BS: Dreams that Stayed With You

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 06:36 PM

When around ten yrs old I had a recurring dream of being with friends at a cliff edge picnicking..I rolled over the edge...couldn't stop myself....and as I hit the sea...I hit the floor.. I had fallen out of bed each time.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 06:33 PM

I'm strange in that I can have consecutive dreams - I'll dream of one scenario one night and in consecutive nights, the dream will continue more or less where it finished previously. Sometimes I'll go back to a dream I had months before and continue it as if it were never interrupted.   They usually involve me performing some athletic or heroic feat that I could never imagine doing in my waking life, and occasionally I have superpowers. Quite often there's a lot of cooking involved and I've been known to dream smells too.

The dream that's stayed with me most vividly though - for other reasons - I was being chased through my in-laws' bungalow, which was filled with giant steel daisies. I was weaving in and out of the daisy stems, running towards the front door and the lighted hall and I was watching myself from above. There was a chiming bell that wouldn't stop and I could smell fresh cut grass and vanilla.

It's stayed with me because of where I had it - in the cardiac care ward of my local hospital. I was suffering from cardiac arrhythmia and had been experiencing chest pains. I wandered down to the hospital where they admitted me to the ward for 24 hours. I was wired up to a monitor geared to sound an alarm when my heart rate dropped below 50. The alarm sounded so often that earlier in the evening the techs had lowered the limit to 30. It was this alarm sounding that I could hear in my dream and I woke to see four nurses standing over me with the adrenalin needle unsheathed and ready. I remember saying as they took a collective short sharp intake of breath, that I was being chased. I didn't feel any pain, I wasn't breathless, it was just like I'd dozed off and woken normally.

LTS

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Bill D
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 06:12 PM

I have 'pattern' dreams...mostly coping with problems. Some are about old houses with decaying rooms, and ALWAYS nasty plumbing and complex bathroom/toilet setups. Others are cars and parking and forgetting where the car is.

But the ones which are most common are being back in college and losing track of what classes I'm in and trying to rush around at the end of the semester wondering how to make up work. It usually involves getting lost and not even recognizing the rooms and the teachers. Brrrrrr...

Also a common theme is "Getaway" dreams...music and eating, but with LOTS of strange organization problems and weather and location confusion. (like, reality, you know)

The good ones have commonly been flying dreams. I can soar and levitate and see things. One was at a beach, with big waves and sunlight, where I zoomed out over the ocean and back, the envy of all those 'ants' below!

Sometimes I am 'learning' to fly, and needing to concentrate in a certain way to 'bobble' in the air like one does in a swimming pool, knees drawn up and barely able to float. Other times, I can 'swim' the air at will, above trees and with good control.

I have had a few weird dreams about people that were so 'real', I almost called them to check on them...not recently though.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Bee
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 05:45 PM

Frog escaped, hid, couldn't be found. Tommy no help, just watches with apparent deep interest. Hour later, spot frog. Catch him, shoots outta my hand like a watermelon seed, heads for the bathroom. Tommy no help. Frog under fixed piece of furniture. Borrow butterfly net from neighbour. Finally catch and release frog! Tommy absolutely no help!

Back to dreamland...

I am on the lush shore of a small tropical lake. It is smooth as glass. I step in, it is warm, and I walk out until I'm over my head. I am walking on the bottom, underwater, but I am breathing as if it is air. Everything is green, there are no fish, but moonsnails are floating everywhere.

Another...

This is a house I know, in the dream, I will live in. It has a long triple window over the kitchen sink; stained glass barn swallows are incorporated into the glass. The kitchen is long and woody. There are two wooden steps up from the kitchen into an old fashioned dim-lit parlour. The floor is dark wide planks, scuffed and worn, partly covered with worn oriental rugs. There is a transparent old woman sitting in a chair, staring at me.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Acorn4
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 05:04 PM

Don't know what some of you people are on but can I have some, please!

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Amos
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 03:47 PM

These are truly wonderful tales; I appreciate the chance to read them. I love the "night-shift" metaphor! To me, this thread reveals how deep the dynamics of, and capacity to create, poetry go in all our kind, not just the few who let it leak into their day-lives.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Rapparee
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 03:31 PM

Wandering around, newly re-employed, by the first library I worked in professionally. Only it's a lot bigger (even though in the same building), and the Children's Room is now downstairs from the basement.

Wildly disproportionate sizes of things around me: near things are very small, as if they were far away and distant things are huge. (I have this sometimes even now when I change eyeglass prescriptions. It's related to my messed up depth perception.)

