Dreamscapes

I often have vivid dreams which I can remember when I wake. For years I kept a dream diary to help with understanding, remembering and processing what my unconscious mind played with whilst I was sleeping. I feel that the diary helped me trace themes (to better understand myself) and helped me have more lucid dreams (i.e. it greatly increased the chance that I would recognize I was dreaming and consciously take control of the dream-Good bye haunted house of fears, I'd rather be flying!)

Here is an example of a really vivid dream I had the other night which took scenes from a movie I watched: A woman (not me) is in a house on the second floor and realizes that she has a chance to get out of the house; she starts to run downstairs when she hears (and sees) through the window bikers pulling up outside. The woman runs back up stairs and starts opening doors looking for a hiding place or way to escape. The view changes to the bikers talking to each other in the front room of the house which is pierced form a loud scream upstairs. The scene then cuts to an upstairs room where a woman (same clothes as previous woman) with multiple tentacles instead of a head is chained by the arms, standing, with the bikers surrounding the woman/creature and discussing what to do with it. I believe this dream's inspiration was The Dunwitch Horror which I watched recently which has a Cthulhu creature hidden upstairs attacking someone who is randomly opening doors.

The dream while strange and eerie was not frightening (probably as it appeared film-like) unlike the apocalyptic nuclear war dreams which I have just started having again (which I think I last had when I was in my teens!). I know I am not alone in nuclear nightmares as I recently picked up a pop-up book of nightmares which featured a person looking out of a bomb shelter doorway at the world being destroyed by a mushroom cloud as a common nightmare theme. Sweet dreams are definitely not made of these.

I find it fascinating that the mind bubble over with such creativity while sleeping and I look forward to hearing some of your night visions.

Algonkin cultures treat dreams as a vital source of information - usually a means for spirits and gods to communicate visions and prophecies through. Children are trained to remember dreams (and likely some form of lucid dreaming) and any dream-messages are treated with respect by the community. Conversely, modern western culture treats dreams as some sort of waste-byproduct of consciousness, often distasteful and best flushed away upon awakening.

I would not want to go back to the Algonkin way because you would end up under a 'tyranny of dreams' where visions trump moral or logical debate, and parts of dreams do seem to be made of the detritus of waking life. Yet modernity's complete devaluation of dreams is no better. Every night some part of the Self takes our deepest desires and fears and re-mixes them into a wild phantasmagoria - surely, such an amazing theater of the mind is worthy of individual contemplation and cultural worth.

Freud called dreams 'the royal road to the unconscious' and Jung encouraged clients to take the imagery from their dreams and work with them in art to allow their meanings to unfold. So when I taught Philosophy of Psychological I had student keep dream diaries and while some had difficulty at first, every student was able to record at least 2 or 3 dreams over a month (super-heroes, zombies and anxious parents were the most common themes).

As I told the students, "Dream dictionaries are worthless because you made the dream so somewhere inside you know what it represents." Dreams are like a free nightly therapy session conducted on LSD - no cost and with complete privacy.

Typing up that response actually allowed me to re-call the end part of a dream from this morning:

I'm at a Skinny Puppy concert held outdoors at night. Ogre jumps into the audience beside me and tears open a Pepsi can, I take the can and completely flatten it out until it is a thin foil sheet.  I hold it up and light goes through casting an image of shadowy script on a bench. Some people on the audience like this and start pointing at various words - one word has a box around it and a few people cheer. I'm holding the foil sheet up and trying to see the words but they are too blurry.

Suddenly the mood changes and Skinny Puppy storms off the stage in anger, crossing the street to party in the Cano's house, and the audience starts booing at me. I'm left in the front lawn of my old house watching people enter and leave the house across to party with Skinny Puppy. I feel rejected and hope that my 'pepsi can shadow language' will be acknowledged but eventually other people not allowed into the party start milling around and we begin talking.

