That would be a very good reasoning why I dont have (or cant remember) any such dreams the past decades. I'm just so bad in remembering and reminding my duties that I either have to instantly fire it into a electronic reminder/calendar thingy and forget or I need to get used to doing it regulary (brushing teeth). So I don't have this regular "I need to remember this or that" thing at all - which is a great piece of mind I can recommend to anybody. I have to ask kids and wife - which are dreaming a lot - and the later is just littering everything with pieces of paper with random todos.
Another reason could be that I use a tiny dose of a Z-Drug (2.5g, Zolpidem each night so I can fall asleep without two hours of endless thought circles...
"so I can fall asleep without two hours of endless thought circles..."
Are the the worry-thoughts that people have when trying to fall asleep ... just pre-dreams? Just that they're way more coherent because you're conscious, and when you have them asleep, they're disjointed and dreamy because those "make thoughts coherent" part of your brain is off?
Add some ashwaganda and you’ll probably recall your dreams. I’m sure someone on this forum knows why ashwaganda has the effect, but I couldn’t tell you why.
The thought circles of my first 4 decades were mostly just endless streams of associations, curiousitiy, recalls of situations, the day, things I had read or seen. Never got diagnosed but I might carry a AD(H)D spectrum brain. I tried like 90 percent of recommended things from meditation, self hypnosis, autogene training, sports, no sports, no blue light, no media, no blue light, all kinds of natural substances - but only this 2.5-5g of Zolpidem lets me really sleep especially after any social event in the night like a party, a networking event, meeting friends, watching a film...
I'm bad at remembering such things but also don't really bother to write things down consistently; never have such dreams either—in my case, maybe this is a sign that I don't really care deep down, or something. (Or else it's the buprenorphine; had terrible insomnia till I got on it, and now I can fall asleep any time any where! It's great.)
I've only ever had a single recurring dream, which I've probably had a good two dozen times. When I was a child, I had a close call with a notorious F5 tornado (Jarrell), and ever since I have—maybe once a year—had dreams wherein the tornado is getting closer and closer, and the wind starts to rise and wail, and the ground starts to shake and a deep roar fills the very fabric of reality, and I huddle over my cat to try to protect her maybe just maybe...
...and then I wake up. (In real life, IIRC, the tornado lifted up, roped out, and dissipated just before it got to us—wasn't actually close enough to shake the ground, but close enough to hear. Hard to see, because it was pitch fuckin' black like midnight, but I can still remember the ominous, absolutely gigantic ridiculous huge towering black blot stretching up into the sky...)
I was going to attribute this purely to fear, but perhaps it is related to "checking" after all. I don't recall the dreams starting until I was old enough to watch a weather radar, and ever since I've watched that sucker like a hawk every time a storm is on the way.
The effect of medication on dreaming might be worth investigating as well. I almost never dream while I'm taking anti-depressants. ...Which is unfortunate, seeing as dreaming is so much more interesting than being awake, even if they are nightmares. I still remember that one time I got stabbed through the shoulder with a katana. Didn't hurt as much as I thought it would, obviously.
"I huddle over my cat to try to protect her maybe just maybe..." Too real by half.
I wonder if the intensity of that experience imprinted on you so much that it drowns out all other fears, at least in your subconscious. I've never experienced a natural disaster (except for drought which is really just an annoyance in the first world); all of my scariest waking experiences have been connected, at least in part, to me forgetting things, and thus it makes sense that my most frequent dreams are the "I enrolled in a class and forgot to attend" or "I forgot my homework" varieties.
Strangely, I never had close encounters with tornados, but I dream of them now and then, tens of times. I don't hear the sound, but the special effects have gone as far as the tornado hitting a high-rise building where I stand in the dream, making it wobble, and I feel the lift created by the rising air current, even though the dream house, thank goodness, stays intact. The dream situations are different: once it was a classical smoke experiment setting where everyone else in the room was ignoring the tornado and the wobbling house and I was the only one finally running downstairs; another time I ran from a tornado, almost escaped, then realized I had left my kids in a house now destroyed by the damned weather event, turned around to run back with barely any hope left... it's recommendable to wake up at this point.
I have this condition. Not diagnosed, but I have it. Sometimes the "noises" wake me up and occasionally I think they were real for a short time.
I would never have guessed for a second, though, that it would be called "Exploding Head Syndrome". That's like calling mild myopia "Utter and Terrifying Blindness".
Also very bad at remembering such things (feels like I have a hard cap of 3 slots for such things, and not everything can go in an electronic aide). But I have the opposite reaction - I am nervous because it's very likely that I am indeed forgetting something I need to do. I'm not very stress prone in general, so I'm not terribly anxious about this unless I have a large number of important things to remember in a short time. I do have those dreams occasionally though, often with childhood themes (e.g. end of high school exam, and not forgetting to file my taxes).
Tangentially related, I'd be curious what the correlates of this character trait are. Personality and otherwise. And also the specific mitigations people use. Let's start a thread about it! :)
As mentioned - I had to embrace the electronic helpers early on. Never could work okish with analogue stuff like calendars, agendas, post-its and so forth. My electronic life is pretty well organized while my physical desks always looked cluttered at best and were piles of 3 years old docs pretty often.
Electronic helpers alone is not enough unfortunately. I've implemented an optimized a set of cloud service, computer, smartphone, smartwatch and processes for when and how and how often I set appointments, reminders etc. So I think up-front about the actual event, how many preparation in advance I need to do, how long it will take to travel to the location / setup the environment etc.pp.
On the other side I have disabled ANY other notification on my gear of news sites, Teams, WebEx, any other apps, games, even eMail - because its a medium I want to use on my own terms and not having to react when I'm not prepared to. So I get only alarms (for waking up, preparing the kids for school), a couple of reminders for appointments, pop ups sleeping in the notification bar for Todos, and notifications for messengers I use to stay in touch with friends. All that is happening mostly silent or vibrating on my smartwatch were I can have a short glance and see if its fluff of friends or an important appointment coming up.
What do you do about reminders not triggered by time. E.g. "when I see this friend, I need to return that thing they lent me." Or "I need to buy new shirts"?
And what about things you don't have time to put into your system? E.g. when cooking, there are a lot of actions that need to be performed, and if I'm roasting nuts while chopping a salad I need to remember to stir them every minute or so.
And ditto about cluttered desk (still!) but very organized digital folders, calendar, etc.
Good that you're asking about the kitchen: We only introduced Alexa smart speakers last year - but those were the best 25 bucks (per speaker) invested in a long time. Even wife and daughter (both hating but defending their todos on flying pieces of papers) who were complaining "about that damn computer" are now happily commanding our fleet of Alexas. At any period of 5-15 minutes in the kitchen we put a couple of things on our shopping list by saying "Alex, put X on the list". During grocery shopping we just go through the list in the Alexa App. Alexa can manage multiple named lists if necessary. We let Alexa turn and tune the lights. We run timers "Alexa, timer 10 minutes" - the speaker is showing the countdown and alarming when it fires off. then we stop it by "Alexa, stop". We set all kinds of further Alarms for cooking, baking, on-time or re-ocuring reminders for medication, kids preparing to school asf. I sometimes even set reminders for a kid at home from remote to remind it to do something while I'm away and not able to call. One of the mostly used feature is the Alexa speakers being the least expensive Multi-Room-Audio system - with free unlimited Spotify-like Radio. We permanently ask "Alexa, play Song XYZ" or "Alexa, play music of artist ABC" and it does exactly that continuing with more songs from the artist or fitting the mood or so. Way more comfortable and less expensive then a Spotify or Youtube prime subscription on your smartphone. From time to time Alex tries to sell us the Amazon music subscription but is letting her to stop instantly. Kids are asking Alexa from time to time so trivial pursuit questions. If its getting more complicated, we run one of the many Free-of-Charge skills which lets us talk with ChatGPT for free. So its like "Alexa, run AI" - "Hi - this is your AI, what you wane discuss today" - and its a handsfree conversation with ChatGPT. This was possible long before OpenAI announced its own hands-free mode.
All that is hands free without any smartphone.
Then you asked - How to remind giving something back to a friend or other situational reminders. There are smartphone apps trying to do this based on your actual location - but I'm still to paranoid letting random apps track my locations all the time. But I use Microsoft todo app to remind me around a time or an event to remember Xyz. Generally I have really good experience with real-world situational reminders. For example I mainly pay for short term parking fees by using a popular parking app - and often forgot to cancel it when leaving. These days I put something unusual on to the steering wheel and know in an instant I have to cancel the parking app when I come back. So I mostly will try to find a virtual or physical related thing/action/reminder to that meeting a friend etc. Its more like proper processes built around my cheesy brain. Putting "abc needs a new shirt" onto the shopping list is like a situational reminder as well. We dont buy shirts in the grocery store but the next time we are in a mall (doesn't happen all to often) we go through the list as well and see the shirt.
