 15y - 20y ago absolutly
| vividly, although I have had forgotten them in the mean time.
| Suddenly, during the day, like in a split second (maybe triggered
| from a scene or scent) I feel that "feeling" (or more like a
| superposition of all impression of that dream i had) of a dream
| long lost and the dream is fully present in that moment and I
| kind of "remember" it completely. Then it is fading away fast.
|
| Every so often I have these vivid dreams with what feels like
| long story archs. In my youth / pre 30s more often then now. At
| the end of my 20s I started to keep a dream diary, not very
| consistently, but still.
|
| So now, when I have these dream flashbacks, I immeadiately grab
| this journal or a piece of paper. I write everything down and
| draw sketches of the scene and really try hard to remember
| specifics of that dream. And then something really weird
| happens... i start to remember scences form other forgotten
| dreams and it feels like I opened a door or pathway in my memory
| and can look/explore fragments of these dreams. And the harder I
| try the better results I get. It is really an odd experience.
| gavinmckenzie wrote:
| I can relate. I have a handful of recurring dream worlds that I
| visit. Sometimes I'll have a series of dreams over a few days
| that all take place in the same dream world. Months or years
| can go by and then I'll find myself dropped back into a dream
| world that I had forgotten about. Sometimes the world has
| progressed since my last visit, and sometimes I'm put back
| nearly where I left off last time.
|
| The weirdest thing for me is that I swear I have a separate set
| of memories in these different dream worlds; a personal history
| exclusive to that dream world, where once I'm in that dream
| world, I suddenly remember previous visits to that world,
| places I've visited, events that took place. It's an incredibly
| strange feeling that can momentarily make me question my sense
| of self.
|
| I should note that I nearly always dream lucidly. Not sure if
| that plays a role in this phenomena.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I have very long story arch dreams, an ex-girlfriend called
| them epic dreams. They're strange, some times I have recurring
| dreams with long story arcs in which I am in them as myself,
| sometimes I am in them as another person, sometimes they are
| narrated, sometimes they span generations, sometimes I'm not in
| them at all, sometimes they are episodes of a tv show that
| never had those episodes.
|
| Examples - one dream was set in a post apocalyptic wasteland,
| sort of like A Canticle for Leibowitz, with narration, there
| was a kingdom being misruled by a duke and the only one who
| would be able to stop him was the exiled bishop, his brother, I
| turned out to be the bishop - an old man returning after many
| years of exile to the kingdom etc. etc. there were sword
| fights, radiation monsters, extra sensory perception..
|
| Another dream was a very long special episode of Laverne and
| Shirley were the girls came out and had their first kiss, I
| think it was a Christmas episode also.
|
| Actually funny enough I had three dream flashbacks just a
| couple days ago, first I remembered a comic book store and then
| I remembered no that store was from a dream, then I remembered
| a couple other locations from dreams that I had not had for
| lots of years and had forgotten about.
| abruzzi wrote:
| I'm completely the opposite. 50 years old and I have never once
| in my life remembered a dream. Never. I see things about
| dreams, such as this like, as interesting, but can relate to
| them at all, because they are things that happen to other
| people. I assume I have dreams, but when I wake up, I never
| have any recall of them.
| terramex wrote:
| It is quite popular form of deja vu called deja reve. Happens
| to me all the time, more often when I'm stressed or sleep
| deprived but almost never when I'm physically exhausted.
|
| https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2017/00000...
|
| > Nearly 80% claimed to have had such experiences and the
| associated frequencies are presented. Age was negatively
| correlated with the incidence and there was little gender
| dependence.
| monadic5 wrote:
| How do you know it's a "true" memory? Does that even matter to
| you? I don't think it would to me! But, I'm curious how
| confident you are about whether you're in the same space or
| your brain is rapidly manufacturing the sensation.
| rpiguyshy wrote:
| i always love a chance to share what i have discovered about
| dreams.
