Last night’s dream involved conspiring with my fellow prisoners to plan an escape from a Harry Potter-themed sex slavery ring
I don’t remember much else about it, which is probably for the best, really
Last night’s dream involved, in part, going to a grocery store to buy some sort of product that came in a long thin tube, except to discover that there was a tiny living human embryo hiding in one end of the tube
And apparently in this dream reality human embryos were like little animals that were fragile but could, in principle, live on their own, which was how it was still alive. I brought it to the manager of the store and he assured me he would “find a home” for it, and after picking out another tube to buy, I went on my way, satisfied with the good deed I had done
wow those were some horrible dreams
i think im awake finally? glad to be
i dreamed that somehow i was a pedophile? like, the police came to arrest me, and they had all this proof (which seemed devastatingly convincing in the dream) that i was DEFINITELY an “unconscious pedophile” and would DEFINITELY molest or otherwise sexually creep on children sooner or later if they didn’t take me in.
then the dream changed to “i killed a deer by accident and everyone hates me for it” and then to “one of my friends is burying me alive” and then to “i got really drunk and/or dissociated and now im ‘waking up’ next to a person from school who i REALLY don’t want to have slept with”
something like that
based on some comments i’ve been getting, i have to wonder: is “somehow, i find out that i am really a pedophile (or child molester, or rapist)” a common type of nightmare/anxiety dream?
it was pretty awful, i have to say
maybe it’s noteworthy that my nightmares tend to involve situations where i’ve been forced to hurt others terribly, situations where i discover i’ve accidentally or unknowingly/unconsciously hurt others terribly, and situations where i realize that somehow i am doomed to become this horrible, destructive rapist/murderer/monster in the future
i don’t have many bad nightmares where i am in peril from some powerful malign force, or where someone’s hurting me. actually i fairly often have pretty emotionally neutral dreams where people i care about are killing me/cutting me apart/etc. (this is never painful in the dream.)
probably the main theme of nightmares where i’m actually the victim of something is “entrapment” (being buried, restrained, walled into a room, unable to escape a location or situation) rather than being hurt or pursued or w/e
i mean this probs says some stuff about me, psychologically, yk
I haven’t had the pedophile/etc. ones specifically, but many of my anxiety dreams fit this general description.
Often, for me, the dream will utilize its ability to make up arbitrary past events to just stipulate that I’ve done something terrible and/or stupid in the past, and I spend a lot of the dream trying to figure out what I could have been thinking – like, I don’t want to seem like I’m trying to excuse myself by telling people “I have no idea why I did that, it feels like it wasn’t even me,” and yet that’s simply true
(In my case it ties pretty obviously into my waking anxieties about whether any given decision I make will seem flagrantly bad in retrospect)
Sudden memory of a dream from high school: having been transported to 17th century England, I was told to seek out early scientist “Robert Drain,” who had, apparently, “invented the drain”
Another thought I had while driving around my old neighborhood today: “oh, it’s that house. I don’t know who lives there and have never been inside IRL, but a lot of weird shit has happened there in my dreams”
Last night’s dream was majorly fucked-up and involved a really good friend of mine dying. I wouldn’t even post about it except there was an aspect that was sort of conceptually fun
Initially, it involved me meeting this heterosexual couple who both seemed pretty cool. The woman was sort of an … anime witch? Like, not literally rendered in anime style, but fashion-wise she clearly looked like she was from, I dunno, Touhou or something, and she had magical powers.
And at one point I was talking to them about the things that magic could do, and she mentioned that it was hard to kill people with magic, but that if you had a certain amulet you could use it once to kill one person. And she had the amulet, and showed it to me, and then just decided to use it to kill my friend, for no apparent reason (she had never even met him, it was done long-distance). This was depicted through this elaborate, anime-style “spell effect animation.”
Obviously, I freaked out about this, went through a denial phase, etc. I was mostly too much in shock to be sad or anything (even then, I was unrealistically sanguine about the whole thing, who knows how dream emotions work). But I pleaded with the couple and asked why they thought this was an OK thing to do etc.
And it turned out that they both just … had no emotions whatsoever associated with negative things happening to other people? It wasn’t that they had no moral emotions – they liked good things happening, and actively worked to make people happier and stuff, but their emotions did not register changes for the worse, only changes for the better. They would have been happy if my friend got a raise or something but couldn’t care about him dying (or me being sad as a result).
AFAIK there isn’t anyone in reality who is like this, but it seems conceivable. In the dream it was very strange to talk to them because they weren’t exactly amoral, they weren’t people who simply “didn’t give a shit,” they were just really … different, in a specific way I had never even imagined before
I have this unpleasant recurring dream, and I have no idea where it’s coming from, psychologically. I had it again last night – must be the 10th time or something
The premise is:
“For some reason, I decide to take a year off of grad school and re-enroll at my undergrad alma mater, where I will take another year of senior-level classes and write another undergrad thesis. It is not clear what I will get out of this; the answer is either ‘nothing’ or ‘another undergrad physics degree, but I already have one, and who cares if I have two.’ Sometimes even school administrators seem uncertain which of these two will occur. However, the school agrees to this unusual plan because hey, more money, why not. [N.B. by non-dream logic this does not seem plausible, since they could presumably get the same money from a student with similar credentials who is not already an alum and could boost their statistics or w/e in ways I obviously can’t.]
