Another brief note, RP-wise:

[camwyn]

Dreams neither have to be cohesive, coherent conversations, nor totally surrealistic. Conversations in most- not all, just most- people's dreams tend to wander weirdly but make perfect sense in the context of the dream, only losing their content when the dreamer wakes.

And nightmares are funny things, being highly subjective. Remember what Pterry points out: "Hi! I'm your worst nightmare!" is often only accurate if spoken by a giant cabbage with a whirling bit, or a pair of socks chasing you down the street, or whatever. It's all in what your mind makes of it, not in how recognizably horrible the subject matter is to the rest of the population.

Just saying.

Comments

[batyatoon]

This is true, and it makes dreams that aren't more or less straight flashbacks hellaciously hard to write. I've only ever written a few dreams that I think feel like dreams at all.

[camwyn]

The dream I remember most clearly as leaving me gripping the bed and staring at the ceiling going "it was only a dream, it was only a dream" was the one where I woke up on board a plane and found out the Red Cross had sent me to Alaska without telling me, and no one knew where in Sitka I was supposed to go or why. It was full of stuff that didn't especially make sense, but it wasn't surrealistic for the sake of being surrealistic, either. And I don't think anyone else would've found it terrifying, but for me it was a genuine nightmare.

Pain in the arse, royally.

[batyatoon]

And I've had at least one dream that sounds truly horrific -- I was in prison and going to be executed within the day, was part of it -- but that didn't really distress me much at all once I'd woken up. Just kind of "...oh. That was weird."

[blackswanevent.livejournal.com]

I read somewhere that dreams are the mind's attempt to process events or react to things that happened during the day or during a particular period. Of course I dunno how true that'd be considering, as Scrooge said to Marley and Marley Ghosts, "You may be a bit of undigested beef or a blob of mustard" How true that is. I'm not entirely sure of this, but didn't Jung and Freud support the theory that there are certain Archtypal images that appear in dreams at certain stages in life?

*is probably totally crazy.*

I dunno-one of the weirdest dreams that I had was me dreaming that I was asleep at my dad's when in reality I was at my mom's asleep in my bed there. So the weirdest part of that was the loosing a complete grip on where I was and having a hard time waking up because I thought that I had to wake up in both my dream and in reality-It was funky.

[camwyn]

Sometimes, yeah; and as a student of both anthropology and religion, I can verify that most cultures have culturally defined dreams, accepted by that specific society as having a very specific significance. American society in general doesn't, since 'OH NOES I AM NEKKID IN PUBLIC' is only really thought to be a manifestation of Anxiety, rather than indicative of Something One Should Do or Some Archetypal Action To Be Understaken.

I can personally vouch for the fact that certain changes in surrounding conditions- temperature, say, or a particular pillow- affect my REM sleep and the manifestations thereof, psychological archetypes or no. And even for the fact that virtually none of my dreams feature people I actually know. I'm more likely to have a coherent, waking-normal conversation with a stranger in a dream than I am with someone I know- I had dreams all through college that my contact lenses were torn or blackened, or that my teeth were falling out, and my father inevitably took me to task for failure to care for my teeth. Those eventually stopped after a single dream in which I reached into my mouth and showed him that the latest tooth was growing back. But that's the kind of thing you get, more than 'pure wackiness' or 'pure memory'... at least when you're dealing with the contents of my skull, anyway.

[blackswanevent.livejournal.com]

You know I had a funky dream like that right before I graduated? Not with teeth of course. I dreamed that I showed up for graduation in unwashed clothes and sneakers without a shower or a grad-gown and they said that I couldn't graduate cause I wasn't "ready" for the real world.

Haven't there been studies though that outside conditions and inside conditions can affect mental response? But then I guess it would be hard to conduct a study on that because it would require an extremely large control group-and the control group would have no effect because each person responds to things differently.

Since you mentioned this in conjunction with roleplay and gaming however, here's a question to pose to you. If you're playing a character that's a non-original-like-let's say John Preston-are you more apt to apply your own experience with dreaming and the unconciousness to them or attempt to describe their dreams as they would happen canonically?

It's rare however-for characters to actually dream in canon unless it's crucial to the story arch-so I guess I semi answered my own question? I've gotta stop doing that. ><

[camwyn]

Well- the reason this came up is because I wanted to describe one of Sarge's nightmares, because right now he's having a lot of them. While I figure most of them are the usual 'memory replays of things that happened to the lads' or 'a really wicked imagination spinning up what might've happened to poor Spoony', I don't think they're all gore. Wells is quoted in canon as having a very specific fear of never seeing his wife again. I should think that, given his current condition and his insistence on Not Taking This Home To The Wife, any self-respecting subconscious would throw a nightmare at him to force him to process the fear that even if he does make it out of Milliways, his condition might prevent him from ever seeing Annie again. The specific content draws on his own brain's images, but the format is a simple, common one: attempt to reach the goal, and not make it.

Interesting..

[argonautilus.livejournal.com]

My dreams are full of people I know, usually not in their typical "place" I would expect to see them, and not being who I remember them as. My subconscious seems to recycle faces and the like..and when I wake up I'm constantly going..."Wasn't that the kid from 7th grade middle school Home Economics? Why was he giving me instructions on how to do a breach birth on a sea horse?" (And yes that did happen)Very rarely are people I don't know in my dreams.

[genarti]

Yeah.

Which makes dreams alternately really fun and really frustrating to write, depending on how clear you want the underlying "message" of the dream to be to the reader.

Dreams are one of the things for which I'm never entirely sure if I've done it well or made a much too coherent scene with dream-logic window dressing.

[condotierre.livejournal.com]

Dreams are funky things, indeed. I'd have been quite happy to dream about Jet Li all night after 'Fearless', but instead weird wandering vignettes of LARP-ing danced through my head.

And I don't even LARP.

(Incidentally, yes, that film is worth a look-see if you can find it. The weaponry is enough to make an arsenal drool a pool. How often do you get to see the man attempting to plant padi in a most comical way?)

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

I used to write down my dreams whenever possible, which helped a lot to exorcise the nightmares I used to have pretty regularly and gave me a good source to draw on for using dreams in stories.

The worst type of dream I ever had was when something unspeakably horrible happened, then I dreamt I woke up, thought "It was only a dream", dreamt that I got up to get me a glass of water, and found out that it was all "real", i.e. still there. I made good use of that in a CoC-RPG later.