I’m a little more interested in dreams that match real-life events, before the events actually happen.

my first memory of this is the common ‘flying’ dream, i was standing on the ledge of a large building (i still remember the panorama in great detail) and fell, realised that i was dreaming – and then went for a little fly! very exhilerating. or even a similar feeling but better spelt.

although through the years i have always had at very least a passive control over these dreams – the strangest thing happened once when i was dreaming of being on a canal barge watching a fox run alongside on the bank…..at that point i became lucid – and regardless of all my trying, the fox became quite scary and with intelligent eyes that bore into me, aware of what i was doing in my lucid state and mocking me for it!! he also became more human and was now running along the boat but on two legs. i only woke up when it leapt to the boat and into me!

to give you an image of the impression the anthropmorthic fox gave off, see the mighty boosh’s CRACK FOX

told you it was scary : )

The flying sensations are much like the feeling I get swimming underwater. As a kid, I enjoyed the ability to maneuver underwater in 3 dimensions with 6 axes of freedom for as long as I could hold my breath. This has carried over into dreaming where I find aerial swimming an efficient way to travel through crowded hallways at about 7 to 8 feet of altitude (AGL). A real time-saver.

Someone mentioned losing teeth in dreams. Occasionally I will dream most of my teeth are detached in my mouth, feeling like a mouth full of gravel I can’t spit out. Very annoying.

Occasionally I’ve invented things in my dreams. My wife swears I woke up one night knowing how to do head transplants, but I don’t remember that. The only one I can remember at the moment is a double tissue box, a package design with full-size tissues on one end and smaller ones in a separate compartment at the other end, giving the user a choice of sizes depending on the mission. Anyone care to take this idea to product development?

Does anybody else experience what I describe as “the drop”. When dozing just before actually going to sleep, I have occasionally felt a sensation as though myself (or the bed) just suddenly dropped about a foot straight down then stopped (a variation on this can be a perception of a sudden shaking movement – as though one were suddenly grabbed by the shoulders and shaken back and forth, except of course, I’m horizontal, not vertical at the time). It’s quite a shock and tends to make me suddenly wide awake again.

I have very limited experience of lucid dreaming, in so much as I can fairly often recognize that I am dreaming (usually when things get too surreal to be believable), but have only been able to vaguely steer the course of the dream on a few occasions. Most often I tend to wake very soon after discovering that I am dreaming – although this can be helpful in that over the years I have learned to exit a nightmare upon recognizing it for what it is (I just think to myself “this is too nasty, I wish to wake up now – and I do – sort of a dream equivalent to the holodeck command “end program”).

My experience of flying is somewhat dismal. I can leap great distances on occasion, and can sort of hover (oddly enough by pressing down on the air at my sides with my hands…), but any attempts at actual flight are limited to short distances as the weight of my legs inevitably drags me down. This (and other’s comments about references to “floating” or “treading water”), leads me to wonder if our concept of flying in dreams is based in some way on our experiences of swimming. Our brain has to construct the virtual world of our dreams using the experiences of the real world that we have accumulated (hence why people born blind or deaf have no visual or hearing content in their dreams respectively), and since most of us have no actual experience of flying (at least under our own control – I don’t think passenger planes count), the nearest analogue (in terms of sensation) that the brain has to work with, is our experience in water. Getting back to my heavy legged flying style, I have always been a rotten swimmer, and whenever I have tried floating (even with assistance), my legs have always pulled me down (hence my flying style is similarly cramped in the virtual world). Anyone with experiences that could lend support, or disprove this [admittedly spur of the moment] hypothesis?

Two other interesting observations on the dream state:
Our sense of time is completely different. While research tells us that most dreaming (or at least REM) periods only last a few minutes at most, I can recall dreams in which days or even months of virtual time have elapsed.
Our emotional responses can be completely different in the dream state (eg. One can be completely terrified by something that in real life is completely harmless – such as an egg).

Incidentally, I tend to dream in a mix of both first -person (in which I am me), and more cinematic third person (in which I am seeing myself from another vantage point). Anyone else do this?

[quote]I think my lucid dreaming ability is enhanced by daydreaming as I fall asleep. I am aware when I start to think crazy dream-like things as I fall asleep. Also, if I wake up mid-dream, I try to recall as much as possible of the dream as soon as possible. I practice recalling in my mind what I would have done if I had been lucid. [/quote]

I also used to do this when falling asleep, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream that had any connection to my pre-sleep daydreams.

[quote]I have another dream question. Many times I have gone to bed thinking about a particularly difficult math problem, or computer algorithm I was trying to write, subsequently dreamed about it, and solved it during my dream. When I wake up, the solution is still running around in my head and all I have to do it write it down and verify it. Is this common? [/quote]

One of the most important discoveries in chemistry was made during a dream:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_August_Kekul%C3%A9_von_Stradonitz#Benzene

[quote]I still get similar episodes like that, but since living and sleeping in the same bed with my girlfriend, the content of the dream is fortuitously reversed. In my current dreams I’m cheating on my girlfriend. This usually results in a wet dream (which is the good part – provided I can remember the orgasm) but when I awake I am overcome with a horrific sense of guilt (which sadly ruins the experience). I have twice before begun confessing to my girlfriend sleeping beside me, telling her how sorry and stupid I am, but managed both times to catch myself before she woke. [/quote]

I’ve had such dreams before, and no matter how much I’ve been in love with a girl at the time, the dream would invariably feature either a stranger or some girl I knew but would never dream about starting something with (well obviously I would dream, but you know what I mean…) Those dreams dramatically decreased in frequency when I was in a relationship, but I probably wouldn’t have had pangs of conscience about it anyway. I knew they were dreams with a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming reality.

[quote]About a year before I gained that ability, I started a dream journal, and spent about fifteen minutes every morning typing out any dreams I had the night before in as much detail as possible. After a few months, my general desire to remember details made me a little more conscious during dreams, and as time went on, I eventually became conscious enough to actually participate in them. [/quote]

I might actually try that, but I don’t think it will help much. I probably would have something to write in that journal once a month at most…

My inability to dream has a nice side-effect, though: I never awaken at night. I go to bed and sleep until my alarm clock is ringing. When my GF moved in with me, I was surprised to learn that she woke up two or three times during the night. Actually I didn’t notice until she told me, because, you know, I was sleeping ;-) Until then I’d thought sleeping without interruption was normal, but I’ve since learned that it is more likely the exception.

I can always change the direction and frequently do, ussually to reflect a figment of imagination like 100m tall giant robots.

I’d say most of my dreams are lucid, I just never thought of controlling them. Unless they’re not going the way I want, I’m content just to let them play like movies. This is the first I’ve heard of this being a unique phenomenon, I thought it happened to everybody.”[/quote]

That actually happens to me frequently. I lie on my bed and when I start slipping into sleep I feel like the room is spinning or my head is at least. After that I feel like my body is sinking or sometimes my body feels weightless and yet strangely heavy at the same time. After that though I don’t remember much.

I completely agree with letting it play out. I love dreaming because it’s so unpredictable. However, controlling them from time to time sounds quite fun. No doubt, I would land myself in the middle of a desert in a parallel world and have crazy crazy adventures. One of them would be landing in the middle of a desert war. I’d probably panic, which would be quite amusing.