As I have been documenting my dreams in an offline journal away from dream views (and most of them having been inappropriate for discussion in a public online environment) I have come across some phenomenon and some dream themes that either emerged into my dream recently or only came to my awareness recently.

I have discovered that I have a lot of dreams that recurse. (For those who are unfamiliar with the term; Recursion is a term used in computer programming in where a method (a block of code) calls itself into action. It's difficult to explain unless you at least know basic programming but the important thing you need to know is that it's when something comes back to itself.) I call it this because I have a lot of dreams that seem to repeat with minor variations. Sometimes I might be lucid or semi lucid when the dream happens or the dream may simply proceed slightly differently. I might be offered a chance to try different actions or slightly different characters or events may be present.

One recent instance; and a good example is a dream I had not too long ago was a dream in where I had difficulty controlling my car and was repeatedly crashing into stuff, but by pressing the radio button on the dashboard I could rewind the dream by about a minute or so and prevent the instance of crashing my car. It was somewhat strange as the method of recursion was actually built into the dream itself and that does not have to be the case.

I have also discovered a phenomenon that I just call Quasi-Recursion but I'm looking for a better name for it. This is when you have a dream, then have a false awakening from that dream and begin to either tell a dream character about the dream or go about journaling the dream you just woke up from. (Though this is probably just a sign that I need to do more false awakening checks.)

So has anyone experienced either of these phenomenons and have any thoughts on the matter? Do you think recursion is an appropriate term for this?