Right before I fall asleep, I’ll remember some random details of a dream I had when I was 5-10 years old. It changes each night, but never is a newer dream.
Does that happen to anyone else?
No, but every once in a while I’ll visit a place in a dream which isn’t real, but which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen in an old dream. That’s kind of the same.
Very interesting!
I also sometimes recognise places and situations from previous dreams, or at least I dream that I recognise them…
It’s like those dreams that feels like a hours/days/years even if you only had a 5 minute nap. It’s impossible to know if time actually passed or if you just dreamt a memory of a long time passing.
A few times I have been certain that the place in the dream was the same as I have dreamt of before, but other times I am equally convinced that I’ve never actually dreamt about it before, even if it felt so in the dream.
I’ve had a couple of dreams that were impossibly longer than the time I was asleep.
Once I lived months a single night. Woke up disoriented and took a long time looking around confused before I remembered who I was.
The other dream was at least many weeks, and in real time it was only three minutes! It was a sort of detective/bounty hunter thing with me chasing a guy. It ended with a sci fi battle in a first that was utterly terrifying, and I woke up in a cold sweat. Literally three minutes since I’d last looked at my phone. Body drenched in sweat that was actually cold, my heart pounding. The dream had been so real.
Both of those dreams ended with me dying.
My usual dream location I’ve returned to so often that I know where places are in relation to each other. It is a patchwork of my home area but with nearby areas that I can’t remember ever having seen IRL. Almost all my dreams, since I was a kid, takes place in this personal dream realm.
It has expanded with new places as I’ve grown though. Latest addition is a cruise ship, with extremely many decks, and a single one-person elevator. I had a room at 58th floor of 85 floors(!) in my dream a few weeks ago. And I had some trouble getting the elevator to the right floor, of course. I always have trouble getting places in dreams.
Another strange quality is that sometimes events of a dream triggers my memory of an older and often forgotten dream. Not as old as OPs, but usually weeks or months back.
That’s pretty neat!
Oh yes! I have a few places that recur in dreams.
One is a huge cave that descends down into the earth. There’s a little city down in the cave, more like a village. Carved into the rock and built up in little shacks. In the place where the cave opens to the surface world, there are nicer little farm places.
There’s another one that is a city on a peninsula. Huge like manhattan. It often gets slowly submerged beneath rising water.
I know there are some others but I can’t think of them right now.
Ayy same.
Same! I’ve been wondering what this could mean. A couple of nights ago I was at one of such places and thought “here it is! this is the place I dream of sometimes!” I was pretty disappointed when I woke up
Oh that’s perfectly normal. What it means is that you are still a kid and your entire life since the age of 10 has been a dream. You’re gonna be a little weirded out when you wake up but all this knowledge and wisdom will be helpful to you.
No but when really high I will hallucinate dreams I think I had when younger. Since the brain is all chemicals there is no way to prove if I had those dreams as a child as I never wrote them down. But they are some of the most trippy dreams.
Hmm I usually do fall asleep high, I wonder if it’s related to that?
Like…most nights?
Man, I don’t even have to wait until I’m falling asleep.
I don’t always remember a dream after I wake, but I’m what might be called “hyper-phatastic”. You hear about people that can’t visualize, and often don’t have visual dreams at all. I’m the opposite. When I read books, I see what is being described, if there’s enough to go from. My dreams are extremely vivid, and the more vivid they are, the clearer I remember them.
And I remember a ton from childhood. The one with tornadoes, the super-hero one that was recurring, the fire dream, the ones about other worlds, the ones about family. I could write down a hundred descriptions like that about childhood dreams I can still see in my head, even while awake. It’s a little fucking crazy sometimes.
I have had a few dreams that were so bad I get PTSD flashbacks when something reminds me of them. That’s not exaggeration, it’s not a misnomer, I’ve discussed it with a therapist and a psychiatrist in conjunction with my other PTSD triggers.
But, luckily, it’s usually the good dreams that get triggered instead :)
Out of curiosity, how many years back are you remembering? I can imagine it happened to me when I was 20 but its not really a thing for me at 50.
20 years back, but I’m not even 30 yet
Not unless I’m intentionally thinking about them.
However, I do have some difficulty differentiating between memories and dreams that I recall from my early childhood.
Here are three examples of memories I have from a very young age. One is confirmed real by my parents. One as far as I can tell is physically impossible so must be a dream. And the third I have no clue if it is real or a dream.
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Shortly before my 3rd birthday, we moved. I remember getting bored while the moving truck was at our house so I rode my tricycle to the next door neighbors and hung out with the old lady and her dog until my mom realized I was missing and yelled at me for wandering off without telling her. (This one really happened)
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We were at the mall to meet my dad for lunch at the food court. As we got onto the escalator, I remembered I was able to fly and flew through the mall (it was similar to swimming but in air instead of water). (Obviously this had to have been a dream but it feels just as real of a memory as the first one).
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As long as I can remember, when we drove anywhere as a family, my spot was behind the driver’s seat and my sister’s spot was behind the passenger seat. I have a vivid memory/dream of it being reversed but my sister saying we should switch spots. My mom said ok and we switched to the standard positions. Nobody remembers this so it may have been a dream (and I would’ve been extremely young if it was real).
My first dreams and memories is from around 3 year old too. And yes, I too can only guess if it was real or dreams from context. Maybe a mix?
One cool thing is that I recently got one memory confirmed from a photograph I’ve never seen until now. 34-ish years later. Damn impressive what brains choose to remember sometimes.
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I get that. I also get continuations of older dreams sometimes. What I find most interesting though is that 99% of my dreams take place in the exact same location.
It’s my home town, but instead of having large grocery stores and such with massive parking lots, those are replaced by plazas linked together in slightly odd ways with all kinds of interesting stores.
My dreams, since I was little, usually start with me taking a walk around this alternate version of my home town, and often visiting a restaurant which in every dream is located in the same place: at the end of a plaza which you have to pass through another plaza to get to.I need to stay awake some time during the night to feed the baby or support my wife doing it. I always fight against the sleep and that is when the pre-sleep dreams are really getting weird. What is happening a lot is that I read something and half way the sentence I fall half asleep and at that point, my mind completes the sentence(s) with the weirdest things.
This is such an odd thread for me to read
I’ve never been able to remember my dreams, nor even remember if I had a dream.
What happens in the dream stays in the dream.
Take my upvote 🤣
Yep! Sometimes they are dreams from when I was a toddler.
I don’t understand why they randomly happen, but I am amazed that something I remember from 3 or 4 years I can still remember.
No, but I sure wish I could record my dreams. Have some really funky ones.
Last night, I was partying with Sammy Hagar. 🤣
Not really, but there are a handful of dreams that always stuck with me. One of them was a recurring dream where I would play with a neighbour girl the same age as me. I didn’t have such a neighbour girl.
When I met my wife, a decade later, she looked exactly like that dream girl.
That’s pretty crazy, good enough to be a movie!
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I remember the struggle of what i want to do with my drone this dream.
And once we got drones i was too old to really like them. :(
No, but the only dreams I ever remembered were a couple from when I was a kid over 30 years ago. One where I was running from a giant version of the Blob from the movie, one where me and my dad and our giant pet wolf went into explore a cave and found and started beating up all sorts of crazy monsters inside, and one were I went through an entire day from waking up to going to bed, only I figured out how to fly that day and it was awesome. It didn’t feel like a dream and when I woke up I went outside to go fly around some more and couldn’t. It took me a good ten minutes of trying to fly before dissapintment set in and I realized it must have been a dream. The disappointment was huge.
