Ask Lemmy

Wildest recent ones were nightmares. Some highlights:

Met a drop-dead gorgeous woman, and we spend the day going around town and having a great time. We open the door to one shop, and it's a backstage area of some kind. There's a horrible realization that the whole town, our experience and the experience of everyone else was actually part of a CCP propaganda film about agricultural output (??). Upon this realization, everyone starts wailing out of existential horror. I turn to the woman, and she is also wailing, but now she is a wizened elderly Chinese lady. She turns to me, suddenly gives a horrible smile, and starts laughing manaically. Cue wakeup.

In a creepy forest of some kind, where I find this big ominous looking machine. Stuff happens and I end up on top of the machine. There is some creature on top with a horrible grin, who presses a button. An X shaped port opens up like a ... well, imagine someone has a scab and they start to expand, tearing it open to reveal the interior of the wound, a mix of blood and viscera and fire and screaming. I look up from gazing into this and the creature, still smiling, has my right arm in one hand and a knife in the other. Still smiling, looking directly into my eyes, it runs the knife down my arm to let the blood drip into the machine wound. I felt every part of that knife. Cue wakeup.

The combo of recent decisions to divorce due to a partner's cheating, REM rebound from taking a break from weed, and deep horniness due to vacationing at a friend's apartment who made you promise you wouldn't masturbate is one I would not recommend to anyone who doesn't like amazing horror movie level dreams. Wake up experience was "OMG what in the actual fuck was that!?", followed shortly after by "These would've been dope as fuck if I saw them on a theatre screen."

Oh, there's also one from many years back that starts with a bus trip from a creepy carnival and ends, narrative period of a few weeks later, sitting on the throne of hell holding Satan's head with legions bowing, but I'll save that one for another day.

I recently had a dream that my cat had laid, cared for, and took care of a baby sea turtle.

I often don’t recall my dreams, so I do have more limited options than most.

I mean I get weird dreams all the time. Cities that don't exist, whole worlds and people I have never met.

Craziest one I think for me personally was:
I was being held in a hospital for the mentally insane child. Now I was not a child and it made it very awkward cause they did not like me and kept threatening to dissolve my body in acid or let the lead doctor know I wasnt a psychopathic child. Now the head doctor was Frankenstein, the monster, not the Dr who was a monster; who if you stayed still wouldn't notice you much. So I had to pretend to be into shape puzzles and torture, while hiding at the sound of heavy boots.

Anyways, after 2 months I planned my escape by pretending to be a pregnant woman to get transferred to a new hospital.
I enjoyed the view of the California coastline as I rode away in that limo taking off my fake belly and wig to the shock of everyone in the audience. I had won.

Then I woke up from my 40 minute nap.

freud might rise from the grave to interview you

I occasionally have really detailed dreams with plots and allegory and everything. Sometimes someone will tell a joke in my dream, and I don't get the joke until I wake up and think about it. My subconscious is sometimes more clever than I am.

Anyway, the best dream I ever had was one of those really detailed ones with a complex plot. I don't remember any of those details, but it was some kind of mystery story where two children are on the run from a detective. It was full of plot twists and complex lies. As the plot unfolded, it seemed like there were some contractions in the narrative. One character says it happened like this, but another character claims the opposite. Typical mystery story stuff.
But as the dream went on, these little inconsistencies built up and up until I concluded that a key event in the plot must have happened two different ways at the same time. Irreconcilably, both ways must have been true, but they absolutely contradicted each other. It's not that somebody is lying, there must actually be something wrong in the timeline itself.
This is when the dream drops its biggest plot twist: why is it inconsistent? Because it's not real; it's all a dream. And then I woke up.

I know the "it's all a dream" plot twist is usually cheap and stupid, but like, it WAS all a dream. I sat in bed for like 15 minutes just being impressed with how incredible the twist was, and how it was quite impossible for anybody else to experience the same story.

I once dreamt that a house in my neighborhood was used as a filming location for a movie, and that whoopie Goldberg was in it. When the movie was over, she had developed agoraphobia, and could not bring herself to leave. I took care of her, along with her sister, and eventually married her. We were married for 35 years. I know this sounds insane, but I swear to you, it lasted 35 years in that dream, for years, I could remember it like a second life. When I woke up I grieved.

I was 11 years old, and 2 years later we moved into that same house.

There was also the much less cool dream I had in early 2001, where we took a trip to NYC, and when we got to this big bridge, soldiers made us turn around, and the air was filled with ash and smoke, and the soldier told us "New York is closed"

At the time I kept a dream journal and wrote that one down. No one believed me when 9/11 happened until I showed my parents the journal

I used to take a weekly anti-malarial drug known for giving intense dreams on the first two nights after you've taken it. They would get WILD while feeling cinematic and super real. It was like going through a whole day of events. And someone always died. Always. Not sure if it still is, but it was listed as one of the known side effects of the drug. I think now it's just "intense dreams."