|
| for most of my life i never really thought much about how dreams
| work. i shared the same notion with most people, that they are a
| kind of sloppy simulation of real life. but it always stuck in my
| mind that this didnt make any sense: the physics of life are too
| complicated for the brain to simulate in real time in a way that
| recreates sensory inputs. and why would the brain have hardware
| that was dedicated to performing dream simulations? wouldnt that
| be rather a lot of hardware and energy for no apparent reason?
| but i always chalked it up as one of the great mysteries of our
| time and didnt dwell on it. and then the answer came to me.
|
| it is well known that it is possible to "lucid dream." i have
| experienced this, and it is what precipitated my effort to
| understand dreams.
|
| the answer is that the brain works with abstractions, it stores
| everything in the world, physical objects as well as feelings and
| concepts, as a kind of model that can be recalled. as you
| experience more things, the library of abstractions grows larger.
|
| you are a small part of your brain. there is a part of the brain
| that holds a "simulation." this is your consciousness, you live
| inside this simulation, everything you experience is inside this
| simulation. it is a simulation of the physical world, but it
| contains much more than physical objects. it contains mental
| "primitives" that inform your emotions, your identity and your
| feelings about the world and your place in it. the non-physical
| aspect of the simulation might be called the "ego" and people who
| experience so-called ego-death are actually experiencing the
| simulation with these things taken out of it. at the core of the
| simulation is some kind of atomic, immutable "self" that is
| discreet and separate from all experiences, traumas and emotions.
| so to make it short, your being lives inside a simulation where
| the physical world is simulated as well as you as a person.
|
| there are other parts of your brain that manage the simulation.
| some parts of the brain create new abstractions from sensory
| data. other parts of your brain monitor sensory data looking for
| things that it recognizes, looking for abstractions that have
| already been created. and another part of your brain is
| responsible for placing those abstractions into your simulation
| when they have been found in the environment. when the
| abstraction is placed into the simulation, you experience it.
| your brain is constantly monitoring reality through sensory data
| and recreating it in your brain-simulation using "assets" that
| already exist, assuming there is nothing too new in your
| environment. it is possible for this machinery to break, which is
| what we call a hallucination. a hallucination is not the creation
| of something that doesnt exist, it is the mistaken placing of a
| pre-existing asset into the simulation. objects are a composite
| of many different abstractions, and this is why hallucinations
| can have strange, ethereal or other-worldly qualities. a human
| figure can be placed into your simulation without the concept of
| humanity accompanying it, or the presence of a person can be
| placed without a physical manifestation. all kinds of weird
| things are possible. the takeaway is that the simulated world
| that is created for you by your brain is very sophisticated, hard
| to get right, and the symphony of neural mechanisms to make it
| all work is probably breathtakingly complex.
|
| why? its an optimization. experiencing raw sensory data is too
| inefficient. the scope within which you make decisions must be
| narrowed. and this leads into the answer to dreams: there are
| other optimizations at play. there is yet another part of your
| brain that actually looks inward at the simulation and the assets
| that have been placed within it. it will then guess what other
| assets should be in the simulation based on experience, and place
| those assets into the simulation. these guesses assets are the
| same as any other assets, of course. their presence in the
| simulation is the same as anything else. they are just as real,
| in every way, in your experience, as anything else. this
| optimization probably saves time and energy, saving the brain
| from going through the long process of interpreting every bit of
| sensory data and matching it to pre-existing assets. instead,
| your brain translates the big things and your brain guesses
| everything else.
|
| when you take this entire system into account, and you take away
| all sensory input, what do you get?
|
| you get a dream.
|
| what happens when you keep certain parts of the cortex active
| during sleep? you get a lucid dream.
|
| what happens when you consider the situation where a little
| sensory input leaks into the brain during sleep? you get a
| simulation loosely guided by sensory data, just as we all have
| experienced.
|
| dreams are in reality not simulations but a demonstration of the
| awesome power of the guessing machinery of the brain. it is not a
| sloppy simulation, but incredibly good guessing.