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: frogprince
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 03:02 PM

The mother of all nightmares, 40 years ago; the scenes, as they progressed: 1. Riding a cross-country bus, and seeing a woman passenger suddenly start chewing on another passenger 2. Attending the funeral of an infant. A number of the congregation get up in mid service, walk up and surround the coffin, and start devouring the body. 3. Riding a city bus, trying to flee from whatever was going on, watching wholesale cannibalism from the bus windows, with the mobs we were driving through reaching up to claw at the bus windows with bloody fingers. Woke up miserable and soaked in sweat.

A much different dream, 27 or 28 years ago: I was sitting beside a small stream, in virtually pitch-darkness, watching an incredible number of fireflies. That much was a very literal replay of an actual nice evening, in Arkansas, a few years before. Then, in the dream, a large shimmering translucent bubble drifted toward me from a distance. Just before touching me, it burst, quite naturally and silently...except that, as if released by the bubble, a soft, gentle voice said "We love you.

I've never had real nightmares again since the latter dream.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: RangerSteve
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 02:54 PM

My most memorable dreams are what I call "weird architecture" dreams, always bought on by prescription medications. The first was produced by nitrous oxide from a visit to the dentist. I was lost in a huge city, all the buildings were of a style I believe is called "Beau Arts" (first time in my life I've ever used that in a sentence), and the buildings were huge, 50 stories tall and covering entire city blocks. There was no way out of the city, no signs, nothing. This dream seemed to go on for at least 8 hours.

Another time, I dreamed that I was working for a glass company that in real life I had left about a year earlier. My boss took me to a large mansion 3 or 4 stories tall, something like 100 rooms. He told me to replace all the windows by the end of the day. Then he took me into a circular room that was entirely made of stained glass, including the ceiling. He told me I had to dismantle it and put it back together. I woke up in a cold sweat, not because of the nature of the job, but because I didn't work there and didn't know how to break it to the boss.

Another, bought on by nicotine patches, had me driving my patrol car through a neighborhood of victorian houses, each having a feature that didn't belong, such as thatched roofs or onion domes. The street was paved in colored flagstones. I took a map out of the glove compartment to see where I was, realized I was about 50 miles from where I was supposed to be and had 5 minutes to get there. Again, I woke up in a cold sweat, worried about what was going to happen to me.

Seems to me that legal drugs are not much different than illegal ones.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Becca72
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 02:14 PM

Good boy, Tommy! LOL

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Bee
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 01:44 PM

Amazing what the unconscious mind is doing while we are sleeping. I feel that remembering dreams is like catching the night shift at work, doing the jobs that are magically done in the morning, usually with no trace of the workers - like the cobbler and the elves that made his shoes at night.

Another, this one more recent...

There's a tall maple that shades our deck. The branches have stretched, in the dream, so that they sprawl out over the deck rails, and they are heavy with huge and diverse fruit, none of the fruit are recognizable as ones I know, but they are definitely edible and ripe, in all the colours one associates with tree fruit, plum purples, pear yellows and roseate and apple green and delicate orange. I reach to touch one; it is smooth and cool and a delicious scent of pear-orange-apple comes from it. As I pluck it, the dream ends.

An old one, when I was living in the city...

It is recognizeably my neighbourhood, in my city, at night, but the pavement is broken and cracked; grass and weeds grow through it. There is no electricity, just dim lamps and candles showing through windows here and there. I am hurrying through the dark streets with a message for someone clutched in my hand, and when I see anyone walking, I slip into the shadows between houses and wait until they pass...

Ack! We interrupt this dreamcast to report that Tommy has just brought in a huge bullfrog - alive and hopping! BRB...

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: wysiwyg
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 01:18 PM

A nightmare with a silver lining.

In the dream, I have just committed an unspeakable act of major proportions, and I'm on the run-- mortified, more than half mad, and unable to recall just what I have done. I only know that my life as I know it is over, and that I have much to face. I have no idea what to do next, and I'm just wandering. I somehow take action to link up with some angel-people and turn myself over to them. They're so nice to me that I first think they must not know what I have done, but they break the news to me of what I have done (incredibly compassionately), and absorb my reaction. They agree I will have much to face, but focus on how strongly I have trusted my autopilot (to get myself to them) and how excellent that autopilot is. They've just given me acid to help me remember the act for myself, and assure me that they are going to help me. (The dream ends there.)

The dream was so strong that I seem never able to forget that lesson. I'm very grateful to have learned it in the dream instead of having acted out the dreamed actions in order to arrive at it....

This dream was years before our culture had learned about anything like school shootings, federal building bombings, or twin towers terrorism..... understand, I was very young and sheltered; Hitler and Hiroshima were my only models of mass cruelty at the time I dreamed it.

Each time I have heard of these later events in the news, one of my first thoughts has been gratitude for that dream. Because that dream showed me that we are all capable of thinking of the "unthinkable" (or dreaming it), but we also are capable of learning our lessons without acting out every angry thought that bubbles up.

