Has anyone ever analysed their dreams?

[the undisputed truth]

I had a dream ages ago...

...i saw this object in space. It was just a spinning blur and it was trying to show me what it actually was

but it was moving too fast so I asked it to slow down...

...and it did, just long enough to make out what it was so i said thanx, then woke up, drew it on a piece of paper and went back to sleep

I got up in the morning and had completely forgot about it til i saw what i drew and this is it, of course it was spinning much faster ...

...I have since ascribed meaning to it but i don't think I have fully comprehended it's relevence yet

what do you see and think it is or means then i'll tell you what i think???

BTW I think it is back to front, must put that right and repost it...

chur

 

[DJ PIMP]

Did you hear the strings in your dream or is that creative license?

Just helping to set the tone. Everything else is pretty much verbatim.

Not via dreams but I do hear music in my head sometimes... my brain starts writing techno seemingly on its own. I've been trying to make some of it lately

HELL_SD: It looks like the heads of two eagles or phoenixes (beaks towards the center). The rotation/b&w makes it very yin-yang.

 

[the undisputed truth]

^^^nice, yeah that's what it is...

...want to take a stab at what it might mean ???

 

[D84]

I get a lot of those sleep paralysis dreams often and in various formats, some "spectacular" but mostly a desperate feeling that I need to wake up or I'll die etc.. Thanks for wikipedia links - I never realised it was so common.

I do hear music in my dreams sometimes. One I remember most vividly is one where I was on a roller-coaster (a common motif for me) except all I could see were some coloured patterns on a black background; there was silnce as "the car" was climbing to the peak and then after a pause I felt this keen falling sensation and heard/replayed some John Zorn/ Painkiller track. I thought that was very cool when I woke up

"Big" week-ends sometimes have a part in the vividness of a subsequent dream...

HELL_SD, yeah I reckon there's yin & yang symbolism but I think flight is also there: a very common and powerful symbol, see eg. JG Ballard's "Unlimited Dream Company", Aristophanes' "Birds" and pretty much anything else that features birds and wings. It sounds like a good dream.

Apparently dreaming of flying is common. I don't get them much though, alas.

So yeah I have analysed my dreams to some extent, esp. after i read that Jung edited book on Picador, "Man and His Symbols". I don't think you need to read it (there's some dodgy stuff in there) but it gives you some help in cracking the puzzle and the notion about blurring the boundaries between sleeping and waking life is really interesting.. I found the best thing is to be brutally honest with yourself etc.

It's an worthwhile exercise but I don't do it so much these days. My dreams haven't been that interesting lately, apart from the sleep-paralysis/succubus style nightmare - so take from that what you will re the present state of my subconscious...

 

[sufi]

travelling always gives me very intense dreams, just back from a trip which was in many ways a dream come true

 

[Constance Labounty]

I read this thread and decided to try the B6 deal. I first checked online about dangers of overdosing. From this I found that at least one scientific study has found a link between B6 and dreaming. I found that although 100 mg is the max recommended daily (any more than that can lead to nervous system effects like numb limbs or sketchy stuff like that), the scientific study with college students was done with 250 mg so around that should be fine.

I took 300 mg (nearly a half year's worth of the daily recommended amount!) before bed one night. I did notice I had more dreams (or, I noticed more dreams I had, hmm..) but they didn't seem any more vivid or memorable than usual. If anything, it almost seemed like they were less dreamy than usual- being less euphorically emotional and feeling more like my boring waking life. This is possibly due to the stimulating effect of B6. It makes sense that being awake enough to remember dreams better would also cause them to be less dreamy. Darn. But, the next night I did have particularly vivid dreams. So, my verdict is that the B6 effect lasts multiple nights and is possibly better the second night because the stimulating effects of B6 are decreased. Or, you could just try taking B6 in the morning or taking less of it.

BTW, HELL_SD, that spinny thing is the coolest ish I've ever seen. I need more dreams like that! I think I'd need to take more than just vitamins.

 

[dogger]

Do other people hear music in dreams?

I hear music in dreams. Sometimes it's so loud it actually wakes me up; it's as though I am *really* hearing it rather than aurally visualising it, as I would in waking life. Sometimes it is so beautiful it makes me cry. I can usually remember it when I wake up, but it never seems to have the profundity that it did in the dream. Has anyone else experienced this?

 

[Tweak Head]

This is interesting. On lucid dreaming, try Stephen LaBerge - it's meant to be the key stuff tho I haven't read it. "Dreaming Realities" by John Overdurf and Julie Silverthorn is good too if you ignore the stuff about quantum physics. Also "Conscious Dreaming" and its sequel "Dreamgates" by Robert Moss are excellent.

 

[the undisputed truth]

kontrabirds v2.0

I think it's got something to do with interchangeable spatial dimensions, phase shifting, fundamental particles and possibly quantum gravity...

...try saving it as a quicktime gif, minimizing it, looping it and hitting the fast forward button, then looking at it through squinted eyes to get a close approximation of my dream

and i think they connect like this also...

it's 2d but cos it's spinning and possibly rotating at superluminal speed, it becomes a 3d object moving in time making it 4d

 

[rewch]

I read (or my unconscious read ; ) )the above as 'where the guy is talking to the rapist' which obv made no sense.

the rapist finder

 

[Gabba Flamenco Crossover]

Here's an interesting one...

I have a fairly frequent recurring dream (every few months or so) that i can fly around just by concentrating, up to a height of about 100m or so. This isnt a dream in itself but it crops up in other dreams.

I slept really well last night, and had a long narrative dream - cant remember the plot exactly, I think someone had stolen something from me and i was trying to get it back, but there were lots of digressions.

