14 replies to this topic

[Ironhand]

Do any of you have weird and interesting dreams?

For instance, last night I dreamed that John Carter and George Dubbya Bush were leading a Thark raid on a rival tribe (Warhhoons?) to capture green females. The unmarried Thark males could marry the captured females, but married Thark males would just take a captured female to be a female slave for their wives. JC and George WB were in the latter category. George had a great time during the raid,whooping and hooting. The raid was a mass action, but the captured females would then be herded into the arena, and individual Thark males would "cut out" captured females and wrestle them individually into submission, while the Thark populace looked on. The Thark males would dust their hands with ground up salt so they could get a better grip on the females, and if they failed to subdue a female, they would sit there and lick the salt off their own hands so they could at least get a taste of a female. George tried to subdue a big ugly female, and she beat the snot out of him while Tharks in the audience hooted and jeered.

Anybody else have weird, entertaining dreams? I invite you to relate your dreams, or interpret mine or somebody else's.

Edited by Ironhand, 14 April 2012 - 06:29 AM.

[amster]

Ironhand, you're not the only one who's been dreaming about Barsoom. I'm currently reading The Chessmen of Mars, and the other night I had a dream Mars, but I don't remember any details except that it had a Martian Princess. I got up in the middle of the night, still half asleep (almost sleepwalking), and wrote down her name. For some reason I thought it was important to remember. I wrote it down on my bookmark to Chessmen of Mars so that I would be sure to find it, just a plain piece of notebook paper, and I completely forgot about the episode until the following afternoon when I cracked open the book to read it. The name on the paper is Hap Nun Hanud. I've googled it to see if it had some kind of significance, like maybe I heard it somewhere and it remained in my subconsious, but apparently it's just gibberish.

[Officer Aggro]

I have weird dreams all the time where I wake up thinking, "WTF?". Just last night I dreamed I was using a public toilet and Tyrion Lannister came into the stall right next to mine. I was concerned for my privacy since the stall walls were only about 3 feet high, but I figured it wouldn't be a problem for a dwarf.

[emerald]

I don't remember my dreams anywhere near as often as I used to, and even when I did recall them I only rarely had dreams with any fantastic elements in them at all.
Jealous, Ironhand. I'm green as a thark. Barsoom and J.W. Bush together for the first time. Lord.

I once, way back in high school, had a dream with Conan in it.
Anyone else ever have the Cimmerian show up in a dream?

[Almuric]

I had a dream when I was a young'un where arms came up from my bed and pulled me inside. Then I was on a train, and then I woke up.

[RJMooreII]

If you glimpsed my dreams you'd be reduced to gibbering in the corner.
Actually, while I do have some good dreams, most of them are just hilarious because it's so transparent they're absurd.

[amster]

I had a dream when I was a young'un where arms came up from my bed and pulled me inside. Then I was on a train, and then I woke up.

Oh boy, Freud would have field day with that one.

[Officer Aggro]

Anyone ever had recurring dreams?

When I was a kid before my teenage years, I had recurring nightmares where I was chased by a featureless woman made entirely of white porcelain glass. I called her The Breakable Lady, and a typical dream would involve her chasing me up the basement stairs and grabbing my ankle right before I could escape. I always woke up before I could be dragged back down. Sometimes my little sister was with me, but she would always escape. I had a fear of mannequins when I was really small, so I think the nightmares stemmed from those experiences.
In the final dream I ever had involving the Breakable Lady, I discovered she wanted to help me. She brought me and a couple other kids to an underground chamber beneath a mall parking lot where she taught us how to perform magic. My mom picked me up after the class was finished, and we drove off.

[amster]

Anyone ever had recurring dreams?

When I was a kid before my teenage years, I had recurring nightmares where I was chased by a featureless woman made entirely of white porcelain glass. I called her The Breakable Lady, and a typical dream would involve her chasing me up the basement stairs and grabbing my ankle right before I could escape. I always woke up before I could be dragged back down. Sometimes my little sister was with me, but she would always escape. I had a fear of mannequins when I was really small, so I think the nightmares stemmed from those experiences.
In the final dream I ever had involving the Breakable Lady, I discovered she wanted to help me. She brought me and a couple other kids to an underground chamber beneath a mall parking lot where she taught us how to perform magic. My mom picked me up after the class was finished, and we drove off.

That's a really good story. I wonder if those dreams were occuring during REM sleep. I was watching a documentary on dreams, and according their studies, dreams that occur during REM sleep are different from dreams during other levels of sleep. During REM sleep, your subconsious mind is actively trying to work out problems that you're having in your life. If you've ever woke up from a dream and thought "Ah hah! I've got it!" the dream you recall was probably during REM sleep.

As for recurring dreams, sometimes in my dream state I recall previous dreams, dreams that I apparently have forgotten in waking life, and when I wake up I'm not sure if I really ever had the previous dream or if I just dreamed that I remembered the previous dream. As for recurring themes, my dreams oftern take place in underground cities. I don't know iwhether it's my subconsious mind trying to tell me something or that I just think underground cities are cool. Sometimes a yellow banana is just a yellow banana.

[Almuric]

My recurring dream lately is that I'm back at school. And I'm really, really late for class. Or I haven't studied anything at all and the semester is almost up. When I wake up, I realize that the school I was at wasn't any of the real ones I attended, it's always much smaller or much bigger than any normal school would be.

Amster: No kidding. What always gets me was the train? Why a train?

[Ironhand]

My recurring dream lately is that I'm back at school. And I'm really, really late for class. Or I haven't studied anything at all and the semester is almost up.

