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How else has this?

I sometimes remember dreams from easily 15y - 20y ago absolutly vividly, although I have had forgotten them in the mean time. Suddenly, during the day, like in a split second (maybe triggered from a scene or scent) I feel that "feeling" (or more like a superposition of all impression of that dream i had) of a dream long lost and the dream is fully present in that moment and I kind of "remember" it completely. Then it is fading away fast.

Every so often I have these vivid dreams with what feels like long story archs. In my youth / pre 30s more often then now. At the end of my 20s I started to keep a dream diary, not very consistently, but still.

So now, when I have these dream flashbacks, I immeadiately grab this journal or a piece of paper. I write everything down and draw sketches of the scene and really try hard to remember specifics of that dream. And then something really weird happens... i start to remember scences form other forgotten dreams and it feels like I opened a door or pathway in my memory and can look/explore fragments of these dreams. And the harder I try the better results I get. It is really an odd experience.

It is quite popular form of déjà vu called déjà rêvé. Happens to me all the time, more often when I'm stressed or sleep deprived but almost never when I'm physically exhausted.

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/imp/jcs/2017/00000...

> Nearly 80% claimed to have had such experiences and the associated frequencies are presented. Age was negatively correlated with the incidence and there was little gender dependence.

I can relate. I have a handful of recurring dream worlds that I visit. Sometimes I'll have a series of dreams over a few days that all take place in the same dream world. Months or years can go by and then I'll find myself dropped back into a dream world that I had forgotten about. Sometimes the world has progressed since my last visit, and sometimes I'm put back nearly where I left off last time.

The weirdest thing for me is that I swear I have a separate set of memories in these different dream worlds; a personal history exclusive to that dream world, where once I'm in that dream world, I suddenly remember previous visits to that world, places I've visited, events that took place. It's an incredibly strange feeling that can momentarily make me question my sense of self.

I should note that I nearly always dream lucidly. Not sure if that plays a role in this phenomena.

I have very long story arch dreams, an ex-girlfriend called them epic dreams. They're strange, some times I have recurring dreams with long story arcs in which I am in them as myself, sometimes I am in them as another person, sometimes they are narrated, sometimes they span generations, sometimes I'm not in them at all, sometimes they are episodes of a tv show that never had those episodes.

Examples - one dream was set in a post apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like A Canticle for Leibowitz, with narration, there was a kingdom being misruled by a duke and the only one who would be able to stop him was the exiled bishop, his brother, I turned out to be the bishop - an old man returning after many years of exile to the kingdom etc. etc. there were sword fights, radiation monsters, extra sensory perception..

Another dream was a very long special episode of Laverne and Shirley were the girls came out and had their first kiss, I think it was a Christmas episode also.

Actually funny enough I had three dream flashbacks just a couple days ago, first I remembered a comic book store and then I remembered no that store was from a dream, then I remembered a couple other locations from dreams that I had not had for lots of years and had forgotten about.

I'm completely the opposite. 50 years old and I have never once in my life remembered a dream. Never. I see things about dreams, such as this like, as interesting, but can relate to them at all, because they are things that happen to other people. I assume I have dreams, but when I wake up, I never have any recall of them.
How do you know it's a "true" memory? Does that even matter to you? I don't think it would to me! But, I'm curious how confident you are about whether you're in the same space or your brain is rapidly manufacturing the sensation.
I have this. I always imagine these are bubbling up one last time to the surface and I never experience these thoughts ever again.
I always wondered if anyone else had this! People I have asked all seemed surprised by the question.
Just curious, does anyone here have dreams with some recurring themes? I've tried googling for this but sadly most of the content seems to be related to spiritual/mystical "explanations" of it. And I don't bring it up with anyone in real life so as to not appear like a kook.

I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great probability that it falls into these 2 categories -

1. I suddenly find myself naked in public, the rest of dream usually involves me trying to remedy the situation. This is the stage where I usually wake up (in a panic with elevated heart rate).

2. Snakes. Not even sure what is up with this one. I am pretty afraid of snakes in real life, more so than normal people. But then there's a bunch of other things I am equally scared of, but I don't dream about them at all.

