One Man's Meat

[mrissa]

I get confused when I hear people talking about their dreams and their nightmares, because the things that qualify as nightmares for other people and the things that qualify as nightmares for me are not really similar.

I often have dreams where I've gone somewhere naked where it would usually be inappropriate, but it's never uncomfortable. Nobody ever seems upset by it, least of all me. Also I have dreams where I'm falling, but they're happy falling dreams, floaty cloud dreams.

If there's a bishop in my dreams, though, you can guarantee it's about to get deeply unpleasant.

Other nightmares -- well, there's the one where I can't protect some loved one from something hideous, that's pretty obvious, but if I'm riding in a car, it's very very bad, and I don't usually feel at all upset about riding in a car. And being in school again is always a horrible dream, not because I'm unprepared, but because I'm overprepared. Because I explain to them that I've done differential equations and calculus of complex variables and any number of things, and they still make me do third-grade math worksheets, and all of my arguments about why I shouldn't have to go through that get me nowhere. And that makes sense, because I made functionally similar arguments at the time and still had to do the damn worksheets. I had generally a pretty good college experience, with only some specific bad classes, but any dream where I'm back at college is a bad one. I just don't like dreams of going back.

So while I'm cleaning the house and looking for distractions, do you have dreams that don't connect up with how other people talk about them? Other people's nightmares that come out fine, or your nightmares that are hard to explain? Or do you always have neutral dreams, or do you remember your dreams at all?

Comments

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I sometimes have those dreams where I'm inappropriately naked, but like you it never seems to be a problem.

I also occassionally have dreams where I'm killed, and there is a vivid account of my lingering death in the hospital. These dreams don't frighten me, either. I always seem to end up dead because I'm doing something important that needs to be done, so there's a sense of completion or satisfaction to go along with the pain. Weird.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And the same question I just asked songwind: does being dead hurt in your dreams?

Water is always wet in my dreams, but sometimes everything is submerged.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

>Not so far, but the thing is, the majority of my dreams take place in something like third-omniscient (dipping occasionally into first-person in different people as the dream progresses).

Yes! Yes! Yes! Thank you. You're the only other person I've met ("met?") who admits to having third-person dreams.

[ksumnersmith.livejournal.com]

That happens to me, too! Or sometimes I'm present, but am part of something inanimate. Once I was an elevator wall, and when the dream characters moved on I could only watch the elevator doors close behind them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Wait, okay, so does being dead hurt in your dreams, or just the dying part?

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Dying. Being dead doesn't sound like much.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

I remember my dreams fairly often, and a few of them even stick with me for a day or more. I very rarely have what I'd consider nightmares, but when I do, they're usually doozies. The scariest one I remember was after watching parts of a suspense/action movie where lots of people died. I was walking around in a dark house with lots of corpses hanging from the ceiling for some reason, certain the killer was in the next room... or the next... or the next....
*Shiver*

Mostly though, I have good dreams, like the one where I learned the secret of how to fly (take two large steps, and kick off just right on the third). I walked around the next couple of weeks with the feeling that I was going to take off at any second.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The disturbing school dreams I most often get are variants on the "all your adult life has been a fantasy, all those good things haven't really happened, you're still really fifteen and studying Honours Irish for Inter Cert" theme. The other one I get every now and again that really knocks me over is the one where I do an often quite hard exam, hand the results in, leave the exam room, and then find I was only given a partial paper.

The ones with monsters in, otoh, usually end up getting eaten by stories.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yet another data point that the people who tell high school students "these are the best years of your life" are full of it.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I rarely remember my dreams, ever, but I had a recurring nightmare as a little kid.

My pillow got very, very hard. Right where the back of my head meets the base of my skull. Very very hard, very flat, slightly cool. And everything else got very very hard, and very very fast. I couldn't keep up with everything that was going on, it was too fast. I couldn't even see everything that was happening, it was all so fast and so hard. And there's still a very flat, very hard something right behind my head.

