Do you have any recurring themes in your dreams?

[GabeZhul]

Also trying to fly/run fast and not being able to. Like you're stuck in deep mud or being constantly pulled back down by ghostly hands. It's so irritating.

Oh, I had this one too. It's especially weird because it is one of my "wake-up dreams". It usually goes like this:
-I dream that I have to get somewhere fast, so I start running.
-I get immediately exhausted and/or find it incredibly hard to move.
-I get frustrated because I know I should be able to run as fast as I want.
-I realize I know that because this is my dream.
-I realize that I'm in a dream.
-I immediately wake up from the realization.

The whole "waking up when you realize it's a dream" part was so common for a while for me that it made me have insomnia, where I kept waking up over and over during the night and not getting any quality sleep for weeks at a time. I would like to say it doesn't happen anymore, but I don't want to jinx it...

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Yep. Because of all the lucid dreaming I did a few years back, I'm always subconsciously aware that I'm dreaming, so I instinctively have access to a handful of abilities that are common across all dreams.

1) Everything in my dreams runs on video game logic. To the point where I can fall 3 floor down to the concrete street and take no damage because I did a 3-point-landing (Knee, foot and fist touching the ground first)

2) Chaos Control, which provides a somewhat slow "continuous air-dash" that I can use for "flight", as well as the ability to stop/slow down time.

3) A grappling hook, which is either a spider-man style web shot, or my entire arm is bionic and I can launch my hand at stuff. When I remember, my arm also tends to have an electric stun prod built in so I can eliminate enemies in my dream.

4) Near inability to kill anything. It's incredibly rare for me to be able to kill, or even injure anything in my dreams (I don't like causing pain). Hell, in one dream, two guys tried to break into my house to kill my family and I ran him through with the ornamental dagger I have....and he just gave me this "I'm totally not affected, and now you're gonna die" look. >_>

So to eliminate things in my dreams, I typically have to resort to non-lethal incapacitations.

There ARE exceptions, however.

a) If the thing in question is a zombie, anything is fair game. Hell, most non-human stuff I can take out by any means I can dream up.

b) If I completely destroy the attacking dream creature (say, by happening to have an explosive magnum from Borderlands, only it also turns things into sand when they blow up), then that works too because my brain no longer registers that dream entity as an actual living thing and can't remember how to put it together.

So far, I've had only one dream I can remember where I was able to outright kill something human that was trying to kill me/cause me grave harm. It...Kinda scared me to be honest, since I'm not used to being able to do that in my dreams.

 

[ProtoChimp]

I keep having dreams where I faint but I'm aware what's going on around me, or I lose total control of my body and go limp.

 

[Story]

Sure, all the time. I tend to dream in color too. I'm a pretty imaginative person so I love my dreams. One day I want illustrate my dreams exactly as I see them.

1) Flying, levitating, or floating in some way. I'm never exactly falling either.
2) I'm never myself in the dream. I'm usually someone else that I ve never met before or the dream takes place in the third person like its a movie or something. Likewise I rarely see faces that I know in real life in the dreams.
3) Usually takes place in areas that are very large, very exciting, or fantastical in some way yet always recognizable. These are often amusement parks, hotels, malls, canyons, or water parks. These places are usually very open too, rarely do I feel claustrophobic. In fact the largeness of some of these places feels over whelming.
4) I'm usually being chased, sometimes I'm caught sometimes I'm not. The thing chasing me can be either a monster or a person.
5) My dreams usually have some kind of plot and have a beginning, middle, and end.

 

[ninja666]

1) Someone bullying me/beating me up
2) Going to work in the place I worked my first job
3) Killing something/someone
4) Teeth falling out
5) Bombings
6) Planes crashing/falling down

 

[zumbledum]

Post apocalypse , i seem to have a lot of dreams set in the aftermath of super majour world apocalypse , be it nuclear, zombie or unspecified. i always seem to be leading a bunch of survivors to some safe place. now the thing is although lots of people die and its always a pretty horrific environment these are not nightmares. im always having quite a lot of fun, feel perfectly safe i never get so much as a scratch from the hordes of zombies or bandits. and i always seem to wake up shortly after the dream transitions to us being in a safe zone.