Given how much brainspace is used for social stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if those common dreams about "embarrassment of not being prepared for X" were centered around "fear of social disapproval."
When I had/have the "didn't prepare for a test/performance" dreams, it was rarely about "oh no I don't know the answer to number 4!", the parts I remember after waking are the "other people had expectations for me, and are now disappointed."
I agree. I think most anxiety dreams are about reinforcing social norms into memory. Feeling shame over failure to live up to one's responsibilities is a common dream theme.
If the root of these social dreams is an experience of shame, in a more ruthless society than ours losing teeth may be the literal origin of "losing face". Prehistorically, when people didn't live long, you were more likely to lose teeth from losing a fight badly than from gum disease. Getting disfigured in a fight was shameful. Way worse than walking around naked.
oh yeah, I didn't even think about that in the context of the losing teeth one, you're totally right, that fits the model.
We associate "food" with "rewards" and certainly in an earlier society, someone losing their teeth will have trouble eating food, and symbolically (or maybe the dream goes back so far that it is "literally" from when we were creatures who needed their teeth to hunt) incapable of providing for the tribe. Plus your smile, a key feature for persuading others that you're on their side, and not a threat to them, is now less appealing - a very important thing back then.
Dogs obviously have dreams about chasing prey. Do wolves have nightmares about losing their teeth?
Reinforcing social compliance seems spot on to me: just as social anxiety generally makes sense (we have much more control, historically, over not being cast out than over external threats) so do those dreams. They remind people to take care of their reputation basically.
Somewhat by-negation anecdata: my social anxiety is low by human standards and I don't have "humiliated or fast out" dreams, and didn't have them as a teenager either, my recurring unpleasant dreams are either about physical threats or about responsibility for others (so essentially I will die or I don't save others from dying).
Makes sense, but why are these dreams about certain specific situations only? At least for me. For example, I never have dreams about missing a deadline at work, even though it's quite a salient fear for me, but still get dreams about being unprepared for something at school.
I am not a brainologist, but I assume that for your sleeping brain, they basically are in the same category of emotion, and it happening "at school" was just the scenario you remembered first, back when your brain was forming? i.e. your waking brain can tell the difference between "unprepared at work" and "unprepared at school" but asleep brain thinks "same thing"?
As a professor, I find that I often have dreams about being unprepared to teach a class but never about being unprepared to take one. Perhaps I was the kind of student that eventually goes on to be a professor, and thus never felt unprepared as a student, but started getting that feeling for the first time later, and that’s the one that stuck for me, while other people got a similar thing stuck earlier.
It might be worth surveying people about whether it’s a college class or high school class or middle school class or what that they’re unprepared for in their dream.
I also teach at a college and have these dreams. But I only have them starting about 3 weeks before fall semester starts up until the start of the semester. I also occasionally have the dream that I am missing a class I signed up for, even decades after finishing my own studies. When I was young, my recurring dream always had to do with getting on the bus and realizing I forgot my socks. I had that dream a lot all through my youth and adolescence.
That should be testable. Certain people are "shameless", meaning they really put little or no value on what others think of them. Do these people have those kinds of dreams at lower rates than average?
> Given how much brainspace is used for social stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if those common dreams about "embarrassment of not being prepared for X" were centered around "fear of social disapproval."
I mean, I understand that The Website Formerly Known As Twitter is ever more of a verbal Thunderdome, but damn.
Agreed. It's been about 20 years since the last time I was in a play, but I still have dreams where I'm about to go onstage and I realize I never learned my lines, don't know what my cue is, and/or can't find the stage itself.
this is roughly how the un/underdressed dreams go for me. I'm in a situation where other people (potentially) exist and find myself without shoes or other clothing. There's no sense of shame or embarrassment, nor even a sense that *I* have made an error, just "ugh, now i have to manage other people's perceptions more carefully because i am marked as Other/Deviant"
yeah, that makes sense, I assume cultures that have totally different dress codes than us wouldn't dream about not having pants, but they might dream about forgetting the socially-appropriate hat or shoes or whatever.
I'm a "pathological lucid dreamer", of the kind Scott mentioned in his post Bad Dreams. Quoting him:
> Somewhat related to epic dreaming are pathological lucid dreams. Normal lucid dreams are fun experiences where you realize you’re dreaming, take control of the dream, and spend the rest of the dream riding dolphins or kissing supermodels. Pathological lucid dreamers realize that they’re dreaming, but this somehow turns the dream into a nightmare in which the dreamer is attacked by demonic figures, all while fully conscious and realizing the nature of the phenomenon. These dreamers report experiencing real pain from the attacks and sometimes go to great lengths to stay awake and avoid having to subject themselves to further dream attacks.
My recurring dreams are mostly nightmares, reflecting back on real-world traumatic events. I used to not know that, but as I 'unlocked' traumatic memories with a therapist, I now understand. There is one recurring nightmare I have that is not yet solved -- being swarmed by insects, enduring their very painful bites. I don't know if that relates to anything in the real world.
Among non-nightmares, the most common recurrence is needing to urinate and seeking for a suitable place to do it. That I can pretty trivially connect to a urination-related OCD theme.
I never had recurring dreams of being late, or being embarassed by being naked, or anything else that is a common genre. Although I have no internal nudity taboo and this doesn't sound embarassing to me at all. I remember _one_ dream of teeth falling out, and I didn't know that is a common theme.
Sorry to hear about your recurring nightmares. Have you thought about trying hypnosis? I successfully used hypnosis to deal with a non-nightmare dream scenario that would wake me up at 3 am the Monday before I had to go to work.
In regards to needing to urinate in your dreams, do you actually have to get up and pee?
I'm a type I diabetic, and if my blood glucose levels are running high, I'll need to get up to pee during the night. When I start looking for a bathroom in my dreams, I know it's time to wake up and go pee. So, this fits Scott's external stimuli hypothesis.
As for nightmares, I haven't had any since I was about six years old. But I remember that I had them frequently as a little child (a creature would come out from the washing machine in the basement and steal my mom away). After sixty years, I still prefer to sleep on my left side because that was how I slept with my back against the wall facing the door as a child. When I was about six years old, I was lucky enough to encounter a guardian entity in my dreams that showed me how to escape the cycle of nightmares. It showed me how to walk outside and explore the world outside my bedroom, and the nightmares couldn't follow me when I went out exploring. Since then, I haven't had nightmares — though some of my dreams may be disturbing, they're disturbing in nonterrifying ways.
Maybe, engaging in dream yoga might be interesting since you already got the lucid dreaming down.
> There is one recurring nightmare I have that is not yet solved -- being swarmed by insects, enduring their very painful bites. I don't know if that relates to anything in the real world.
Something somewhat similar appeared for me in meditation (randomly being eaten by maggots in my case). Imagine it's far less real than a lucid dream but the solution might be the same.
Being eaten/bitten/swarmed by insects isn't actually a problem unless we make it one same as with everything else. At least that's true from some frames (e.g. timeless, or self-less frames). This is somewhat what enlightenment is about. However, re-framing is something we often do to solve problems (e.g. thinking outside the box).
Gampopa's String of Pearls involves "seizing the dream" to become lucid in the dream. The practitioner continually reminds themself to see/imagine all perceptions and thoughts as a dream during the day. Then, they must go to sleep with a strong determination to recognize they are dreaming within the dream. Gampopa has a visualization practice with a mantra that's supposed to spontaneously produce the experience of lucid dreaming. There are more steps to this than that, though. I never tried this myself.
There's also a Tantric practice that utilizes our "third eye" to enter a state of lucid dreaming. The third eye is the patch of phosphene activity that's between your eyebrows above the level of your eyes. Not everyone seems to have this phosphene patch, but some people, myself included, have the perception of phosphene patterns around that spot when they close their eyes. If you can detect it, try to concentrate on that area when you close your eyes before sleep. Keep concentrating on it to try to stabilize the phosphene pattern so turns into a glowing ball of light. At some point, you'll enter the hypnogogic transition state before you black out into your initial sleep state. Try to hold on to the glowing patch in your hypnogogic state. You should still have some conscious will in the hypnogogic state, and you should try to clearly enunciate in your mind that you wish to have control of your dreams. It will likely take months of practice before you can will yourself to dream the themes you choose.
As I said, some people either don't have to have the third eye, or they're unable to perceive it. If you can't detect a patch of phosphene activity between your eyebrows, you're SOL for this method. :-)
But a quick Google turned up a couple of lectures by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche about Bön lucid dreaming practices.
