Seriously. I've been just chatting with the both of them, not 20 minutes ago, in perfect English, even took care to use British English and I spoke a bit slower than I usually would, so that I could monitor my pronunciation better. We were in some mansion, with completely white furniture, large kitchen and large, wide windows with a view of a beautiful, colorful garden. And none of it felt or looked the slightest bit off. Looking back, the only thing that was very weird were the cloths 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 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.

It's because you are carrying the one ring.

Memories. Dreams are not made from scratch, they are memories re-arranged.

NineBerry wrote:It's because you are carrying the one ring.

Never watched the Lord of the Rings movies, actually.

I've had similar dreams to this, rendered in IMAX widescreen with Dolby cinema surround sound. They tended to centre upon me taking a flight from Malaga Airport in Spain, destination New York, and in the dreams in question, I was accompanied by a fairly eclectic collection of fellow passengers. On one occasion I was joined by Carl Sagan, by Enya on another, and Tanita Tikaram on a third occasion.

On other occasions, I've had repeat instances of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge dream, which sees me cycling through Manhattan specifically in order to ride my bicycle over this bridge. I don't even know if it's possible to cycle over that bridge, but this has been a recurring dream of mine.

A more florid dream saw me as a passenger in a Volkswagen Beetle, accompanied by no less a personage than Adolf Hitler, along with two blonde Rhine Maidens straight out of a Wagner opera, cruising through a landscape resembling the buildings from the film Metropolis. For some reason, Adolf Hitler seemed to know a hell of a lot about Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his art, about which we had an in depth conversation.

One of the weirder ones saw me shrunk to about 6 inches tall, and watching the fish leaving the aquarium and swimming about in mid air, with me wondering how to get them all back in the aquarium ...whereupon I found a Lego helicopter, sat in it, and flew around the living room in it to round up the fish.

Then there was the one where I was in some sort of Low's Gully type rainforest location, photographing butterflies whilst clambering on giant pieces of topiary shaped like dinosaurs, accompanied by Peter Harrison of this board.

More recently, I had a dream in which, incongruously, I was challenged to a tennis match by Martina Navratilova. Though why someone who has won Wimbledon nine times would want to play tennis with a slob like me was never fully answered.

Nah, you're just making it up...

Whoah, the details you guys can remember from your dreams... I can hardly recollect what my dream was about and most of the time even that disappears in a few moments after my waking up.

Cali: sure you were dreaming? Sounds more like you tried to smoke some of the algae from your aquarium.

Why do I never (if at all) dream cool stuff, that comes across as real?

babel wrote:Whoah, the details you guys can remember from your dreams... I can hardly recollect what my dream was about and most of the time even that disappears in a few moments after my waking up.

Cali: sure you were dreaming? Sounds more like you tried to smoke some of the algae from your aquarium.

Definitely noted the transition from sleeping to waking afterwards. Frequently accompanied by the thought "why the fuck did I dream THAT?"

Oh, and as for trying to use aquarium algae as a cannabis substitute ... BAD idea. Especially if it's accompanied by any cyanobacteria. Some of which can produce weapons-grade nerve toxins. You wouldn't get high on it, you'd be dead in about 15 minutes if any of the cyanobacteria produced saxitoxin.

quas wrote:Memories. Dreams are not made from scratch, they are memories re-arranged.

I think so too. I see dreams as the post-hoc story that you write as your brain parses new information into old information; It freely associates short term memories and experiences with old knowledge and you see fragments of images, sounds, sensations and experiences. We, being the pattern seeking machines that we are, interpret these things like a narrative or a set of new experiences when they are in fact a confabulation of old ones.

I don't know if others have had the same experience but I've tried writing my dreams down in the past and found myself having to ad-lib most of it in order for it to make any logical sense.

Bribase wrote:

quas wrote:Memories. Dreams are not made from scratch, they are memories re-arranged.

I think so too. I see dreams as the post-hoc story that you write as your brain parses new information into old information; It freely associates short term memories and experiences with old knowledge and you see fragments of images, sounds, sensations and experiences. We, being the pattern seeking machines that we are, interpret these things like a narrative or a set of new experiences when they are in fact a confabulation of old ones.

I don't know if others have had the same experience but I've tried writing my dreams down in the past and found myself having to ad-lib most of it in order for it to make any logical sense.

The weird thing about my dreams is that ever since I've read about how we form the randomness of our dreams into a narrative after the fact, I'm more sensitive now as to just how arbitrary my dreams are and all sense has entirely leaked out of them.

The only problem I have now is that I don't know if I'm seeing my dreams closer to as they actually are now or, am I just weaving a more chaotic narrative?

The coolest thing about dreams/ing is, for me, stuff like ability to learn to fly or to wake up at will because it implies some kind of awareness but not the kind known from being awake. The other stuff is, to me, random nonsense or maybe even some sense, but this being on and off at the same time is neat as its not random.

tuco wrote:The coolest thing about dreams/ing is, for me, stuff like ability to learn to fly or to wake up at will because it implies some kind of awareness but not the kind known from being awake. The other stuff is, to me, random nonsense or maybe even some sense, but this being on and off at the same time is neat as its not random.

Weird stuff like your room suddenly has no walls or ceiling and it is in the middle of some street or beach or fair and you're going out to buy chewing gum in your boxers, at a club or arcade around the corner and you're just totally okay with it.

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

Last night I dreamt that me and my wife were at the front of a queue for some standby tickets at a London theatre.

I suggested to my wife that when the doors opened she ran up to the box-office whilst I held back the crowd. Off she ran, whilst I "tripped" in the door and everybody stumbled over me. Just then a theatre employee announced that there was only two tickets available, so we all headed towards the bar with me feeling victorious and the crowd of people pissed off.

As I sat with a drink in hand, feeling smug, my wife appeared from the box office and announced in a loud voice "to get the tickets we need to go to the pub next door and say the secret word OXO", at which point the crowd ran off leaving me feeling rather miffed.

Strangely, when we got out of bed this morning I still felt a bit miffed with my wife for a few mins.

And who'd blame you, she ruined your night.

quas wrote:Memories. Dreams are not made from scratch, they are memories re-arranged.

I even read somewhere that the faces you see in your dreams are of people you have seen at some point in your life, even if only once.

I had a dream this morning where I ended up with my head through a car door window. Some person who I couldn't look at directly was helping me get my head back out through the hole my head had made through the glass, I was trying to be careful of cutting myself up or puncturing my neck with the jagged glass. I turned my head various ways, cautiously trying to work it out, but I kept catching off the shards with my ear, jaw or chin. After two or three attempts the person helping told me they'd made a couple of incisions under my face when I wasn't paying attention and I should be able to get free. I withdrew my head and sure enough my face lifted and rolled right off as I wrangled my head loose. It felt like taking off a jumper.
I looked back at the pane to see my face caught on the window shards, pulled out like a spider web.


I love dreams.

It could be that dreams are an interaction between the brain & free-floating bits of consciousness. It's all really just quantitative differences between fundamental forces, particles & space-time. Allegedly

chairman bill wrote:It could be that dreams are an interaction between the brain & free-floating bits of consciousness. It's all really just quantitative differences between fundamental forces, particles & space-time. Allegedly

My reckoning is that pieces of consciousness drift off of people's minds like dandelion seeds where they land on to other brains, planting themselves in their minds.