Nope, I haven't been drinking since the beginning of the year. Just don't feel like it since I was ill. These dreams come out of nowhere. The other night it was my youngest as a child again, and me talking to him. Strange.

MattHunX wrote:...
And none of it felt or looked the slightest bit off. Looking back, the only thing that was very weird were the clothes I wore. Some...darker blue? pants, a dark blue hooded jumper, with the hood up, face obscured by dark shadows only my mouth and chin visible, and the bottom bit of the jumper pulled up, tucked in the neck, pulled down again and twisted up into a not on my chest, if you can picture that. I caught a reflection of myself in a mirror and didn't even double take.

I think when we dream our 'anomaly detectors' are turned off. We lose any sense of unreality. The lack of that sense is a sense of hyper-reality, since everyday perception is rife with little errors and consistencies that get filtered out before they get to awareness.

I think this is similar to the inhibition of motor function, to stop us moving physically when we dream of moving.

MattHunX wrote:I cannot even recall most of the conversation, but I remember Ian McKellen mentioning he was looking forward to the premiere of the latest X-Men movie, and I can only recall my last few lines.

That seems typical. You wake with the strong impression of a very vivid and detailed dream, but find you don't now any of the detail. Maybe you failed to remember the detail, or perhaps you just were inhibited from tracking any detail, and were unable to notice the lack, leading to an impression that there was a normal level of waking detail there.

GrahamH wrote:
I think when we dream our 'anomaly detectors' are turned off. We lose any sense of unreality. The lack of that sense is a sense of hyper-reality, since everyday perception is rife with little errors and consistencies that get filtered out before they get to awareness.

I think this is similar to the inhibition of motor function, to stop us moving physically when we dream of moving.

Perhaps. Although, I distinctly remember accidentally punching the wall in front of me, whilst lying on my side. Whatever I was dreaming about made me lash out and ouch. I also headbutted the wall, once. Good wake up call, that.

GrahamH wrote:That seems typical. You wake with the strong impression of a very vivid and detailed dream, but find you don't now any of the detail. Maybe you failed to remember the detail, or perhaps you just were inhibited from tracking any detail, and were unable to notice the lack, leading to an impression that there was a normal level of waking detail there.

Well, I haven't the faintest idea what makes people lose their memory of their dream, or the lack there of, after waking up. The whole thing felt like ~5 minutes. Probably less. And just as I said goodbye, I woke up.

But I do remember my last line(s).

MattHunX wrote:I am playing Castlevania Lord of Shadows and Patrick Stewart is the narrator, so...that might have had an influence on my dream.

Also, I have been looking at videos and images of Stewart and McKellen being buddies, all those pics on their twitter pages...cause they're nice. Two old friends. It was days or perhaps even weeks before I had the dream, so it must have had an influence.

Animavore wrote:Drink has an effect on my dreams. When my dreams are at their most brutal, horrifying and grotesque, you can be guaranteed I was drinking the night before the night before (Never remember dreams after the night of drinking. Always just wake up in a daze).

I once forgot to take off a nicotine patch when going to bed once. Those bastards give you three-hour widescreen epics with screenplay by Joss Wheedon and SFX by Industrial light and Magic. The dream I had was basically 'Aliens Vs Downton Abbey'. We were stuck in a Stately Home surrounded by Xenomorphs. I can still remember them scuttlling over the immaculate lawns and smashing though the floor of the Drawing room, knocking over plinths with plaster busts on. We had to get up to the attic and break through roof to get to a waiting helicopter, piloted by my Nan strangely enough.

MattHunX wrote:Well, I haven't the faintest idea what makes people lose their memory of their dream, or the lack there of, after waking up. The whole thing felt like ~5 minutes. Probably less. And just as I said goodbye, I woke up.

But I do remember my last line(s).

Dream memory is stored in temporary memory. You can store this to permanent memory by waking up immediately or you can restrict bodily movements until you wake up. That's because bodily movements (eg. tossing and turning in your sleep) overwrite the temporary memory.

Scarlett wrote:It's funny that isn't it?

I used to be in a relationship with a guy who was a bit stalkery.

He'd dream I was having affairs and get up the next day in a foul mood with me for cheating on him in his dream

There was a woman talking about her husband's dementia on the radio yesterday, and she said the worst thing about it was that he kept accusing her of cheating on him.

It's quite common with dementia apparently.

I had a normal dream this morning.

I suspect just reading this thread and talking about dreams is making me remember them these last few days.

Animavore wrote:I had a normal dream this morning.

That's really awful...

I woke up from a dream where I was giving a theist a real fight. See this is what Ratskep is doing to my head. I was really irritated to be woken up mid-post.