Dream Yoga: Lucid dreaming from the Bön Buddhist tradition of Tibet
Interesting, I also have the "need to urinate" dream, typically when I have a full bladder in real life. Often, when I have the dream, I'll find a place and unleash an extraordinary jet blast of pee, and yet feel no relief; this prompts a moment of lucidity where I realize I'm dreaming, and then I wake up. I don't normally have lucid dreams otherwise.
Recently, I was dreaming that I was being strangled by someone much physically stronger than me, so that I stood no chance of overpowering him. I knew something else had to be done, immediately, and I came up with a pretty reasonable plan of how to get out of this situation. I don't know if the plan would work in real life, but it impressed me by being somewhat realistic when I woke up (as opposed to the nonsense we sometimes think when we dream).
This seems very related to this whole "be prepared" topic - like I tried to prepare for an real-life attack by coming up with a plan for countering it in a dream. But it's not like I have brain cells going "hey, I should check if I'm being strangled right now". Maybe dreams are related to preparedness in some broader way as well?
That's what I always figured, since most of mine seem to revolve around various threats that I've run into or could run into at various points in my life. It's the brain's prep-for-potential threats mechanism running on idle. A sort of 'danger room' (thanks Joey Miller below).
Of course, it's probably a lot of different things that can produce a dream--some of that, some of Scott's prospective memory thing (and in that sense it's a threat to prepare for), some of the body sensations he talks about. It's one of the reasons they're so bizarre.
Sort of makes sense to me; my only recurring dream is a nightmare wherein a tornado is coming, except unlike in real life, it's not lifting up and dissipating but just getting stronger & stronger. I often think about what I'd do if I knew one was coming now that I'm an adult, so... could be related.
Freud's theory of dreams was that a central purpose that dreams serve for the organism is to keep you asleep even though various disturbances might wake you up.
Sounds reasonable with physical sensations during sleep -- your brain confabulates in details so it "makes sense" rather than having the physical sensation wake you up. Many frightening memories and emotional recollections that provoke bodily sensations seem like they could be similar. (Sometimes people wake up sharply from a nightmare, other times the nightmare continues like you describe and the brain tries to make the details make sense...)
Freud took this really far: he said this is the *only* way dreams function, so therefore apparently-random dreams must really secretly be the brain's way of dealing with unconscious drives. I doubt that.
But maybe it is the case sometimes, and might be at least part of why evolution selected for dreaming in many organisms.
Being strangled seems connected to being suffocated, and I think many dreams are related to sleep paralysis and the inability to control one’s breath while sleeping. I often have dreams where I want to yell something but can’t get the breath out.
Sorry you have PTSD, but this is interesting to me, because years ago I was also diagnosed with PTSD, and I tell myself I overcame it, but hearing your dreams—I still also have violent dreams like this, and I’m usually escaping. I sense most people don’t have such violent dreams. Which I guess they do say that PTSD causes night terrors, which is violent dreams adjacent.
Thought #1: I can't overpower him, so I need to figure out something else.
Thought #2: There is no need to overpower him, I just need to stun / distract / blind him for a moment so that he'd drop me. He just needs pain and disorientation.
Thought #3: He is strangling me with his bare hands, so his face is literally at arm's length.
Thought #4: I could poke his eye with my finger.
Thought #5: Finger's not good enough, not that firm and not that sharp, more likely to break my finger than anything. What's the sharpest thing I can reach?
Thought #6: I have my keys in my pocket. I can reach them. I will strike the attacker in the eye with my key.
Don't think we haven't noticed that you kept the plan secret, just to make sure you do have the upper edge in case some ACX reader ever felt like strangling you. Good OpSec. Constant vigilance.
Interesting, my recurring dreams usually involved being trapped in some sort of fictional horror story that I’ve consumed recently. Compared to that, I don’t have any of the dreams you mentioned, except occasionally flying away from the fictional horror monsters.
I could see the flying dreams falling into the same category if there was a brain function whose sole purpose was to monitor if and when you need to put your foot down to catch yourself. Walking is one of those things that seems really easy once you learn how to do it, but there is probably a whole slew of processes running in the background doing things like checking your balance, where your legs are, what you need to move next, etc. If one of those is in a loop triggering saying 'you need to put your foot down and touch the ground soon', but you never do, it could feel like flying.
This is how most of my flying dreams feel. I'm running, then forget to put my feet down and just start flying.
My "flying dreams" involve taking bigger and bouncier strides, and having to take strides in mid-air to stay up. A bit like a cross between the way you can "run" in water, the way astronauts look like they move on the moon, and Flappy Bird.
Have you tried gliding down staircases? That's the best way to get to the bottom. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to glide back up to the top. ;-)
Oh, I hate that, too! Until recently, I couldn't read in my dreams, so I couldn't read which gate the next leg of my flight was at. Recently, I've begun to be able to read in my dreams, but I need bigger letters than the ones on the departure boards. Very annoying that my visual cortex isn't able to enhance the details of my dreams.
Mine sometimes involve flapping my elbows really hard like I'm doing the chicken dance. Or sometimes I just have to will myself up hard enough and I float.
I've had a reoccurring dream of rollerskating through the woods and realising that when I take a big breath I ascend until I'm rollerskating above the canopy. I think it's during a lucid dreaming phase.
Maybe causality is the other way: it could be that sleep contains virtual exploration/rollouts of RL episodes, in some of them things go wrong because you didn’t put on clothes, and prospective memory, which would’ve prevented it, is reinforced in these dreams, and when you’re awake, you don’t want to end up in one of these dreams, so you take actions that avoid branches that lead to being stuck far away from home/hotels a couple of minutes before Shabbat.
A weird thing - not sure how it fits: apparently, dreams of flying are mutually exclusive with dreams of breathing underwater. How can such an exclusion work in this system?
In the same person! I've asked this of everyone I meet, and those who fly never dream of underwater breathing, and vice versa. N~47 (I think more but I only kept notes since a few years back.)
Okay now this is interesting! Both the "flying away, realize you are untethered" feeling and the "wait, why am I drowning, I just need to breathe normally" feeling? Was this at a similar period in your life or you were flying as a child and now you breathe underwater as an adult? Do these seem like interchangeable sensations?
As a child, I had the I'm flying this is fun WHEEEEE dream a couple of times. This was a highly coveted dream-treat.
As an adult, my "flying" dreams are more like the ones described in the article. Sometimes I can jump/launch and I can sort of descend very slowly, go someplace if I manage to propel. I guess the sensation is closer to swimming but it definitely doesn't have the same feel as my swimming dreams.
My swimming dreams are like you described. Oh no, I'm underwater...omg I can actually breathe. I find I have these most in the morning. If I wake up and then go back to sleep I often have more vivid dreams. Sometimes this triggers my awareness that I am dreaming because I know you can't breathe underwater and I've had this dream enough times. A few times I've been able to dip in and out of the dream while being aware of my cheek against the pillow. They usually feel darker or more compressed if that makes sense.
They don't feel interchangeable.
It's really hard to write about dreams! The urge to invent logic to explain the nonsense is strong.
I guess I can do both. I haven't flown in my dreams, but I can jump long distances in a single bound. Also, I have frequent water dreams where I'm underwater, but I'm not thinking about breathing when I'm submerged.
I dream of both flying, and of breathing underwater.
They are both enjoyable kinds of dreams - in each case being there is effortless and fun - but the water ones are better because of the fish, which are generally gorgeous.
I've had both kinds of dreams as well. And I think they are both just linked to physical sensations.
The breathing underwater dreams actually became an easy path for me to lucid dream. As it was a reliable anchor point in any dream of "this is not real".
Breathing underwater I think is related to my sleep apnea. Once I got a CPAP machine those dreams drastically decreased. For those who don't know, sleep apnea usually involves short periods of not breathing, where your air passage is blocked. Which would be easy to associate with being underwater where you hold your breathe.
The falling dreams always happened at the start of the night when my muscles were relaxing. I'd often wake up with a "slam" into the ground where i have a sort of whole body twitch / spasm.
As an anecdote counter to yours, I've been in the ER multiple times for apnea-related atrial fibrillation and never had the breathing-underwater dreams.
I can't recall ever having a "breathing underwater" but I used to frequently have "flying" dreams which were more akin to "swimming through the air". I always chalked this up to the fact that I spent a *lot* of my childhood in pools (And early childhood, especially - I learned to swim before I was even potty trained), but maybe there's another link there.
I've had both on multiple occasions! But I dream a lot, and remember dreams a lot, and my dreams tend to be fantastical or terrifying (rather than mundane stresses, although have those too).
