How vivid are your dreams?

Roxxsmom said:

Sometimes I dream about my dad, who passed over a decade ago. Also, beloved animals I've lost over the years sometimes show up in dreams.

What's odd is I kind of know they're dead, even in the dream. Or rather, I know I shouldn't be able to see and interact with them. But there's a part of me that thinks it's real too, like there's some sort of temporary reprieve that's been granted.

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I adore animals and have beloved pets in real life, but nine times out of ten, if there's a pet in my dream, that dream is a nightmare. I actually had one of these last night, featuring a cage full of parakeets.

I'll be having some other random dream and suddenly think to myself, "Oh no! When did I last feed the donkey/dog/horse/ducks/chickens/rabbit (lots of variation on a theme with this one)?! I forgot all about them!"

I always rush to wherever the poor animal(s) are housed. Occasionally they're dead. More often, they're alive but emaciated, filthy, and desperately hungry and thirsty, so I race to feed them and clean out their space, and the guilt at having forgotten about them is just overwhelming. Sometimes they're my own animals. Sometimes I'm supposed to be pet-sitting them for a friend. Either way, it's always my fault for forgetting and the poor animals suffer the consequences.

One particular little donkey housed in a backyard stable the size of a toolshed, has made a whole series of appearances this way. Every time it happens, the amount of time that has "passed" is roughly the amount of time since I last dreamed of it, sometimes with gaps of months at a time. Somehow, though, it keeps on surviving... and it's always sweet-tempered and happy to see me, which makes me feel even MORE guilty.

Poor dream donkey.

Interesting. I've had quite a few dreams with my dog in them, he's usually at the edges sniffing around and doing his thing, not really going along with the narrative but his normal goofy and familiar self. My GF dreams about sharks eating her constantly, but says those are pleasant.

Tazlima said:

I adore animals and have beloved pets in real life, but nine times out of ten, if there's a pet in my dream, that dream is a nightmare. I actually had one of these last night, featuring a cage full of parakeets.

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I have anxiety dreams about pets sometimes. I have to get a sick pet to the vet, but I have to find his vaccination record first, and looking for it, I keep getting sidetracked by more and more chores I need to do before I can take my poor suffering dog or cat in. And I'm late, but maybe not too late, except the vet closes soon, and maybe it's already closed, so is there another one I can go to, and is said pet still breathing ... GAH!!!!

Or I'm getting ready to go to an agility trial, but I have to pack something in my car, and I forgot something and have to go back, or I have to walk the course, but I can't figure it out, because some of the obstacles are up on the roof of the arena, and I can't figure out how to get up there, and...

Come to think of it, I have lots of anxiety dreams along those lines related to various work and play things. The theme is always I want or need to do something, but I keep getting sidetracked by things I need to do or produce first, and the more I work towards trying to get the prerequisite things done, the further I am from actually accomplishing my task, because the things I need to do keep multiplying exponentially.

When I have more traditional nightmares, though, dreams that are genuinely terrifying, they tend to be about plummeting in an elevator that didn't stop at the right floor and fell when I hit the button again, or of driving off a cliff or something, or finding out I or a loved one has a deadly disease, or (more rarely) walking into a familiar place where everything is deserted and a sense of something being eerily wrong, like wind blowing through my empty house, and a feeling of growing dread, and knowing something terrible is about to happen and freezing up and not being able to move or even scream.

Then there's that waking up thing with a feeling that someone is in the room looking down at me and not being able to move. Happened a lot when I was a kid, but now when I have a dream like that I can generally move right away, and thrash and cry out. It usually turns out to be a weird shadow, and once it was a coat thrown over the back of a chair at the end of the bed.

Once when I was a kid it was my brother, and he WAS standing by my bed looking down at me. He thought it was hilarious when I woke up and screamed.

Roxxsmom said:

Then there's that waking up thing with a feeling that someone is in the room looking down at me and not being able to move. Happened a lot when I was a kid, but now when I have a dream like that I can generally move right away, and thrash and cry out. It usually turns out to be a weird shadow, and once it was a coat thrown over the back of a chair at the end of the bed.

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Sounds like sleep paralysis of some sort. (I used to have "dragging dreams," where I'd be lying in the dark certain I was awake, being drug and thrown around the bed by a malevolent force I couldn't see. In retrospect, I'm reasonably sure it was sleep paralysis, but boy did it seem real when it was happening. The dreams have faded considerably as I grew up, but still recur sometimes... very, very Not Fun.)

On dreams in general, though, I had one last night that was becoming a frustration dream, lots of relatives showing up inexplicably and there were no chairs or room or anything, so I got annoyed at the dream and left. The rest of the dream was mostly me wandering around on my own, though toward the end I started heading back on a vague notion that I had to go back where I started for closure, or just to wake up.

Tazlima said:

I adore animals and have beloved pets in real life, but nine times out of ten, if there's a pet in my dream, that dream is a nightmare. I actually had one of these last night, featuring a cage full of parakeets.

I'll be having some other random dream and suddenly think to myself, "Oh no! When did I last feed the donkey/dog/horse/ducks/chickens/rabbit (lots of variation on a theme with this one)?! I forgot all about them!"

I always rush to wherever the poor animal(s) are housed. Occasionally they're dead. More often, they're alive but emaciated, filthy, and desperately hungry and thirsty, so I race to feed them and clean out their space, and the guilt at having forgotten about them is just overwhelming. Sometimes they're my own animals. Sometimes I'm supposed to be pet-sitting them for a friend. Either way, it's always my fault for forgetting and the poor animals suffer the consequences.

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Oh my! I often have this kind of dream too! Usually they are small animals, hamsters, mice, cats etc.

I wonder if these dreams aren't ones with some specific meaning... I like animals too, but I've never had a pet and I've never had to care for any animal.

I started lucid dreaming when I was 18, now 27, and it is at the point where I lucid dream every single night without fail. It started where I had to use totems, objects that grounded me to a specific dream state or helped me realize I was in a dream so that I could then control it. As much as I hate to say it, normal life gets kind of boring and mundane after you spend a lot of time in those dream worlds. Working a 9-5 does not compare to spending a few days dream-time building a city the size of NYC, flooding it, and then watching coral and ocean life populate the ruins. Or creating an island getaway complete with a cliff side that's a carved out figure of your goddess with a secret room in her hollow head that is all oriental rugs, writing desks, and books with open windows through her eyes. Or another dream state where I am a rogue detective with a metric crap ton of mob connections and just happen to get there every time before the police, clean up the gangsters, and get away with bags of money or other things.


At first, it was just oh hey I want to go "inset dream state here" *grabs specific totem* and I would hop in to a fresh slate. The way it has developed now is that I need to, literally need to, visit them on rotation intentionally because life just goes on in them when I'm awake. If I don't visit a specific dream state for weeks than all goes to shit and I need to start rebuilding it or I loose control of some connections, or things get overgrown, or the city out of hand etc. Its almost like alternate realities and alternate selves and while it is wildly beautiful, and I have complete control over the settings and overall happenings of these things, I lack the minor control of things like what people say or do in those dreams- so in that sense it is very realistic. TLDR; I create world states and live in them nightly.

It occasionally happens with me, usually if I've had caffeine right before bed.

Lucid dreaming is underrated.