Dreams!

[clyde]

If I go to sleep with my head resting on my hand, I always have a really weird dream involving me being stuck, often in bed, with something strange happening like someone coming into my room or me getting pulled into a cavern in my bed or one of my cats being alive again and on my bed. Then I wake up and am slightly annoyed.

Reminded me of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

[SecretAsianMan]

I once went to sleep on my side and I had a sideways dream.  I don't remember the specifics but it was like watching a movie turned 90 degrees.

[tegan]

I had an Idle Thumbs Dream! They read two emails that I sent in (in the dream, not in real life). One of them was probably goofy but I don't remember it. The second one amounted to me asking if the thumbsketeers spoke any other languages and if they had any interest in language in games. Chris read and answered the email in a language that I didn't recognize, but was internally consistent enough to sound like a real language.

[Zeusthecat]

A very rare thing happened to me last night. I actually had a crazy dream that I remember most of.

 

I was at work in our old office building on a Friday afternoon. We have half days on Friday so there were only a few other people in the office and the whole place was lit up with soft yellow light from some lamps instead of the harsh light from the fluorescent lights. I was working on some stuff and there were a few people there but they were being really loud and annoying. It seemed like a normal Friday working late in the office (except for the lighting).

 

After working for awhile and being annoyed at the other obnoxious people things started to get weird. I slowly started to realize that I wasn't at work at all, but I was at an orphanage. I also realized that I was a little orphan girl in the orphanage. After talking to some of the other kids I came to understand that this orphanage was run by a mean old lady and all of the kids were terrified of her. I think she yelled at me for some reason or another but then decided to reward me for the good work I had done. So she walked over to the water machine and filled up a paper cup with water and gave it to me to drink. All of the other kids were really impressed that I got this reward and I was elated. I gulped down the water and ended up with a mouthfull of pills that were mixed with the water. I tried to spit them out but I ended up swallowing some of them and couldn't get that crappy pill taste out of my mouth. 

 

I walked into another room and found myself in the big cylindrical chamber with the elevator from Resident Evil 5 (I think I was still the little girl). The elevator started to go up and a bunch of enemies started dropping all around me. I knew I shouldn't kill them because there was a certain achievement I needed that involved them dropping some kind of orb. So I started kiting them around the room and onto some adjacent walkways. I did this through many waves of enemies but the achievement never popped. I looked up at the wall and there was a giant scoreboard that indicated I had messed up on the first wave. I knew that was impossible because I had done everything perfectly and I was really pissed.

 

Then I woke up.

[Twig]

I had a straight up fucking nightmare, like literally awoke in a panic on Saturday.

 

It was one of Those dreams. BACK IN SCHOOL. FORGOT TO STUDY. FAILED A TEST. HAVEN'T DONE THE ASSIGNMENTS. GOTTA BEG THE TEACHER FOR SOME EXTRA CREDIT.

 

Weird part is it was my high school teacher, but it was a college class.

 

And I'm not exaggerating about the panic. I actually said to myself after a few minutes, "What the fuck, calm down, Jon. You're not in school anymore. CALM DOWN." God. It was awful.

[SecretAsianMan]

I occasionally have that dream.  They are terrible.  I think the worst one was a calculus final I hadn't prepared for at all.  The feeling didn't go away when I woke up because I haven't used that level of calculus for so long I actually have forgotten it.

[Twig]

Haha it was calculus for me, too. GODDAMN.

[tegan]

Last night I dreamed that Ryan Davis had faked his own death as a joke. Waking up was a pretty horrible feeling.

 

 

I also keep having nightmares about my high school bullies. Ugh, worst.

[Zeusthecat]

The feeling didn't go away when I woke up because I haven't used that level of calculus for so long I actually have forgotten it.

 

I like to think I can still do all of this stuff but then I realize I don't remember much beyond Calc 1. I might still be able to do integration by parts but that would be a stretch.

 

I have had a few of these nightmares too but it is always for bullshit gen-ed classes because those are the ones I would always put off studying for and forget about. I remember a dream a while back where I was about to graduate and suddenly realized I had completely forgotten to go to all of my psychology of law classes. I ran back to the classroom but it was too late and I was going to have to do one more semester just for that class.

