Stupid REM Moments
 

Why do we have irritating dreams, sometimes? You know, the ones where you have to dial a phone to make an important call but all the numbers are hard to read and you keep slipping up and have to re-dial over and over again?

Last night: an endless, blank stairwell. Nothing but repeating flights of concrete stairs and buzzing flourescent lights. No exits no matter how far up or down I travelled and I swear that all that sleep I had during this dream was completely useless, judging by the number of cups of coffee it has taken to get going today.

Damn you, sleep demons! Why can't I return to the grand old days of dreaming about that peaceful island where stress did not exist? Or all those women? Or that peaceful island with all those women?

You have the phone call dream too??

Mine is where I have to make a really important phone call but the number isn't expressed as a number but as a word number like "BAKER-6-9000" and I can't translate it! I haven't had that one in a while (thank god - its a wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat dream).

The other one I had wasn't so much stressful as frustrating - I have to run somewhere but my legs won't move.

But the dreams I have when I'm sick and have a really high fever are just awful - like I'm in a sauna with a full sweatsuit on and I can't find the door.

Someone once noted to me, and I'm not sure if I believe it, that the part of your brain that allows you to understand text shuts down while you are sleeping. Hence, the numbers and letters are hard to read.

One night, before going to bed, I read a massive amount of Calvin and Hobbes. My dream, of course, was that I was reading more of these comics, but I could only see blurred text with sharp graphics. I kind of had to figure out what was going on just by the pictures and, of course, it made no sense at all in a dream.

The worst thing about these dreams is that I feel incredibly tired on waking from them in the morning.

You have the phone call dream too??

Other common dreams people have, I think: tornados, many of them, all converging on your house. Well, it was common to other people I knew who grew up in the midwest and lived with fun weather come April followed by sirens that made everyone a little nervous. And, of course, running from something and slipping and falling a lot.

I know several people who have dreamed about their teeth crumbling in their mouths. I've had it a couple of times. That's one unpleasant dream.

I have one that recurs relatively frequently. I'm in school taking classes. The problem is, it's getting close to the end of the semester and there's this one class that I've never even been to and done no studying for. This is obviously a problem with exams pending (leaving aside the question of whether the prof would award a passing grade to a student who had been awol the whole term even if they did blow away the final).

This is, I think, a pretty typical scenario for an anxiety kind of dream. But there are a couple things about it that always make it seem even more odd and surreal, especially when I've just woke up from it at 2 AM.

First, it mixes different elements from my past. For example, this course I'm in trouble over might be happening on a campus where I used to work, and be taught by a physics teacher from my high school as part of the math department where I went to college.

Second, the course in question is always a math course. Math was my best subject and I could soak it up instantly. (Note the past tense; after 15-odd years of disuse I'm lucky to balance my checkbook properly. I might as well never have taken real analysis or abstract algebra for all that I can recall now.) So why does it show up like this? It would be more apropos for me to have a nightmare about biology or American lit or some other subject where I was indifferent at best.

Oh ick Happy Monkey, I'm so bad at dental hygeine. Who knows why? It's just something I'm very slack about. Now I'm probably going to have that dream!:worried:

Ugh! The teeth rotting dream is also common, then! Nasty! I've had that one a number of times.

One of the most unpleasant experiences ever was to wake from a dream and experience sleep paralysis. All the instructions for your muscles to move for actions in your dream are actually sent from your brain down your spinal cord. When you dream, neurons in your spinal cord send a convient "don't do this" signal which defeats the action. The result: you don't move around much when you dream. If you wake up and the signal is still being sent, you try to move and can't. It lasts less than a minute, but it is truly horrifying to try to move or yell and you cannot.

The other possibility: REM without atonia, where the "don't do this" signal is not sent and you act out all of your physical actions that take place in your dreams. The result: you can murder your wife and successfully use the condition as your defense.

I think my scariest and most often reocuring dream involves me realizing that I'm taking MORE classes than I thought.