|
| the reality you experience in a lucid dream is exactly the same
| reality you experience when you are awake. dreams are reality
| with sensory decoupling.
|
| most of the things you experience in your life are guesses. most
| of the things that you are aware of at any given moment are just
| guesses. the guessing is so good that it has gone unnoticed.
|
| because the brain uses a fundamental model of abstraction, many
| parts of life are consolidated, in part, into an abstraction and
| therefore are very localized in space in the brain. the amount of
| accuracy and control we will have over matters of the mind with
| simple electrodes ala neuralink will be much higher than anyone
| understands.
| irrational wrote:
| Do you not dream? I'm almost 50 and I don't have a memory of ever
| dreaming. I probably do, but have some sort of selective amnesia
| so that I don't remember dreaming when I wake up. Does anyone
| else out there experience the same thing?
| codazoda wrote:
| Do you see pictures of things in your mind? For example, if I
| tell you to imagine the ocean waves coming into the beach, do
| you "see it in your minds eye"?
|
| I do, almost as if it's a photo or video, but some people
| don't. I wonder how this affects dreams.
|
| I'm 45 and I do not dream very often (or I forget when I wake
| up). Remembering only a few per year. But, when I was young I
| dreamed often.
|
| The human mind, and dreams in particular, are fascinating.
| irrational wrote:
| Oh yes, I have a very vivid mind's eye.
| joshspankit wrote:
| If you want to try and coax the awareness out, put paper and
| pencil/pen next to your bed so that as you're waking up you can
| jot down anything that might be the edge of a dream.
|
| Even if you start with a single word once every few weeks, in
| time that can grow.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Yep, me too. It's very rare I'll remember anything even moments
| after waking up. If I do, I can only remember an abstract story
| (with a lot of missing pieces) rather than an experience with
| sound or vision.
| warent wrote:
| I'm curious to know if frequency of dreaming correlates to
| anything. Most people I talk to "rarely have dreams" (probably
| meaning they just dont remember them).
|
| For some reason in my case I have a vivid dream every night,
| sometimes multiple per night, and can't remember the last time my
| sleep was dreamless.
|
| I've heard keeping a dream journal can help you remember/have
| more vivid dreams, but I only write my dreams down it it affected
| me very strongly so I can interpret what my psyche is saying, so
| this only happens maybe once every few months.
|
| So what gives? Why do some people dream a lot more than others?
| indogooner wrote:
| Anecdata: I usually dont remember my dreams unless I wake up
| early or at least not all the details of it. However, some
| times, before I sleep I imagine myself in some situation I
| always wanted to be. For example, a soccer player in a cup
| final, an activist making people aware about how politicians
| are dividing them and such things. And then I have vivid dreams
| and next day I remember most details. Not sure if others also
| experience this but at least it makes me very happy next day.
| That's why I so much hate days when I have night or early
| morning meetings at my job.
| patcon wrote:
| I always assumed this had more to do with the different
| psychology of how different people wake up.
|
| I usually have amnesia in the few minutes after I wake up, and
| I lose everything. Like when I used to drive my mom to work as
| a teenager, she would wake me up right before, and I would just
| put on pants and hop in the car. Halfway there, I'd sometimes
| admit I had no memory of how I got into the car.
|
| But if I am focussing on writing my dream right away, usually
| by writing it down in detail, I can recall it later.
|
| I'm definitely jealous of people who somehow remember it so
| clearly without any special time commitment. Dreams always feel
| like living a second life
| codetrotter wrote:
| And relatedly, what about people that claim to not have any
| dream at all?
|
| > To really be sure that an individual does not dream, we would
| have to follow him for years and perform awakenings from REM
| sleep to see if he dreamed. If the individual never reported a
| dream after years of awakenings from REM sleep then we could
| reasonably conclude that either the person does not dream, that
| he or she lacks the ability to recall dreams, or that he or she
| is a liar who, for some reason, wants to conceal the fact that
| he does in fact dream.