That is one of my most common recurring dreams. It's gotten to the point where when I have that dream I say (even though I am still asleep) "Oh f**k, it's that goddam dream again!"

Other recurring dreams are:
I am at work, and some project I have been working on is way overdue, and I have been procrastinating, and it's 5 pm, and now I have to start working on it,
or
My tropical fish are starving to death, because I haven't been feeding them. One of the fish has been eating the others, and he's grown really huge. A variation of this dream is that I am in a pet shop, and the tropical fish are really big (like man-size) and they float out of their tanks and start dancing around.

So this seems like such dreams are my subconscious conscience is trying to jog me into action.

The most recent theory I have read is that dreams are the brain's filiing system filing memories into directory folders.

But I have also had the problem-solving dreams. I developed such a reputation for solving problems in my sleep that when we had a totally insurmountable problem at work, that neither my boss nor I could solve, he would tell me to go home and sleep on it. He actually had come to believe in my ability to solve problems in my sleep.

Edited by Ironhand, 16 April 2012 - 01:49 AM.

[Officer Aggro]

Anyone ever had recurring dreams?

When I was a kid before my teenage years, I had recurring nightmares where I was chased by a featureless woman made entirely of white porcelain glass. I called her The Breakable Lady, and a typical dream would involve her chasing me up the basement stairs and grabbing my ankle right before I could escape. I always woke up before I could be dragged back down. Sometimes my little sister was with me, but she would always escape. I had a fear of mannequins when I was really small, so I think the nightmares stemmed from those experiences.
In the final dream I ever had involving the Breakable Lady, I discovered she wanted to help me. She brought me and a couple other kids to an underground chamber beneath a mall parking lot where she taught us how to perform magic. My mom picked me up after the class was finished, and we drove off.

That's a really good story. I wonder if those dreams were occuring during REM sleep. I was watching a documentary on dreams, and according their studies, dreams that occur during REM sleep are different from dreams during other levels of sleep. During REM sleep, your subconsious mind is actively trying to work out problems that you're having in your life. If you've ever woke up from a dream and thought "Ah hah! I've got it!" the dream you recall was probably during REM sleep.

As for recurring dreams, sometimes in my dream state I recall previous dreams, dreams that I apparently have forgotten in waking life, and when I wake up I'm not sure if I really ever had the previous dream or if I just dreamed that I remembered the previous dream. As for recurring themes, my dreams oftern take place in underground cities. I don't know iwhether it's my subconsious mind trying to tell me something or that I just think underground cities are cool. Sometimes a yellow banana is just a yellow banana.

Interesting! I would guess that those nightmares I had were during REM sleep since I was a very deep sleeper when I was a kid...that and the fact that they were related to conscious fears I had had of mannequins and a certain statue bust my grandma had (that she had to hide when I came over heh). Makes sense that REM dreams are a way of working out problems, and that last dream I had of the Breakable Lady had reached a resolution.

I'm not sure I've recalled previous dreams in my sleep, though I have had a continuation of a dream that I'd had during the same night. For instance, I've had a dream that I enjoyed, woke up at some point, then went back to sleep and had the dream continue. Those are pretty rare, though.

My recurring dream lately is that I'm back at school. And I'm really, really late for class. Or I haven't studied anything at all and the semester is almost up. When I wake up, I realize that the school I was at wasn't any of the real ones I attended, it's always much smaller or much bigger than any normal school would be.

I used to have those dreams pretty often (though always at the college I had attended), and I still get them every once in a long while. One variation of those dreams I've had is where it's toward the end of the semester and I realize there's a class I signed up for but completely forgot about.

[Almuric]

So this morning I had a dream where aliens took over the planet and led the Cookie Monster away in handcuffs.

This thread is clearly a bad influence on my subconscious.

[amster]

Anyone ever have out of body experiences? Lucid dreams where you know you're dreaming and it seems real to you? There's been a lot of research done on the subject in the last decade or so, and there's actually a rational scientific explanation for this phenomena called sleep paralyses. In layman's terms, your body becomes paralyzed while you're in a dream state to prevent you from acting out your dreams and injuring yourself, but some people experience this state while part of their brain is still awake (EKG scans confirm that the brain activity of a person in this state is virtually identical to the brain activity of an awake person). The symptoms and testimony from test subjects are remarkably similar to each other. It begins with a feeling of paralyses, and it's often accomapied by visual and auditory hallucinations. People often report some sort of alien or supernatural presence in the room with them. This is often followed by an out of body experience where the subect can see himself lying in bed, or a lucid dream where the subject is aware he is dreaming. It's interesting because the testimony of the test subjects are remarkably consistent with those who claim to be the victims of alien abductions, and it also explains the historical accounts of succubi and incubi that visit people in their sleep, as well as astral projection. I have had a number of these experiences in my own life, especially when I was an adolescent, and still have them from time to time. When I was younger I believed they were evidence of a soul and spirit world, but now I'm forced to accept that there's a perfectly rational explanation for them. I wonder if HP Lovecraft ever suffered from sleep paralyses, and if it was the inspiration for his Randolph Carter stories.

Edited by amster, 16 April 2012 - 11:13 PM.

[EM Erdelac]

When I was a kid I used to have a recurring nightmare about running from Martian tripods (a la HG Wells) heat raying the neighborhood. Though they were the big hooded walking machines depicted in a Classics Illustrated comic I had, but when the heat ray fired it was the same effect and sound as in the George Pal movie. I'm running hand in hand with my mother and I look up and see a kid from my class through the cockpit glass, a kid I was unkind to in my gotta-fit-in years. He zaps me and I turn into an orange snake and promptly fall through the cracks of a large garbage heap as my mother cries.