Do you remember your dreams?

I used to experience lucid dreaming all of the time, now almost never.

Interesting, Castaneda says ( I think it was 'Yaqui Way of Knowledge' but it's hard to recall. My days of reading Castaneda were long ago.) says that the key is counting your fingers in the dream. To exercise real control of the dream, you should hold up your hands and slowly count each of your 10 fingers. Things will happen around you in the dream, attempts to pull your concentration away, but don't be distracted.

 

Same for me. I had lucid dreaming pretty regularly from as young as I can remember to late teens or early 20s. Didn't even realize it was a big deal. But then it stopped and haven't for years now.

 

One weird thing I do remember from my dreams: fairly often I am back working at a previous workplace, and I remember in perfect intricate detail how to run machinery, computer codes, passwords, lock combinations, etc etc.

I worked in a gas station from 1977-1981. I still remember in complete detail exactly how to do an automated cash register checkout and balance the daily books.

 

I have the recurring dream of being five minutes before deadline and not one page is done. That was the progeny of the dream of walking into an exam, looking at it and not recognizing a word.

 

Had a dream last night that I was apparently in England. I say this because I had a sex dream about Kate Middleton. Suffice to say, Prince William is one lucky dog.

 

One time when I was pulling an all-nighter at my college paper, I dozed off at the computer and woke up a few minutes later with the opening fragments of a dream typed on the screen. Disjointed phrases, nothing I could piece together, but still.

Dream about the exam, though it's always the class before and I haven't been in said class all semester; I just forgot to go. Art imitating life. Rarely remember much of my dreams, just that they're always very sad.

 

When I was a kid, up until adolescence, when I remembered my dreams, every so often I would have a horrifiying nightmare. One time when I was about 16 I woke up just absolutely screaming. Didn't remember the slightest thing of what it was about.

After 25 years or so of pretty much not dreaming at all, since starting to have dream-fragments over the last 10 years or so, I hardly ever have nightmares. Even once in a while I remember somebody dying or even some life-threatening situation for me, it never seems to bother me very much.

 

I had a weird dream this morning. Woke up at 6 a.m. in a cold sweat for some reason.

I remember parts of it: I was out of town at an auction of some sort, and I bought a car and pickup truck for less than $2,000. Only I didn't have any money on me, so I couldn't pay up. I tried to walk out of the place, but someone hit a button and the floor collapsed out from underneath me and I fell into a basement of some sort. Somehow, I managed to climb up a ramp and back upstairs. I ran out to my car and started to drive away, but I couldn't stop my car from going backwards down a hill at a stop light. I guess someone cut my brakes. Eventually I wrecked, while going backwards still, into a building or an oncoming car -- I can't remember which. I remember shards of glass flying all around me and the car starting to roll. It flips three or four times and comes to a stop in the middle of the road, where I get hit by a car that can't stop in time.

That's when I woke up. I sat straight up in bed, trying to catch my breath. For a moment, my back and my legs hurt as if I was actually in an accident. Then I looked at my phone, realized it was just a dream, got a drink of water and went back to sleep. It was one of the strangest and most terrifying (for whatever reason) dreams I've ever had.

 

I was just going to say "sometimes" but Rusty's explanation is about on par with what I feel.

If the dream is something involving people I know and situations I'm in, I tend to remember them more vividly. There was one dream I had when I was about 18 that still makes me think even though it's been nearly 20 years since I dreamt it.

The ones I remember the most vividly are the ones that involve things like people at work or situations. I remember dreaming that my boss at my last newspaper telling me "it just didn't work out" very early in my tenure, long before I actually got shitcanned.

 

for me, whether i wake up and remember or forget seems to be completely random.

i've kept a notebook by the side of my bed since 1996 in which i record my dreams. i'm lazy though; i only write in it occasionally so it's probably got about 75 or so pages written in during the past 15 years (and i sometimes go a year or two without writing in it). it's weird that when i look back through the notebook at what i wrote i can sometimes remember the long-ago dream by jogging my memory.

 

Anyone else had a dream in which they were crying, only to wake up to discover you really are crying?

 

That happened to me once. Not sure what it was I was dreaming about, but most of my dreams are sad, so smart money says this one was too.

I've had dreams involving SJ screennames recently. That's a pretty good sign that I've gone around the end.

There's also a really lucid dream involving Burger King and a prophecy of sorts seven years ahead of schedule, but I'm probably too plastered to go into great detail about it.