Only recurring dream I have is I'm back in college and it's the end of a semester, suddenly I realize there's some math class I haven't been attending and I have just a few days to cram everything I've missed in time for the final.
Yes. Some common ones: 1) Being back in school, missing an exam or test. 2) My car is out of control: won't stop going backwards, accelerates uncontrollably, etc. 3) Finding secret / "extra" rooms in my house. 4) Most recently with covid: being in a store, and realized I've forgotten my mask.

There are definitely other themes but these are the most common.

I don't know if I'd call it recurring, since it's pretty rare, but: Sometimes I lose my mind in my dreams. I can feel myself losing my grip on my faculties, as if something were ripping my mind apart. It's hard to describe, visuals become distorted, things split apart into colours, my grip on reality feels slippery. I imagine having a stroke might feel that way, although I hope it's less dramatic. This is just sheer terror.

Also rare, but in a similar vein, sometimes I wake up into a dream, over and over again. I'll be in bed, relieved I'm finally awake, until I soon realize I'm still asleep and wake up again. When this repeats enough times, it becomes pretty desperate.

Otherwise, I rarely have anxiety-inducing dreams.

Don’t so quickly discount mystical descriptions of dreams, even if you aren’t a religious person yourself. The thing that is special about dreams is that unlike our conscious waking experience you have no control over how they manifest themselves. They aren’t scientific or rational at all; they are human. Dogs have dreams, and we wouldn’t expect them to have a rational, non-mystical explanation for them. In a sense your dreams are the only way your body can communicate unconscious (and therefore irrational) fears or desires, short of a panic attack or mental breakdown.

Your fear of snakes is likely older than humanity itself, so even if you can have rational control of yourself around a snake in real life they could terrorize your dreams. Snakes used to be a real and present danger in our environment for millions of years of our evolution. They are the unknown environment, the cunning adversary, the unforeseen consequence of carelessness.

In a similar way, you might find that you can manage to present yourself in social situations, there is a very human fear of being found out, cast out, laughed at, and/or rejected socially, since we are social creatures. Even nudists have dreams of finding themselves naked in front of their peers. If you spend your day putting on a facade of some sort, which you probably do if you have a job, then somewhere there is a part of you that you don’t want others to see, and in your dream they all see it big time and you have to deal with it.

I would like to know what small children (1-2 years) dream, but we can of course never really know for sure. My daughter (2 years) definitely seems to have nightmares. She also seems to have conversations in her dreams, as she often speaks answers to questions while sleeping. Personally I very strongly remember some wild dreams when I was very young, probably around the age I started remembering things at all, so around 2,5 years. These dreams were often synesthesic, I could see sounds in extremely saturated, moving, three-dimensional colors, and could "taste" geometric forms like pyramids and cuboids. I have never taken LSD, but I imagine the experience to be quite similar. The closest (but not very close) thing I have seen to these dreams is the stargate sequence in 2001.
I wish sites had a browse feature, like “here’s a sample of what you’ll find, here are the keywords that would reveal this same entry”

This and Sci-hub are two of many examples that bounce me over and over again because I have no inspiration on what to search or how

This site even has an entire primer on how to make a useful search query, because apparently its not even a familiar search bar?

And all the users are like “ah thats not a problem, just be so into this field like me that you already know all the papers you want to read!”

I'm curious to know if frequency of dreaming correlates to anything. Most people I talk to "rarely have dreams" (probably meaning they just dont remember them).

For some reason in my case I have a vivid dream every night, sometimes multiple per night, and can't remember the last time my sleep was dreamless.

I've heard keeping a dream journal can help you remember/have more vivid dreams, but I only write my dreams down it it affected me very strongly so I can interpret what my psyche is saying, so this only happens maybe once every few months.

So what gives? Why do some people dream a lot more than others?

Do you ever dream about programming?

I sometimes dream about code or debugging, especially when my team is working on a deadline. A few times I dreamt of solutions to problems we had. It felt good on the spot, calming and relaxing. Unfortunately, after waking up, they don’t make any sense.

Direct link to all dream series and samples:

http://www.dreambank.net/grid.cgi

I’m convinced that dreams, at least in my case, are from past lives. I don’t have any strong religious or other reasons to believe this. It’s just a strong hunch.

