Dreaming

[pameladlloyd]

Ever notice how some dreams and dream images stick with you, even though others evaporate before you're even truly awake?

For me, it's often setting and its associated feelings that bump around in my brain, jostling my waking moments (sometimes years after the dream), although people, critters, and events may also keep me company. Dream fragments from last night include a dusty--er, well, dusty is an understatement, dusty as in chalky plaster dust and crumbles, some as big as a marble--dining room with rose-colored flowered wallpaper, and cuddling an owl in my arms while I worried about mice climbing onto the dining table where my husband wanted to serve a meal. Why I didn't think to let the owl take care of the mice, I don't know. It feels important to mention that the owl's feathers were soft, but also full of the gritty dust.

Although I can sometimes make a connection between my life and my dreams, more often the dreams stand apart, with no clear relationship to my waking life. For instance, I've never held an owl, never thought that owls would be particularly cuddly, and can't remember any owls hanging around yesterday, or even coming up in conversation. Also, my dining room has been converted to an office, there is no wallpaper anywhere in my house, the house I was in in the dream wasn't even remotely like my home, and even with my poor housekeeping skills, nothing is covered in plaster dust, nor do we have mice. (Mice? With six cats? Nope. The mice are smarter than that.)

My dreams do have themes, however. Houses, especially old houses, are one of those themes, so last night's dream was not especially unique in that respect. One of my favorite old-house dreams had me purchasing a crumbling mansion for a tiny sum. It was haunted, of course, but who could have guessed that the indoor basketball court would double as Hell's ballroom?

What about your dreams? Do you have dream images or events that linger, haunting your waking life? Do your dreams tie in to current or past events in your life? Are there recurring themes? Or, do they seem to well from some divergent universe?

Comments

[marycatelli]

the dreams you don't remember are those where you were dreaming deeply, most likely. memories work better when you are in the same frame of mind when you made them.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

This is true, but doesn't explain why an image from a dream that's ten years old may suddenly visit me in the middle of the day while I'm otherwise engrossed in a completely unrelated project. :)

[marycatelli]

Well, "dreams" have no substantive content. Your brain is firing in ways it never does when you're awake. So you wake up with impressions that you would never encounter in waking life -- and your waking mind tries to process them as if they were waking life.

It's rather like seeing the same image twice in the clouds -- it probably does mean something.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

That's one theory. :)

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I have adventure dreams, and several of them have mutated into stories - I dream about total strangers doing interesting things in locations I don't know; and they make sense. Sometimes I have dreams that aren't worth remembering - but over the years I've built up a mental map. This world maps onto our planet, even though the locations themselves are completely different. I've seen a number of maps, I revisit places, and while I can't always recall them actively, I usually know in my dream a place I've visited before in another dream.

Ocassionally, I'll have a telling dream - not just anxiety, but dreams about choices, the sort that can be decoded with a good look at metaphors, but they are rare.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I've had some very detailed dreams, several of which have given me stories. Sometimes, as happens with your dreams, they are about people I don't know about in real life--almost as if I were watching a movie. Sometimes, I have POV switches within a dream, spending some part of the dream watching the characters and other parts from inside the POV of one of the characters.

I've had at least one dream set on another planet. It had a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, although it was still breathable, but the air was very cold and the sky was incredibly dark with very few stars. I was just one of thousands of humans who'd been deposited there by an alien race. We were all completely naked and the only way to stay warm was to sit in bubbling mud pits, none of them big enough to hold very many people. It all sounds nightmarish, but I didn't have the pounding heart or experience of fear that I would with a nightmare.

[core-opsis.livejournal.com]

Wow. I can't say as I've ever had an "alien planet" dream. My recurring dreams are always house and big city dreams. They're always incredibly vivid (though never with any dust), with particular smells and the way the light falls, and though not exactly nightmares, feel some kind of primal anxiety.

I find them fascinating, because, "random firings" or not, they're filled with images, that my waking mind tries to make sense of, just like poetry.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

The alien planet dream was unique. And very vivid.