[SecretAsianMan]

I had a fever induced dream last night.  It was basically Plants Vs Zombies except instead of zombies they were germs and instead of plants they were white blood cells.

[Ucantalas]

I had a dream where I was being trained in some sort of fighting style

And I wasn't very good. So I got hit right in the nose, and it was bleeding and stuff.

I woke up and my nose was bleeding.

[Zeusthecat]

I woke up and my nose was bleeding.

 

Your mind makes it real.

[SecretAsianMan]

Dreamt last night that I was watching a hockey game.  That alone made it unusual since I don't watch hockey, but what really made it strange was that some sort of cheat code had been put in and big head mode was turned on.  All the players had huge heads and tiny bodies, like they were bobbleheads.  In a game it's kind of amusing but it was freaky in my dream since they were real people.

[Nappi]

About a week ago I had a dream where I was told to drive a bunch of white deer away from the backyard of my parents' house. They weren't really doing anything - just standing on top of things - but I casually chased them to a nearby forest anyway. Suddenly we reached a huge black pot that was suspended in air by thick cables and whose lid was replaced by some sort of lens. The deer ceased running and wouldn't budge no matter what I did. I was getting very uncomfortable. Finally, I decided to cut the cables supporting the pot. The pot shattered and out crept some sort of horrible spherical pot-sized sun monster. As I turned around to run away, I noticed that the forest was full of identical pots with white deer around each one of them. I woke up dreading what would happen if the deer were allowed to cook up sun monsters uninterrupted.

[clyde]

About a week ago I had a dream where I was told to drive a bunch of white deer away from the backyard of my parents' house. They weren't really doing anything - just standing on top of things - but I casually chased them to a nearby forest anyway. Suddenly we reached a huge black pot that was suspended in air by thick cables and whose lid was replaced by some sort of lens. The deer ceased running and wouldn't budge no matter what I did. I was getting very uncomfortable. Finally, I decided to cut the cables supporting the pot. The pot shattered and out crept some sort of horrible spherical pot-sized sun monster. As I turned around to run away, I noticed that the forest was full of identical pots with white deer around each one of them. I woke up dreading what would happen if the deer were allowed to cook up sun monsters uninterrupted.

This is why you shouldn't (or should) read alchemical illuminated manuscripts before you go to bed.

[SecretAsianMan]

I dreamt last night I was playing a Spider-man game.  For some reason I was fighting the X-men.  After beating up Cyclops (who looked like James Marsden but was wearing the 90s X-men animated series uniform), I saved the game and turned off the Xbox.  Then I woke up.  Its like my brain knew it was going to wake me up so it saved first.  Maybe that means I'll have another dream later and continue that save.

[clyde]

The other day I was thinking about how during a dream, your mind is probably tasked with two computationally intensive tasks: simulating a world, and interpreting it. It's interesting to me to consider how this conflict of interest could be a potential reason for why dream environments, and your decision-making abilities while dreaming, are so gnarled and feedback-warped.

[Twig]

I just found a text file containing a write-up of a dream I had long long ago. Here it is.

 

---

 

It began pretty innocently. I was having an average day. But then something bad happened. I don't remember what. But then something worse happened. Earth was invaded, and quickly taken over by some sort of alien force, though I never actually saw them.

 

They killed almost the entire human population, as far as we knew. The ones that survived, me included, were put into this maze. It seemed like the maze was created in the image of our worst nightmares and memories. I had to relive my worst memory over and over. Eventually I got out, though. I found a way. I don't know how, but I did. Soon, I was traveling around to various points in the maze trying to help people. I noticed that others had also gotten out of their ttraps, but they were worse for the wear. They had gone mad.

 

Eventually, even though we were the last humans on Earth (or wherever we were), we were all fighting each other. Some were taking advantage of the seemingly malleable nature of this maze to create their own fantasies and live them out as they wished. Others had, as I said, gone mad and were trying to enslave the rest of us to do their bidding, whatever it was. Maybe they were taken over by whatever force destroyed our race.