I’ve only had 1-2 vivid lucid dreams. One was where I was a doctor tending to a patient and we were located in an old cabin that would have been typical in the old west. It was so vivid that it was as if I was remembering a past life.

I’ve also had many deja vu moments where I’m visiting somewhere in real life and I swear I remember it from a dream.

If I had a good dream and suddenly woke up. I can get back to sleep and continue the dream and somehow manipulate the story while I'm in it. It's very weird, usually i know immediately when I'm dreaming while it's happening and I can wake up if it's not interesting.

I don't have real nightmares, because I can wake up, since I realise it's not real.

There are only 2 times that i remember that i didn't realize it. ( One quite embarrassing one).

One time when I had a fake wake-up ( i thought I woke up for real and the feeling afterwards that something was off was really weird. Since I already thought I woke up). After a while, i woke up for real ofc, not by my doing.

Another time i needed to go to the toilet and i couldn't. So i tried harder... Yeah, quite embarrassing this one, 10 years ago after a night of going out pretty late...

I do think I'm having less dreams lately. Since I never have the need to try to fetch the dream again. But I'm using my alarm clock again and perhaps that's related.

Fyi, i forget about the dream immediately after standing up.

It's possible that I talk in my sleep, i once woke up during that and had a conversation with my girlfriend before I woke up. Somehow my dream was a visual interpretation of what she said ( while my eyes were closed ofc) and I was way more open than i usually am. She could have asked me anything and I sincerely doubt of i would have been able to dodge a question if I would have wanted that.

Ps. I'm a very irregular sleeper. I can only sleep 3-4 hours and it's almost all REM/deep sleep according to an app that i placed on my bed.

Ps2. If you have trouble waking up. Set a hard noise 10 minutes before the desired time ( 1 second duration), you should get up more easily when the real alarm goes off.

I have written code in my dreams. When facing a particular problem if I think about it obsessively all day long I can sometimes end up dreaming about it. If the dream comes towards the morning I can often times remember the code I wrote and go try it out when I wake up. It doesn’t make for good sleep but the code usually works even if it has some really weird convoluted quirk that I end up working out once awake.

I had similar things happen in high school. For example the first time the teacher explained integrals I had a rough time visualizing the geometry. Having a dream a few nights later of an integral being like an apple peeled into a long strip helped me wake up with a better intuitive understanding of integrals.

Anyone else ever fall asleep awake? I've been able to lucid dream for a while now, but I started meditating recently and I've discovered I can meditate myself to sleep while still being "awake". I have to be really tired to do it, like physically exhausted, but mentally awake, so usually during naps, but it's really strange. First time I freaked out because I could feel my body going into sleep paralysis I felt like I was choking / couldn't breathe. Unfortunately I've only managed to stay awake for a few moments and didn't procede to a lucid dream yet.
My dreams are often pretty epic and often have sound tracks. Frequently I wake up and record them - including the music. If I don't take notes and record songs immediately, then both are lost forever.
If I had a good dream and suddenly woke up. I can get back to sleep and continue the dream and somehow manipulate the story woke I'm in it. It's very weird, usually i know immediately when I'm dreaming while it's happening and I can wake up if it's not interesting.

There are only 2 times that i remember that i didn't realize it. ( One quite embarrassing one).

One time when u had a fake wake-up ( i thought I woke up for real and the feeling during afterwards that something is off was really weird.

Another time i needed to go to the toilet and i couldn't. So i tried harder... Yeah, quite embarrassing this one...

I do think I'll having less dreams lately. Since I never have the need to try to fetch the dream again. But I'm using my alarm clock again and perhaps that's related.

Fyi, i forget about the dream immediately after standing up.

It's possible that I talk in my sleep, i once woke up during that and had a conversation with my girlfriend. Somehow my dream was a visual interpretation of what she said ( while my eyes were closed ofc) and I was way more open than i usually am. She could have asked me anything and I sincerely doubt of i would have been able to dodge a question if I would have wanted that.

Ps. I'm a very irregular sleeper.

I have more than two hundred pages of dreams typed out. It was a lot easier to do this when I was younger as I had much more time in the mornings. I remember everything vividly but once ten minutes have passed since waking it's pretty much gone unless I make a conscious effort to commit it to memory.

