What are Dreams?

Originally Posted by Links girl!

One time i was dreaming of a girl with neon greent eyes and she was at a graveyard and as I walked up to her she pointed to a grave that said my name and the little girl said to me "Mommy is that you," and I turned around and turned back and she was there and told her "Your not apart of my life! Go Now!" (It was all in my dreams.) Can any one help at what my dreams mean??

Absolutely nothing.

Dreams are not, naturally, fully understood, but they've consistently failed to be anything other than hallucinations when tested.

John: What about the weird ones that seem to foreshadow future events?

Most of my dreams involve me coming out of a manhole in a busy street.

Lots of factors at play there:
People dream multiple times per night, and each dream contains a massive number of situations.

Let's be generous and say that, on average, one "scene" per night is remembered.

That still means that 7 billion scenes are remembered every night. I'd be surprised if millions of them didn't resemble stuff that occurred the next day.


Next, people tend to dream about things at least somewhat related to their life and hopes/fears. This increases the odds of a dream "predicting" something.

Also next: People suck at accurately remembering dreams. Like, we're terrible at it. Horrible. We tend to remember dreams completely differently mere hours after having them. So a dream will, when you remember it, seem eerily like something that actually occurred...save that, originally, it had (at absolute best) a slight, passing, similarity. You're mind has just change how you remember it to better match your experiences.

Originally Posted by Midnafan1

It's actually been proven that we don't dream in color. We only think we do. As to where the source that says this is, I don't know. I'll have to do more research. But yeah, no one can truly say they dream in color.

Sorry if somebody's already said this, or if it seems a bit ignorant, but given that dreams are completely abstract things inside our head that don't actually exist in a physical manor that can be sensed, dectected or measured, that seems like a very wishey-washy thing to set about proving. What I mean to say is, it's like proving that, infact, a talking car didn't chase them last night. Of course it didn't, they just think it did, because they just think the whole dream happened. Its' obviously a complete farse composed within the confinds of their own mind and precieved in a realistic manner. They're well aware of this. I don't see why you'd single out one element of the dream, to essentially say that it happened even less than the rest of the dream which didn't happen.

Originally Posted by John

Also next: People suck at accurately remembering dreams. Like, we're terrible at it. Horrible. We tend to remember dreams completely differently mere hours after having them. So a dream will, when you remember it, seem eerily like something that actually occurred...save that, originally, it had (at absolute best) a slight, passing, similarity. You're mind has just change how you remember it to better match your experiences.

Truth. Sometimes, a dream I had will be gone mere seconds after I wake up at times. It's extremely frustrating.

Why is this?

Originally Posted by Lunchbox*

Truth. Sometimes, a dream I had will be gone mere seconds after I wake up at times. It's extremely frustrating.

Why is this?

I have no idea why, I have that same issue.

I hardly ever dream in first person. It's usually in 3rd person omnicient. Just last night I had a disturbing dream. "I" was a girl who was kidnapped by serial killer and he tricked some family into transporting us across the country. In the dream I knew the license plate of the vehicle and where exactly we were. When I woke up I couldn't remember those details. It is quite disturbing. I have dreams like that quite often.

Also, has anyone ever had a lucid dream? A dream that you are aware you are having and are able to control what happens.

Alas, lucid dreams have not happened to me yet. But I want to have one. I'd know exactly what I'd do

I used to have them all the time as a kid. I was went through an entire dream, didn't like how it ended and went back and did it all over again lol. I hardly have them now. But it is possible to condition yourself to do have them.

I've wanted to try it, but I found it too difficult to train myself.

I usually have them when i'm only half asleep.

Yeah. It's really a pain to train yourself to do it. I've been trying to tain myself to do it for years. Along with other things along those lines.

I think that dreams are planned out pre-hand by a certain part of your brain and are determined by memory, desires, or personalities of the dreamer. I also think dreams are your body or 'spirit' trying to communicate with you aswell (in some cases). They truly are an interesting topic.

As far as "what dreams mean" is concerned, I'm pretty certain there isn't all that much to it. I don't like the "merely random firing of neurons" idea, since if that were the case, methinks dreams would make even less sense than they do now, but I don't think there are any "deep meanings" hidden in them all the time.

