I’ve finally finished updating the spreadsheet (I’m calling it my Dreamsheet™), phew! From now on I’m going to be much better at copying details over as soon as a new deream is posted, for my own sanity.
Total logged: 43!
Thanks guys, this has been great so far. I didn’t imagine I would collect this many. Keep going!
I’ve also started collecting dreams from my colleagues, since they expressed an interest - it sparked a long conversation. Turns out everyone loves talking about their dreams!
Are you going to produce some stats or diagrams or something like that? Or will you just keep it as a list?
How would that even work?
Anyone ever had a person (most likely from the opposite sex) come up to them and say: “Hey I dreamed of you and you did this-and-that in my dream. Why would you do something like that you asshole?”
@PiecesOfKate could classify or “group” the dreams. For example she can count in how many dreams the dreamer tries to escape (from something). She could also investigate if there are common dreams, for example the fear to fail in an exam.
Mhhh, if there were clear pattens like that, sure. But firstly the sample is way wayyy to small to draw any conclusions from that and secondly from what I have seen most of the dreams we have here are very specific to the persons who had them (though I don´t know those from outside of the forum, obviously).
But still I´m very curious how the current chart looks like, however it is made. 
That is the interesting question: Are there any (common) patterns or are the dreams individual things? 
Same here.
I haven’t done anything like that - at the moment just collecting. I’m not sure about stats or graphs or that sort of thing as it’s a bit too conceptual for that - but I will look at patterns and similarities across different people’s dreams.
This guy has
The first thing I remember is that I was going uphill in a bus with my mother and other people at sunset, and a lady was telling us, like a tourist guide, that we were going to watch “world’s biggest clock reflection”. In fact, at the peak of the hill, we can see an enormous Big-Ben-like clock reflected on a glass building. Every building in the street is made of glass and reflects parts of the clock. I know there was more to this dream because I and my mother felt very proud, as if we had something to do with it.
Then I’m in Rome - which looked exactly like Zurich, but still - it was night, I was near the stadium and I was running because I was late. An old friend sees me and comments to another friend “see? here’s someone who had no organization and now doesn’t know how to watch the game”. I think “I’m actually just looking for a kebab, but now I want to watch the match”.
So I find myself in an apartment, watching Rome - Barcelona on a small TV with other people I don’t know. The game is actually field hockey, but played with those plastic sticks / ball for kids, and inflatable goals. Nevertheless, Lionel Messi is still the man to fear, as the CTO of my company comments while lazily laying in an armchair. Yet Rome scores a goal, and it seems like they might have chances to overcome the defeat in the first leg (I know, it’s a postmonition dream since it has already happened).
Now, for some connections I don’t remember, I’m in the… landing? @PiecesOfKate, how do you call the corridor on a building’s floor that has access to stairs, elevator and all the doors of every apartment? By the way, I’m outside the apartment, and the door to the other apartment is open too, and there’s people speaking. It’s probably half time, everyone is speaking about the match. I understand that the guy living in the other apartment is famous, but I don’t know him. There’s an increasing amount of steam, and condensation on the windows, as if we were in an enormous shower being turned on. In fact, everyone is now wearing just a towel (so I have to speak up, @milanfahrnholz). The cousin of an old University friend of mine comes and tells me “we might wait for Ramona” (her cousin) “since you know she really cares about this match”. I agree, so I come back in the apartment and call the reception (the building is now an hotel) and ask for other towels.
So I wait, and I spend some time giving a look at the luxurious room. There’s just a corridor whose walls are decorated like button back armchairs, but I know there are two doors hidden in the decoration. I open the one on the right, and it brings to another corridor. On the left there’s an arc leading to the room we were watching TV in. My CTO is still sitting on an armchair. He looks at me and raises an eyebrow, basically asking me why I entered the room from that door instead of the one on the left. I answer that I’m just thinking of how the room could be rearranged. The bell rings - it’s my towels! - and I turn back, but the big door is now closed and there’s a desk with lots of cables and behind it a set of wooden panels and I don’t know how to exit. I move a panel, but there’s too much cables and I can’t crawl under the desk there. The bell rings again, I shout “I’m coming!”, then another person takes me and lifts me above the wooden wall, so I’m in the corridor again and answer the door. I have to go downstairs for my towels. I’m now in the back of the hotel lobby, at the delivery door. Outside is raining, there are three guys dressed as couriers, slightly wet with rain. One of them asks if I’m the one who wanted the towels. I answer yes. He asks me to extend my hand, I do, he leaves a small ball of wet kitchen paper in my hand and says in an angry tone “that’s all we have”. The other two laugh and begin commenting on how stupid I am to think that someone might want to go look for towels in Rome when it’s raining and Rome is playing the Champions’ League. I’m upset and say “well, I’m sorry if I thought you might have done the job you’re paid for”, but they become angrier. I turn my back and head to the lobby, but I can feel them watching me. I can hear one of them commenting “let’s see what he does”, another one says “if he goes for the toilet he’s a real dumbass” (it made sense at the time, I suppose they were expecting me to look for towels in the toilets). I was looking for the elevator instead. I finally find it, and the valet asks me which floor. I show him the key to the 4th floor, and I wait until the elevator starts. The elevator is not a real elevator with doors, but it was like a pillar that raised from the floor. So I stand in the middle of this pillar with the valet, and as the three guys are out of sight, I complain with the valet, which is now the hotel manager.
