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The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports
- warent 6y agoI'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?
- codetrotter 6y agoAnd 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/201204/people-who-do-not-dream https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/dream-catcher/2012...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ThePhysicist 6y agoI 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 6y agoThis seems to be the secret: consistently training your brain by telling it “dream details are something important to remember”
- eightails 6y agoTotally agree. Generally if I can't get the ball rolling remebering last nights dream before I'm really awake, I won't be able to get much detail at all. > Most people have at least 2-4 REM sleep phases at night One of the things I've noticed in taking a dream journal over the past few years is that when I remember a night's dreams thoroughly, they're often split into a handful of distinct sections, with each one being an almost entirely self contained story and scene. I never made the connection until now but I wonder if each 'scene' is a specific REM cycle.
- poopoopeepee 6y agoSome 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 6y agoMy 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.
- Viliam1234 6y ago> This isn't to say you should be reading "dream interpretation" guides or speaking to interpreters. The problem with using guides and interpreters is that you don't know whether they explain your unconscious associations, or just substitute their own. If you interpret your own dreams, you can be sure that all associations were generated by your own brain. Maybe during the dream, maybe during the interpretation. Who cares; either way, it's about your brain. My simple interpretation method is to write an outline of the dream, and to some words add an arrow and write what it reminds me of. Usually at least three things in the dream remind me of the same topic -- that is the core message of the dream.
- indogooner 6y agoAnecdata: 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 6y agoI 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
- closeparen 6y agoI 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.
- bgroat 6y agoI 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"
- Viliam1234 6y agoAlso, dreams are quickly forgotten, even if you make an effort to recall them. Once I was writing a dream diary. I had a dream, and I was like "this reminds me of another dream I had a few weeks ago". I opened the diary, and saw that the "few weeks ago" was actually yesterday. So, if the dream from yesterday feels like a few weeks ago, and the dreams before yesterday are either forgotten or feel like an ancient past, it is quite easy to believe that you usually don't dream, even if you actually dream every night.
- vinceguidry 6y agoI'm fairly certain this is due to the same reason it's easier for a chess player to recall 'real' chess positions rather than if you just placed pieces randomly. Causality makes it possible for us to "compress" memories into a small enough representation. Dreams usually don't follow the same kinds of rules. I'm remembering a particularly vivid dream I had perhaps a month or two ago. I remember the settings it took place in, some of the characters, some of the story elements, though to call it a "story" is a bit of a stretch, just a rambling sequence of unconnected events. I often dream consciously, So I can remember actually wanting to pay attention to how cause and effect worked, but when I woke up, I couldn't recall how stuff managed to happen. Without that thread running through everything, dream recall would seem to go very against how the brain normally works. Not that techniques can't help anyway.
- malthaus 6y agoSome anecdata... but I do have aphantasia so my dream experience is probably a bit different from most. In the past i never much noticed or remembered dreaming, only when waking up agitated from a nightmare (hasn't happened in years) But i've been a double espresso drinker for years. Since i started cutting out the dinner espresso (e.g. having my last coffee at lunch) i dream almost every night (sometimes 2 distinct storylines) and can remember them for a few minutes after waking but they fade quickly after.
- hntrader 6y agoWould it be interesting to fine-tune GPT-3 on these?
- fumblebee 6y agoGPT-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.
- allemagne 6y agoSometimes 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.
- hntrader 6y agoI wonder if it's because an invented language has a gigantic number of permutations, the frequency of which swamps English-language replies. Then the most likely next word/statement that completes the input prompt is always going to be the latter due to the relative frequencies.
- motohagiography 6y agoWould using this for an ML classifier corpus potentially yield a set of hitherto unnamed categories that reflect something structural about our minds?
- xkeysc0re 6y agoSounds similar to efforts by Franco Moretti to do "distant reading" on literary corpuses to reveal trends (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_reading)
- xkeysc0re 6y agoDirect link to all dream series and samples: http://www.dreambank.net/grid.cgi http://www.dreambank.net/grid.cgi
- soheil 6y agoIs there a site for non-dreams? I don't know maybe ThoughtsBank?
- lqet 6y agoI 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.
- bregma 6y agoI 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.
- throwawayboise 6y agoChasing squirrels
- Pentamerous 6y agoThis 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 https://dreams.ucsc.edu/Library/domhoff_2020b.pdf - Chapter "Dreaming Is a Gradual Cognitive Achievement"
- jobigoud 6y ago> It seems that there are some "cognitive prerequisites for dreaming", which are mostly developed around the age of 5-7 But seeing cats and dogs dreaming is fairly common.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoThis is cool. Where can we download the entire corpus?
- crancher 6y agoDoesn't seem to be available.
- johnisgood 6y agoOh that would be cool! I hope it will become downloadable.
- achairapart 6y agoThis 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=jasmine http://www.dreambank.net/more_info.cgi?further=1&series=jasm...