It's great fun to go back and be prompted to remember some of the crazier ones or Ctrl+F to see how often various people and things pop up.

This website is part of another one called Dream Research - https://dreams.ucsc.edu/ full of interesting info with a scientific approach into the world of Dreams, including analysis of the Dream Bank itself.

You can find some studies on what is the current thinking regarding dreams, and their purpose and meaning.

Would it be interesting to fine-tune GPT-3 on these?
Possibly related: Scientists entered people’s dreams and got them ‘talking’

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-p...

David Lynch's work is often described as "dream-like", and you can definitely see that connection in these transcripts. This could easily be a scene in his movies:

> I'm at a Sunday night church gathering. I'm thinking, "I haven't done this in years." It's crowded. A drunk man next to me whispers, "Reproductive organs." I good naturedly tell him to shut up. I see a big sign that says "Brothers, Jesus..." Later someone, a male, says he has to take part of my reproductive system out. I just play with my nipples and enjoy it, i.e. I have an orgasm. I look at him and say, "I can't do that. I would feel embarrassed that I would have to go to orgasm with people watching." A girl whispers, "You can do it."

I've had some pretty strange dreams over the years. Including some that were 2D animations, others that were like video games with cutscenes and text overlays. And that's without considering the precognitive dreams and those with side effects in the real world.
I've often wondered if dreams are fully constructed stories during REM or REM is more or less random vignettes of cognition that are assembled into a constructed story upon awakening.

Rewriting memories seems to be reasonably well understood, and if the recall mechanism for waking memories reconstructs a plausible story from memories, is it reasonable that the same is happening with dreams?

We always remember dreams, have there been experiments where the paralytic effect of sleep has been blocked? I remember seeing a cat video (ironic) of a cat having that part blocked by drugs or surgery and it jumping like it is catching a bird.

Would using this for an ML classifier corpus potentially yield a set of hitherto unnamed categories that reflect something structural about our minds?
There are reports that dreaming is some sort of brain healing process. There are some build ups that occur during the day and thus sleeping cleans this up. Are there are definite conclusions why people dream at all?

From personal experience there are dreams I remember vividly to dreams that I know I had and then easily forget as I wake up again in the morning. Dreaming is such an interesting phenomenon.

Has anyone seen research linking dream content to the causes of the dream? What I'm imagining is dream journals like the ones on the website, accompanied by things that are happening in the patient's life that might explain the dream.

E.g. Dream: I saw my mom and gave her a hug.

Posited cause: I've been thinking about my mom a lot recently because her birthday was last week and I really miss her.

(edited for formatting)

Reading the stream "Barb Sanders [n=3116]", who dreams tend to be surreal, I was reminded of my own online dream log from many years ago: https://oneirolog.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/legs-of-our-fathe...
This is fascinating to me. I would love to contribute to Dream research. I also keep a dream journal and consistently have very vivid and colorful dreams. The most frustrating thing to me is that I would love to share these dreams somehow with the world but I'm not a great writer and I'm even worse at drawing.
This is overall very cool but I find this series[0] extremely fascinating, I wish I could listen to that tapes.

[0]: http://www.dreambank.net/more_info.cgi?further=1&series=jasm...

Do you not dream? I'm almost 50 and I don't have a memory of ever dreaming. I probably do, but have some sort of selective amnesia so that I don't remember dreaming when I wake up. Does anyone else out there experience the same thing?
Is there a site for non-dreams? I don't know maybe ThoughtsBank?
I wonder if feeding this into a machine learning system could yield artistic/funny/useful gifs, especially for recurring dreams could give a pattern for a "meme".
I have read that certain antidepressants have "strange dreams" and "nightmares" listed as possible side effects. Not sure what to make out of that
This is cool. Where can we download the entire corpus?
Vipassana meditation makes me more awake in dreams. Better remembering. More lucid.

I hear it's common.

If anybody's looking for a way to do that, there you go.