I do think they can be connected to your experiences or your personality or other such things, but I don't really think your dreams are going to give you any answers to the meaning of life or whatever. But they can coincidentally make you think of something you may not have thought of before, so in that regard, they can be useful, just because of how unusual they usually are.

For instance, one idea I came up with to try if I have a lucid dream is to use my own cartoon characters to help me out of a rut in writing a plot. If I've already decided a character dies, but haven't figured out an interesting way how, I could simply ask that character myself in a dream, and see what answer I get. I can be sure it's not something I would have thought of while awake. (I just have to hope it's not a stupid answer to use while awake.)

Originally Posted by Oni Dark Link

I usually have them when i'm only half asleep.

Yeah, same. Does anyone ever have where you're like, just on the virge of actually sleeping (eyes closed, thoughts slowing down, getting weary and less alert of the world around you) and then you feel like you're falling, you reach out to grab something, try to open your eyes and you feel your body smacking into your matress as if you just fell on it from a great distance. It's like you weren't quite asleep when it started, but you were definately awake when it ended.

More than just reality lurks in the depths of the mind.

If all we ever dreamt of was the real world, then we would never have the sort of terrible nightmares that many people experience.

I most commonly dream about what I do not want to happen. In our waking hours we have a better control over our thoughts and worries, when we are asleep we lose that control, and we are at the mercy of our worries and our hopes.
They run rampant.

My dreams are very similar to what LunchBox experiences. It's usually very random. One time I dreamed the sky was a giant quilt, with green, red, blue, and purple patches stitched together. Also, the quilt was only about 30 feet from the ground. It rippled and moved around almost like a cloud.

I do have lucid dreams, although they are rare. However, I can't control the outcome of my dreams while lucid. It's still nice to know that you're dreaming while you're in a dream, because it gives you total freedom to do anything you want.

I can't remember the last time I've had a nightmare. I never have them.

Originally Posted by teep

Yeah, same. Does anyone ever have where you're like, just on the virge of actually sleeping (eyes closed, thoughts slowing down, getting weary and less alert of the world around you) and then you feel like you're falling, you reach out to grab something, try to open your eyes and you feel your body smacking into your matress as if you just fell on it from a great distance. It's like you weren't quite asleep when it started, but you were definately awake when it ended.

That happens to you too? Good i was afraid there was something wrong with me. ANyway when that happens i sometimes get the feeling that i came close to having an out of body experience.

Regardless of what dreams may or may not be, I have found them to be both entertaining and insightful: but only subjectively so. I suspect that if conditions were altered for me, or if another were to experience the same dreams that I do, the connotations therein would be quite different than my own.

Dreams may be an awakened tool, but it is an unwieldy, subjective, malleable tool.


Personally, though, I adore dreams, and have kept record of every dream event for quite some time (nearing 7 months now, every night at least one vivid dream). I do not sleep much, but in a way of honesty, I would say that dreams are the primary reason for me bothering to sleep at all.

I have found some of my dreams to be as symbolic and interesting as some of the literary greats (Huxley, Orwell, Conrad, Asimov, Hugo, Herbert, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Capote, Twain, etc) as well as being just as hypnotic and spiritual as the heaviest doses of psychedelics and deliriants, and sometimes both.

I dream in colour unless a special condition has occurred in order to alter this (I was once transmogrified into a deer-snake-cougar chimera of sorts and thus saw as I thought it must).



I have had deja vu, but do not know what to think of it. I have run into and checked back in my record of dreams, and sure enough there was the event. However, the instance was nothing particular to note, and was one that is not entirely beyond imagination. The event was one in which I got coffee with a distant friend.

Oddly, though, this friend is hardly ever in the same state as I am, the occurrence in my dream was right to the exact place we went to - a place I had been in only once prior.

But even with words made to record the dream, I know that within these packages of information (words and sentences), there is room for subjectivity, even if I am the original scribe. I can only relay in words what occurred: never the image. Additionally, in as much I was someone then, I am someone now: and two minds of the same but from different time periods debate the meaning. Eventually, it buckles and the meaning is lost and a new one is made.

So I am at a loss in concern with clairvoyance.

When we are awake we balance our perceptions of the real world based on what is reasonable.

In our dreams, our personality goes unchecked leading to wild extremes we would never
consider if we were awake. It's scary.