From what I recall of my psychology class, dreams are basically your brain trying to interpret random firings of neurons while we sleep, particularly in REM sleep.



You can develop some degree of control over dreams. This takes some practice. I'm not particularly adept at this, but I do have some control, sometimes.

For me, the first thing to do is try and recognize that you are dreaming. Generally, clocks are unintelligible in dreams. By taking notice of the clock, and recognizing that the time displayed is unintelligible, I can know that I am dreaming without waking up. At that point, I can begin to exercise some degree of control over the dream.

Ah yes lucid dreaming. I've experienced it once; it was a dream where so many stupid things happened to me and I had to wonder, my life can't be this FUBAR. So I was able to manipulate thusly, righting lots of wrongs.

If only life was like that.

My most vivid lucid dream :

(It has been written as a short story)
Free short story : Love After Death

Lucid dreams mean having control of your dream right? Being aware you are dreaming right?

If so, then practically all my dreams are lucid dreams. I'm surprised Didymos that you seldomly get them and then Victor as well.

The most peculiar thing about my dreams is that I am often wearing a watch that I have never worn before in the real world. And it has the time on it; and I wake up purposefully (usually I can do this), and it is the same time as on my alarm clock.

Have you ever had a dream that was like a replay of another dream you had completely forgotten about many years ago? And then you continue the scenario. Everything pieces together as you dream it, and its vaguely familiar so you can tell its been in another dream of yours. Then you add on to it with new intentions. Its neat to view what your intentions were years ago and compare them to now. I wish I could draw well, then I'd show you a particular dream I had of this which was very vivid and creeped me out. The land was in no way on Earth but beautiful. It was like an archipelago landscape with a beach and there was nobody around. Just me. And I could switch to a birds eye view whenever and travel to other locations in this 'area'.

That's cool - some people are just more adept than others. I get them frequently, but I also lose control, and sometimes have very little control. I really have to struggle to control the dream.

As a kid, I wasn't half bad. But age and time took that from me. Not that it really matters, I do not think dreams are particularly significant. It's just cool to be able to have the control and dream whatever you like.



Yeah, I have several different recurring dream scenarios. Some have been with me since I was very young. All kinds of strange stuff.

Yeah, I loose control when I talk to myself in the dream. Primary rule to a lucid dream from my experience is never talk to yourself or think verbally to yourself. You'll just wake up, unless thats what you want. Although I've found talking to others in a dream doesn't wake me up.

But I usually don't have people in my dreams.

Really? My dreams are almost always populated by others. Often by people I know, but just as frequent are characters invented by my own minds. I guess they are assimilations of different aspects of people I know or people I have encountered. Many strange conversations.

Sometimes when I wake, I have to focus to separate the conversations of dreams from real conversations.

One of my recurring dreams is a house party. Tons of people, most of which I ignore. Others approach me and instigate conversations. All very strange.

My dreams vary on the people issue; but yeah, mostly the people I know and like, I dream about. But I'm also fine with scenery shots too! hehe

Yeah, it seems as though I tend to encounter people I think about in my waking life in my dreams. Certain ex's show up frequently. Sometimes that's wonderful, other times, nicht so gut.

A screen saver for work behind the scenes.


We dream because we can, and it is possible because of brain chemistry


All dreams have their basis in experience. You feel something which is a recollection of experience or experiences.


Lucid dreaming, and we can learn to control it, no one can teach it to us though; it just happens for you


You dream about the girl on the light rail train, you must favour that experience over some other experience. That is not mumbo jumbo.

This is mumbo jumbo: The dream is a sign that the constellations are in alignment; the girl is the one and only girl. You must find her and tell her this dream; only then can your life find essence and completion!

its hard to tell if your lucid dreaming cause you are always there doin stuff... but to be TRULY in control... im gettin better... though that clock thing dont work well for me... i have seen clocks... and they kept accurate time for me and totally made sense...

for me i can recognize im dreaming too... yet things happen beyond my control even if im dreaming... i mean control to the point that im not just doin stuff... but like... i can change my scenery... ive done it a few times.. and usually always try to immediatly fly as thats my lucid dreaming goal always. like the most recent i was in school, and the bell rang and i was like... wait a minute... no... i refuse... i walked out the door and melted the parking lot into a forest... jumped and tested my skills... i flew... then i manifested a store with some clothes to pick through... i woke up after leaving the changing room and gettin complimented by someone i never met before and didnt ask to be there.

i have 1 reoccurring nightmare since childhood

and i believe in dream interpretation not as a prediction of the future... but insight to how i feel about things

like you can tell when a dream is influenced by your day.... but then there are bizarre totally original experiences that are totally unexplainable and can hardly be put into words... those are the dreams to interpret

Clocks are intelligible in your dreams? That's strange. You're the only person I've heard who can understand the clocks in dreams. Do they tell time? What time do they say in your dreams?

Yes in fact you can have lucid dreams. You can also learn how to have these. Lucid dreams are when you realize that you are dreaming. Eventually you will be able to control them. They are very hard to keep though.

For me, it tells the time and when I wake up I find it matches. Its crazy.

What are dreams?
I'm with VE: screen saver. At least, I'm with that response right now. My OE and poli sci homework have taken it out of me tonight.

Why do we dream, how is it possible?
Quick answer: From what I've read, it has something to do with qualia. Which is awesome because that really just means that something we don't understand has something to do with something we understand even less. Oh how I love the mind.