I've just had what's possibly the wackiest dream for a long time, and given my propensity to dream weird stuff I've mentioned in the past, you're all in for a treat as I tell you about this one.

I was taking part in a sort of real life version of one of those silly Internet car games, where you set out to blow the crap out of the opposition with various weapons bolted to your car, while of course the opposition is setting out to do the same to you (and everyone else). Except we were all doing this in real cars. Though the entire playing field was a sort of surreal, cartoon version of the Arizona Badlands, complete with striated mountains and giant cacti. Moreover, the weapons some of the others were using were straight out of Dastardy & Muttley In Their Incredible Flying Machines.

One of the opponents was driving a 1959 Desoto in Barbie pink, with a giant version of a mediaeval spiked ball and chain whirring about on the roof like a perverted rotor blade, which of course would render any real car totally undriveable, and confer upon it the handling characteristics of an Asda shopping trolley with bent wheels. For those who've never seen a 1959 Desoto, this was one of those gigantic contraptions the Americans loved so much in the past, 18 feet long, with a gas guzzling engine that delivered about three miles to the gallon (remember, it was built in the days when petrol was about five cents per gallon), and was adorned with possibly the most extreme incarnation of those "rocket fins", that were so much of a fetish amongst late 1950s American car designers, you could possibly wish for. The actual real car had "rocket fins" big enough to make the car a hazard to drive in a crosswind, or, more correctly, would be a hazard in a crosswind if it didn't weight about three tons.

Another opponent was driving a silver PT Cruiser, with, wait for it, a sodding huge hammer on the roof, which came down and slammed into the ground in front of the car as it went along. You can imagine that such a contraption would probably make this beast totally undriveable as well, and probably inflict more damage on the car itself than the opposition, as the suspension loads entered the sort of wild extremes normally associated with the landing gear of an Airbus A380. But again, for some bizarre reason, this seemed to make sense in the silly cartoon world this all took place in, where we were all inflciting gratuitous cartoon violence upon each other of the sort seen in Tom & Jerry, where, for example, Jerry gets stuck in a keyhole, and Tom smacks him with a tennis racket, propelling him through the keyhole so that he ends up the same shape.

Meanwhile, I adopted to drive, wait for it, a Volvo. Out of all the cars I could have picked, given that this was my fantasy dream, I picked a bloody Volvo. I could have treated myself to a Lamborghini Aventador if I'd had any sense, though whether this would have been an optimum choice for a cartoon demolition derby remains to be seen. There was actually some method to my madness - I apparently reasoned that since Volvos were built to withstand lots of punishment in a crash, a Volvo would make a good choice of battle car. In addition, the choice I made has something to do with the history of gaming, as I shall now explain.

Wind the clock back to around the late 1990s, when the first incarnation of the Sony Playstation was wowing everyone with its abilities, one of the games for this console was based on the British Touring Car racing series, in which massively souped up versions of regular road cars blitzed around various race courses, and all sorts of hilarious antics ensued during overtaking. Anyone who remembers Keith Chegwin's attempt to become a Touring Car driver will know exactly what I mean. But I digress. In this game, you had a choice of cars, one of which was a somewhat boxy Volvo that, in the game, had the best acceleration and fastest straight line speed, but whose cornering left a lot to be desired, so that if you punted it into a corner too enthusiastically, you ended up pirouetting off the circuit in a most embarrassing manner, as everyone else sailed around the corners wetting themselves laughing at you. At the other end of the scale, was an Audi Quattro whose straight line speed was about the same as an arthritic snail on Tomazepam, but which went round corners like it was on rails, so if you were driving this, you simply waited for everyone else to brake for a corner, then slotted between them and took hairpins at impossible speeds while everyone else was piddling around finding the right gear to catch up on the subsequent straight. Each car had its own driving technique, and you had to spend time mastering its quirks to get the best out of it, so that the way to corner in the Volvo was to drift the car into the corner and then boot the throttle on the exit, after some manic steering wheel antics.

So, I chose, in my dream, to pick the exact same model of Volvo used in the Touring Car racing game, and then equip it with a silly pair of circular saw blades on the sides, thinking that no one would be able to get close enough side on to do any real damage once these were fitted. I also decided to replace the somewhat modest firepower of the machine guns next to the headlights, with a nifty set of laser cannons for maximum invincibility.

The mayhem you're all imagining right now duly ensued in the dream, and I managed to overcome the opposition, only to drive on top of a left over land mine deposited by one of the other contestants, which duly went off, and resulted in my pride and joy collapsing around me like Del Boy's Reliant Robin in an episode of Only Fools And Horses.