- vmception 6y agoI 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!”
- misterkrabs 6y agoI 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.
- codazoda 6y agoYeah, 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).
- clarle 6y agoI just ended up searching "I" in the search bar to read all of the dreams as all of the dream diaries are written in the first person.
- as1mov 6y agoJust 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.
- dqv 6y agoA 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 6y agoI 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- skulk 6y agoFear 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.
- mushishi 6y agoI 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 6y ago[deleted]
- Pentamerous 6y agoThis website is part of another one called Dream Research - https://dreams.ucsc.edu/ 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 6y agoI'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 6y agoAll 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.
- splittingTimes 6y agoHow 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 6y agoI 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.
- swayvil 6y agoI've experienced that dream memory thing too. A whole other set of memories that I hook up with when I'm in dreamland. It makes you think.
- 6y ago
- lrossi 6y agoDo 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.
- enricozb 6y agoIn 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.
- drusepth 6y agoI 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.
- timonoko 6y agoI 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 6y agoYou're in good company: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/08/mendeleev-periodic-table-dream/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/08/mendeleev-periodic-...
- sep_field 6y agothe sun with its magnetic force lines?
- pbadg3r 6y agoHas 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)
- gfaure 6y agoSearching this database by typing keywords reminds me of the "search engine" gameplay in Sam Barlow's game Her Story.
- yboris 6y agoPossibly related: Scientists entered people’s dreams and got them ‘talking’ https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-peoples-dreams-and-got-them-talking https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-p...
- autoditype 6y agoIsn't that part of the plot to Inception?
- irrational 6y agoDo 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?
- c7DJTLrn 6y agoYep, 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.
- codazoda 6y agoDo 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 6y agoOh yes, I have a very vivid mind's eye.
- joshspankit 6y agoIf 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.
- alexjplant 6y agoI 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 6y agoConsider submitting them
- heikkilevanto 6y agoI have read that certain antidepressants have "strange dreams" and "nightmares" listed as possible side effects. Not sure what to make out of that
- joshspankit 6y agoI have a few friends who took Champix (to stop smoking) and reported significant changes to the vibrancy, clarity, and content of their dreams
- intrasight 6y agoMy 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.
- rpiguyshy 6y agoi 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.
- khazhoux 6y agoDavid Lynch's work is often described as "dream-like", and you can definitely see that connection in these transcripts. This could easily be a scene in his movies: > I'm at a Sunday night church gathering. I'm thinking, "I haven't done this in years." It's crowded. A drunk man next to me whispers, "Reproductive organs." I good naturedly tell him to shut up. I see a big sign that says "Brothers, Jesus..." Later someone, a male, says he has to take part of my reproductive system out. I just play with my nipples and enjoy it, i.e. I have an orgasm. I look at him and say, "I can't do that. I would feel embarrassed that I would have to go to orgasm with people watching." A girl whispers, "You can do it."
- swayvil 6y agoVipassana meditation makes me more awake in dreams. Better remembering. More lucid. I hear it's common. If anybody's looking for a way to do that, there you go.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kin 6y agoThis is fascinating to me. I would love to contribute to Dream research. I also keep a dream journal and consistently have very vivid and colorful dreams. The most frustrating thing to me is that I would love to share these dreams somehow with the world but I'm not a great writer and I'm even worse at drawing.
- matthewfelgate 6y agoThis seems worse than astrology. BS
- aarpmcgee 6y agoThis seems simply to be what it is; a collection of written accounts of dream memories. To what are you objecting, exactly?
- matthewfelgate 6y agoJust that many people seem weirdly obsessed with reading into the meaning of dreams.
