And my pillow was gone

[prog]

It occurs to me that, at least for me, the cinematic - or even literary - depiction of dreams is as consistently technically incorrect as the depiction of computers. Does anyone really have dreams that are picture-perfect flashbacks of things that happened earlier to them in waking life? Or that are even recognizably flashbacks at all?

I'm a little more willing to believe stories about recurring dreams, but I don't think they're really all that common. When I hear someone on the screen saying "I still see her face in my dreams every night" I'm like "No you don't, you liar. Last night you dreamt of a penguin wearing a bikini that was trying to give you a green lollipop but you wanted a purple one and suddenly you were making out with it, and maybe in retrospect you figure that the penguin was supposed to be her, but it's rather an oversimplification to abstract the whole deal as 'her face'. But, whatever."

Comments

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

If you have a traumatic event that involves an individual, often that person will come up in your dreams, even years after the traumatic event, especially in times of stress. Trust me, I know.

However, I never or rarely dream about things that have happened to me. That would be boring.

Not that a single data point is worth much

[queue.livejournal.com]

There was a time in grade school that I had a dream that recurred 3 or 4 times, but it was over a period of months, if I recall correctly.

Also, I have never had any flashback dreams.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I've had weirdly-distorted flash-backy things, where I'm in a familiar place (a mountain I used to ski as a kid, say) but nothing remotely picture-perfect (it isn't any particular day, and nothing that actually happened happens).

Also nothing strictly recurring, although one particular past g/f showed up in my dreams (not like that) a significant number of times during the course of a subsequent relationship. I never used to take those "she is haunting my dreams" things seriously until that happened, but I can attest that it does. Those particular dreams were realistic and detailed, and we were doing the kind of things we had actually done, like hiking and sailing and canoeing.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

As near as I can remember I don't have 'flashback' dreams much if at all.

Actually there are times I'm not even in a few of my dreams. It's as if I'm watching a movie with a whole different cast of characters I've never really seen before.

Other times I'll have dreams with me and other people I know in them but the setting would be all different -- I'd be in a different house (not necessarily a big luxury house .. but often not a house I'd remember ever being in before) with people I may or may not have ever lived with before. One or twice I tried to remember what the architecture was of the dream house.

Once, when I was on FurryMUCK a lot I had a dream entirely in text with the sound of a clicking keyboard in the background. I decided to cut back on MUCKing after that. *some say you cannot read in a dream .. that is incorrect

For a time whenever I had 'flying' dreams I had a hard time flying right-side up. I think that was due to my sleep position of lying on my back.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

But I loved that penguin, damn it!

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

Picture-perfect flashbacks, no; flashbacks that were obviously brain's reinterpretation of events, and similar enough to real events that they could have been real, yes. Ditto people showing up as recognizably themselves, even if the dream-setting is not one in which they ever appeared.

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

I was debugging perl code in my dreams once. Very real and totally useless.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

In grad school I had math dreams that were like the sort of visualizations I would make while (awake and) following a math proof. I studied topology and geometry, so a lot of it was "shapes" (as opposed to, say, algebra). So it would be structures and "well, then that implies that we can smooth out this mapping here, and then we can do a covering translation and then look at the quotient space, and so that has the following homological properties, and therefore we can apply this theorem to say that ..." but it never went anywhere.

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

I often have dreams about my "current events", but they are not really flashbacks at all.
I do find that I process things that way often. Many of my dreams are long discussions where conversations that were cut short (or never happened) in real life continue, or have some sort of "mirror universe" type feel to them.

I do have recurring dreams, or that are at least using the same setting or stage, but the events are often different each time, even if the cast is the same. Usually there is a big interval between the repeating dreams -- often years. And yes, I really do know if I have "seen" a dream before or not when I wake up.

[dictator555.livejournal.com]

I have plenty of dreams where I'm a penguin wearing a bikini, or such. But I also have some extremely literal dreams. And my dreams are almost always populated by people I know, looking exactly like themselves. (Though they don't always represent the people they look like, of course.)

I've also had a couple of recurring dreams that have been spread out of years. One that I've had since I was 15 I continue to have every few months even now, and it's totally based on a real life event. And the faces in that dream are always very clear.

But most of my dreams are sort of what you're talking about. I think of movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind or Neil Gaiman's Mirrormask as being more representative of how most of my dreams feel.

But, you know, I think everyone dreams different, as is apparent from the other comments here. I don't think you should discount other people's accounts of dreams just because they aren't like yours.

on "recurring" dreams

[wrog]

I've certainly had a number of dreams where I was certain during the dream and after waking up that I'd had the dream before.

But since I never actually get around to writing down my dreams, I don't know whether that's actually the case, i.e., whether it's a memory of an actual previous dream or simply a dream-memory of a dream that's getting fixed in my awake memory as having been a previous dream.

Though it could well be true given that I (as with most people) have forgotten most of my dreams.

On the other hand, it seems likely to me that dreams are just mental garbage-collection, so it's not at all surprising that the pointers encountered (i.e., to previous dreams and whatnot) might be inherently unreliable.