How vivid are your dreams?

Maggie Maxwell

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Some days, I don't remember anything. Some days, I wake up with bits and pieces. And some days, I wake up with entire new stories or ideas, down to character names, from the dream I just had. Probably half of the viable novel ideas I have come from dreams. These can be as simple as "I woke up on an abandoned beach, and there was an house on the island that was ramshackle on top but had an underground passage" to as complex as "I was an angel who lived on a series of manmade islands that hover over the clouds. A dark castle appeared even higher in the sky one day and I knew that it was my fate to go there. I went into the underworld of the flying city which was a bunch of smaller islands, some just the size of a rowboat, hanging off chains from the main island. Something shook the main island and I fell off into the ocean far below, where I was saved by an old man in red robes and his grandson, who helped me get back to my sky islands and from there to the dark castle." That's an old one, but man, vivid. Gonna write it some day.
 

Cobalt Jade

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Extremely vivid. They're always been vivid. Often I dream of traveling, to a place I've never been to before, like Australia or Saudi Arabia. When I wake up, I feel compelled to buy a plane ticket there -- if I had the time and the means, I would!
 

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I rarely have vivid dreams, mostly they are extremely weird (for example, yesterday I had the dream that I was in a spaceship trying to find my nail polish lol). But one year ago, when I came back to States from Dubai, the following 2 weeks I had a dream of my life in UAE. And when I woke up, I felt like I'm there, and felt extremely disappointed when I found out I'm not there.
 

Introversion

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Mine are often vivid, but not what I'd call complete stories.

Decades ago, I once told someone that I didn't think I dreamed in color. That very night, I dreamed I was walking on a country road by myself beneath a black sky, when suddenly the night lit up with a meteor shower. The trails were shockingly colorful, like, I remember in the dream thinking that such colors didn't actually exist, and I didn't even have names for them. It was achingly lovely. And then I woke up. :tongue

I once dreamed that I was an insect, some happy little beetle walking through a forest of grass "trunks". I remember walking beneath a barbed wire fence whose lowest strand seemed like it was miles above me, and then suddenly there was a spider above me, bigger than a T-Rex. It was such a severe, terrifying shock that I sat up in bed.

I once dreamed that I was on Mars, in a cave. There was a woman there who claimed she was a goddess, and she needed to give me a talisman for reasons that were unclear. She handed me a kind of brooch that looked like it was made of amber, with veins of dark bloody color running through it. The closer I looked at it, the more details I could see, like fractal patterns of amber and blood. I remember in the dream thinking that this was a profound gift, the most important thing I'd ever held, and I didn't know how to respond properly to the goddess. I woke up.

Often I dream that I'm being chased through dark, factory-like warrens. Sometimes it's by a T-Rex (a recurring theme of my nightmares), sometimes by something like the Alien in the movie. I'm chased, one step ahead of it, trying to open doors, always managing to stay one step ahead, but never able to slow down. Those are probably generalized anxiety dreams?
 

The Second Moon

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Most of my dreams seem like they are fragments of a story, so when I wake up I add on to the dream. That's how I get most of my story ideas.

But, on to the vivid question...I can taste in my dreams and I've read that that isn't possible. Does anyone else taste in their dreams?

Decades ago, I once told someone that I didn't think I dreamed in color. That very night, I dreamed I was walking on a country road by myself beneath a black sky, when suddenly the night lit up with a meteor shower. The trails were shockingly colorful, like, I remember in the dream thinking that such colors didn't actually exist, and I didn't even have names for them. It was achingly lovely. And then I woke up.

That sounds amazing!
 
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The Second Moon

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I've never dreamed of falling (thank goodness, because I'm afraid of heights) But, my sister once told me she fell in her dream and entered a time loop, where she kept falling over and over again, never hitting the ground.
 

Maggie Maxwell

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Haha, I used to when I was a kid. My house was a strange 2.5-story thing with a banister on the 3rd floor hall over the stairs from the 1.5th floor to the 1st (Kitchen and entryway was 8 steps up from the living room). Being an itty-bitty kidlet, I could potentially have squeezed between the banister's bars and gone straight down. Twice to my recollection I dreamed I did, but as soon as I started falling, my own dreams gave me the blue screen of death XD I swear to God! I didn't even know what a computer was at the time, but as soon as I started falling, everything would go blue! It was so weird.

Second Moon reminded me of a more recent one, where I was running from a centipede monster and I found my way to a high waterfall and jumped off. Next thing I know, I'm back where I started. My brain effectively "Game Over"ed me and put me back at my last save point XD Seriously, my dreams WILL NOT LET me fall.
 
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heza

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I'm not sure if I see color, taste, and smell things in my dreams or if I just sort of interpret that I do... like, were the trees green? Or do I just remember them as green because I know trees are green? I guess it would be more conclusive if the trees were pink or something.

The dreams I recall are almost always very vivid, but they sort of start and stop in weird places or skip time or have randomly shifting objectives.