Anyway, the dream begins near the end of the school year. In some iterations, I have somehow failed to perform academically and have to deal with the shame of failing to do something I already succeeded once at, and which was, to begin with, pointless to try to do twice. In all iterations, people express confusion over why I have decided to re-take senior year of college, and I struggle in vain to remember why I thought it was a good idea, and have nothing to tell them. I also wonder what I will tell people in grad school when I get back. Around me, there is much rejoicing about other seniors being about to graduate – mostly people I don’t know – and I feel even more lost in light of this.”
(In last night’s version, I ran into the president of the college while wandering around, and spontaneously decided to ask him what I should make of my situation. He was sympathetic but couldn’t figure out what to tell me.)
As I said, I have no idea what makes this particular plot appeal to my subconscious/whatever? It’s a subtype of a broader genre – “it is stipulated that I have done something that makes no sense, people understandably ask me why I did it, I have no answer and feel ashamed” – and I understand why I get that, since it relates to anxieties I have in real life. (It’s very common for me to worry that when I do a thing, I’m later going to have to shame-facedly explain to everyone “why it ever seemed like a good idea.”)
But I have no idea where the specific “re-take senior year of college” plot comes from.
This didn’t used to be the case, but in the last … I dunno, year? or so? … pretty much all of the dreams I remember are unpleasant. I rarely have “nightmares” per se, but I have a lot of what I think of as “anxiety dreams,” where some unpleasant or embarrassing (though not always dangerous) circumstance appears and then grows and intensifies to parodic levels, piling on more inconveniences, embarrassments, mistakes recognized too late, etc. At this point nearly all of my dreams are of this type.
It doesn’t feel like all that much of a problem, since there’s that sort of separation between my waking and dreaming identity – I remember unpleasant dreams as unpleasant, but I don’t really feel like they’re things that “happened to me,” and I don’t wake up being worn out by them the way I’d be worn out by similar IRL experiences. But it has gotten to the point that I feel a certain morbid resignation when I get in bed at the end of the day – “here we go again … “
(The silver lining is that in retrospect the plots of these dreams are often hilarious, see my #dreams tag)
You know that thing that happens when you’re on the verge of sleep, where your thoughts suddenly start to obey dream logic although you aren’t dreaming yet?
Last night, while in that state, I noticed (correctly) that my legs were really achy and that I didn’t know why … and then immediately thought, “I wonder if I have gangrene?”
This then transitioned into a brief dream episode in which I posted jokingly about this on tumblr, and someone reblogged it with an angry callout-style response in which they accused me of being “insufficiently supportive” of “people with gangrene” by treating gangrene as a comedically far-fetched possibility rather than “a real condition some of us suffer from.”
Last night’s dream was lucid, and very entertaining.
I was in my apartment, and was experiencing something that I guess I would describe as a certain sort of stereotypical or Hollywood version of “hallucinatory madness.” No delusions, just hallucinations. Specifically, my environment kept changing in unphysical ways – the first big one I remember was that I started watching a movie and the line between the picture on the screen and reality gradually faded away, so that the characters from the movie were there in my apartment, talking to me. (The movie was about a group of pleasant old women, like the Golden Girls.) There were also a lot of visual distortions – mostly that when I looked at my hand, or my face in the mirror, they would move and warp and distort a great deal.
At first, before I realized I was dreaming, this was really scary. I haven’t been sleeping that well lately, so my initial guess was that sleep deprivation had caused me to have a psychotic break. But then I realized I was dreaming (I’m not sure how I convinced myself of this, it was just suddenly obvious), and all of a sudden it became incredibly fun. I was in this wonderland where something unexpected would happen every minute or two, and interacting with ordinary objects would have cool and unpredictable results.
E.g. I tried watching a few other movies/videos to see if I could “interact with the characters” in the same way. This generally didn’t work – instead the environment would generate some new distraction so that I wouldn’t be able to keep paying attention to the screen. For instance, at one point I played a video and immediately a man I’d never seen before appeared recumbent on my bed and asked who I was. (We talked a bit; he seemed nice.)
At one point I looked up from my bed and above it had appeared a wooden rack well-stocked with various kitchen implements. At another point a guy appeared out of nowhere, I mis-recognized him from behind and called him “Reuven,” he turned out to be someone else I knew but still acted like his name was “Reuven,” and left the apartment soon after. I walked around the apartment looking at things, and they changed as I looked closer – piles of paper would become larger and messier, a few piled books turned into scores of piled books, etc.
A phone started ringing, and looking in the direction of the sound I saw a phone that hadn’t existed before on a table that hadn’t existed before. I answered it; it was someone from some utility asking about a bill or something, but she acted like I was being horribly angry and offensive, even though I was just saying things like “yes” and “okay.” Knowing that none of this was real, I decided to try actually yelling at her in fake anger to see what would happen; this caused her to hang up and was immediately followed by some other reality distortion I don’t remember.
This dream felt qualitatively different from any other dream I’ve ever had. There was the reality-distorting aspect, but also the complete lack of the unusual background assumptions or “backstory” that usually comes with dreams and leads one to take some of the weirdness in stride. (The closest thing to a counterfactual assumption was that after I became lucid, I seemed to take each reality distortion as further evidence that I was dreaming, although technically they were also consistent with the theory that I was awake and having some sort of mental health issue.) I’ve heard that when you’re sleep-deprived, your brain will lengthen your REM sleep periods when you go to sleep again, as if it’s “REM-starved,” so maybe this dream was a kind of “hyper-REM” intended to counter REM starvation? I dunno, that’s silly in several ways and I really doubt it’s true … I just feel like it would be satisfying to have some explanation for such an unprecedented type of dream.