Very, very creepy. Although you might just have to trust me.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I've not had what I'd call a nightmare in years. Many, many years. Since I was a kid. The last one I remember was when I was about 8 or 9. I dreamt I was sick and my parents had called a witch doctor. I knew he was going to kill me, not make me better, but no one would believe me. I tried to get away from him by hiding under the car, but he found me and injected me with poison anyway.

Mostly I have vividly strange dreams. There's one in my LJ at the moment, about a bomb that destabilizes probability. That's fairly indicative of the sort of dreams I have. That and the one where I was hunting a mythical bird-shapeshifting thing that had Nick Nolte for its liver.

The dreams I have where I'm surrounded by corpses and monsters are usually fun for me, or at worst not hugely restful. I occasionally have anxiety dreams, but they're just mildly annoying -- like computer crashes when I'm not working on anything essential. My anxiety dreams usually take the form of me trying to shoot some bad thing or person and the gun refuses to work.

I know it's terribly tempting to use that as a sexual metaphor, but I've done enough target shooting with crappy air rifles and broken paintball guns that it's actually specific, remembered imagry and always tied in to how I felt when I was actually using the broken-ass gun-type-thing in question.

I'll second the comment that I've pulled interesting story ideas from dreams. Lots of visuals too. If I'm in the right mood though, I can usually tap into that part of my brain while I'm awake, however. So I don't need to dream to get ideas that way.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

Mostly I have fabulous, megalomaniac wish-fulfillment adventure dreams. This probably says something terrible about my character, but I sure do enjoy the dreams. I've defeated the devil with a cup of chicken soup; I've blasted a psychic mind-control network with the life force of an armload of celery; I've composed and sung an entire opera in fake Italian about the glories of vegetarian cooking.

I wind up going to hell a lot, but I like it there. It's a calm, soothing place. The gods of my version of hell are pretty mellow, and they'll turn a blind eye to people sneaking out and in. A typical hell dream: my friend Chris was working on a paper in a university library. There was a minor earthquake, and a book popped off the shelf and hit him in the head, killing him. So our mutual friend Joy and I took a cab to hell to get him back. Charming the chthonic gods into letting him go was easy, but Chris himself proved difficult. We found him in an exactly similar library in hell, working on the same paper. He was writing a phrase, crossing it out, writing another, crossing it out, writing the first phrase again, etc. We couldn't get him to leave. He brandished his papers at us. "With all this peace and quiet," he said, "look at how much I'm getting done!"

My nightmares, when I have them, are usually of the "someone is in my house" variety. I used to have repetitive bad dreams about a certain character who'd been in my life, but then I was lucky enough to have a good bout of lucid dreaming during one of those nightmares. Knowing it was a dream, I hit him over the head with my heavy brass music stand, kicked him in the stomach, threw him out of the house, and locked the door behind him. He never bothered me in my dreams again.

Other nightmares involve having to drive somewhere. (Given that I'm car-phobic and do not drive, that's not so surprising.) Recently I dreamed I had to drive a fire truck around the neighborhood without getting caught by the police.

[sculpin.livejournal.com]

Well, those are the usual nightmares. The really disturbing nightmares, though, those always seem to be one-off jobs. Like the dream that major surgical operations were sponsored by large corporations in return for advertising time. A heart transplant included the addition of tiny flute-like filters that whispered advertising slogans with every heartbeat as the blood rushed through them. "Coke is it. Coke is it. Coke is it." Or this one (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sculpin/145419.html).

Actually, I guess both of those may refer to heart surgery, metaphorically or otherwise, and maybe it's worth noting that I had heart surgery when I was very small. Huh. I'll have to watch for that.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

My most disturbing childhood dream: I woke up and realized I'd been dreaming. Then I woke up, realized I'd only dreamed about waking up. Then.... I'm not sure how many more times it repeated. When I really did wake up, I wasn't certain for the first few minutes that I was no longer dreaming.

Most disturbing adult dream: I was at the tiller of a car whose controls I didn't recognize, except that the tiller was where the steering wheel should be. I was on a mountain road full of hairpin curves.

I decided to stop till I could figure out what I was doing. Asked the other person in the car "Where are the brakes?"