Like realizing that instead of 6 classes I'm taking 7 and have missed the 7th class the whole term and now will certainly fail. This forces me to start thinking about what classes I am taking, when the mystery class was supposed to be etc.

I have it at least once every term before the finals. It drives me insane because I can never figure out which class it is that I've not gone to, if I'm really failing etc. Maybe I should go to my classes...in RL I go to maybe 1/3rd of all my classes.


Scariest dream ever: I woke up, it was about 9 am, I walked into the living room, turned on the TV, went into the bathroom, washed my face, brushed my teeth..decieded to take a leak. So as I was standing there taking a piss I suddently started to feel warm all over. - Thats when I realized that it was all a dream except for the part that I was in fact taking a piss while still in bed. I was about 5 years old at the time. This was an 'odd' thing for me because I never wetted my bed before or after(excluding the diaper age).
Ever since that dream, any thought or mention of body functions in a dream causes me to wake up spontaneously.


Edit:

Scariest way to wake up was face on the pillow, one hand under the pillow and one hand under my chest. Both had gone numb, I could feel the slight tingling but I didn't know where my arms were..I tried to get up but couldn't controll my hands...I managed to roll over and just lay there till I regained sensation..

how about the one where you know you need to wake up or you will die from sleep apnea, but you can't wake yourself up because your dream self can't get in touch with your real self.

Yikes. :eek: I hope you aren't refering to a personal experience. Sleep apnea is no fun.

When I was working a graveyard shift my dreams became extremely weird, because I was sleeping during the day, instead of at night. I attribute it to my body trying to adjust to a wacky schedule.

During that period I got alot of those dreams in which I cannot tell if I am in a dream. I would lay down on the couch to rest before work and then (presumably) wake up and start going about my normal activities. Gradually things would warp and unusual things would start to happen and I would suddenly realize, I never woke up at all and so I would wake myself up from the dream...and it would happen all over again. This could happen 5 or 6 times in a row. That is the scariest kind of dream for me, because it blurs my sense of reality, even when I really do wake up.

the crumbling teeth dream typically expresses a fear of growing up or maturing.....facing realities that you've been avoiding.

FnF......you shouldn't have shared the bed wetter thing.....I fear it may haunt you in the future.

oh, and case......you never DID wake up...this IS a dream.....you've been in a coma for over 13 years......I think it's time to wake up.......the good news is, your not really married to Perth, and are again free to date.

so what are you doing tomorrow night?


-just kidding, jinx!...oh, and you too , perth

Really? Aging? The Freudian analysis I got on that one was "that means you're gay".

Dream analysys is the new astrology. Or the old astrology. Anyway, it's just as accurate.

Yikes...13 years of sleep make for nasty pillow drool.

Tell me about it. :rolleyes:

That is the absolute worst!!! That and the one where I'm just below the surface of water, but can't get my face out to breathe. Hate them ::shudder::

You know LJ, I've thought about that...

But I figured with all the other things I posted about myself, the fact that I once pissed all over myself while dreaming that I was pissing in the toilet won't make the group opinion of me sink any lower as it has either already hit rock bottom or is unaffected by my personal issues.

My GF often gets a freaky dream; you see she's still less than fluent in English to say the least. As in she understands it perfectly but has trouble phrasing a response. She often gets a dream where she has returned to Russia to visit her mother and friends to find that she can only speak in English, she understands Russian but just can't respond. She always has a particularly troubling scene where the stries to communicate with her very confused mother.

Personaly I find the whole dream uncontrollably funny. It's even funnier because she likes to think that dreams have some sort of meaning to them.

from what i understand/been told is the tornado dream means that you feel as if your life is out of control. makes sense to me, mine had been out of control for the last year and a half and i had the tornado dream on more that one occation. damn thing(s) were always chasing me. be it on the ground or when i was flying a plane.:mad:

another type of dream i can't stand is the one where your having a nightmare and you wake up, only your still asleep. yep the ol' dream within a dream thing. always scares the hell out of me!:eek:

I haven't had a good tornado dream since I was really young (and life seemed more in control), but back then I also had UFO dreams. Much in the same theme as the tornado dreams, it didn't seem to matter where they were or how many there were, they were out to get me no matter which direction they were headed when I initially saw them.

