Thread: What's different about your dreams?

I usually enjoy being naked in dreams. I know this is often an anxiety dream for people but I really like it for some reason.

Last year my best friend from jr high who I almost never talk to now emailed me and said she dreamed we were in an atrium with little animals. There was a pool in the room. I had just written my lucid dream down and also dreamed of an atrium with a pool and little animals and my friend was there as well. I can’t remember ever dreaming about her as an adult. This was a very odd coincidence that made me go huh??

Hmm.

I wonder here if another question shouldn't be asked on this topic: Is there really "normal behavior" in a dream?

Seriously. We are all individuals, and all our dreams are generated in a manner that reflects our unique personalities and life experiences. Sure, similar people might have similar dreams, and there are arguably archetypes (i.e., the presence of water, or public nudity, or perhaps being handed a test for a class that you hadn't attended all year) that may hold similar symbolic meaning in most of our dreams -- or not, as Azaleaj noted about nudity in her dreams. But it may be a mistake to assume that there are any "normal" images or behaviors in dreams; and I believe that that mistake has been made quite often in popular books (especially dream dictionaries, which in my mind are invariably useless) and forums like this, to the point where dreamers start to think they're supposed to dream in a certain way, and that if they don't then their dreams are weird, different, or somehow wrong. This is especially true with LD'ing, where novices feel like they must experience or do specific things when lucid and if they don't then they've somehow failed... and that is not a good thing, in the end.

For instance, Cron, your example of clocks always working for you is a good one: Yes, for most of us clocks (especially digital ones) tend to change their readout each time we glance at them in a dream. But if your dreaming mind has established that clocks don't change, then they don't; and that is not unusual at all, but rather simply the way your mind has chosen to present an image in your dreams. As an extension of this, I wonder how many dreamers actually cause the clocks to change, thanks to their expectation that that will happen (same goes for reading text, BTW, which is something I personally have never had trouble with),

So maybe the real thing to wonder about is when similar images or behaviors occur, as in Azaleaj's example above, because that could reflect true oddness.

Originally Posted by Cron

I remember reading studies about lucid dream reality checks a long time ago that said to try and check the time in a dream. If it isn't legible or keeps changing, then you're dreaming!

I've seen that test too, but clocks work just fine for me as well. I've also heard you should try a light switch, because light and darkness don't happen in dreams either, but my dreams have light, shadow, and the states in-between too, so that "rule" also appears to not work for me.

It got me to thinking that it's the person who came up with all these tests who's the atypical one. Maybe he's the only one out there whose dreamclocks are broken.

Originally Posted by Azaleaj

Last year my best friend from jr high who I almost never talk to now emailed me and said she dreamed we were in an atrium with little animals. There was a pool in the room. I had just written my lucid dream down and also dreamed of an atrium with a pool and little animals and my friend was there as well. I can’t remember ever dreaming about her as an adult. This was a very odd coincidence that made me go huh??

Azaleaj, it's up to you of course, but if you didn't mind, it would be cool to get to see the email she sent as well as your dream entry.

I don't personally believe shared dreaming occurs, but the possibility is interesting to think about, and would be fun to see how similar your two accounts were.

Usually, in cases I've seen where shared dreaming is claimed, at least one of the two people ended up not writing down their entry ahead of time. Your case is much better, because both of your entries were written/sent before either knew of the other's dream, so it's clear from interference of memory mistakes/rewriting.

Originally Posted by Azaleaj

I usually enjoy being naked in dreams. I know this is often an anxiety dream for people but I really like it for some reason.

Last year my best friend from jr high who I almost never talk to now emailed me and said she dreamed we were in an atrium with little animals. There was a pool in the room. I had just written my lucid dream down and also dreamed of an atrium with a pool and little animals and my friend was there as well. I can’t remember ever dreaming about her as an adult. This was a very odd coincidence that made me go huh??

I can understand the naked thing. I still like to get extremely intoxicated in my dreams. Like, drinking 5 bottles of vodka intoxicated. It's like a super high without any adverse side effects! Don't worry, I don't drink much IRL. I was doing this before I've ever even tried alcohol IRL, so I was quite disappointed when I got my first buzz on the real thing. So, maybe not as whimsical as being naked, but just something I like to do.
As for the thing with your friend, it reminds me of a documentary-like movie on lucid dreaming I saw years ago. At one point it goes on how some researches did a study on random people and there were some cases where some people would have very identical dreams or wake up with identical ideas on the same day. It theorized that many people's minds could be subtly connected when dreaming in some way. I have a far-fetched idea, but I wonder if our brains are capable of transmitting and receiving signals unseen or documented by man. Maybe our brains need to be sleeping to transmit certain frequencies, like a cellular device? People who know each other could have a stronger connection like in your case. Just an idea.