My most favorite one I've written about before online and so I'd be doxing myself to get into details about which cartoon characters were with me, but the short version is like a level from a video game where I defeated a mini-boss and got a lamp with 3 wishes, and used my wish to go on a trans-dimensional adventure to go kill the main boss. Patrick Swayze was killed.

A full African safari while driving around in an open-top blue Cadillac. Random person was killed, and it was abrupt - mid-conversation with a friend I turned to see someone get whacked in space between some trees off to my right. Then on with the show. Great day, great weather. Stopped for lunch at one point and everything, I had some grilled meats and an orange Fanta.

Worst one was running through the mall that I went to when I was a kid (my one and only "mall world dream") and I was shopping like normal. Checking out stores, showing them to my spouse since some hadn't changed since I was a kid. Very much a walk down memory lane dream. Then the ceiling tiles started falling, but not the panels - they were all the bottoms of stone columns smashing down. So it was like some Indiana Jones smashing ceiling thing. Ran from one of the mall to the other, eventually got cornered in a jewelry store where I got smashed and watched the column fall on my face like it was IRL. Woke up literally out of breath and covered in sweat.

Not the anti-malarial, but I had a friend give me some melatonin once to help sleep, and I didn't realize at the time you took it right before you go to bed. So being an idiot, I took it right then and passed out on his couch for an hour or so. I played a whole game of hockey. I don't play hockey, or even watch it, and it wasn't on the TV. I think I was playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins and we were playing the Rangers. All 3 periods. I felt the ice below me, cool air on my face, the tension of the helmet fitting poorly on me. We won 3-2, but I really wasn't keeping score. Stadium was empty, though, which seemed odd.

Personally I get sleep paralysis almost weekly. It's always disembodied voices as opposed to incubus' or succubus' (I wish!)

Had a dream that some people were messing with my car so I went out to investigate and one of them stabbed me. I felt everything. The knife, the blood draining from my face, the dizziness and weakness then I "died" at which point I woke up. It's never left me

I had a dream that Freddie Mercury didn't die. But he got middle-aged and fell out of popularity. And I watched him perform on the stage of an elementary school with no band. Singing "Don't Stop Me Now" while sort of running in place and wearing a suit covered in oversized blue sequins. And he had no confidence in himself. His voice was quiet as he ran through the song. He didn't look anyone in the eye.

I was deeply affected by this.

I don't remember a lot of them, but my most recent strange dream had me in prison and finding out an older coworker was also there for trying to stab Nixon. I was just there, one of those kinds of dreams where the setting is just taken as expected, no idea why I was in prison. The prison would force inmates to hunt each other and they wanted me to hunt my coworker but I like him so I just kinda faked it walking around searching for nothing. Some time later I was talking to him about how I couldn't find him and he said it's because he stuffed a whole bunch of leaves into his pants. Lol

I once had a dream that I went with my family to visit an old family friend (not seen in years) for dinner, but they lived in a different (i.e fictional) house that I had never been to before. Normally this wouldn't seem strange but when I woke up and told another adult family member, they looked completely shocked. It turns out they had also dreamt of this exact same scenario that night set in the same fictional house. We could describe the setting and events in detail and both had exactly the same experience but from different perspectives in the dream.

I have no doubt there is some psychological explanation for this phenomenon but regardless it was quite an interesting experience.

I generally have vivid dreams, so those aren't uncommon.

The weirdest one was I was having a nightmare and "woke up" in my room, but I was still dreaming. It was a struggle to wake up from that, which isn't normal at all.

Accidentally doxxed myself the other day on IRC by repeating my Dad's favourite dream anecdote. A psychicatrist (or philosopher depending on when he tells it) has a dream that he'd invented the funniest joke of all time, was famous and doing tours of SNL and others just telling the joke. He woke up in the night remembering it and it was just gibberish when he looked in the morning. I said I wasn't sure if my Dad had just made it up. Someone looked for sources online and the only source was my Dad's blog which had pictures of me at my wedding on it. Trying to keep this vague to avoid doxxing myself again. My life is basically Big Fish where my Dad loves to tell tall tales like this. Fortunately not too affected by this foible unless I mention it online. Looking forward to seeing the psychiatrist/philosopher at his funeral to be proved wrong like the end of that movie.

I've had a series of continuous, hyper-realistic dreams in which I encounter bizarre god like beings. The weirdest part is that I've been into lucid dreaming for more than 2 decades after learning it to combat nightmares, despite knowing I'm dreaming, I can't change anything during these specific dreams. I have full control of me, but all the tricks I use to change the dream world don't work.