After reading all these comments, it appears that I just lacked datapoints :) also Cunninghams law going strong! In any case, there goes my theory of "quasi-unicity of feelings in the conceptual dreamspace".
The defunct theory postulated that we never dream of the same intense feeling in different ways.
> Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet
I don't know about you, but childhood me had very frequent dreams about monsters in the... well cupboard, because I'm British and the word "closet" isn't much used here, but it comes to the same thing.
One of my more frequent dreams nowadays is having to go on stage and perform a role that I haven't rehearsed for at all and can't remember any of the lines or music.
Same, in childhood I had plenty of dreams about all kinds of monsters. They even lasted for a few years after I've grown up enough to not be afraid of monsters in the waking life.
Though it's been little while since the last one I had, I too had dreams about monsters as a child and continued to have them occasionally into adulthood. I think on a deep level I never really stopped believing in monsters, so they show up from time to time in my dreams.
Monster dreams are claimed to be common among little kids, and there are also the non-REM 'sleep terrors' where the monster 'stays' for a while after the kid seems to be woken up. I once had to put on lights and search the room to prove to my kid that the wolf was gone.
I definitely get the “never went to class” one. Also, for some reason I’m in a high school that is definitely my high school but doesn’t look like it, and I’m a 38 year old adult with a Masters degree retaking a class.
The other common theme I get is “I’m getting ready to go somewhere but keep getting delayed/forgetting things” and by the time the dream ends I still haven’t left.
Both of these fit your “prospective memory model”!
I get those dreams about college. There's a class that I signed up for, went to a few times, but then missed a week for some reason I can't recall, then just forgot to go back. Now it's the end of the semester and....wait a minute, I graduated and have been working for over a decade now. That's pretty much always how it goes.
I’m curious about what era of school most people have this dream about. I don’t have it about taking classes, but I do have it about teaching classes (which I’ve done for the past 15 years). Some people seem to have it from high school and others from college. I wonder if some have it from earlier education and some have it from med school or law school or grad school or whatever.
I have it for both high school and college. Slightly more often high school. Never had it about law school. Though usually, it's the point in the dream where I start thinking wait, why do I have to go back to high school when I already have a law degree? that I'm about to wake up.
I still have it about high school and college, but never about grad school. I also have "I'm trying to teach, but it's all chaos" dreams (used to be a teacher). Usually in my school dreams I'll realize "wait, I'm a 4X year old man with a PhD, why the heck am I in AP Physics again?" And the dream will transition to something else.
But why the situations are always the same and often implausible? And solutions tend to never materialize or be equally implausible/impractical? Seems more like a problem-solving engine running idle, decoupled from its normal task inputs (sensory organs) and the means to actually solve anything (body).
From the experience it seems that most people's brains can solve the problem "how to not be naked in the public" just fine - when awake, that is. Same for things like tests, being on time for your flight and so on - most of the people successfully do it most of the time.
It would be interesting to see if dream themes correlate with personality at all. My partner, who is high on neuroticism and very good at remembering appointments/obligations (presumably they have many functional "homework neurons") nevertheless has very mundane dreams ("I went to the store and bought an apple." "I saw my friend and had a conversation.")
The prospective-memory theory sounds reasonable, but doesn't actually explain that very well by itself.
Long ago I read about a study indicating that boring dreams are a symptom of depression. Don't know how true it is but the measure has seemed accurate.
I have a recurring dream/nightmare that I've experienced since I was a teen. The details vary, but the central theme is the same. I'm in a hurry to get somewhere, I'm running, and suddenly, with no warning, I become completely enervated. I lose all strength in my legs, unable to run, I have to walk, then stagger, then fall down and desperately crawl. It's usually somewhere around this point that I wake up.
This really doesn't feel like it fits the theory, to me at least.
According to the cognitive theory of dreams, what happens in dreams is what we expect will happen. In waking life our predictions and expectations are corrected by objective feedback, but in our dreams there is no feedback so what we expect will happen is what does. From that perspective your dream indicates that you believe that you are vulnerable and incapable. You have goals but they are unreachable because you lack the ability to reach them. In short, on a deep level you expect that you will fail.
If you can recognize and change that belief then the dream may stop coming back.
I usually only have that with my lungs in my dream - I need to breathe harder or say something loudly, but my lungs won’t work. Both of these seem related to the fact that the dreaming mind wants to control the body but can’t due to sleep paralysis.
That sounds like possibly a similar phenomenon to sleep paralysis, where your brain notices that it can't move your body (since physical movement is suppressed during sleep), and freaks out about it.
This reminds me of something I experience in dreams occasionally, where I need to shout or scream for some reason, but I can't make any sound louder than a sort of hoarse, quiet, rasp
It's probably one of these overdetermined things. Some of it's sensation during sleep, some of it's that prospective memory thing you're talking about, some of it's random associations. My favorite theory is that some of it's preparation for dangerous situations you may encounter, since most of mine are about some kind of threat like getting fired.
Maybe interesting datapoint: I have ADHD and, as far as I can remember, I never had dreams about deadlines or not being prepared to the test, or stuff like this.
I was going to share this in the comments as well. ADHD, don't seem to have that prospective memory "dedicated loop", and also have never had a dream of this sort. Perhaps worth some follow-up polling to see if this these are related?
"You’d have to have some kind of brain cell or whatever on a dedicated loop, checking every few hours to see if there’s a homework assignment you’ve forgotten about."
My personal theory is dreams are video games your mind plays with your virtual body because the mind is bored while the real physical body needs rest and because this is a good time for the mind to “practice” navigating the body in preparation for real life challenges.
So basically dreams are virtual training and amusement.
Also I dreamt last night that my ex husband was still my husband and we were staying at a hotel in Atlanta and attending a conference. He started serial murdering women but no one realized it was him. I was so scared that I’d be next. Then I found a gun and started planning to take him out, because I feared if I didn’t, he’d kill me first.
One of the craziest dreams I’ve probably ever had.
It also involved riding the Atlanta subway into an apocalyptic wasteland by mistake, and a dreamy stranger guy who helped me load my gun.
The dreams where I suddenly find that I'm back with my ex husband somehow, or he's around and I don't know how to get away from him, are the worst nightmares I have. much worse than my frequent dreams about being attacked by bears. I have both of these several times a year at least, and the ex-husband back in my life one is far more terrifying.
My alarm clock requires me to jot down the dream I was having when I woke up. I did some stats on it and have seen some interesting trends :
The "first" of a category tends to be more common. Ex: I am more often in either my childhood home or the first place I had lived by myself than any other place (including my current one). The people I meet are more often childhood friends than people I currently know. My first dog (dead of more than 20 years) is more commonly here that any more recent pet.
I have been traumatized by school : many dreams about having forgotten to do my homework or having to do a test without having studied, going back to school (I have been outside the education system for more than 10 years now)
"Nightmares" tend to involve mundane fears : having my wallet stolen, missing a flight
Dreams involving my smartphone tends to be about struggles : failing to book a room in a hotel due to a confusing user experience, failing to find my train ticket, etc...
Teaching college courses for a few years as a grad student permanently (it seems) rewired my "it's the last day of class and I haven't been all semester and now I have to take the final" dreams into "walking into a classroom unprepared to teach" dreams. (For example, I once dreamed I suddenly was teaching the first day of 5th grade.)
That would be a very good reasoning why I dont have (or cant remember) any such dreams the past decades. I'm just so bad in remembering and reminding my duties that I either have to instantly fire it into a electronic reminder/calendar thingy and forget or I need to get used to doing it regulary (brushing teeth). So I don't have this regular "I need to remember this or that" thing at all - which is a great piece of mind I can recommend to anybody. I have to ask kids and wife - which are dreaming a lot - and the later is just littering everything with pieces of paper with random todos.
Another reason could be that I use a tiny dose of a Z-Drug (2.5g, Zolpidem each night so I can fall asleep without two hours of endless thought circles...
"so I can fall asleep without two hours of endless thought circles..."
Are the the worry-thoughts that people have when trying to fall asleep ... just pre-dreams? Just that they're way more coherent because you're conscious, and when you have them asleep, they're disjointed and dreamy because those "make thoughts coherent" part of your brain is off?
Add some ashwaganda and you’ll probably recall your dreams. I’m sure someone on this forum knows why ashwaganda has the effect, but I couldn’t tell you why.
The thought circles of my first 4 decades were mostly just endless streams of associations, curiousitiy, recalls of situations, the day, things I had read or seen. Never got diagnosed but I might carry a AD(H)D spectrum brain. I tried like 90 percent of recommended things from meditation, self hypnosis, autogene training, sports, no sports, no blue light, no media, no blue light, all kinds of natural substances - but only this 2.5-5g of Zolpidem lets me really sleep especially after any social event in the night like a party, a networking event, meeting friends, watching a film...