|
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/dream-catcher/2012...
| [deleted]
| closeparen wrote:
| I can modulate how much I dream based on how dark my sleeping
| environment is.
|
| Blinds open even slightly: no dreams.
|
| LEDs on electronics uncovered: no dreams.
|
| Full blackout: auditory hallucinations before I'm even fully
| asleep.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| I also thought that I don't dream much, but I started the habit
| of trying to remember if I dreamed something when waking up and
| if it's in the second half of the night I can almost always
| remember vivid dream content. Trying to remember dreams after
| being awake for a while (e.g. 5 minutes after getting up) is
| much harder in my experience. Most people have at least 2-4 REM
| sleep phases at night, to have none whatsoever would be quite
| unlikely unless you're regularly very sleep deprived.
| joshspankit wrote:
| This seems to be the secret: consistently _training_ your
| brain by telling it "dream details are something important to
| remember"
| bgroat wrote:
| I think it's that most people don't take time to reflect.
|
| I recently became very anxious that I was "dreaming less".
|
| Then I remembered that this couldn't be true because my
| cognition wasn't impaired. This indicates I'm still hitting REM
|
| So what gives?
|
| The answer, I'm not showering in the morning to go to an
| office.
|
| No shower, no dedicated dream remembering time. Hence the
| perception of "fewer dreams"
| poopoopeepee wrote:
| Some people have mostly bad dreams. If I become aware that I am
| dreaming I stop everything in the dream and "go back to sleep"
| in the dream. It results in better rest. Everything I've
| learned in a dream would only be helpful in a world where we
| wear watermelons for shoes and the trunk of our cars open into
| hidden ballrooms. It is a really dumb place to spend too much
| time
| warent wrote:
| My take on dreams is that they're not literal. The mind is
| structured on a network of symbols and relationships between
| them, so the language of dreams are metaphors, double
| entendres, similar-sounds, etc.
|
| Why it is important is because it tells a story about what's
| going on in your emotional state that you're otherwise
| unaware of or repressing in conscious experience. It can also
| provide solutions. It can be a powerful tool for maintaining
| mental health and wellbeing.
|
| This isn't to say you should be reading "dream
| interpretation" guides or speaking to interpreters. The point
| is we already speak the languages of our own dreams because
| it's our own mind. What seems like nonsense on the surface
| quickly reveals itself to have a surprisingly clear meaning
| on introspection from a slightly different angle. Follow your
| intuition, listen to your psyche, you wont regret it.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| I have read that certain antidepressants have "strange dreams"
| and "nightmares" listed as possible side effects. Not sure what
| to make out of that
| joshspankit wrote:
| I have a few friends who took Champix (to stop smoking) and
| reported _significant_ changes to the vibrancy, clarity, and
| content of their dreams
| pbadg3r wrote:
| Has anyone seen research linking dream content to the causes of
| the dream? What I'm imagining is dream journals like the ones on
| the website, accompanied by things that are happening in the
| patient's life that might explain the dream.
|
| E.g. Dream: I saw my mom and gave her a hug.
|
| Posited cause: I've been thinking about my mom a lot recently
| because her birthday was last week and I really miss her.
|
| (edited for formatting)
| hntrader wrote:
| Would it be interesting to fine-tune GPT-3 on these?
| allemagne wrote:
| Sometimes when I try to force the AI in AIDungeon to do
| something specific, the reaction is often weirdly reminiscent
| of the behavior of dreams.
|
| For example, I once kept trying to force an elf to teach me how
| to say certain phrases in their language (in an attempt to see
| if the AI could invent an imaginary language to some degree of
| consistency), and the character kept "laughing it off" and
| abruptly changing the subject.
| fumblebee wrote:
| GPT-2 would suffice for something as non-sensical and rambling
| as dreams.