 

[Treeberry]

Usually it ends with me shooting her to death again.

I'm surprised nobody has commented on that yet...

Anyway, at the moment I don't but I used have to dreams involving horses where either the horse I was riding would be out of control (as in control could never be regained) or someone would come along and end causing the horse to go out of control. These dreams used to make me wake up in tears.

I used to have dreams where I was flying but people would reach out to me and grab me. At some point I'd find it difficult to stay high enough away from them and they'd 'take' flesh off my body and eat it.

Quite often the people would be faceless or I'd see the back of their heads.

These were recurring dreams I had a child and teenager. I was quite stressed out back then. Rather like a video game I had a degree of control but could rarely change the outcome.

Another one from when I was younger:
I'd be on a sci-fi-like platform above a beautiful forest with lots of riverways or pools, the sun would be breaking through the clouds on the horizon. Quite often I'd jump but surprisingly never felt out of control. I used to make a game of seeing how far I could go through this dream before waking up.

My dreams are typically in third person.

 

[PainInTheAssInternet]

Strangely enough, you, you sexy beast.

Across all of them, falling. I always find myself in freefall that causes me to wake up. I wonder if it's because I'm acrophobic.

 

[one squirrel]

Yes, I do.

One is about having to enter a house where monsters are living in secret rooms between the rooms/floors. I always have to crawl in there for some reason, and I know I am just a few meters away from grotesque vampire-abominations. For the longest time I couldn't find out what was causing this reocurring dream. Then i finally remembered this:

Spoiler

The other one is about going back and having to work a job at a car reapair workshop, where I used to be an apprentice for a while. It was nothing but horrible, my boss hated me and I hated him just as much. I hope I'll never have to interact with him again. Having to work there again would destroy me.

 

[Nuuu]

Escaping people attacking my home is a common one:
A few times i remember it being tiki-mask people (No idea why)
One time is was just armed robbers
Sometimes it's waves of monsters/ghosts, and when a few waves end, teleporting ones that are unbeatable and show up randomly (At that point i'm trying to go to bed (in a dream, yes, super meta) but they keep appearing in a corner of my room, forcing me to run away in a panic. They never really move, just appear and stand still in a pose).
The scariest monsters in my dreams tend to be completely black silhouettes.

 

[username sucks]

Only my nightmares have a theme, really. Other dreams are completely random. Anyway, my nightmares usually follow these guidelines:

1.) Anything red is bad. Very, very bad. Often times the monster in my nightmares is another me, wearing all red. All the other monsters that aren't me usually have a lot of red on them too.

2.) I can't scream. I open my mouth, try to tell for help, and no noise comes out.

3.) People get decapitated. A lot. Not me though, just everyone I know and love.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Its kinda funny. Reading all these and I realize I can barely remember the last dream I had. I mean I know you have thousands of dreams every night you don't remember already, but I'm talking about those handful of ones you do.
From what I remember...I think remember having a dream back in...'08 maybe? I think Bush was still President when last I remembered a dream. And I vaguely remember spider webs and a chicken I think...some sort of bird. Like I said, it was nearly 7 years ago.

 

[Nickolai77]

Mine are:

1: Trains: A lot of my dreams are set on trains or on train stations. I'm not sure why, I'm not exactly a train enthusiast (planes are much more interesting) but when I was a kid I was obsessed with Thomas the Tank engine and was basically the "I like trains" kid although not quite so retarded.

2: My first girlfriend: This one's weird- whenever she appears in my dreams is always completely sound and incredibly nice and friendly to me, and acts as if didn't hold a grudge against me IRL after we broke up. I actually quite like it when she appears in my dream, we have nice conversations but I can never remember the details :/

3: Getting lost or losing something: I rarely have nightmares, most often something mildly anxiety provoking occurs and i get lost or I lose something important to me.

