Thread: Dreams as real as waking life?

Hi,
I'm new to dream views and i'm hoping someone out there has experienced the same dream state as me.

I don't have random dreams, about memories, objects or people i know. My dream world is as real as my waking world.

For example I drive past the same school on my way to work in waking life. In my dream life i pass by houses or forests or beaches where i have been in previous dreams. Sometimes i revisit the same locations but have different dreams.

It's like a secondary life.

I have drawn a map and tried to draw the locations and people. My memories of my dream reality are as vivid as my memories of waking reality. I have friends in both, I know my way around in both and i enjoy both although they are completely different places.

Sometimes this can be confusing as I refer to things in waking life that actually happened in my dream life, and can lead to me feeling groggy or when memories are most vivid i feel a bit crazy!

I can't find anything about this online and wonder if this is a common phenomenon or if this is just me?

Please help if you have experienced the same or similar!

Same happens to me, I threw a book away in one dream, and in another dream I found it. I guess it's normal, because we expect the book to be there again when you revisit that place, I believe such things are called schemas. Like when you see the streets of New York at night -> Danger -> There is a book here -> There might be muggers. The streets of New York at night are connected to danger, and you book, and the possibility of muggers, they're associated. Oh, and I'm not very good at examples, as you might have seen.

EDIT: I am often confused by my waking and dream memories, sometimes I have to ask friends:
"Do you remember doing this with me?"

My dreams seem as real as waking life too. But my dreams are mostly in places I know I never been to making it easyier to tell which is which. Usally continuus dreams happen in one night, and then when you wake up you mind tries and find connections to make it seem like a long dream, despite the gaps. I guess this could occur in more than one night but I haven't had any experiance in that...

This doesn't really address your question, but its interesting what you think of as real. I think of my dreams as being "real" in the sense that they seem real. The emotions I have, the people I interact with, and just the overall experience. When I wake up, my memory of what had "happened" seems like a normal memory of just about anything else like going to the grocery store or talking with friends. I find this completely fascinating since they are by no means "real" in the accepted context of what is real. It has led me to question what constitutes a "real" experience.

But more towards your dreams, have you ever had a lucid dream where everything is normal like waking life?

I have had lots of dreams like that. They are never like the real world, mostly consisting of fantasy type stuff like breathing under water, flying, or finding secret underworlds. But I have visited the same place in different dreams before, and even had a similar dream, and I knew what was going to happen.

Dream continuity? Not too common, but it still occurs. Part of the reason why you dream of such realistic things is because, duh, you live in a realistic world. The majority of dreams do not contain rainbow frogs and talking broomsticks, but instead they contain real people and real places with slightly odd scenarios. I'd also bet that the longer you've lived in the same place (town), the more familiar and realistic your dreams are (I move a lot, and as a consequence dream places end up as an unrecogizeable mesh when together, but when separated into components, the places closely resemble places I've lived).

Cool, you have dream continuity too, I wonder if it generally comes with good recall, anyway, I have it too, tough... there is that traveling I do alot in dreams so never got to know anyone good enough lol

Originally Posted by Abra

The majority of dreams do not contain rainbow frogs and talking broomsticks, but instead they contain real people and real places with slightly odd scenarios.

Tonight's lucid: white nothing with floating structures made of alien seaweed.
Not the majority, true, but total weirdness does happen. Still, I sometimes revisit dream-places as well.

This is really interesting and I've spent hours going through books and research papers trying to find an aknowledgement of this phenomena then bingo - found this post. It important because this may challenge current theories of dream amnesia.

I have experienced for years, dreams where I know exactly where I am. I've been there before, sometimes for the first time and other places, I've been going there for years. I sometimes remember things that happened at that location in previous dreams. When I wake up, those places are no longer familiar, in other words, they are not representations of the waking world in my dreams. They are unique places within my dream world that I know well.

I'd love to know if there has been any research on this. The point is this - if we do not encode our dreams into memory, how can I remember people, locations and things that happened in previous dreams when I'm dreaming?

When I was younger I had dreams like this... they were sort of little epic adventures, and they'd pick up one night where they'd left off. The environment related to the storyline was static, though eventually it would change as a over time a new story was started. I remember talking to my mom about it when I was little, and she told me that when she was young her dreams were the same way... mine aren't like this anymore. The only places that are really static are the ones that are mostly based off of locations in real life. Even then there are some goofy slipups... that's how I got my first lucid!