|
| No fine-tuning using the dataset, but here's the result of
| typing in a dream prompt into Talk-to-Transformer:
|
| [PROMPT - a dream from DreamBank] >>> I was putting together a
| plastic bag full of buttons and sewing paraphernalia. It was
| time to break out of a Hong Kong prison and I was on the fourth
| tier cell block. I had to wait till the window washers were
| busy and distract them by throwing ping pong balls so fire
| hoses filled with cyanide could be squirted on passers-by. I
| threw a rock through [...]
|
| [RESULT] >>> [...] a glass door. I was careful not to pull my
| stitches. I threw another rock out the window. We needed a
| diversion. I needed to take care of myself. The next thing I
| knew, I was in a helicopter about to take off. By this point my
| emotions were in flux, like people around a train wreck. It was
| hard to know what to do with them. I wanted to be strong but
| didn't have the will. I wanted to be a martyr. I wanted to be.
| achairapart wrote:
| This is overall very cool but I find this series[0] extremely
| fascinating, I wish I could listen to that tapes.
|
| [0]:
| http://www.dreambank.net/more_info.cgi?further=1&series=jasm...
| motohagiography wrote:
| Would using this for an ML classifier corpus potentially yield a
| set of hitherto unnamed categories that reflect something
| structural about our minds?
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| Sounds similar to efforts by Franco Moretti to do "distant
| reading" on literary corpuses to reveal trends
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_reading)
| vmception wrote:
| I wish sites had a browse feature, like "here's a sample of what
| you'll find, here are the keywords that would reveal this same
| entry"
|
| This and Sci-hub are two of many examples that bounce me over and
| over again because I have no inspiration on what to search or how
|
| This site even has an entire primer on how to make a useful
| search query, because apparently its not even a familiar search
| bar?
|
| And all the users are like "ah thats not a problem, just be so
| into this field like me that you already know all the papers you
| want to read!"
| codazoda wrote:
| Yeah, I almost bounced too. But, I decided to try a few random
| words I imagined might exist in the dreams they talked about on
| the home page. For example, I searched for "boot" in the series
| of dreams from the Vietnam Vet. At first, I thought I would
| have liked to see the entire list. But, after reading a few of
| those war dreams, I didn't really want to read anymore (and I
| can't really articulate why).
| misterkrabs wrote:
| I think sci-hub is useful when you want to see the full paper a
| news article is citing - not so much for searching/browsing.
|
| I Google for the paper's abstract then copy its DOI into the
| sci-hub search.
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| Direct link to all dream series and samples:
|
| http://www.dreambank.net/grid.cgi
| gfaure wrote:
| Searching this database by typing keywords reminds me of the
| "search engine" gameplay in Sam Barlow's game Her Story.
| yboris wrote:
| Possibly related: _Scientists entered people's dreams and got
| them 'talking'_
|
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-p...
| autoditype wrote:
| Isn't that part of the plot to Inception?
| as1mov wrote:
| Just curious, does anyone here have dreams with some recurring
| themes? I've tried googling for this but sadly most of the
| content seems to be related to spiritual/mystical "explanations"
| of it. And I don't bring it up with anyone in real life so as to
| not appear like a kook.
|
| I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great
| probability that it falls into these 2 categories -
|
| 1. I suddenly find myself naked in public, the rest of dream
| usually involves me trying to remedy the situation. This is the
| stage where I usually wake up (in a panic with elevated heart
| rate).
|
| 2. Snakes. Not even sure what is up with this one. I am pretty
| afraid of snakes in real life, more so than normal people. But
| then there's a bunch of other things I am equally scared of, but
| I don't dream about them at all.
| rcpt wrote:
| Yes fuckin xenomorph dog monster I'll get you one day.
| nprz wrote:
| Only recurring dream I have is I'm back in college and it's the
| end of a semester, suddenly I realize there's some math class I
| haven't been attending and I have just a few days to cram
| everything I've missed in time for the final.
| benmller313 wrote:
| I have this dream constantly. Always that I forgot to ever go
| to the class, never that I'm struggling in a class or that
| I'm going to fail I class I've been attending. I wonder, did
| you skip a lot of classes in College?