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The SP concert is obvious. The pepsi can is either from the 'Welcome to Sudbury' script or the movie 'The Stuff'. The Cano's house is from a mention of Patrica Cano. The light/shadow stuff is from researching the technological origins of films.

The fears of making myself understood or being able to translate my ideas to language comes from writing on this forum - combine that with the fear of audience rejection and it relates to me applying to start teaching on-campus again this fall. Pissing off Skinny Puppy might come from my current critical revaluation of industrial music and horror movies but I often find myself as an outsider in social scenes in dreams - and Ogre did start the unraveling of the tin can.

The dream had unpleasant parts but right now I have the vivid image of holding up a sheet to the light and watching lines of shadow words appear. Thanks for the cool image, brain!

I had a dream last night where we were in North Bay at the house on McIntyre St. and we were all in costumes. We were leaving through the front door and we had to make sure non of the animals got out so we hurried out the door. I was the last one out and when I got out there was a cat at thr door trying to get back in. So I opened the door but saw it wasn't one of our cats. Then our cat Ava ran outside. I knew immediately that this mystery cat was a bad cat. He was dark black grey with green stripes. He immediately started chasing Ava. I ran after them and they started to fight. I was really worried about Ava as this bad cat was really big (and evil). I had a toy gun in my hand that was a water gun...well more of a water rifle. So I started spraying the evil cat with water. It stood up on it hind legs as I was spraying it with a steady stream of water to the face. It lifted it paws to try and block the water. Ava was now behind me. The evil cat on its hind legs and using its paws to block the water startes walking towards Ava and I. It was comedic the look on its face but scary because it would not stop. I looked around and everyone was standing there in costumes watching this. As the evil cat got closer and closer I said "can someone please help me". Everyone started moving and the cat left while I wasn't looking.

That is all I remember. There will be lots of typos as I wrote this from my phone while I remembered it and it is hard to type on this thing.

The Anui/Ainu (sp?) an indigenous race of caucasians in northern japan took dreaming very seriously. They had many rules and guidelines, including the absolute necessity of confronting unpleasant dream figures, whether they be ogres bikers or evil cats.  You must demand a gift from such creatures, whether it be an object in the dream or a message etc. before they are allowed to recede into the dream land/unconscious.

I spent years consciously suppressing my dream-recall with THC.  The two worst moments were having to kill a man, his blood spraying into my eyes as i slit his throat, burning them far more painfully than is supposed to be allowed, and the other meeting a dog on a playground.  The dog was evil in a way that scared me more than i have ever been before or since.  The dog didn't do anything other than see me.  There is actually still a tremor and weakness in my limbs recalling it.

Since allowing my dreams back into my life there have been a statistically dominant theme of the end of the world.  The latest when my group and I were bitten by zombies in a remote location.  they decided to return to civilization, and though I (and they) knew it meant the spread and annihilation of humanity, I went along with them without protest.  But there have also been good dreams, being reunited with friends and family, I suppose a balance reflecting the "real" world, a beautiful and terrible place.

I often experience pain in dreams, and also read fairly often, two things which are supposed to be dream no-no's.  I would be interested to hear if anyone else breaks the dreaming rules, especially if someone like Steff who has developed her lucid abilities.  I think it was in the movie waking life that a lucid dreamer said he was working on 360 degree vision. cool.

I have worked in a sleep lab for about 6 years and the THC does suppress REM. It has also been my experience when I stop using THC for a time I go through periods of significant dreaming. This is REM rebound and we see it any time REM time has been reduced for significant periods of time. Most often we see it in sleep apnea cases and once the sleep apnea is treated the patient spends a significant amount of the night in REM. The most I have seen is about 60% of the night spent in REM. Normally for people between the ages of 20-40 years old we spend about 20-25% of the night dreaming. So a night with 60% REM is extremely high. I have not witnessed it (because we usually only have pts for one night) but apparently the REM rebound can last days or weeks. I have not encountered a explanation for why we go through REM rebound when deprived of it.