- throw0932439 6y agoAnyone else ever fall asleep awake? I've been able to lucid dream for a while now, but I started meditating recently and I've discovered I can meditate myself to sleep while still being "awake". I have to be really tired to do it, like physically exhausted, but mentally awake, so usually during naps, but it's really strange. First time I freaked out because I could feel my body going into sleep paralysis I felt like I was choking / couldn't breathe. Unfortunately I've only managed to stay awake for a few moments and didn't procede to a lucid dream yet.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoIf I had a good dream and suddenly woke up. I can get back to sleep and continue the dream and somehow manipulate the story woke I'm in it. It's very weird, usually i know immediately when I'm dreaming while it's happening and I can wake up if it's not interesting. There are only 2 times that i remember that i didn't realize it. ( One quite embarrassing one). One time when u had a fake wake-up ( i thought I woke up for real and the feeling during afterwards that something is off was really weird. Another time i needed to go to the toilet and i couldn't. So i tried harder... Yeah, quite embarrassing this one... I do think I'll having less dreams lately. Since I never have the need to try to fetch the dream again. But I'm using my alarm clock again and perhaps that's related. Fyi, i forget about the dream immediately after standing up. It's possible that I talk in my sleep, i once woke up during that and had a conversation with my girlfriend. Somehow my dream was a visual interpretation of what she said ( while my eyes were closed ofc) and I was way more open than i usually am. She could have asked me anything and I sincerely doubt of i would have been able to dodge a question if I would have wanted that. Ps. I'm a very irregular sleeper.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoIf I had a good dream and suddenly woke up. I can get back to sleep and continue the dream and somehow manipulate the story while I'm in it. It's very weird, usually i know immediately when I'm dreaming while it's happening and I can wake up if it's not interesting. I don't have real nightmares, because I can wake up, since I realise it's not real. There are only 2 times that i remember that i didn't realize it. ( One quite embarrassing one). One time when I had a fake wake-up ( i thought I woke up for real and the feeling afterwards that something was off was really weird. Since I already thought I woke up). After a while, i woke up for real ofc, not by my doing. Another time i needed to go to the toilet and i couldn't. So i tried harder... Yeah, quite embarrassing this one, 10 years ago after a night of going out pretty late... I do think I'm having less dreams lately. Since I never have the need to try to fetch the dream again. But I'm using my alarm clock again and perhaps that's related. Fyi, i forget about the dream immediately after standing up. It's possible that I talk in my sleep, i once woke up during that and had a conversation with my girlfriend before I woke up. Somehow my dream was a visual interpretation of what she said ( while my eyes were closed ofc) and I was way more open than i usually am. She could have asked me anything and I sincerely doubt of i would have been able to dodge a question if I would have wanted that. Ps. I'm a very irregular sleeper. I can only sleep 3-4 hours and it's almost all REM/deep sleep according to an app that i placed on my bed. Ps2. If you have trouble waking up. Set a hard noise 10 minutes before the desired time ( 1 second duration), you should get up more easily when the real alarm goes off.
- llovan 6y agoI've had some pretty strange dreams over the years. Including some that were 2D animations, others that were like video games with cutscenes and text overlays. And that's without considering the precognitive dreams and those with side effects in the real world.
- spicyramen 6y agoOne of the books for dreams is from Sigmund Freud. I would be interested in learning of there is official science trying to understand the meaning
- jzer0cool 6y agoThere are reports that dreaming is some sort of brain healing process. There are some build ups that occur during the day and thus sleeping cleans this up. Are there are definite conclusions why people dream at all? From personal experience there are dreams I remember vividly to dreams that I know I had and then easily forget as I wake up again in the morning. Dreaming is such an interesting phenomenon.
- iJohnDoe 6y agoI’m convinced that dreams, at least in my case, are from past lives. I don’t have any strong religious or other reasons to believe this. It’s just a strong hunch. I’ve only had 1-2 vivid lucid dreams. One was where I was a doctor tending to a patient and we were located in an old cabin that would have been typical in the old west. It was so vivid that it was as if I was remembering a past life. I’ve also had many deja vu moments where I’m visiting somewhere in real life and I swear I remember it from a dream.
- IgorPartola 6y agoI have written code in my dreams. When facing a particular problem if I think about it obsessively all day long I can sometimes end up dreaming about it. If the dream comes towards the morning I can often times remember the code I wrote and go try it out when I wake up. It doesn’t make for good sleep but the code usually works even if it has some really weird convoluted quirk that I end up working out once awake. I had similar things happen in high school. For example the first time the teacher explained integrals I had a rough time visualizing the geometry. Having a dream a few nights later of an integral being like an apple peeled into a long strip helped me wake up with a better intuitive understanding of integrals.
- hliyan 6y agoThat's odd. There's a belief that you cannot read in dreams because the part of the left brain that specializes in it tend to be less active during dreaming. Well, you can read, but the symbols look jumbled. For some people, they can make out words, but if they look away and look at the page/area again, it says something else. In my case, personally, it's quite peculiar: I can read words, but not digits. In one recent dream, I noticed some Japanese-like characters in a road-side ATM screen, panicked and started grabbing people of the street and yelling "Show me a number! Show me your phone clock!" and sure enough the digits were garbled, which is how I realized I was dreaming.
- IgorPartola 6y agoI can’t really read large chunks of code but for me code is less a collection of words and more interconnects between concepts plus processes that allow them to communicate. I don’t need to read it as much as think about what the things are and what they should do. I remember doing this with some networking code a few years ago and thinking of how I wanted to structure different datagrams and which parts of the system would be responsible for creating and processing them. It had less to do with waking up and copying everything word for word and more to do with thinking of “put this function into this module which should do this kind of thing, then hook a callback to it from this function”, etc.
- hliyan 6y agoReading the stream "Barb Sanders [n=3116]", who dreams tend to be surreal, I was reminded of my own online dream log from many years ago: https://oneirolog.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/legs-of-our-fathers/ https://oneirolog.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/legs-of-our-fathe...