 

[K12]

Does "large bouncy tits" count as a theme?

 

[Asita]

Well let's see...

There's the teeth falling out one which always has me checking my mouth after I wake up. Then there's the 'naked at work/school' one. Funnily enough, that's usually set in my old grade school - with an attention to detail that's uncommon for my dreams - but there's never anybody there. I'm just running around naked at an abandoned school hoping that nobody will show up. Then there's the 'forgot to study' one, which sees quite a few variations, the most memorable one of which was me forgetting my lines for a play I was in in High School...cue me waking up and desperately running my lines before I remembered that not only was that production long done, but it was the middle of July, when school would have been out anyways. Oh, and then there's the drifting car dreams, where - for no discernible reason - I'm in a car, the wheels start rolling and I'm desperately turning the wheel trying to avoid hitting anything...at half a mile per hour.

My nightmares also have an odd tendency towards semi-lucid dreaming, by which I mean...well you remember that scene in Inception where Ellen Page was learning the ropes and messing with the dreamscape? That's pretty much me in a nightmare, only not nearly as calm.

One near constant of my dreams is that they're almost always in the third person, like I'm a disembodied camera flying behind my dream avatar. To my recollection this trend is only really broken in a certain type of dream, which plays out like a skype conversation. I'll get a bust shot of a person and they'll say something enigmatic like "Something changed". And then I wake up wondering what the heck that was all about before I shrug it off and start the day.

 

[GabeZhul]

I just remembered another one and I'm curious if others ever had something similar:

In your dream, whatever the context, you create or do something you cannot do in real life. In my case it is usually creating original music (with full orchestral backing appearing out of nowhere) and speaking foreign languages I can't speak.
In the case of the former all I can remember is that these are some of the best music I have heard in my entire life. In the case of the latter, I not only remember recognizing the language but even realizing I shouldn't be able to speak it and marvel at how I still make perfect sense.

What links these two dream-elements together is that when I wake up I cannot remember any detail at all about them. I can recall that the music in my dream was absolutely awesome but I cannot remember even its beat, let alone its style or genre.
As for the language, the moment I wake up and try to recall the sentences that previously made so much sense they become a stream of gibberish with maybe a few genuine German, Japanese or French words I probably acquired through osmosis showing up in it to give it a sense of accuracy.

These kinds of dreams are incredibly fun when you are in them, but they are just infuriating when you wake up. Do you guys have anything similar?

Also, on a different note, I am a little surprised by amount of nightmares in this thread. I mean, I am 25 and I can practically count the number of nightmares I had in my whole life in two hands and maybe a foot. I can't imagine how annoying it would be to have them so often they become recurring...

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

I wouldn't exactly call it a theme but my dreams are almost exclusively lone affairs. Usually it's nice and calm, sometimes I get the sense there's someone else around and it's unsettling, but I'll only ever have different dreams with people about if something's happened in my life like a breakup, a new job or something like that. It wasn't like that when I was younger, but I really couldn't say when everyone disappeared.

 

[Remus]

I occasionally have one thing happen in a dream that strikes me as odd. I have dreamed of a place that is kind of like an MMO map, lots of people and things to kill, but the areas of that map are made up of areas from other memorable dreams I have had with very little correlation to real life.

I will be having a normal dream, then at some point I will end up in this place with the people I was dreaming about with me too. It almost seems like a giant MMO themed ant farm than a game, its quite creepy and vivid.

I usually wake up not long after this because when I end up there, I recognise it and realise I'm dreaming.

I once dreamed my fantasy MMO - Open-World Chronotrigger *mind blown*. Except the future was taken over by machines so looked a bit like Venus in Destiny. Sword to a gunfight n all that, I did a lot of sneaking.

 

[Fijiman]

I often end up having the dream take place at my old house at some point or another. That's about the only reoccurring thing I can think of.