Searching this database by typing keywords reminds me of the "search engine" gameplay in Sam Barlow's game Her Story.
i always love a chance to share what i have discovered about dreams.

for most of my life i never really thought much about how dreams work. i shared the same notion with most people, that they are a kind of sloppy simulation of real life. but it always stuck in my mind that this didnt make any sense: the physics of life are too complicated for the brain to simulate in real time in a way that recreates sensory inputs. and why would the brain have hardware that was dedicated to performing dream simulations? wouldnt that be rather a lot of hardware and energy for no apparent reason? but i always chalked it up as one of the great mysteries of our time and didnt dwell on it. and then the answer came to me.

it is well known that it is possible to "lucid dream." i have experienced this, and it is what precipitated my effort to understand dreams.

the answer is that the brain works with abstractions, it stores everything in the world, physical objects as well as feelings and concepts, as a kind of model that can be recalled. as you experience more things, the library of abstractions grows larger.

you are a small part of your brain. there is a part of the brain that holds a "simulation." this is your consciousness, you live inside this simulation, everything you experience is inside this simulation. it is a simulation of the physical world, but it contains much more than physical objects. it contains mental "primitives" that inform your emotions, your identity and your feelings about the world and your place in it. the non-physical aspect of the simulation might be called the "ego" and people who experience so-called ego-death are actually experiencing the simulation with these things taken out of it. at the core of the simulation is some kind of atomic, immutable "self" that is discreet and separate from all experiences, traumas and emotions. so to make it short, your being lives inside a simulation where the physical world is simulated as well as you as a person.

there are other parts of your brain that manage the simulation. some parts of the brain create new abstractions from sensory data. other parts of your brain monitor sensory data looking for things that it recognizes, looking for abstractions that have already been created. and another part of your brain is responsible for placing those abstractions into your simulation when they have been found in the environment. when the abstraction is placed into the simulation, you experience it. your brain is constantly monitoring reality through sensory data and recreating it in your brain-simulation using "assets" that already exist, assuming there is nothing too new in your environment. it is possible for this machinery to break, which is what we call a hallucination. a hallucination is not the creation of something that doesnt exist, it is the mistaken placing of a pre-existing asset into the simulation. objects are a composite of many different abstractions, and this is why hallucinations can have strange, ethereal or other-worldly qualities. a human figure can be placed into your simulation without the concept of humanity accompanying it, or the presence of a person can be placed without a physical manifestation. all kinds of weird things are possible. the takeaway is that the simulated world that is created for you by your brain is very sophisticated, hard to get right, and the symphony of neural mechanisms to make it all work is probably breathtakingly complex.

why? its an optimization. experiencing raw sensory data is too inefficient. the scope within which you make decisions must be narrowed. and this leads into the answer to dreams: there are other optimizations at play. there is yet another part of your brain that actually looks inward at the simulation and the assets that have been placed within it. it will then guess what other assets should be in the simulation based on experience, and place those assets into the simulation. these guesses assets are the same as any other assets, of course. their presence in the simulation is the same as anything else. they are just as real, in every way, in your experience, as anything else. this optimization probably saves time and energy, saving the brain from going through the long process of interpreting every bit of sensory data and matching it to pre-existing assets. instead, your brain translates the big things and your brain guesses everything else.

when you take this entire system into account, and you take away all sensory input, what do you get?

you get a dream.

what happens when you keep certain parts of the cortex active during sleep? you get a lucid dream.

what happens when you consider the situation where a little sensory input leaks into the brain during sleep? you get a simulation loosely guided by sensory data, just as we all have experienced.

dreams are in reality not simulations but a demonstration of the awesome power of the guessing machinery of the brain. it is not a sloppy simulation, but incredibly good guessing.

the reality you experience in a lucid dream is exactly the same reality you experience when you are awake. dreams are reality with sensory decoupling.

most of the things you experience in your life are guesses. most of the things that you are aware of at any given moment are just guesses. the guessing is so good that it has gone unnoticed.

because the brain uses a fundamental model of abstraction, many parts of life are consolidated, in part, into an abstraction and therefore are very localized in space in the brain. the amount of accuracy and control we will have over matters of the mind with simple electrodes ala neuralink will be much higher than anyone understands.

One of the books for dreams is from Sigmund Freud. I would be interested in learning of there is official science trying to understand the meaning
This seems worse than astrology. BS