I'm bad at remembering such things but also don't really bother to write things down consistently; never have such dreams either—in my case, maybe this is a sign that I don't really care deep down, or something. (Or else it's the buprenorphine; had terrible insomnia till I got on it, and now I can fall asleep any time any where! It's great.)
I've only ever had a single recurring dream, which I've probably had a good two dozen times. When I was a child, I had a close call with a notorious F5 tornado (Jarrell), and ever since I have—maybe once a year—had dreams wherein the tornado is getting closer and closer, and the wind starts to rise and wail, and the ground starts to shake and a deep roar fills the very fabric of reality, and I huddle over my cat to try to protect her maybe just maybe...
...and then I wake up. (In real life, IIRC, the tornado lifted up, roped out, and dissipated just before it got to us—wasn't actually close enough to shake the ground, but close enough to hear. Hard to see, because it was pitch fuckin' black like midnight, but I can still remember the ominous, absolutely gigantic ridiculous huge towering black blot stretching up into the sky...)
I was going to attribute this purely to fear, but perhaps it is related to "checking" after all. I don't recall the dreams starting until I was old enough to watch a weather radar, and ever since I've watched that sucker like a hawk every time a storm is on the way.
The effect of medication on dreaming might be worth investigating as well. I almost never dream while I'm taking anti-depressants. ...Which is unfortunate, seeing as dreaming is so much more interesting than being awake, even if they are nightmares. I still remember that one time I got stabbed through the shoulder with a katana. Didn't hurt as much as I thought it would, obviously.
"I huddle over my cat to try to protect her maybe just maybe..." Too real by half.
I wonder if the intensity of that experience imprinted on you so much that it drowns out all other fears, at least in your subconscious. I've never experienced a natural disaster (except for drought which is really just an annoyance in the first world); all of my scariest waking experiences have been connected, at least in part, to me forgetting things, and thus it makes sense that my most frequent dreams are the "I enrolled in a class and forgot to attend" or "I forgot my homework" varieties.
Strangely, I never had close encounters with tornados, but I dream of them now and then, tens of times. I don't hear the sound, but the special effects have gone as far as the tornado hitting a high-rise building where I stand in the dream, making it wobble, and I feel the lift created by the rising air current, even though the dream house, thank goodness, stays intact. The dream situations are different: once it was a classical smoke experiment setting where everyone else in the room was ignoring the tornado and the wobbling house and I was the only one finally running downstairs; another time I ran from a tornado, almost escaped, then realized I had left my kids in a house now destroyed by the damned weather event, turned around to run back with barely any hope left... it's recommendable to wake up at this point.
They name tornados? And they name them Jarrell!?!
Yep, same. Came here to say this as well. Feels likely.
More dream content, Scott, please! Hypnagogia is nuts. Have you seen this wild wikipedia page? It's real! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome
I have this condition. Not diagnosed, but I have it. Sometimes the "noises" wake me up and occasionally I think they were real for a short time.
I would never have guessed for a second, though, that it would be called "Exploding Head Syndrome". That's like calling mild myopia "Utter and Terrifying Blindness".
Also very bad at remembering such things (feels like I have a hard cap of 3 slots for such things, and not everything can go in an electronic aide). But I have the opposite reaction - I am nervous because it's very likely that I am indeed forgetting something I need to do. I'm not very stress prone in general, so I'm not terribly anxious about this unless I have a large number of important things to remember in a short time. I do have those dreams occasionally though, often with childhood themes (e.g. end of high school exam, and not forgetting to file my taxes).
Tangentially related, I'd be curious what the correlates of this character trait are. Personality and otherwise. And also the specific mitigations people use. Let's start a thread about it! :)
As mentioned - I had to embrace the electronic helpers early on. Never could work okish with analogue stuff like calendars, agendas, post-its and so forth. My electronic life is pretty well organized while my physical desks always looked cluttered at best and were piles of 3 years old docs pretty often.
Electronic helpers alone is not enough unfortunately. I've implemented an optimized a set of cloud service, computer, smartphone, smartwatch and processes for when and how and how often I set appointments, reminders etc. So I think up-front about the actual event, how many preparation in advance I need to do, how long it will take to travel to the location / setup the environment etc.pp.
On the other side I have disabled ANY other notification on my gear of news sites, Teams, WebEx, any other apps, games, even eMail - because its a medium I want to use on my own terms and not having to react when I'm not prepared to. So I get only alarms (for waking up, preparing the kids for school), a couple of reminders for appointments, pop ups sleeping in the notification bar for Todos, and notifications for messengers I use to stay in touch with friends. All that is happening mostly silent or vibrating on my smartwatch were I can have a short glance and see if its fluff of friends or an important appointment coming up.
What do you do about reminders not triggered by time. E.g. "when I see this friend, I need to return that thing they lent me." Or "I need to buy new shirts"?
And what about things you don't have time to put into your system? E.g. when cooking, there are a lot of actions that need to be performed, and if I'm roasting nuts while chopping a salad I need to remember to stir them every minute or so.
And ditto about cluttered desk (still!) but very organized digital folders, calendar, etc.
Good that you're asking about the kitchen: We only introduced Alexa smart speakers last year - but those were the best 25 bucks (per speaker) invested in a long time. Even wife and daughter (both hating but defending their todos on flying pieces of papers) who were complaining "about that damn computer" are now happily commanding our fleet of Alexas. At any period of 5-15 minutes in the kitchen we put a couple of things on our shopping list by saying "Alex, put X on the list". During grocery shopping we just go through the list in the Alexa App. Alexa can manage multiple named lists if necessary. We let Alexa turn and tune the lights. We run timers "Alexa, timer 10 minutes" - the speaker is showing the countdown and alarming when it fires off. then we stop it by "Alexa, stop". We set all kinds of further Alarms for cooking, baking, on-time or re-ocuring reminders for medication, kids preparing to school asf. I sometimes even set reminders for a kid at home from remote to remind it to do something while I'm away and not able to call. One of the mostly used feature is the Alexa speakers being the least expensive Multi-Room-Audio system - with free unlimited Spotify-like Radio. We permanently ask "Alexa, play Song XYZ" or "Alexa, play music of artist ABC" and it does exactly that continuing with more songs from the artist or fitting the mood or so. Way more comfortable and less expensive then a Spotify or Youtube prime subscription on your smartphone. From time to time Alex tries to sell us the Amazon music subscription but is letting her to stop instantly. Kids are asking Alexa from time to time so trivial pursuit questions. If its getting more complicated, we run one of the many Free-of-Charge skills which lets us talk with ChatGPT for free. So its like "Alexa, run AI" - "Hi - this is your AI, what you wane discuss today" - and its a handsfree conversation with ChatGPT. This was possible long before OpenAI announced its own hands-free mode.
All that is hands free without any smartphone.
Then you asked - How to remind giving something back to a friend or other situational reminders. There are smartphone apps trying to do this based on your actual location - but I'm still to paranoid letting random apps track my locations all the time. But I use Microsoft todo app to remind me around a time or an event to remember Xyz. Generally I have really good experience with real-world situational reminders. For example I mainly pay for short term parking fees by using a popular parking app - and often forgot to cancel it when leaving. These days I put something unusual on to the steering wheel and know in an instant I have to cancel the parking app when I come back. So I mostly will try to find a virtual or physical related thing/action/reminder to that meeting a friend etc. Its more like proper processes built around my cheesy brain. Putting "abc needs a new shirt" onto the shopping list is like a situational reminder as well. We dont buy shirts in the grocery store but the next time we are in a mall (doesn't happen all to often) we go through the list as well and see the shirt.
Given how much brainspace is used for social stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if those common dreams about "embarrassment of not being prepared for X" were centered around "fear of social disapproval."
When I had/have the "didn't prepare for a test/performance" dreams, it was rarely about "oh no I don't know the answer to number 4!", the parts I remember after waking are the "other people had expectations for me, and are now disappointed."
I agree. I think most anxiety dreams are about reinforcing social norms into memory. Feeling shame over failure to live up to one's responsibilities is a common dream theme.
If the root of these social dreams is an experience of shame, in a more ruthless society than ours losing teeth may be the literal origin of "losing face". Prehistorically, when people didn't live long, you were more likely to lose teeth from losing a fight badly than from gum disease. Getting disfigured in a fight was shameful. Way worse than walking around naked.
oh yeah, I didn't even think about that in the context of the losing teeth one, you're totally right, that fits the model.
We associate "food" with "rewards" and certainly in an earlier society, someone losing their teeth will have trouble eating food, and symbolically (or maybe the dream goes back so far that it is "literally" from when we were creatures who needed their teeth to hunt) incapable of providing for the tribe. Plus your smile, a key feature for persuading others that you're on their side, and not a threat to them, is now less appealing - a very important thing back then.
