Dreams

Sundry Chitchat
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Years ago, I would often have dreams that felt significant. I’d write them down and turn them into a kind of poetry, essentially by striking everything that didn’t resonate. I’d write down everything I remembered–which, over time, I got better at remembering and so had more to work with–and then just delete anything that didn’t deeply resonate.

At some point, a few years ago, my dreams stopped. I went years without remembering a single dream. Maybe I had them and didn’t recall. Maybe I didn’t dream. No idea. But they were completely gone. Wholly vanished.

They have come back, and they are powerful. … And I really don’t know what to make of the experience. Or maybe I do and I just have a hard time trusting it. Believing it.

Very few of the dreams feel like random brain-farts anymore. Everything seems significant. And now, it’s not uncommon for me to wake up and then fall back asleep and return to the same dream or a related dream.

It is relevant that I’ve been doing a fair bit of “inner work” lately (a term I dlsike for for some reason)–last night I was at a book group discussing Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now,” for instance. But I’m not sure which came first, an interest in enlightenment or the dreams.

Anyway, I thought it could be interesting to share some of our dreams. Maybe it’s just weird imagery or maybe people will have helpful insight.

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Last night I dreamed I was in a courtroom–maybe being judged. I was a woman (in waking reality, I’m male). There was a cat, but it wasn’t my cat, Gonzo. The more I think about this detail, it seems like a signifier–a reminder. The cat that wasnt Gonzo was Gonzo–the character that was a woman was still me.

I was in a courtroom. I was being judged. And then … I could see people’s souls. I could see something inside of them, and I was outside of my body. I could fly, and I went around touching everyone in the courtroom.

Then the judge was in front of me saying something and for a moment I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get out of the room. But then the woman, Me, was there. And she said, “Oh good, I was afraid you weren’t real.” And I said, “Yes, I can see.”

I woke up shaking, terrified, covered in goosebumps. Maybe terror is wrong, but I was shook and did shake.

I laid there for a while and I guess I fell back asleep, because then I was lying on the floor, under the table in my father’s kitchen, in my childhood home in South Carolina. And the phone rang, and it was my girlfriend.

It was hard to hear her, but I kept describing the dream. But she didn’t want to hear it–she seemed angry, and it seemed like she was saying that something in the dream showed I was trying to take other people’s experiences.

I kept trying to explain, and she finally said, “I don’t have the words you are looking for.”

And I woke up.

5

TL;DR

"The number of events recorded in the diaries was linked to the intensity of theta waves - so the more a person had going on in their lives, the more intense their REM sleep - but not their slow-wave sleep.

In addition, dreams that had a higher emotional impact were more likely to be incorporated into the sleeper’s dreams than boring, humdrum everyday stuff. And these correlations were only observed for recent experiences, too - there was no correlation between older waking life experiences and dream activity."

So essentially, dreams FEEL more impactful because we remember the stuff thats impactful to us.

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And I somehow knew that everyone’s reaction is completely justified and she means trouble, but we walked together through the streets.

For some reason, I knew in the dream the woman was me. Or, I knew that I was the woman.
You knew peoples’ reactions were right, and the girl meant trouble.

The things we “know” in our dreams–can they be wrong?

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Last night I dreamed my gf and I went to a friend’s house to hang out a his pool. There was something of a crowd, people were having a good time. At some point I went back inside to check out of the hotel which his house had become.

At the front desk, I was paying for incidentals. My gf had already paid half of that. I swiped my card for the remainder and turned to a second screen to enter a tip–but it required some math, took me a second, and the screen went blank.

Rinse, repeat. We tried multiple credit cards. Hotel staff came to help. Other guests commented. Over and over, I’d swipe my card but get hung up trying to enter a tip and the system would time out.

Finally, two hotel employees said they would take me somewhere else to complete the transaction. We began walking into the basement of the hotel when I woke up.

On waking, I was very relieved this was a dream and I didn’t have to deal with the charges anymore.

Also, kind of relieved for a fairly mundane dream.

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Sleeping is how we allow our brains to do some essential housekeeping to stop ourselves from going insane. Shifting memories etc around while we sleep results in some strange pseudo-visual effects and narratives that are at least tangentially connected with things or thoughts/emotions we’ve experienced.

That’s what I reckon, anyway.

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For three consecutive nights I have had dreams that hinted at violence, but not … real violence. Something else

I’m going out. To a club? Somewhere. I take two swords with me, they seem to be toy swords.

I’m in a strange game of … laser tag? I have two guns, but one stops working.

Boxing. I hold my own against what seems to be social aggression.

In at least two of these, there is someone present who used to be a good friend (in real, waking life). We had a falling out, to put it mildly. I was ostracized from a social group, and it was traumatuic. He went on to harass me through the use of anonymous social media accounts.

His presence in my dreams no longer disturbs me. I’ve had a few years to move past the events. But the reppearance in recent weeks is strange. The combination with violence does not seem like something to overlook.

In the second dream, I exit the game and make a wrong turn. I wind up walking thru the Korean war memorial in Wasington, D.C., where I used to live. I find a door, and an older woman answers. I’ve seen this woman and the room she guards in a dream before. The room leads to a passageway, to somewhere else. The room was formerly occupied by a man, who has passed away.

WTF is my subconscious trying to tell me?

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Other than the obvious pop-psyche take that for reasons only you know you might be feeling threatened recently, which has triggered memories of this ex-friend, I have no ideas. :man_shrugging:

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This suggests that people and situations you once saw as inherently fun now carry an element of absurd but not necessarily fatal danger. Where once these swords used to be obviously dangerous, you now see that they may not be nearly as dangerous as you once thought. They might actually just be toys.

Alternate take: You are becoming more self aware. You once would have gone into the club with those swords and never thought to notice how absurd the swords were in that situation. What’s more, you are now recognizing that the swords aren’t even real swords. They are absurd and serve no purpose to you.

Alternate alternate take: You are walking into what should be a fun situation, but you feel endangered to the point of bringing weapons to defend yourself. And yet when you look down, you see that these weapons might be merely toys. Worthless and laughable. What tools then do you have to keep yourself safe?

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I don’t believe in deeper meaning of dreams, or in the supernatural at all (although I have doubts sometimes), but me and my sister have both had the exact same dream of my deceased father, and he said the exact same thing to both of us in the dreams. I believe my sister when she told me, and I know what I experienced. I cannot explain it, because it was a very strange dream and not something that seems likely by pure chance. Just absolutely cannot explain it.

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Dreaming of other people is relatively straightforward. They are just ideas in our minds, whether we’re sleeping or awake.

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I recommend this if you have kids or even if you don’t. I may have seen this video 100 times. A long time ago though when the microdaughters were little.

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Just in case you don’t watch that whole video, which you should, we used to refer to this kid as The Professor. He explains dreams.

Although, I really like the 2 kids later explanation.

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Think I broke up with my girlfriend last night.

Dreamed I was driving alone in my car. From the back seat.

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That’s interesting because it’s one theme that recurs in my dreams, and every time the car is extremely hard to control. Sometimes it changes so I’m now standing behind the car and steering it with a remote control and it usually disappears out of sight and ends in some kind of accident.

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In real life. We agreed to talk again next week, hence the “think.”

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Feels closest of the three ideas.

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I had a nightmare that Bernie lost Nevada last night, Bloomberg became the nominee. I jolted awake and was pretty shook up. Fuck. This election cycle is going to kill me, I’m so invested.

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I have also had this dream many times.

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Those talks suck imo, but what do I know, I’m clinically bad at talking about stuff like that. Good luck either way.