I can look back on many, MANY times when that autopilot has carried me through terrible (recognized or unrecognized) challenges. And the model of compassion in the face of grim reality, shown to me by the angel-people, has remained with me, as well.

~Susan

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Becca72
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 12:53 PM

In fairness, Dad, I never told anyone about my dream so you couldn't have known it was happening.

I had a dream just a few months ago that some little creature, much like the thing in the movie Cat's Eye (based on the Stephen King book), was in my apartment trying to kill my cats. I woke up frantic and actually jumped out of bed to try to find them before it could...then realized I had been dreaming.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Amos
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 12:50 PM

These are really wonderful.

My favorites seem to take place in environments of rich, baroqie architecture with glowing weoods turned into elegant buildings.

My never-forgotten childhood dream, in 4th grade, involved an aligator who was a threat, but whom I cleverly distracted by giving him my brown paper lunchbag with the peanut butter sandwich in it. Instead of eating me alive, he chomped down on the bag, which went all mushy and oozed out between his teeth (he was in a stream), while I escaped unharmed.

I have no idea why, of all my sometimes very vivid dreams of childhood, this one has stuck in memory, while the rest have evanesced into the vague impressions of unneeded memories.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: kendall
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 12:43 PM

Becca, reading that just breaks my heart. I had no idea what was going on with you.

My dream happened when I was a small boy. One night I dreamed I was in a sinking ship, and I woke the whole family yelling "Come on boys, she's going under." I know I was under 9 because we moved from that house when I was 9.
Of course, it became a family joke.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: jacqui.c
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 12:25 PM

The dreams I remember were from childhood, round about 8/9 years old.

One was myself as something infinitesimally small being overshadowed by something infinitesimally large, with the feeling that I could be crushed by that object.

The other was climbing a flight of wide stairs in our local train station, except that I never seemed to reach the top of these stairs.

I think, after those, I blocked remembering dreams.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Becca72
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 12:03 PM

I had a recurring dream for years as a child that sounds silly now, but was actually terrifying at the time.

I was being chased through downtown Portland, ME by.....Grape Ape (yes, the Hannah Barbarra cartoon). My parents were on opposite ends of the city and I was running to find them to 'save me' from the ape. I would run up to my mother and she would say "I'm too busy..go find your father". I would run run run across the city and find my father and he would say "I'm too busy..go find your mother" and so on until eventually I would end up in a public toilet, cowering in a stall..I look up and over the top of the door peering down at me is Grape Ape..as he reached for me I would wake up.

This started around the time my parents were separating so there's no real challenge in finding the meaning of that one.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: PoppaGator
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 11:48 AM

I rarely remember my dreams; I used to think I wasn't dreaming at all, but I've read that everyone dreams every night, it's just a question of how much one is able to remember.

A number of years ago, I seemed to have a series of dreams all in the same weird setting. Not so much a "recurring dream" as a "recurring context" in which varous different dream scenarios would take place. As noted above, I rarely remember my dreams, and when I have any memory of a dream at all, it an be quite vague and fleeting, but I had the strong impression for a while that I was living an alternative life, night after night, in a different world than this one. I never had serious doubts about which of the two "worlds" was the real one, but it was disconcerting, to say the least, that such a thought would ever even occur to me.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Paul Burke
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 11:48 AM

Finding my brother drowned in a stream... we often used to play there, and there were absolutely no clues that it was a dream.

Cooking and eating the Boy when he was about 15 months old. I remember saying "It's all right, we've done it before..."

Some others that might cause the Cat to be taken down as obscene.

Subject: RE: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 11:44 AM

I used to have terrible dreams about being on bridges that collapsed under me. Then one night I fell all the way down and said to myself, 'I will just swim when I get in the water.' That was the last bridge nightmare.

Subject: BS: Dreams that Stayed With You
From: Bee
Date: 24 Jun 08 - 11:33 AM

Most dreams are fleeting, forgotten soon after your eyes open, but now and then a dream gets stuck in long term memory. What dreams have stayed in your head for decades?

Some of mine...

A modern city in ruins, plants growing everywhere. A jetplane flying overhead, and as it flies, it leaves a succession of half a dozen perfect circular rainbows.

The interior of a huge building made entirely of translucent green glass, including a bathroom and a great room with long glass tables, chairs, couches.

A grave mound in the woods, quaking and cracking, and after a moment of fear and horror, opening to reveal a cat and her nursing kittens.

Leaping hopelessly into a deep lake to escape a pursuing invisible menace, and unexpectedly being borne across to the other side by invisible hands wrapped around my ankles.

An ascending long whistle; as the pitch rises, I also rise and float away until the pitch descends and I am gently deposited on the ground (had variations on this theme many times through childhood).