Dogs obviously have dreams about chasing prey. Do wolves have nightmares about losing their teeth?
> maybe the dream goes back so far that it is "literally" from when we were creatures who needed their teeth to hunt
I don't think any member of Homo ever used its teeth to hunt.
no, but the things we were before that did, and I assume they had dreams about it.
Reinforcing social compliance seems spot on to me: just as social anxiety generally makes sense (we have much more control, historically, over not being cast out than over external threats) so do those dreams. They remind people to take care of their reputation basically.
Somewhat by-negation anecdata: my social anxiety is low by human standards and I don't have "humiliated or fast out" dreams, and didn't have them as a teenager either, my recurring unpleasant dreams are either about physical threats or about responsibility for others (so essentially I will die or I don't save others from dying).
That would make sense to me, anyway! Do we have any data on Big 5 personality traits (neuroticism?) vs "types of dreams/nightmares" you have?
Makes sense, but why are these dreams about certain specific situations only? At least for me. For example, I never have dreams about missing a deadline at work, even though it's quite a salient fear for me, but still get dreams about being unprepared for something at school.
I am not a brainologist, but I assume that for your sleeping brain, they basically are in the same category of emotion, and it happening "at school" was just the scenario you remembered first, back when your brain was forming? i.e. your waking brain can tell the difference between "unprepared at work" and "unprepared at school" but asleep brain thinks "same thing"?
As a professor, I find that I often have dreams about being unprepared to teach a class but never about being unprepared to take one. Perhaps I was the kind of student that eventually goes on to be a professor, and thus never felt unprepared as a student, but started getting that feeling for the first time later, and that’s the one that stuck for me, while other people got a similar thing stuck earlier.
It might be worth surveying people about whether it’s a college class or high school class or middle school class or what that they’re unprepared for in their dream.
I also teach at a college and have these dreams. But I only have them starting about 3 weeks before fall semester starts up until the start of the semester. I also occasionally have the dream that I am missing a class I signed up for, even decades after finishing my own studies. When I was young, my recurring dream always had to do with getting on the bus and realizing I forgot my socks. I had that dream a lot all through my youth and adolescence.
That should be testable. Certain people are "shameless", meaning they really put little or no value on what others think of them. Do these people have those kinds of dreams at lower rates than average?
> Given how much brainspace is used for social stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if those common dreams about "embarrassment of not being prepared for X" were centered around "fear of social disapproval."
I mean, I understand that The Website Formerly Known As Twitter is ever more of a verbal Thunderdome, but damn.
(I jest, I jest, I know what you meant)
haha I refuse to call it the new name, because I need to use "X" for variable names!
*centuries of mathematicians adopting X as their variable name*
"But they were, all of them, deceived."
*Elon Musk forging the source code of X in the fires of Mount Doom and laughing*
Agreed. It's been about 20 years since the last time I was in a play, but I still have dreams where I'm about to go onstage and I realize I never learned my lines, don't know what my cue is, and/or can't find the stage itself.
This is me 100%
this is roughly how the un/underdressed dreams go for me. I'm in a situation where other people (potentially) exist and find myself without shoes or other clothing. There's no sense of shame or embarrassment, nor even a sense that *I* have made an error, just "ugh, now i have to manage other people's perceptions more carefully because i am marked as Other/Deviant"
yeah, that makes sense, I assume cultures that have totally different dress codes than us wouldn't dream about not having pants, but they might dream about forgetting the socially-appropriate hat or shoes or whatever.
I'll add myself to the datapoints here.
I'm a "pathological lucid dreamer", of the kind Scott mentioned in his post Bad Dreams. Quoting him:
> Somewhat related to epic dreaming are pathological lucid dreams. Normal lucid dreams are fun experiences where you realize you’re dreaming, take control of the dream, and spend the rest of the dream riding dolphins or kissing supermodels. Pathological lucid dreamers realize that they’re dreaming, but this somehow turns the dream into a nightmare in which the dreamer is attacked by demonic figures, all while fully conscious and realizing the nature of the phenomenon. These dreamers report experiencing real pain from the attacks and sometimes go to great lengths to stay awake and avoid having to subject themselves to further dream attacks.
My recurring dreams are mostly nightmares, reflecting back on real-world traumatic events. I used to not know that, but as I 'unlocked' traumatic memories with a therapist, I now understand. There is one recurring nightmare I have that is not yet solved -- being swarmed by insects, enduring their very painful bites. I don't know if that relates to anything in the real world.
Among non-nightmares, the most common recurrence is needing to urinate and seeking for a suitable place to do it. That I can pretty trivially connect to a urination-related OCD theme.
I never had recurring dreams of being late, or being embarassed by being naked, or anything else that is a common genre. Although I have no internal nudity taboo and this doesn't sound embarassing to me at all. I remember _one_ dream of teeth falling out, and I didn't know that is a common theme.
Sorry to hear about your recurring nightmares. Have you thought about trying hypnosis? I successfully used hypnosis to deal with a non-nightmare dream scenario that would wake me up at 3 am the Monday before I had to go to work.
In regards to needing to urinate in your dreams, do you actually have to get up and pee?
I'm a type I diabetic, and if my blood glucose levels are running high, I'll need to get up to pee during the night. When I start looking for a bathroom in my dreams, I know it's time to wake up and go pee. So, this fits Scott's external stimuli hypothesis.
As for nightmares, I haven't had any since I was about six years old. But I remember that I had them frequently as a little child (a creature would come out from the washing machine in the basement and steal my mom away). After sixty years, I still prefer to sleep on my left side because that was how I slept with my back against the wall facing the door as a child. When I was about six years old, I was lucky enough to encounter a guardian entity in my dreams that showed me how to escape the cycle of nightmares. It showed me how to walk outside and explore the world outside my bedroom, and the nightmares couldn't follow me when I went out exploring. Since then, I haven't had nightmares — though some of my dreams may be disturbing, they're disturbing in nonterrifying ways.
Maybe, engaging in dream yoga might be interesting since you already got the lucid dreaming down.
> There is one recurring nightmare I have that is not yet solved -- being swarmed by insects, enduring their very painful bites. I don't know if that relates to anything in the real world.
Something somewhat similar appeared for me in meditation (randomly being eaten by maggots in my case). Imagine it's far less real than a lucid dream but the solution might be the same.
Being eaten/bitten/swarmed by insects isn't actually a problem unless we make it one same as with everything else. At least that's true from some frames (e.g. timeless, or self-less frames). This is somewhat what enlightenment is about. However, re-framing is something we often do to solve problems (e.g. thinking outside the box).
I haven't heard of dream yoga, what source on it do you find most helpful?
There are some Buddhist yogic practices for dreaming meditation. Check out Gampopa's _A String of Pearls_
https://dharmaebooks.org/a-string-of-pearls/
Gampopa's String of Pearls involves "seizing the dream" to become lucid in the dream. The practitioner continually reminds themself to see/imagine all perceptions and thoughts as a dream during the day. Then, they must go to sleep with a strong determination to recognize they are dreaming within the dream. Gampopa has a visualization practice with a mantra that's supposed to spontaneously produce the experience of lucid dreaming. There are more steps to this than that, though. I never tried this myself.
There's also a Tantric practice that utilizes our "third eye" to enter a state of lucid dreaming. The third eye is the patch of phosphene activity that's between your eyebrows above the level of your eyes. Not everyone seems to have this phosphene patch, but some people, myself included, have the perception of phosphene patterns around that spot when they close their eyes. If you can detect it, try to concentrate on that area when you close your eyes before sleep. Keep concentrating on it to try to stabilize the phosphene pattern so turns into a glowing ball of light. At some point, you'll enter the hypnogogic transition state before you black out into your initial sleep state. Try to hold on to the glowing patch in your hypnogogic state. You should still have some conscious will in the hypnogogic state, and you should try to clearly enunciate in your mind that you wish to have control of your dreams. It will likely take months of practice before you can will yourself to dream the themes you choose.
As I said, some people either don't have to have the third eye, or they're unable to perceive it. If you can't detect a patch of phosphene activity between your eyebrows, you're SOL for this method. :-)
But a quick Google turned up a couple of lectures by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche about Bön lucid dreaming practices.
Dream Yoga: Lucid dreaming from the Bön Buddhist tradition of Tibet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0UTQ2SdZJg
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche ~ The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream & Sleep
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vFm19Oqak4
Good luck!