 

At one point, I was trying to convince an old man that his memory wasn't real. Eventually he said, "Does it really matter?" Then he killed himself. In doing so, I think he hurt those who had us here, and I think he knew he was hurting them. They needed us alive, for whatever reason. I think this maze, and everything we did in it, was powering something.

 

Another time, a man came up to me. At this point I had rescued quite a few people from their worst nightmares and we were building up a substantial force. The man, who had escaped on his own, had heard of me. His son was missing. He told me where he thought the boy might be and I went there. It was some sort of factory, run by... giant... creatures. I don't know what. But the boy was fascinated. He just wanted to know more. I picked the boy up just in time to hide him from a giant spider... thing. I didn't know what the spider was. I just knew it was bad and that the spider couldn't see us. So I ran. I saved his son.

 

The last thing I did was go into a room that appeared to be a garden of some sort. There was a battle going on between two factions of humans. I didn't know which side was the "good" side yet so I remained neutral and watched from the sidelines. One side seemed to be controlling these strange purple trees that were sending out blasts of energy at the other side. They weren't BAD, per se - they were shouting things about how they needed the help of these trees to be able to win the fight and save humanity. Somehow I got knocked to the ground next to one of the tree people. I looked up and he was pouring some liquid onto my head. I felt a rush of ecstacy and realized that my head was now just like their heads. Hair replaced by a strange mirror-like substance. I felt compulsions to attack the non-tree people using the trees' energy blasts, but I was able to fight those urges. I ran to the good side and tried to stop the whole thing by talking. I soon realized that wouldn't work. Then another man, someone I didn't know, walked up and started burning the trees. I knew that would free all of us from whatever was controlling our minds. Was it the trees themselves? I don't know.

 

Then I woke up.

 

---

 

These are the kinds of dreams I used to have all the time, and used to frequently remember long enough to write down. These days, not so much. Ahhhh well. I wonder if it's because I'm happier with my life than I was back then?

[miffy495]

I woke up this morning with a notebook on my lap in which I had written the following. This is the note word for word, with things in square brackets being a description of who this person is rather than their name:

 

 

[my girlfriend], [a mutual friend who moved away three years ago], and I are flying sea planes (zubat class). [mutual friend] is murdered by hyper-intelligent Decoy Sharks using a faked signal of [my childhood next door neighbour]'s black box recording to fool us into landing. Now they're eating our raft.

 

 

So yeah. My dreams are stupid.

[dibs]

Not only that, they end on cliff hangers!

[clyde]

I tend to remember more dreams if I'm in the habit of writing them down every morning. You may still be having the dreams, but you are forgetting them when you wake up because your mind fills with getting to work on time or ehatever rathrr than taking a moment to remember more from your dream.

I enjoyed some of the assumed logic in your dream though. Control by unknowns through environmental psychology that forced your peers to compete. That was a huge theme in a lot of sci-fi I read in highschool and the movies I saw in the 90's; Cube, that Vonnegut short-story about chess, Running Man(?). That entire Spartacus thing where two people are equals with no beef, but when they are forced into gladatorial combat they beat the toe-nails off of each other.

[clyde]

I woke up this morning with a notebook on my lap in which I had written the following. This is the note word for word, with things in square brackets being a description of who this person is rather than their name:

So yeah. My dreams are stupid.

I LOVE the idea of turning your dreams into mad-libs so that other people have a more investment in them. That's brilliant. I'm going to do that from now on. It makes so much sense, because dreams are not about the details IMO, they are about roles, associations, and emotions. Writing "[enter romantic partner here]" instead of "Bethany" has the potential to communicate more.

[Lu]

A side-dream to a much stranger dream. I was taking care of a mother duck and her recently hatched ducklings AND IT STRESSED ME OUT SO MUCH. There was a party going on at the same time and I was worried the entire time that someone would sit on them (they apparently couldn't  be anywhere else but the couch...). Sometimes one would fall and they'd scurry around under said couch, which was dusty as hell, which did remind me I should vacuum under there... THE PARTY WAS WEIRD.

[clyde]

I just woke up from a nap where I dreamt that someone had made a Surgeon Simulator style QWOP game where you had to perform a Japanese tea-ceremony for a guest.

[Justin Leego]

Amazing! That needs to be made into Octodad DLC asap.