You've definitely broken it down, Sageous, and I have to agree. On the topic of dreams being influenced by our mind's expectations, this is my largest problem in lucid dreaming. I have a crippling doubt that I cannot continue lucid dreams for long, because I cannot imagine the places I want to go to or the things I want to do. Every lucid dream I've ever had goes black quickly whenever I try to change the dream from what it originally was. Lately, when I become lucid, I simply become an observer out of fear that if I try to change anything the dream will fade. I've learned to be calm years ago, but it does not help either. I've incubated ideas in an imagery based fashion and tried to go to my imagined places in lucid dreams, but alas, the dreams will still fade if I try to change them. I've said in my introduction that my dreams defy common methods, but I know it's probably me. I'm not sure what to think to counter this problem.

Hi Venryx, yes I have pictures. Btw I don’t really believe in shared dreams either. I have a few other examples of seemingly precognitive dreams I have evidence of from my journal but again they could just be odd coonicdences. Going back through our messages it does look like my friend and I had spoken previous to our dreams and there were some differences but there were some interesting similarities. She dreamed of a solarium with transforming little animals and I dreamed I was in a room with glass walls with transforming little animals. The definition of a solarium is a room with glass walls that allows light in. I know this type of speculation is sort of frowned upon in this forum so I don’t really want to post all of the stuff here. I’ll send them privately. Email is easier for me if you’d like to give me that as I’m having trouble figuring out how to easily upload images into a private message. I tried a little while ago and I’m not sure I did it correctly.

Frowned on only by some people - most are very open minded and you'll find quite a few who believe in shared dreaming, in different ways. I used to not believe in it at all, until I experienced it myself a few times and also learned about dream telepathy, which is a slightly different take on dream sharing. The idea is that telepathy happens between people but when they're awake the conscious mind isn't aware of it, and then it informs the dreams when you go to sleep. So people don't need to be asleep at the same time - it isn't a realtime shared experience but more like an idea or image that's been shared that then spawns dreams in both people that night. And the people won't dream exactly the same things - more like each one dreams their own interpretations of the idea. The solariums and the animals and many details might have looked very different in the 2 dreams, but it does sound like the same idea spawned dreams for both of you.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

So people don't need to be asleep at the same time - it isn't a realtime shared experience but more like an idea or image that's been shared that then spawns dreams in both people that night.

That seems less like telepathy and more like memetics to me.

Originally Posted by LabyrinthDreams

That seems less like telepathy and more like memetics to me.

From Wikipedia:

The term meme was coined in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins later distanced himself from the resulting field of study.[2] Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host.

Yes, that sounds right, but what would be the transfer media? I think he was talking about ideas getting to large numbers of people via something like TV or the internet or water cooler conversation. But what would cause people to dream the same thing without any such media connecting them? Unless the people had spoken to each other or seen the same show or movie or something, telepathy would have to be the connecting medium. And why would 2 people share the same dream and immediately think of each other and email each other about it? I suppose it would be a telepathic meme. But of course some people will accept that as a possibility - at least theoretically, and some won't.

I'm a bit late here, but Sageous started with basically what I would have said: I'm not sure if there really is a such thing as “normal” dream behavior. For pretty much every popular “rule” I've heard about dreams, there's at least one person for whom it doesn't follow, myself included (e.g., reading is usually no problem for me, light switches and electronic devices at least sometimes work, blinking or closing my eyes doesn't generally cause me to wake up, etc.). And then there are those times where a person can have the occasional odd dream that totally violates the “normal rules” of their own typical dreams.

Originally Posted by Sageous

As an extension of this, I wonder how many dreamers actually cause the clocks to change, thanks to their expectation that that will happen (same goes for reading text, BTW, which is something I personally have never had trouble with),

I've wondered this a couple of times myself. I wouldn't be surprised if I could just invent my own random, crazy rule for an RC and get it to work fairly easily just by the expectation/intention alone. Since RCs for me mainly seem to start working after I've already become at least very slightly lucid in the first place, it would make sense. In fact, when I think about it that way, performing RCs and making them work in this case appears to be not much more than a basic act of lucid dream control in general.

So maybe the real thing to wonder about is when similar images or behaviors occur, as in Azaleaj's example above, because that could reflect true oddness.

Or perhaps another clue to the elusive mystery of dreaming!