Thank you for this, I'll try
Interesting, I also have the "need to urinate" dream, typically when I have a full bladder in real life. Often, when I have the dream, I'll find a place and unleash an extraordinary jet blast of pee, and yet feel no relief; this prompts a moment of lucidity where I realize I'm dreaming, and then I wake up. I don't normally have lucid dreams otherwise.
Do you also have OCD?
I am diagnosed with a complex PTSD.
Recently, I was dreaming that I was being strangled by someone much physically stronger than me, so that I stood no chance of overpowering him. I knew something else had to be done, immediately, and I came up with a pretty reasonable plan of how to get out of this situation. I don't know if the plan would work in real life, but it impressed me by being somewhat realistic when I woke up (as opposed to the nonsense we sometimes think when we dream).
This seems very related to this whole "be prepared" topic - like I tried to prepare for an real-life attack by coming up with a plan for countering it in a dream. But it's not like I have brain cells going "hey, I should check if I'm being strangled right now". Maybe dreams are related to preparedness in some broader way as well?
That's what I always figured, since most of mine seem to revolve around various threats that I've run into or could run into at various points in my life. It's the brain's prep-for-potential threats mechanism running on idle. A sort of 'danger room' (thanks Joey Miller below).
Of course, it's probably a lot of different things that can produce a dream--some of that, some of Scott's prospective memory thing (and in that sense it's a threat to prepare for), some of the body sensations he talks about. It's one of the reasons they're so bizarre.
yep this fits my model. dreams are for simulated problem solving (or task learning generally). self-play for reinforcement learning.
Sort of makes sense to me; my only recurring dream is a nightmare wherein a tornado is coming, except unlike in real life, it's not lifting up and dissipating but just getting stronger & stronger. I often think about what I'd do if I knew one was coming now that I'm an adult, so... could be related.
Freud's theory of dreams was that a central purpose that dreams serve for the organism is to keep you asleep even though various disturbances might wake you up.
Sounds reasonable with physical sensations during sleep -- your brain confabulates in details so it "makes sense" rather than having the physical sensation wake you up. Many frightening memories and emotional recollections that provoke bodily sensations seem like they could be similar. (Sometimes people wake up sharply from a nightmare, other times the nightmare continues like you describe and the brain tries to make the details make sense...)
Freud took this really far: he said this is the *only* way dreams function, so therefore apparently-random dreams must really secretly be the brain's way of dealing with unconscious drives. I doubt that.
But maybe it is the case sometimes, and might be at least part of why evolution selected for dreaming in many organisms.
Being strangled seems connected to being suffocated, and I think many dreams are related to sleep paralysis and the inability to control one’s breath while sleeping. I often have dreams where I want to yell something but can’t get the breath out.
Yes!
Sorry you have PTSD, but this is interesting to me, because years ago I was also diagnosed with PTSD, and I tell myself I overcame it, but hearing your dreams—I still also have violent dreams like this, and I’m usually escaping. I sense most people don’t have such violent dreams. Which I guess they do say that PTSD causes night terrors, which is violent dreams adjacent.
What was your plan for escaping from a stronger attacker?
Thought #1: I can't overpower him, so I need to figure out something else.
Thought #2: There is no need to overpower him, I just need to stun / distract / blind him for a moment so that he'd drop me. He just needs pain and disorientation.
Thought #3: He is strangling me with his bare hands, so his face is literally at arm's length.
Thought #4: I could poke his eye with my finger.
Thought #5: Finger's not good enough, not that firm and not that sharp, more likely to break my finger than anything. What's the sharpest thing I can reach?
Thought #6: I have my keys in my pocket. I can reach them. I will strike the attacker in the eye with my key.
Don't think we haven't noticed that you kept the plan secret, just to make sure you do have the upper edge in case some ACX reader ever felt like strangling you. Good OpSec. Constant vigilance.
Interesting, my recurring dreams usually involved being trapped in some sort of fictional horror story that I’ve consumed recently. Compared to that, I don’t have any of the dreams you mentioned, except occasionally flying away from the fictional horror monsters.
I could see the flying dreams falling into the same category if there was a brain function whose sole purpose was to monitor if and when you need to put your foot down to catch yourself. Walking is one of those things that seems really easy once you learn how to do it, but there is probably a whole slew of processes running in the background doing things like checking your balance, where your legs are, what you need to move next, etc. If one of those is in a loop triggering saying 'you need to put your foot down and touch the ground soon', but you never do, it could feel like flying.
This is how most of my flying dreams feel. I'm running, then forget to put my feet down and just start flying.
My "flying dreams" involve taking bigger and bouncier strides, and having to take strides in mid-air to stay up. A bit like a cross between the way you can "run" in water, the way astronauts look like they move on the moon, and Flappy Bird.
Have you tried gliding down staircases? That's the best way to get to the bottom. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to glide back up to the top. ;-)
Y'all are lucky. My flying dreams inevitably involve being stuck in the back of Economy wondering whether I'm still going to make my connection.
Oh, I hate that, too! Until recently, I couldn't read in my dreams, so I couldn't read which gate the next leg of my flight was at. Recently, I've begun to be able to read in my dreams, but I need bigger letters than the ones on the departure boards. Very annoying that my visual cortex isn't able to enhance the details of my dreams.
Mine sometimes involve flapping my elbows really hard like I'm doing the chicken dance. Or sometimes I just have to will myself up hard enough and I float.
I've had a reoccurring dream of rollerskating through the woods and realising that when I take a big breath I ascend until I'm rollerskating above the canopy. I think it's during a lucid dreaming phase.
Maybe causality is the other way: it could be that sleep contains virtual exploration/rollouts of RL episodes, in some of them things go wrong because you didn’t put on clothes, and prospective memory, which would’ve prevented it, is reinforced in these dreams, and when you’re awake, you don’t want to end up in one of these dreams, so you take actions that avoid branches that lead to being stuck far away from home/hotels a couple of minutes before Shabbat.
A weird thing - not sure how it fits: apparently, dreams of flying are mutually exclusive with dreams of breathing underwater. How can such an exclusion work in this system?
Like in the same person, or in the same dream? Flying underwater is just swimming.
In the same person! I've asked this of everyone I meet, and those who fly never dream of underwater breathing, and vice versa. N~47 (I think more but I only kept notes since a few years back.)
I dream both!
Okay now this is interesting! Both the "flying away, realize you are untethered" feeling and the "wait, why am I drowning, I just need to breathe normally" feeling? Was this at a similar period in your life or you were flying as a child and now you breathe underwater as an adult? Do these seem like interchangeable sensations?
As a child, I had the I'm flying this is fun WHEEEEE dream a couple of times. This was a highly coveted dream-treat.
As an adult, my "flying" dreams are more like the ones described in the article. Sometimes I can jump/launch and I can sort of descend very slowly, go someplace if I manage to propel. I guess the sensation is closer to swimming but it definitely doesn't have the same feel as my swimming dreams.
My swimming dreams are like you described. Oh no, I'm underwater...omg I can actually breathe. I find I have these most in the morning. If I wake up and then go back to sleep I often have more vivid dreams. Sometimes this triggers my awareness that I am dreaming because I know you can't breathe underwater and I've had this dream enough times. A few times I've been able to dip in and out of the dream while being aware of my cheek against the pillow. They usually feel darker or more compressed if that makes sense.
They don't feel interchangeable.
It's really hard to write about dreams! The urge to invent logic to explain the nonsense is strong.
I guess I can do both. I haven't flown in my dreams, but I can jump long distances in a single bound. Also, I have frequent water dreams where I'm underwater, but I'm not thinking about breathing when I'm submerged.
Interesting. I'm not sure I've ever had either one, but I think maybe once the underwater breathing.
I have both of these also.
I dream of both flying, and of breathing underwater.
They are both enjoyable kinds of dreams - in each case being there is effortless and fun - but the water ones are better because of the fish, which are generally gorgeous.
I've had both kinds of dreams as well. And I think they are both just linked to physical sensations.
The breathing underwater dreams actually became an easy path for me to lucid dream. As it was a reliable anchor point in any dream of "this is not real".
Breathing underwater I think is related to my sleep apnea. Once I got a CPAP machine those dreams drastically decreased. For those who don't know, sleep apnea usually involves short periods of not breathing, where your air passage is blocked. Which would be easy to associate with being underwater where you hold your breathe.
The falling dreams always happened at the start of the night when my muscles were relaxing. I'd often wake up with a "slam" into the ground where i have a sort of whole body twitch / spasm.
As an anecdote counter to yours, I've been in the ER multiple times for apnea-related atrial fibrillation and never had the breathing-underwater dreams.
And I can just swim underwater without worrying about breathing.