Anyway at some stage I started flying around - the flying dream had started. And becuase i'd been thinking about dreams recently, i thought 'Hold on - if I'm flying, this must be a dream.' So i came back down to check if it was dream or reality.

Wierdly i then managed to satisfy myself that this wasnt a dream - cant remember how i did this, i think i asked someone and spent a lot of time looking at trees to make sure they were 'real'.

It appears I was on the cusp of some kind of lucid dreaming, but my mind wouldnt let me do it. But a short while after that, the flying stopped working, which has never happened before. I woke up soon afterwards.

There's a report in the Colin Wilson book about a guy who has a similar experience - thinks he's dreaming, so he asks some people in the dream who assure him that he isnt - then he wakes up.

 

[the undisputed truth]

how's this ??? Happened quite a few years ago

I was awake, lying in bed, facing the wall and someone was talking to me from behind

I said " Be quiet, you're not even real"

he said yes "I am"

I said "no you're not"

he said "yes I am, turn around and I'll prove it"

so I did and there was no one there

so I said smugly "see i told you"

 

[dsp13]

I go through phases with remembering dreams but for the last year and a half I remember them most days... sometimes several different ones... mainly becase I only work part-time at night so I get to sleep in and sometimes wake up several times...

An easy way to do it is if you have a cell phone that you can set multiple alarms on... set 4 or 5 alarms 15 - 20 minutes apart. Lately I also have alot of dreams that wake me up as well. I find most of my dreams are very clearly the product of recent stimulus... movies, video games, music, art... and my thoughts or feelings mixed up but even if it's a nightmare I get a kick out of remembering them...

It's interesting the way the brain kinda remixes all this info into something new... this mornings dream was a mix of the movie "the island" (which i watched a few days ago), my current job, earthquake paranoia and the fact that i have to leave japan soon... it ended with me alone in a stairway in a large semi-futuristic building in tokyo wearing a spandex jumpsuit in the middle of a fairly strong earthquake that lasted for a few minutes (pretty scary at the time... and not just the jumpsuit lol) and then I woke up.

My mother bought me a book from a second hand store about 10 years ago called "would the buddha wear a walkman"... it was a look at different gadgets, drugs and traditional methods of inducing lucid dreams... not the greatest book in the world but interesting none the less.

 

[Gabba Flamenco Crossover]

I find most of my dreams are very clearly the product of recent stimulus...

Yeah, i think you only notice how much once you start looking at your dreams systematically. Presumably these kind of dreams get naturally filtered out once your properly awake - indistinguishable from daydreams or memories of the actual event - and its only the dreams that are less easy to pigeonhole mentally that stay with you.

 

[DJ PIMP]

how's this ??? Happened quite a few years ago

Reminds me of a friend of mine who said that whenever his mind starts to run off on its own paranoid/delusional tangents, he asks it "what is the source of your information?" and it shuts up.

 

[bassnation]

how's this ??? Happened quite a few years ago

I was awake, lying in bed, facing the wall and someone was talking to me from behind

I said " Be quiet, you're not even real"

he said yes "I am"

I said "no you're not"

he said "yes I am, turn around and I'll prove it"

so I did and there was no one there

so I said smugly "see i told you"

i once had a strange experience like that. i was sleeping in the afternoon, gone into a very deep sleep. i woke up and couldn't move a muscle, it was scary - spent ages trying to move my little finger with a lot of concentration but nothing, whole body was like a dead weight, totally paralysed.

then all of a sudden it was like something snapped and i sat up on the edge of the bed - and i could still see myself lying there.

i don't really believe in things like astral projection to be perfectly honest, think i was still dreaming - in any event, woke up normally some time later. anyone ever had anything like that happen to them?

 

[mistersloane]

Last night's dream :

( voiceover, heavy on reverb, reminiscent of Grecian 200 adverts )

" and if I really wanted to get inside your mind?"

"Well, tonight, you'd go home, and fall asleep, and dream of characters ( characters start materialising ) materialising, laid out one by one, like scribbles forming pictures of people, positioned like buffers on a pinball machine, and the next day you'd write
"Do you know what I'd do if I really wanted to get inside your mind?"

and I woke up and wrote :

I don't dream of sheep, I dream of dreams
Eurrgh, my dreams are meta-memes.

 

[DJ PIMP]

i rarely have dreams atm - i wake up and have poems. a lot of them are horribly didactic, but some i don't mind so much, e.g.

my physical environment is a computer
i choose to forget
the heart does all but shatter


although i did have a dream recently where my mum said to me...

in times of need and haste
go quickly and easily
to a place where one
can remind one's self
that everything is dancing


...which i quite liked.

 

[polystyle]

aaah Dreams ...
Used to write the most vivid ones down once awake ,
used to have more in which simple dumb things would occur and reoccur (going out the house without some article of clothing was one that used to pop up).

Then there were ones where a big wave (the 7th , right?) is pulling the ocean back from the beach , pulling , pulling , wave's getting higher.
but never came back down .

Flying , sure.
Once aware of this , in the dream , would start to direct the flight path and , ok , let's figure out WHERE to go...

Music in dreams ? Sure
Have woken up with some notes floating through the mind , jotted them down and a couple times it was worth keeping.
Then of course, the aftermath of being in Studio listening to one piece of music or song over and over and there it is in your dream.
This happens still sometimes after listening at home , last music heard is there in dream.

Dreams changing when traveling ? Sure they do .
One of the good things about traveling , no doubt

Also some difference dreaming when i have a sack of hydro around the house and have been smoking for a few days , the dreams seem fine but.
without it , the dreams definitely come back stronger , clearer

 

[Lichen]

Used to suffer from a lot of teeth falling out dreams.

Began with a wobble, then one goes, then a mouthfull of teeth, tumbling out when you speak

Horrible but quite common.