| as1mov wrote:
| Hah, I don't think it depends on that really. I've never
| really missed classes in college (mandatory attendance
| yay!) but I still get those dreams occasionally.
| DethNinja wrote:
| I'm not the person you are asking but I got the same type
| of dreams, and yes I practically didn't attend to at least
| a quarter of the classes in college. I didn't like some
| lecturers, so I would study through textbooks and ask my
| friends about important exam dates and would generally have
| fears about missing these exams but somehow I still have
| these type of dreams.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Wow I have this dream constantly as well
| Ivoah wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/557/
| dqv wrote:
| A theme that comes a lot for me is getting bitten by a spider
| in the dream. The catalyst I've noticed is heart burn/acid
| reflux. I think recurring themes in dreams are linked to
| recurring/similar events during the day. The same neuronal
| pathways are followed so you get similar dreams that link up
| with those events. Or maybe not! Who really knows?
| jonsen wrote:
| I believe the actual nature of dreams are not as we remember
| them. When we recall a dream and makes it a conscious thing
| we interpret it as we interpret other recollections by making
| a coherent story of the basic memory. So I dont't think we
| can know what the brain process actually were when dreaming.
| Different things may coalesce into a dream process. And when
| it is recalled and interpreted it is formed into a meaningful
| but relatively arbitrary direction.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Some dream themes seem to be fairly universal:
|
| https://xkcd.com/557/
| [deleted]
| neoplatonian wrote:
| Hey. Same - I have recurring dreams (across years) on the
| themes you mention + a few more (inventing "flying", cosmic
| apocalpypse). Shall we connect to see if we can solve this
| mystery? - see its connected to personality or life
| experiences?
| skulk wrote:
| Fear of being somewhere specifically without clothes is
| something deeply ingrained within us but not really typical
| among animals. I wonder if these "man-made" fears are more
| likely to appear in dream scenarios.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes. Some common ones: 1) Being back in school, missing an exam
| or test. 2) My car is out of control: won't stop going
| backwards, accelerates uncontrollably, etc. 3) Finding secret /
| "extra" rooms in my house. 4) Most recently with covid: being
| in a store, and realized I've forgotten my mask.
|
| There are definitely other themes but these are the most
| common.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I had a variation of the mask dream. Note that I live in
| Manhattan:
|
| 1. I forget to take my mask when I leave my apartment.
| Apparently the door man doesn't notice.
|
| 2. When I try to go back to my apartment to retrieve my mask,
| the door man doesn't let me in, because you need a mask to
| enter.
|
| 3. I'm not allowed to enter any stores to buy a mask, because
| you need a mask to enter.
|
| So I'm trapped outside in this catch-22.
| zwkrt wrote:
| Don't so quickly discount mystical descriptions of dreams, even
| if you aren't a religious person yourself. The thing that is
| special about dreams is that unlike our conscious waking
| experience you have no control over how they manifest
| themselves. They aren't scientific or rational at all; they are
| human. Dogs have dreams, and we wouldn't expect them to have a
| rational, non-mystical explanation for them. In a sense your
| dreams are the only way your body can communicate unconscious
| (and therefore irrational) fears or desires, short of a panic
| attack or mental breakdown.
|
| Your fear of snakes is likely older than humanity itself, so
| even if you can have rational control of yourself around a
| snake in real life they could terrorize your dreams. Snakes
| used to be a real and present danger in our environment for
| millions of years of our evolution. They are the unknown
| environment, the cunning adversary, the unforeseen consequence
| of carelessness.
|
| In a similar way, you might find that you can manage to present
| yourself in social situations, there is a very human fear of
| being found out, cast out, laughed at, and/or rejected
| socially, since we are social creatures. Even nudists have
| dreams of finding themselves naked in front of their peers. If
| you spend your day putting on a facade of some sort, which you
| probably do if you have a job, then somewhere there is a part
| of you that you don't want others to see, and in your dream
| they all see it big time and you have to deal with it.