The really cool dreams are the emotionally powerful ones, or lucid dreams. Dammit -- I've only had one lucid dream my entire life. "Hey, what's happening is so stupid that I must be dreaming! Cool, I'll fly around a little."

the worst dream is the one where you are at work.....and you're working!......just normal stressful work.....

I WANT TO GET PAID FOR THOSE DREAMS!!

Odd. I decided this morning to share the dream that I had this morning; and I find that there is already a thread about dreams on the Cellar.

So, this morning I was awoken by my roommate coming home at 3 am, and couldn't go back to sleep. I tried listening to music (Ulrich Schnauss); I focused on the music and let the rest of myself spiral away.

Since I couldn't get to sleep, I got up and went into the kitchen. I trimmed the stem of an iris, and set the flower shoots into an old sauce bottle that I had filled with water. I fantasized about walking around the woods naming flowers -- there might have been a girl with me -- and recalled an anecdote given to me by my roommate a few days ago: "Why am I having so much fun? I'm just walking through the woods naming flowers!".

I set the makeshift flower vase on the table, and sat down to glower at my inability to sleep. Hunched over the table, I stared blankly at it for a long time. There was a lot of junk on the table. My roommate had a tiny dremel (10 cm length, disc was 1 cm thick and had a radius of 1 cm, rough edge), which for some reason was turned on. It was slowly grinding into some steel object of mine.

I feared to remove the dremel from the object, because I thought that it might harm me. I stared at it sleepily and uncomprendingly in the dim ligh. Eventually, I made up my mind and picked up the dremel. The dream became fraught with tension as I raised the dremel up in the air, and I left the dream.

At some point during the dream, I was jerked my arm across the table and swept a lot of the junk off of it. I picked up the junk and put it back on the table, noticing a piece of torn camera lens cleaning paper. I thought about going back to my bed.

"Wait," I thought, "I'm still in bed, amn't I?" I tested it and realized that I was still in bed. The dream flickered in strength for a moment, then faded.

interpretation
 

Teeth
dream interpretation
meaning of dream
Dreaming about teeth is very common in all cultures and age groups. Most dreams about teeth leave people feeling uneasy and anxious. Consider the overall content and context of the dream and note if you are having dental problems before making interpretation. Teeth usually symbolize power and/or control. Animals use their teeth for defense and nourishment and show their teeth when angry. Humans often display similar behaviors. Look and see if you are losing or abusing power and control in any area of your life (especially if you are losing teeth in your dream). Old dream interpretations say that dreaming about teeth is a bad omen that suggest financial difficulties.

Just some food for thought. ;)

Sorry...
 

I forgot to put the link to the site of the dream interpreter, just in case anyone was interested/curious:

Free Dream Interpretation Dictionary

I had that one, once -- dreamt I was under water and couldn't breath. Woke up to find myself face down in the pillow.

...and no, there was no one pushing me.

My Dream Interpretation:
 

Teeth crumbling dream interpretation: I probably grind my teeth in my sleep on occasion. I know I catch myself clenching them during the day sometimes.

This probably is how the "dream interpretation" books came up with their stories. Grinding/clenching teeth implies stress. So associate it with loss of control, financial worries, or sexual problems. Good chance of a hit there.

I thought this thread was going to be about silly things done on stage by Michael Stipe. "Never mind"

http://tragickingdom.net/images/mstipe.jpg


On dreams, I often get the falling-from-great-heights nightmare, waking up before I crash. The first Evanescense video reminds me of these.

I've got very weird one for you....

Ever heard singing in your dreams? I had one that kept on occurring every other night for a couple of weeks that had a crowd singing this song over and over. The song was kind of a cheerful pick-me-up (kind of a family song) but puzzled the crap out of me until I slowly woke up while dreaming and recognized all of the voices. The voices were my voices at different points in my life, from small child to adulthood, varying in range and tone.

No, I don't do drugs.