Introversion said:
Often I dream that I'm being chased through dark, factory-like warrens. Sometimes it's by a T-Rex (a recurring theme of my nightmares), sometimes by something like the Alien in the movie. I'm chased, one step ahead of it, trying to open doors, always managing to stay one step ahead, but never able to slow down. Those are probably generalized anxiety dreams?

I often dream that I'm trying to evade someone or something by going up and down stairs. It'll be a tall building with dozens of stairwells fairly close together, and I'll start running up a flight of stairs, run along a floor to the next stairwell, run down two flights, run along the floor to another stair well, run up four flights, and so on, never really stopping or making much progress in getting away.

Sometimes, I'll dream that I've gone down into the basement of a hospital or department store and it's a dark labyrinth with lots of stairs and I can never find my way back to where I was on the ground floor with the lights and other people.


The most interesting dreams for me are when I'm someone else in a fairly linear story.
 

jennontheisland

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The only time I've dreamt I in my body alone was falling, it was like falling through the void, nothing but black; I woke up as I hit the floor.

I have dreamt of falling in the sense of driving vehicles off of things, but those usually result in significant hang time, and then the dream ends. No sensation of falling at all. Sometimes I don't even wake up.
 

Brightdreamer

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Some are vague, some are vivid, some even outright lucid - touch, taste, smell, everything, even reading, though the words tend to change if I look away. I actually have a dream test, pressing a thumb or hand against a wall to see if I can pass through the surface, though the fact that I even think to use it usually means I'm dreaming (I admit to having done it a few times in waking life when reality was too impossibly wrong that it just had to be a nightmare - 9/11 was one such time.)

Some have coherent plot arcs - even soundtracks. Some are random crud.

And anyone who thinks you can't feel pain in dreams, I could send 'em a few of mine... the feeling doesn't always align with the source, but it's definitely pain.
 

Kjbartolotta

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Pretty vivid, but rarely cohesive. I had read somewhere taking B6 vitamins before bed helps you remember them and started doing that; so far, not really, but I keep it up because I had later read they are helpful as a sleep aid and mood stabilizer (which I can always use).
 

Michael Myers

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I once had to spend an extended period of time in a hospital. My stay required use of Dalaudid. No pain was involved; it was a brain chemistry thing. Dreams while under the influence of that stuff can be really weird. Even more entertaining were the hallucinogenic effects upon withdrawal when I went home. I recognized immediately what was happening so I played with the effect. It was kind of fun while it lasted. Better yet was no more seizures.
 

Brightdreamer

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I once had to spend an extended period of time in a hospital. My stay required use of Dalaudid. No pain was involved; it was a brain chemistry thing. Dreams while under the influence of that stuff can be really weird. Even more entertaining were the hallucinogenic effects upon withdrawal when I went home. I recognized immediately what was happening so I played with the effect. It was kind of fun while it lasted. Better yet was no more seizures.

After one surgery, my dad claimed he could "hallucinate at will" for about three days; he would go into this maze of bright, weird tunnels for a while, even able to backtrack if he wanted, then come back out when he needed to be awake.
 

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I did have one dream, a very long time ago, that actually rolled credits at the end of a decent plot arc.

I had one of those once, too! White words (that I couldn't quite read - more's the pity) scrolling down a black background and orchestra music playing, the whole shebang. I don't remember the dream itself, but those credits were nifty!

I also died in a dream once (I was in some kind of POW camp and was evicerated by my captors). I could feel death closing in around me, blackness filling my vision like when you fight to not pass out, then... nothing. It was so very nothingy that I didn't even have consciousness to be aware of the nothing. I only knew it had been nothing when it started to recede and I became aware of myself again, and at the same time became aware that I hadn't been for a while. I found I'd reincarnated into a completely new dream, wherein I was a toddler doing normal toddler things, with only a vague recollection of my death that faded even as I remembered it.
 

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Many of my dreams are quite vivid, but I rarely remember much of them. Some were like stories, most often I dream about family, many of whom are gone. For example my late brother, a customs inspector, was involved with me on a shipment of tea to China. I didn't say it made sense.
 

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I had one of those once, too! White words (that I couldn't quite read - more's the pity) scrolling down a black background and orchestra music playing, the whole shebang. I don't remember the dream itself, but those credits were nifty!

I think my credits were yellow text. That seems right. I did remember parts of the dream. It was dystopian and two soldiers from different factions had to stop a plot to poison a city.


I also died in a dream once (I was in some kind of POW camp and was evicerated by my captors). I could feel death closing in around me, blackness filling my vision like when you fight to not pass out, then... nothing. It was so very nothingy that I didn't even have consciousness to be aware of the nothing. I only knew it had been nothing when it started to recede and I became aware of myself again, and at the same time became aware that I hadn't been for a while. I found I'd reincarnated into a completely new dream, wherein I was a toddler doing normal toddler things, with only a vague recollection of my death that faded even as I remembered it.

Dream? Or... memory?
 

Albedo

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Sometimes incredibly vivid and exciting, where I'm some kind of secret agent or powerful entity saving the world (or blowing it up). Sometimes dull as rocks. Have y'all ever had a paperwork dream?