| methodin wrote:
| For me I have found if I really think hard about the
| situations I find myself in dreams they are correlated to
| thoughts or things I've heard/seen or experienced throughout
| the day. Suppression of thoughts would manifest itself
| certainly in a dream but for me specifically it's garbage
| collection. I've also found that it's fairly easy to
| recollect what prompted that dream scenario since presumably
| it's still at the forefront of the my memory circulating
| around my brain if you will. While this is my own judgement,
| if accurate for other people, I'm not sure your assertion
| that "They aren't scientific or rational at all" would be
| correct.
| airstrike wrote:
| "Mystical" and "unconscious" aren't interchangeable.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Since I was younger, whenever I am ill - like a fever or
| something - I have a recurring dream about boulders at the top
| of a mountain with changing numbers on them. It just kinda
| loops ... very strange
| jointpdf wrote:
| Oh yes, and specifically about anxieties like you describe. It
| makes intuitive sense to me that your brain would simulate
| anxiety-inducing situations in order to exercise those high-
| stakes decision-making pathways (or similar). Escape sequences
| are very common for me.
|
| Example: "waking" up on the last day of a semester, only to
| discover that I am enrolled in a required class that I never
| actually attended...woops.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| NovaJehovah wrote:
| I wonder how these kinds of dreams are affected by dealing with
| the underlying anxieties.
|
| I remember having the "naked in public" dream in the past. I've
| also had a fair amount of body shame for most of my life.
|
| But after getting in better shape and spending time on nude
| beaches and in the occasional (mixed gender) nude sauna in the
| last few years, my body shame pretty much disappeared. I now
| feel almost no self-consciousness from being naked.
|
| I can't recall having a single "naked in public" dream since
| getting more comfortable with my body.
| as1mov wrote:
| I guess this does make some sense in my case. Unfortunately
| my issues can't really be fixed by getting in better shape.
| NovaJehovah wrote:
| Getting in better shape did make it easier, but I think
| just being naked around others and seeing that no one
| really cares that much what your body looks like is the
| more important ingredient.
|
| I guess it's a form of de-conditioning. We've been trained
| to expect this extremely negative response from others when
| we take our clothes off. Doing it over and over and
| receiving no negative response whatsoever seems to
| eventually alter the expectation.
| splittingTimes wrote:
| As a kid, age 6-8 probably I had many dreams about owls. I
| never figured out why or what would have triggered it.
|
| Between my 20s and 30s I did a lot of selfdefense training. I
| would dream a lot about conflict situations where I would have
| to fight (or run). In real life I might have had 3 conflics in
| those 10 years. Anyhow, fighting in a dream was like being
| submerged in molasse: every movement had resistence and was
| painfully slow, while opponents moved normally. This was
| freaking me out.
| rebuilder wrote:
| That slowness is very common, AFAIK. I have it, too,
| specifically if I try to punch things. Good thing, too - a
| couple of times that has failed to work and I've woken up
| just in time to see my first punch a wall or my elbow smash
| into the radiator next to my bed. Hurts.
|
| I don't know if it's related, but sometimes in my dreams I
| fly by taking advantage of this oddly sluggish momentum. All
| it takes is to launch myself into a spinning motion like a
| frisbee, and I'll fly a good distance.
| splittingTimes wrote:
| yes punches especially. But it is really good it is slow. I
| punched my little daughter that slept in our bed one night.
| But no harm was done... phew
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I think that's your body's way of making sure you don't hurt
| yourself - kinda like why I can never run in dreams - body
| has a sleep paralysis
| krisgee wrote:
| I dreamed myself a sci-fi miniseries and it was extremely weird
| so it's not just you. I work in games/entertainment so I assume
| it's just how my brain organizes stuff.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| For years, I've had a recurring dream where I've returned to a
| location of many fond childhood memories, my grandparents'
| home. More recently, the dreams focus on the impossibility of
| my being there again after all these years, the paradox
| resolved by some handwaving of my subconscious.