I say that I would expect them, such a luxurious hotel, to have enough towels for everyone, but most importantly, if they don’t, that their personnel just say “sorry, we’re out of towels” instead of making me go downstairs and make fun of me. The manager takes my complains very seriously and asks for the name of the people. I say I don’t know, but I begin describing one of them. I’m usually awful at remembering resp. describing faces, but this time it’s easy. He was young, maybe 28, a bit of black beard, long black straight hair, pale skin. The manager says he understood and tells me the guy is called Simone. He tells this in a tone that makes me think it’s not the first time a customer complained about him.
Unfortunately the dream ended because my daughter woke me up by screaming “a treasure chest! with gold coins!” in the middle of her sleep. Followed a couple of seconds later by “and chocolate coins!”. How I’d love to see her dreams.
But I got my revenge nevertheless. As my dream ended, Simone stopped existing. I wanted him fired, I had him dying. Sweet, sweet revenge.
I love maze-like dreams like that, where there are lots of (literal) twists and turns. The towels fiasco made me laugh but I’m glad you got your revenge.
I was going to say ‘lobby’ but I think that’s usually on the ground floor. Not sure there’s a specific name for it - I’d probably just say ‘hallway’.
I think it’s one of the most coherent dreams I’ve ever had. I mean, except for the changes in rooms and so on, there was a consistent theme all over: the search for towels during a football match.
One thing that always bugged me as a kid about dreaming or falling in sleep in general. You never realise the moment when you do fall asleep. You´re awake and suddenly it´s morning (well in ideal cases not in mine, obviously. But it was better in my childhood).
Here´s the thing, though. In recent years I realised that when a sudden noise or something else wakes me before I feel asleep, the moment of drifting away becomes much more clearer and this is where I stupidly have to contradict popular dream theories.
Sometimes when I´m just about to fall asleep I start seeing things and pictures in my mind that I can´t possibly conciously have thought up, because they´re usually images, places, people or things that don´t make any sense or are just weird, but at the same time I still know I´m lying in bed and not really asleep yet. And sometimes I wake up again and know that this was the moment I was about to fall asleep that I wouldn´t have remembered had I been successful.
So it may be possible that we start dreaming even before we fall asleep and not only during the REM phase.
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. When that happens to me I like to lie there and see what ‘filters’ in. Sometimes it’s a weird phrase for me, too, or like I can hear people saying odd, non-sensical things. In my semi-conscious mind I know it doesn’t make sense, but it flows in really easily. I like trying to figure out where it comes from.
I wonder if this is technically ‘dreaming’, though – since the person isn’t completely asleep. Maybe they’re closer to hallucinations, or a kind of ‘semi-dream’.
Yeah, everything you say describes exactly how it is for me. Especially the people saying weird things part.
Your subconcious mind is thinking about language more than you seem to notice!
I think it must come from the same place somehow. It´s like the rehearsal for the night concert.
I meant it like that 
as in weird phrases pop in.
Or when Faith No More come on before Guns N’ Roses.
Yep, same here. It happened yesterday, I was falling asleep and then my daughter cried. The first thing I thought was “damn, I was about to fall asleep”, and I knew it was so because I was already “seeing” things that didn’t make much sense. I mean, when I try to fall asleep I usually think a lot (thus making me need a lot of time to fall asleep 
) but I noticed I was thinking “unconsciously”, like in a flow, before I got distracted by the noise.
I know all of this is anecdotal evidence vs. the mesaurable evidence on a scale of the REM phase. But I don´t think it´s entirely impossible that the dream phase can start much earlier than we´re usually assuming. There might be a difference between this “drifiting off hallucinations” and “deep dreams” or whatever.
But then there is also “daydreaming” I don´t think the difference between all of these is all that great except the state that your body is in. And in deep sleep when all the other body functions are down the mind can work faster and more intense. It is always there, though. Some people get it out with drugs, others might be able to access their subconcious through other means. But it´s a thing that constantly keeps working and proecessing.
I had a dream last night where Ron told me the secret of monkey island, it had something to do with smoking a doobie. (Not something I personally have ever tried)
Then along with David we robbed a toy super store (not sure why or for what). So then, because I was one of the few people who knew the seceret I had to contend with people continuously asking me what it was and it got so so annoying, I never caved in the dream or told anyone what the secret was, but man was it so annoying the amount of people who kept asking me what the secret was.
That so far, is the most likely theory I have ever heard!
Maybe we should ask these guys what the secret is:
Mhhh, never mind. Looks like they´re busy right now.
Last night I dreamed I was in the kitchen slicing food and I cut top of my little finger. My mum suddenly appeared and said, ‘Oh it’s okay, it’s just a little cut’. Then I looked at it more closely and pushed at it gently, and the whole top of my finger bent back like one of those Pez sweet dispensers. Oh no! Much panic. My mum took me to a place that looked like a hairdresser’s, where apparently they fix this stuff. I sat in one of the reclining chairs and noted that the lady next to me had an arm hanging off. Then my mum tried to fix my finger herself but it started to really hurt until in the end I was screaming and screaming. Then I woke up.
I listened to a really interesting bit in my sleep audiobook this morning. It was about the differences between how humans sleep compared to other animals. I knew that sharks sleep with one side of their brain so they can literally keep one eye open, but apparently some birds do it to. They’ve been observed sleeping in rows - the middle ones sleep completely while the ones on the outside edges only sleep with one half of their brain. The other half stays alert to look out for predators. Then they rotate and switch sides! Interestingly this is only for non-REM sleep - when they need REM sleep it requires all the brain.
It made me wonder if we ever did this earlier in evolution, as it’s weird that we’re so vulnerable when asleep, given all the predators in earlier times (though I guess we just took turns to sleep).
That’s really interesting! I wonder how a bird or a shark can properly rest, when one half of their brain is still alert? It may be two halves, but it’s still one creature.