One Man's Meat
Nov. 23rd, 2004 01:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaI 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?
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?
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-23 12:58 pm (UTC)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.