I can't recall ever having a "breathing underwater" but I used to frequently have "flying" dreams which were more akin to "swimming through the air". I always chalked this up to the fact that I spent a *lot* of my childhood in pools (And early childhood, especially - I learned to swim before I was even potty trained), but maybe there's another link there.
I've had both on multiple occasions! But I dream a lot, and remember dreams a lot, and my dreams tend to be fantastical or terrifying (rather than mundane stresses, although have those too).
Hmm I don’t think I ever had either type of dream.
After reading all these comments, it appears that I just lacked datapoints :) also Cunninghams law going strong! In any case, there goes my theory of "quasi-unicity of feelings in the conceptual dreamspace".
The defunct theory postulated that we never dream of the same intense feeling in different ways.
> Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet
I don't know about you, but childhood me had very frequent dreams about monsters in the... well cupboard, because I'm British and the word "closet" isn't much used here, but it comes to the same thing.
One of my more frequent dreams nowadays is having to go on stage and perform a role that I haven't rehearsed for at all and can't remember any of the lines or music.
Same, in childhood I had plenty of dreams about all kinds of monsters. They even lasted for a few years after I've grown up enough to not be afraid of monsters in the waking life.
Though it's been little while since the last one I had, I too had dreams about monsters as a child and continued to have them occasionally into adulthood. I think on a deep level I never really stopped believing in monsters, so they show up from time to time in my dreams.
Monster dreams are claimed to be common among little kids, and there are also the non-REM 'sleep terrors' where the monster 'stays' for a while after the kid seems to be woken up. I once had to put on lights and search the room to prove to my kid that the wolf was gone.
I definitely get the “never went to class” one. Also, for some reason I’m in a high school that is definitely my high school but doesn’t look like it, and I’m a 38 year old adult with a Masters degree retaking a class.
The other common theme I get is “I’m getting ready to go somewhere but keep getting delayed/forgetting things” and by the time the dream ends I still haven’t left.
Both of these fit your “prospective memory model”!
Oh god, I was reading the schedule wrong and winding up in the wrong classroom in my dreams for something like 20 years after high school.
I get those dreams about college. There's a class that I signed up for, went to a few times, but then missed a week for some reason I can't recall, then just forgot to go back. Now it's the end of the semester and....wait a minute, I graduated and have been working for over a decade now. That's pretty much always how it goes.
I remember having one of these dreams then thinking "wait, I graduated already" then I woke up
Worst was when I was in high school and dreamed that I had overslept my alarm. I woke up in a panic. It was 3am. I did not go back to sleep.
I've also had that kind of dream: oh no I'll fail my exam ... wait that was years ago and I'm no longer a student and have a job now.
I’m curious about what era of school most people have this dream about. I don’t have it about taking classes, but I do have it about teaching classes (which I’ve done for the past 15 years). Some people seem to have it from high school and others from college. I wonder if some have it from earlier education and some have it from med school or law school or grad school or whatever.
I have it for both high school and college. Slightly more often high school. Never had it about law school. Though usually, it's the point in the dream where I start thinking wait, why do I have to go back to high school when I already have a law degree? that I'm about to wake up.
I still have it about high school and college, but never about grad school. I also have "I'm trying to teach, but it's all chaos" dreams (used to be a teacher). Usually in my school dreams I'll realize "wait, I'm a 4X year old man with a PhD, why the heck am I in AP Physics again?" And the dream will transition to something else.
As a general high-level model, what about dreams as a psychic “danger room” where the brain workshops solutions to prospective stressors/problems.
That's what I figured. I forgot the comic-book metaphor but that's great for this audience. Thanks!
But why the situations are always the same and often implausible? And solutions tend to never materialize or be equally implausible/impractical? Seems more like a problem-solving engine running idle, decoupled from its normal task inputs (sensory organs) and the means to actually solve anything (body).
Maybe those are the situations for which the brain has been unable to come up with a solution.
From the experience it seems that most people's brains can solve the problem "how to not be naked in the public" just fine - when awake, that is. Same for things like tests, being on time for your flight and so on - most of the people successfully do it most of the time.
It would be interesting to see if dream themes correlate with personality at all. My partner, who is high on neuroticism and very good at remembering appointments/obligations (presumably they have many functional "homework neurons") nevertheless has very mundane dreams ("I went to the store and bought an apple." "I saw my friend and had a conversation.")
The prospective-memory theory sounds reasonable, but doesn't actually explain that very well by itself.
Long ago I read about a study indicating that boring dreams are a symptom of depression. Don't know how true it is but the measure has seemed accurate.
I have a recurring dream/nightmare that I've experienced since I was a teen. The details vary, but the central theme is the same. I'm in a hurry to get somewhere, I'm running, and suddenly, with no warning, I become completely enervated. I lose all strength in my legs, unable to run, I have to walk, then stagger, then fall down and desperately crawl. It's usually somewhere around this point that I wake up.
This really doesn't feel like it fits the theory, to me at least.
According to the cognitive theory of dreams, what happens in dreams is what we expect will happen. In waking life our predictions and expectations are corrected by objective feedback, but in our dreams there is no feedback so what we expect will happen is what does. From that perspective your dream indicates that you believe that you are vulnerable and incapable. You have goals but they are unreachable because you lack the ability to reach them. In short, on a deep level you expect that you will fail.
If you can recognize and change that belief then the dream may stop coming back.
I usually only have that with my lungs in my dream - I need to breathe harder or say something loudly, but my lungs won’t work. Both of these seem related to the fact that the dreaming mind wants to control the body but can’t due to sleep paralysis.
That sounds like possibly a similar phenomenon to sleep paralysis, where your brain notices that it can't move your body (since physical movement is suppressed during sleep), and freaks out about it.
This reminds me of something I experience in dreams occasionally, where I need to shout or scream for some reason, but I can't make any sound louder than a sort of hoarse, quiet, rasp
It's probably one of these overdetermined things. Some of it's sensation during sleep, some of it's that prospective memory thing you're talking about, some of it's random associations. My favorite theory is that some of it's preparation for dangerous situations you may encounter, since most of mine are about some kind of threat like getting fired.
Maybe interesting datapoint: I have ADHD and, as far as I can remember, I never had dreams about deadlines or not being prepared to the test, or stuff like this.
I was going to share this in the comments as well. ADHD, don't seem to have that prospective memory "dedicated loop", and also have never had a dream of this sort. Perhaps worth some follow-up polling to see if this these are related?
Same
"You’d have to have some kind of brain cell or whatever on a dedicated loop, checking every few hours to see if there’s a homework assignment you’ve forgotten about."
I definitely don't have this.
My personal theory is dreams are video games your mind plays with your virtual body because the mind is bored while the real physical body needs rest and because this is a good time for the mind to “practice” navigating the body in preparation for real life challenges.
So basically dreams are virtual training and amusement.
Also I dreamt last night that my ex husband was still my husband and we were staying at a hotel in Atlanta and attending a conference. He started serial murdering women but no one realized it was him. I was so scared that I’d be next. Then I found a gun and started planning to take him out, because I feared if I didn’t, he’d kill me first.
One of the craziest dreams I’ve probably ever had.
It also involved riding the Atlanta subway into an apocalyptic wasteland by mistake, and a dreamy stranger guy who helped me load my gun.
Very video game dream.
Are you from Atlanta, or was your brain treating that as an exotic place to visit?
It was treating it as an exotic place. So weird. I’ve only been to Atlanta one time.
The dreams where I suddenly find that I'm back with my ex husband somehow, or he's around and I don't know how to get away from him, are the worst nightmares I have. much worse than my frequent dreams about being attacked by bears. I have both of these several times a year at least, and the ex-husband back in my life one is far more terrifying.
Right! So terrible! I agree.
My alarm clock requires me to jot down the dream I was having when I woke up. I did some stats on it and have seen some interesting trends :
The "first" of a category tends to be more common. Ex: I am more often in either my childhood home or the first place I had lived by myself than any other place (including my current one). The people I meet are more often childhood friends than people I currently know. My first dog (dead of more than 20 years) is more commonly here that any more recent pet.
I have been traumatized by school : many dreams about having forgotten to do my homework or having to do a test without having studied, going back to school (I have been outside the education system for more than 10 years now)
"Nightmares" tend to involve mundane fears : having my wallet stolen, missing a flight
Dreams involving my smartphone tends to be about struggles : failing to book a room in a hotel due to a confusing user experience, failing to find my train ticket, etc...
Is the school usually your elementary school or middle school or high school or what?
Teaching college courses for a few years as a grad student permanently (it seems) rewired my "it's the last day of class and I haven't been all semester and now I have to take the final" dreams into "walking into a classroom unprepared to teach" dreams. (For example, I once dreamed I suddenly was teaching the first day of 5th grade.)
School really is just that traumatizing for everyone involved, huh?