| davchana wrote:
| Absolutely same as first one. Naked, in social settings, people
| around me not even noticing my that state, i am trying to act
| normal as well as find my clothes.
| Tade0 wrote:
| There's a city I have been visiting in my dreams for years now.
| It's a very different experience each time, but the streetcars
| are always the same[0], as well as the general impression of
| the place.
|
| At this point I can identify a few areas like "old town" or
| "business district" or "very large square with an enormous
| roundabout".
|
| [0] Mostly various types of Ganz UVs
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_UV which is interesting,
| because I've only been to Budapest once in my life.
| carabiner wrote:
| I've had the naked dream a LOT, usually taking place at work.
| It's the place where I'm most anxious and insecure.
|
| Another I've had is being at the top of a very tall skyscraper
| that starts shaking from an earthquake, and I have to get down
| somehow. Like everything around me is about to crumble and it's
| totally out of my control.
| rebuilder wrote:
| I don't know if I'd call it recurring, since it's pretty rare,
| but: Sometimes I lose my mind in my dreams. I can feel myself
| losing my grip on my faculties, as if something were ripping my
| mind apart. It's hard to describe, visuals become distorted,
| things split apart into colours, my grip on reality feels
| slippery. I imagine having a stroke might feel that way,
| although I hope it's less dramatic. This is just sheer terror.
|
| Also rare, but in a similar vein, sometimes I wake up into a
| dream, over and over again. I'll be in bed, relieved I'm
| finally awake, until I soon realize I'm still asleep and wake
| up again. When this repeats enough times, it becomes pretty
| desperate.
|
| Otherwise, I rarely have anxiety-inducing dreams.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| My dreams are always of the sense that I'll get physically lost
| and die for it -- as in, I'm driving up a winding road, and I
| take a wrong turn, and that turn causes me to skid off past a
| guardrail and plummet to the ground, infinitely below. Or
| walking back from buying groceries, and all the signs are
| blank, then turning out into the woods and falling down in a
| pit in the sidewalk.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| In my twenties I had recurring dreams about being in a field of
| golden wheat during the summer, with a guilty feeling I hurt
| someone.
|
| They really were weird. Maybe testosterone? Maybe Freudian?
| Maybe it was due to a stint job I had at the Coroner's Office
| in high school? Maybe nothing?
|
| Those dreams ended in my thirties, after a breakdown in grad
| school.
|
| I pop a gasket (just really bad anxiety), and all those dreams
| subsided? Crazy?
|
| Life became the nightmare after the breakdown though.
| pdbwimsey wrote:
| Oh yeah, I just assumed everyone saw the green lady. You know,
| green skin, bald, tusks, too many eyes.
|
| She's been visiting for a couple decades, but she just stares,
| so you get used to her. I figured it was one of those common
| ones like you have a surprise exam and you forgot your pencils
| or you have a candy bar for a head.
| alexjplant wrote:
| I have more than two hundred pages of dreams typed out. It was a
| lot easier to do this when I was younger as I had much more time
| in the mornings. I remember everything vividly but once ten
| minutes have passed since waking it's pretty much gone unless I
| make a conscious effort to commit it to memory.
|
| It's great fun to go back and be prompted to remember some of the
| crazier ones or Ctrl+F to see how often various people and things
| pop up.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Consider submitting them
| mushishi wrote:
| I wonder if feeding this into a machine learning system could
| yield artistic/funny/useful gifs, especially for recurring dreams
| could give a pattern for a "meme".
| [deleted]
| intrasight wrote:
| My dreams are often pretty epic and often have sound tracks.
| Frequently I wake up and record them - including the music. If I
| don't take notes and record songs immediately, then both are lost
| forever.
| soheil wrote:
| Is there a site for non-dreams? I don't know maybe ThoughtsBank?
| fumblebee wrote:
| Twitter?
| techer wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/ Not really the same,
| sorry.
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