At this point, we're all standing around, surveying the scene, wondering how this contest is going to be scored, when along comes a new and unannounced competitor out of the blue, who looked like Bluto from the Popeye cartoons, driving a Peugeot 205 GTI in shiny blue, equipped with a pair of missile launchers and heavy machine guns, who obviously thought to himself that he'd have an easy victory just running over us all. At this point, for some bizarre reason, he slowed his car to a walking pace, presumably sizing up the best path to inflict maximum destruction in a single pass, whereupon I run up to the side of his car and tip it over onto its roof. While he's sitting there, strapped into his now upside down seat, wondering how the hell he got into this mess, I'm kicking the crap out of his car with my titanium toe-capped boots, and with half a dozen well aimed kicks, turn his shiny new car into a knackered old shed. Then, at this point, I have a bright idea, and pull out from under my jacket a stick of dynamite. I duly light the stick of dynamite, open the filler cap, pop the dynamite down the petrol pipe, and run like the clappers. At the end, I turn round, to watch Bluto's car being duly blown up, wheels flying in opposite directions, and most hilariously of all, Bluto, still strapped into his seat, flying through the air with his butt cheeks on fire.

Apparently, at this point, I started laughing so hard for real in my sleep, that I woke myself up, and found myself a helpless, gibbering wreck in the bed, spending ten minutes in peals of laughter, tears streaming down my face, as I recounted Bluto with his burning arse doing a fine impersonation of a Roman Candle.

Needless to say, this has flushed down the toilet my plans for an early night tonight. I climbed into bed at 6pm, thinking "I'll get a good early night's sleep", only for me to wake up about 30 minutes ago in the state described above. Which means I probably won't get to sleep now till about 2 am.

I'm still wondering what in the name of all things diseased and unholy made me dream this.

Well, I guess we all have...issues.

(Decompression in progress.)

Decompression, my ass! Rain Man and Sand Man had a child and...

Either that, or those aliens in our bedrooms should really find other ways to entertain themselves.

Calilasseia wrote:I'm still wondering what in the name of all things diseased and unholy made me dream this.

You are prone to hyperboles, so it seems like a natural extension of that.

I have to thank the thread "Piper's cuteness pictures" for the lovely dream I had this morning. We were away on holiday and were having lunch when we found ourselves in some sort of zoo filled with friendly animals all playing together, including bears and tigers. On the floor at our feet were squirrels and other little furry animals all being very cute. Now if only I could dream this sort of thing every day, I would be really happy.

Agrippina wrote:I have to thank the thread "Piper's cuteness pictures" for the lovely dream I had this morning. We were away on holiday and were having lunch when we found ourselves in some sort of zoo filled with friendly animals all playing together, including bears and tigers. On the floor at our feet were squirrels and other little furry animals all being very cute. Now if only I could dream this sort of thing every day, I would be really happy.

Ha. My colleague and I talked about his cats a few days ago, and I had a dream about some kitten playing around.

Yep, so keep the cuteness pictures rolling. I like these dreams.

That's good, among the cornucopia of dreams I had this morning, one featured an American red squirrel. I was watching birds peck around...my living room floor, and saw a squirrel among them. I was so excited. (squirrel sightings have been rare this winter)
When the squirrel put it's head down to get something, it's ears were so big that it looked like a rabbit in that position and I had to excitedly inform a relative that there's a squirrel, check it out! Oh wait I do that irl.
I tossed and turned for about an hour before getting up, and each time I'd nod off for a few minutes I'd start dreaming again.
ETA - I also saw a black-capped chickadee that was the size of a well-fed pigeon.

Cute.

I have lots of very vivid dreams. Often they are recurring dreams, sometimes they are continuation dreams. Interestingly I have had a dream like Cali's, where the fish in my aquarium have floated up and out of it to ''swim'' around the room. One recurring dream is where I fly, but only about 2 inches off the ground. Another is where I am riding a space hopper to school. However usually, my recurring dreams involve me walking through an enormous house or hospital or hotel or some other structure where every room is differently themed. The vast majority of the time there is a sinister atmosphere about the place, even though some of the rooms are pleasant. A lot of the time I am trying to hide from something. Very often I have the sensation of something either following me or chasing me. I have dreams where I am in my actual house and it's in my street, but it's subtly changed to be larger, or the street is wider, or across from me is a house that comes from a different street I've lived on in the past. Once there was a fire in one of the houses in the street behind. Several times I have been trying to avoid a knife attacker or a person or group who are attempting to take hostages. And of course like just about everyone else, I've had countless dreams where I've needed the loo but every toilet I find is unsatisfactory - too dirty, too overlooked or the stall door is only a foot high.