"There are no brakes."

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Nonconnecting dream: I have flying dreams from time to time, and they're always good. A sense of freedom and liberation comes with them. And in an almost-tie in with lucid dreaming, I know when I'm about to wake up from them because the closer I get to waking up, the harder it gets to fly.

Occasionally I'm falling in a dream, too, but there aren't any particularly negative emotions involved with it. Just as I hit the ground, I wake up.

[ckd]

I generally don't remember my dreams.

Based on the few I do remember, this is probably a feature. Anxiety dreams are bad enough, but I had one a few months ago that wasn't even my anxiety dream. (Well, it was, but it was based on something someone else had posted about to their LiveJournal, and they were in it....)

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

My dreams are...weird as hell. I've told people about them, and heard about others' dreams, and the response is usually "Man, Avi, you have one screwed up brain!"

Ferinstance: I once had a non-Euclidean dream. As in, the geometry of the space that I was watching the action unfold in did not follow standard Euclidean geometries. It didn't start out that way: it started out as an X-Files dream, in which Mulder and Scully were tracking this conspiratorial (natch) group of mystics who seemed to be behind a series of thefts and odd disapeparances, and eventually found them at a temple in southern New Orleans, providing support for a group of monks who continually chanted over a gate to Outside; their chanting had to continue uninterrupted, with different monks in shifts seamlessly picking up where the others left off, lest the gate open and let in Things from Beyond which would do Horrible Things that involved Capital Letters.

Anyway, Mulder ended up inadvertently screwing up the whole thing, and the gate opened, and Something came through...and space changed. They were now in a space described by hyperbolic geometry, and had to try and move through the world as it was now, while trying to figure out how to put things back the way they were. I woke up from this dream with a splitting headache: I don't think the brain is meant to process that kind of reality.

I've had other, slightly more pedestrian dreams, such as the one in which I had to help my beautiful girlfriend escape from the evil Canadian secret police (don't laugh) while carrying the last vial of nacho cheese flavoring in the northern hemisphere (don't ask).

Or the one in which my arm splits open due to an injury, revealing plastic and metal fittings and wires, instead of flesh and bone. Or there's the one I had about transforming into a predatory, demonic mantis and hunting down innocent bystanders at midnight in a field somewhere. Or the ones in which I'm flying; usually, this "flight" is very hesitant, as I basically step off the ground and find myself hovering unsteadily, wobbling around and drifting without much control.

I suppose the "you're in college, but you have to go back to high school as well for a bit" dreams qualify as frustrating. They're not actual nightmares, just very odd, and somewhat frustrating. I am usually, in these dreams, both in college and in high school. Just doing one class back in high school, for some unknown reason.

Oh, there's also the frustrating dreams I have where I'm trying to do something, or talk to someone, and the other person keeps taking it the wrong way and getting angrier, and everything I try to do to make things better just makes everything worse, and finally in frustration I end up killing them. It's usually a family member or close friend, too. I find those very distressing.

None of these are what I would call "nightmares", though. You really don't want to know about my nightmares.

[ksumnersmith.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite dream elements is being underwater and not being able to breathe. It sounds terrible, but it's not. I'm not drowning, and I'm not breathing water, I'm just ... there. There's no pressure in my lungs, no need for air. I look up through the water, and drift, and am filled with the most perfect sense of calm.

Maybe it's not surprising that I love this. For as long as I can remember being able to swim and hold by breath, I'd sink to the bottom of the pool and stare up at the daylight, and wish that I could stay there.

nightmares

[greykev.livejournal.com]

I have occasional dreams where-in I've moved from one place to another, but keep going back to check the empty former residence. The fact that it's still there & empty is distressing in the dream. I think this is an update of the dreams of finals week where-in I discover there's a class I haven't been to all semester. neither of these bother me when I'm awake.

The one (and I've only had it once thankfully) that still bugs me felt like a fragment of childhood memory in which I felt guilty over (somehow) being responcible for another kid's death & my parents were covering it up. That had me awake for a couple hours thinking 'What the Hell?!'