I can recall smells, colors, and physical contact, pleasant or not... how can i feel something if its just imagined?
The imagination is a powerful thing. It actually makes a fair amount of sense that anything we can gain information about through our senses would be replicatable (not a word, I'm sure) in our mind. It won't likely be perfect, but I suspect this is based largely on how much attention we pay to those inputs during our waking hours. And I already have reason to believe that Sarathustra in particular pays more attention to detail while awake than many of us do, so chances are her senses (or anyone else in a like position) are especially keen in her (or their) dreams as well.

Why cant we control our dreams? Can we control them, can we learn to?
This is actually a funny question. There are many many people out there who flat out do not believe that lucid dreaming exists at all. I haven't looked much into why (perhaps they have a particular definition of lucid dreaming that would indeed mean a person couldn't lucid deam), but it's not hard at all to find someone who lucid dreams at least sometimes.

I taught myself to lucid dream when I was little. My parents weren't particularly sympathetic, so if I had a bad dream I had to take care of it myself...eventually this led to learning to recognize while dreaming that it was a bad dream, take control and turn it around. I never really played with it - I've always loved just watching what's going on, like a movie - so I never tried to do anything more than change a key element or two (the enemy no longer has a weapon, for example), but I was able to take control of the whole "scene" if I needed to.

Anymore I only use it during nightmares (well, that's more of a still than an anymore) and only in situations in which there is no possible way to get out of the situation. But otherwise, my dreams are plenty entertaining enough on their own.

Do you think dream interpretation is mumbo jumbo?
I think dream interpretation *can be* a very powerful psychological tool, though I don't think the various dream dictionaries out there are very helpful. I suspect that they are based on symbolism that is fairly outdated for the last several generations.

The best dream interpreter is, of course, oneself, but only if one is able to be honest with oneself. I think our subconscious can tell us a lot about what we're feeling that isn't getting through in other ways, but we have to be receptive to those feelings being regarding parts of our life we don't want to deal with. That's a sidenote, now that I re-read it :s

please share your dream thoughts and theories with me
Oh lordy...I have plenty, but I think I'll leave them until a time when OE hasn't taken my life and my poli sci professor has assigned readings that have been edited for..."making sense" in both grammatical and logical senses.

I've been having some crazy dreams lately, and not good ones.

A couple of nights ago in a dream 2 cats were fighting in my lap, and their claws were digging deep into my fingers. I tried to got them away from me but found myself unable to. Suddenly I woke up and had sharp pains in my hands. I looked at them and they appeared to be fine, but continued to hurt as if claws had actually been dug into them. This lasted for about a minute, and then over the next couple of minutes the sensation faded away.

I had another horrible dream recently and it bothered me so much I won't go into much detail, but it involved very sick children in a hospital. I was depressed for hours after I woke up.

Last night I dreamt that my mom and I got into a HUGE fight. When I woke up, I was pissed! I had to keep reminding myself it was just a dream, b/c I could tell my mind was carrying the anger from the dream over into real life.

A couple of times recently I've done the thing where I have a dream, and then wake up from it, and then wake up from that dream! That's weird! You think you've woken up from sleeping, but you're actually still dreaming, and only realize it when you actually wake up. Anyone else ever do that? It can mess with your head b/c you can start wondering if "life" is just a dream that you haven't woken up from yet.

I used to be able to have lucid dreams sometimes, but I haven't been able to for a while.

I think some dreams are worth interpreting, but others are really pretty random and meaningless. I think if you tend to have vivid and frequently bad dreams like I have been having lately, there's more likely some underlying meaning in your dreams.

Oh, there was also a dream I had recently where I was sure I had figured out the meaning of life! It made sense out of evolution and DNA and made perfect sense. It was glorious! That time I actually woke up in a good mood that lasted for a bit. At first I was sure that I had had some epiphany in my sleep and that I could make sense of everything while I was awake based on what came to me in my dream, but alas, the understanding proved ethereal, and little came of it. But to this day, I still kind of have this feeling that it's all just a puzzle that I might one day be able to figure out if given enough thought and time.

Those are both my favorite and least favorite dreams...because while I'm confident that it really was just gobbledy-gook I came up with while asleep, there is also that nagging feeling that I really did solve some great puzzle of life...

oh man theres so much here i could comment on!!!

i agree the screensaver analogy is clever i loved that response too

didymos, yup clocks arent like VERY frequent but they do work and seem to keep dream-according accuracy... last one i had was 8-19 i had one of those awesome cell phones (blackberry maybe?) with like a little flip out keypad and internet and text messaging stuff but ive never really used one and i was mad i was having trouble sending a text message, but i finally was able to, and i arranged to have someone pick me up at 12:45 and the time on it was 12:17 when i sent it... events happened in between and before my ride showed up which would equal the correct time...
and frequently in my school dreams i see clocks on the walls in the hall with sensible time

i have dreams similar as deftil and madel... like it would take a HUMONGOUS narrative but to be quick, i found the name of the most amazing city ever, but was with a friend who passed away so it was the name of what i assume might be limbo, and i felt the urgent need to write the name of this place down but when i grabbed a pen in the dream i heard flys buzzing in my ears so bad i couldnt stand it, and it made me wake up...
and ill dream of symbols alot lately too, like a strange writing in a different language but i can never remember it when i wake up and can never reproduce what i seen
and in the dreams i always scramble to document this as if ill still have it when i wake up... and then when i wake up, its not rememberable

i have very harsh nightmares most often... i dont like to write them. maybe i should... but its not things i like to recall... cause theyll start off like its been gonna be my best dream ever but then things go horribly wrong and snowball into the most bizarre undesirable events...

Wow, I wish I could remember as many of my dreams. I find the subconscious fascinating.

I had a long bought of Night Terrors when I was younger. Anyone who's had these (and remembers them) wouldn't confuse them with Nightmares. Anyone here had any of these?