The first was about 8 years ago. I found myself in a dream zone I created to look like my ideal pizzeria surrounded by the usual characters but outside this lady in blue keeps getting closer to the window and it's creeping me out so I go to leave. As I'm going down the hall to the kitchen, there's a mirror on the wall but it shows a stone tunnel instead of a reflection. As I'm staring at it, I realize I'm staring at the hallway and I'm now in the tunnel. I don't like it, and I try to change venues but there's no way out. Eventually I decided to follow the tunnel and it takes literal days of time. The stone is this waxy smooth rock descending slightly but with too much of a curve to see past. Everything is dimly lit with no apparent light source.

I finally get to the bottom and it's a giant domed room. Same stone, still dimly lit, maybe 500ft across. There's a 10ft walkway around the edge of the room and the rest is a huge pool of what looks like basalt, but it's moving and ripling like water. There's this constant low grinding noise echoing all around. I suddenly feel like I'm not alone, I turn and it's the blue woman. Before I register, she plants both hands on my chest and shoves me full force into the basalt pool.

I hit it with a thud but immediately begin to sink. I can't swim in it, it's pulling me down. It washes over me with the grace of fluid and the texture of stone. I feel it flowing around me, scouring my skin like sandpaper, it's in my mouth, my nose, my eyes, seeping into my pores and joints, and I feel it scraping every inch of me inside and out. Just as the pain becomes unstable the grinding of stone becomes coherent. It's not a voice, it's an understanding.

Thousands of memories flash through my mind. Knights throwing peasants into the pit, their skin melting away and their bones twisting into wretched things. A Mongol band stands at the edge, when their horses refuse to near the pool the light their tails on fire. The plunge in only for a second before rising from the pit, half skelital, half stone, galloping around half submerged as they scream in ways animals never should. The woman, sorrowful and scared, dressed in hides with brilliant red hair. She cradles a stillborn baby in her arms and lays it gently into the pool. It's skin blues be its features contort before it cries out and sinks into the basalt pool. Her arms bear the same blue where she touched the pool. These and thousands others fill my mind and as I witness I understand that the pool does not want the innocent's it's been fed but the cruelty of those who stand on its bank and cast others in. Eras immemorial of being forced to sup on the insubstantial while true neurishment stood just out of reach. Starving in a prison as a feast waited just beyond the bars.

Finally the visions receded and I realize I feel no pain. I understand that the torture was an unfortunate necessity to allow me to understand and that I am different now, changed inperceptibly. The pool raises me first to the surface then up to stand on the stone lip of it's bowl facing the tunnel I entered from.

Before me stands the blue woman and I take her in for the first time. She is nude from the waist up, her skin a sickly mottle of pale human and that corrupted ashen blue spreading from her arms out across the body, but her vibrant hair and green eyes are the same as the day she came to the pool. What I had though was a tattered skirt is actually the skin from her hips down, flayed away from the body in Evan strips and left the hang from the waist where a braided leather belt seems to prevent the lines from running further. The muscle of her legs raw and exposed. Our eyes meet and the expression she gives is apologetic, embarrassed, and understanding, for both her role in this event and the grotesque image that she knows herself to be. We nod to each other in silence understanding before she steps aside so that I may leave.

The tunnel that took days to follow is now less than a few steps and as I reach the end the mirror is simply a frame, allowing my exit back into my family pizzeria. I wake.

My dreams aren’t necessarily “wild,” but they are incredibly vivid and detailed. A recent example would be a dream about a city where all the buildings were solid gold Inca style pyramids surrounded by lavish gardens, with fine details on the buildings that made me wonder how my brain found the time and energy to render it all.

And yeah I have sex dreams too I guess. About the only place I’m getting it these days.

As a kid - 5 years old - i woke up confused because i thought about 2 years had elapsed. I think i experienced something akin to the famous lampshade story where a guy dreams of an entire simulated life. Tbf though that guy's dream sounds like it was induced by a concussion, but I had nothing of the sought.

I remember having many particularly vivid, surreal, dreams around that time. Unfortunately I can't remember for sure if I dreamed an entire 2 years of life, nor do i remember the contents of the dream at the time, but i remember feeling like I'd time travelled and I think i told everyone I'd dreamed i was 7.

Almost more interesting to me is the fact that me and some others in my family all have short, decently detailed, precognitive dreams; we get a 'vision' of events before they happen, in our sleep.

It mostly occurs with conversations, just me sitting alone somewhere, or with going to a new place.

Having read about "second sight" in scottish folklore, the way it manifests for me and my relatives is exactly like that. We likely have scottish ancestry as well.

Naruto and I had to rescue Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy.