Since the snow hit my life consists of daytime television, keeping toilet paper stocked in the can and coffee, coffee coffee. And thats fine; I mean, it certainly beats the fuck out of being out in this. I feel particularly bad for all the guys up in the woods at this time of year...I can see the lights in the dark of the morning as their log trucks toil up the mountainside and it just makes me shiver.
As my daytime activity shrinks to almost nothing my nightime dreaming life becomes incredibly vivid. As probably comes as no big surprise to anyone, I dream BIG. And even in busy times my dreams are complicated and vivid. I was told when I started taking Prozac that it tends to make you dream vividly at night, and laughed out loud. The addition of Prozac to my nighttime cranial stew has made as much of an impact as throwing a brick into the Grand Canyon. Prozac didn't stand a chance. I dream bigger after a slice of anchovy pizza. (And by the way, anchovies are good and nice and great, with all tastiness and goodness and deliciousness? and are also very yummy and super of tastiness? So don't dis on my damn fishies of anchovies.)
If you have never seen the movie 'Dark City' then do so AT ONCE. It's in my list of favorites for a reason, and that reason is that whoever planned out the concept for that thing has an imagination I admire and a brain that works a lot like mine does at night. (Not that my dreams are all dark and full of flying alien zombies in bowler hats...um, not that they aren't; c'mon, just, you know, not exclusively.)
When I dream, I dream in detail. Full detail. Smell, sound, songs on the radio, patina, taste, temperature, it's like daytime life.
But now I have episodes.
Continuing stories, reacurring characters and places, subplots. The backdrops and props are places and things I've seen in everyday life over the years, but with no regard to the time in which I first encountered them. A building I lived in when I was 19, full of people I knew in gradeschool, a car I owned when I was 23 parked out front, on a street I remember from a movie I saw last year...like that.
But all these things stay the same.
I could draw a map of the place. It would have to be on layers of transparencies, like the visible man in the medical books*, but I could do it, and I can visualize it. It stays the same. Details that get added stay added. Details like fabrics. Perfume. People that get older. Things that get broken and are repaired. Seasons. And layers of combinations patched together from my daytime life that make no sense in my daytime memories stay combined in the dreams, from night to night, and from year to year.
Year to year!
This has been going on for years!
It's not bothersome in any way, just odd. I've never heard of anyone else who has dreams like this. Unless you do?
Do you?
I have my own private television shows!
*you ever notice that the Visible Man had no dick? he didn't. Visible Broad had boobs and a uterus with a baby in it, though. christmas miracle? or Visible Damian? you decide.
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I don't remember my dreams unless I am pregnant when I have incredibly vivid dreams of the type you describe, always featuring monsters from the Dr Whos of the early 70s.(the green slugs particularly)
ReplyDeleteI used to have recurring dreams that occasionally picked up where they left off, but it's been ages, and they didn't necessarily age or get details, but when the dream is about a ghost girl who lived in your attic, I guess it's hard to age a ghost.
ReplyDeleteAnd also? Sweet Jebus that is a TON of snow. Poor pups. Stay warm.
I have explicit detailed dreams and the best are my RUM dreams...for some reason they are especially REAL!
ReplyDeleteI remember reading that if you fall in a dream you are not supposed to hit the ground...pfft..I have fallen from buildings onto the pavement, been bitten in half by sharks in cold black salty water clouded by blood, and every so often Monica Belucci or Salma Hayek (I think that it's the accents) show up and sing
Don' worry,
'bout a 'ting.
'cause evry little 'ting,
gunna be awright!
..such a fine line between hallucinating and dreaming.
We have covered this before , I am a simple soul , I only dream in black and white , I am almost always nekkid , and I can fly.My dreams consist of me eating stuff and shagging innapropriate people.
ReplyDeleteDoes that make me shallow ???
Did you know that Prozac has a very similar structure to Esctacy? both work on releasing serotonin and work the same brain receptors, eat plenty of bananas and some dark chocolate so you don't get deficiencies.
ReplyDeleteI have the same dreams - usually girls banging on the front door demanding their boyfriends back or the terrifying one where Im chased down the road by giant lipsticks.
*shiver*
Beast is shallower than a puddle
ReplyDeleterealdoc: well crap. that aint good. i seldom have monster dreams. and i am glad that i have never had a green slug dream; ewewewewewewew slugs ew.
ReplyDeletechristine: woo! thats one for the continuing saga! thank you. if this is the sign of an exotic brain disorder i now know i do not suffer alone.
homoE: salma hayak? i'd leave my husband for salma hayak. even if she was singing in a strange accent. what is that, polish?
beast: a naked flying shagging man is certainly not boring. shallow, i dunno. depends on which end of the pool you're in. naked.
frobi: yup; drs orders even. I have 1/4 tsp of dark chocolate in every cup of coffee i drink! the dr also said that drinking pop with aspartame in it was good. every heard that? re x....WAY too scared to mess with it. now hand over that twink slooooooooooly...step away from the twink. carefulllllly. put the twink DOWN.
ratso redux: so much for what end of the pool, then. someones going to have to clean the filter for sure.
i SO dream like that! i can remember dreams from when i was small, and every so often i revisit a dream and on some level i'm all oh! i dreamed this when i was six! oh! now the chinese restaurant has moved and there is a nun singing bahaus songs with a banjo in that spot!
ReplyDelete*eats more cheese, plumps pillow*
I dream a lot as well - giant anthropomorpic beetroots, evil natured radioactive monkeys, clog dancing Goblins, border warfare with Dorset - then I go to sleep!
ReplyDeleteMr frobisher has nude men by the way - I have nude girls - scroll down!
ReplyDeleteMmmm....dreams. I especially enjoy the dreams where my departed mother visits me we talk. We both know she's gone and we talk about stuff.
ReplyDeleteStuff is good.
I have a great dream last night in which I helped a gurl that was knocked down by a bus,I got someone to call 999 for an ambulance and I did first aid. I actually achieved something in a dream without waking up, and I was in control.
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of people having vivid, episodic dreams, may I recommend The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. One of the main characters experiences exactly this phenomenon throughout the book, and indeed, their content was what caused the Fatwah to be issued against the author.
ReplyDeleteQuite besides which, it's a cracking read.
My dreams are extremely vivid and weird. I once dreamt that The Original Batman Adam West was walking down my street placing bombs in my neighbors yard. How come I snuck into the batmobile, hid, we went back in time, I became USA Girl and had a very satisifying affair with Batman? Yeah, yeah, that was years ago, but I still rememeber every single detail and what happened.
ReplyDeletesurly: thats it EXACTLY! dang. so far theres three of us.
ReplyDeletemuttleydog: thats what you get for eating cat crap before bed.
pamela: that sounds lovely. i've never dreamed about a beloved dead person. but this is true-i did dream that John Cleese made me a low-fat vegetarian breakfast once. does that count?
knudie: welcome! thats pretty heroic. you know, if you dont have a cpr card, though, you could be sued. avoid dreaming in that vicinity in the future.
qenny: you are one of the very, very few people i've run across who's found SV any good at all. hmmmmmm. innnnnnteresting.
awaiting: which does not suprise me one bit. you have great taste though...the original Batmobile had KLASS.
I have extremely vivid dreams, which sometimes cause me to flip around and exclaim at night (unless these two things are independent of each other). Annoys the cats and scares the bejeebus out of the Mrs., sometimes.
ReplyDeleteI have had serial dreams in the past, but not of late. I have some dreams that do reoccur. However, mostly it is all very surreal, and does mix places & times (and persons, and personas, and genders, and dimensions, etc.). I'm not sure how much effect my anti-anxiety meds have on this, considering I've been on them so long... although there was a period, way back in late adolescence, where I didn't have any dreams (or didn't remember them) for at least a year. Hmm.
Had a fun one last night. Was back in time with my crew of friends just got acquainted. They had a band - a large diversion from real life - and invited me to join, and then we were touring the lesbian bars and getting free beers and lady admirers. Very cheesy but a lot of fun!
Time to dust off the old guitars, mayhap...
It doesn't surprise me that you have really vivid and detailed dreams: it's probably the way your mind works and it comes across in your writing (... that's a compliment, by the way).
ReplyDeleteUnless I'm ill, my dreams are really mundane. The one about being late for the maths exam has cropped up again and again since 1979 for gawdsakes. My parents are always alive in my dreams, particularly my mother, who has been dead for 26 years. Lately, I seem to have done a lot of travelling in my dreams, so I hope I don't start sleepwalking.
I dream very odd strange vivid dreams that I often can't get my handle on recalling. Although I had a dream recently with some very vivid beautifully colored hopping frogs that I was trying to capture in containers. Quite psychedelic really. I often revisit same streets - almost like Hollywood sets in my my dreams.
ReplyDeleteI think I need to go lie down. Stay warm.
i love dreaming. it is simply another life, and sometimes ireally look forward to it. i also dream very vividly, having kept a dream diary in my teens (very worrying when i go back and read them!!), i trained myself to remember them. last night i dreamt that i was (eek) britney spears, in a gym, thinking i was the bees knees, when pamela anderson came in with bigger tits than me, looking hotter than myself, and she was lifting much heavier weights than me and doing really fancy moves, and i felt all jealous and inadequate, then dolly parton came in and started doing chin-ups with one hand. i was devastated......
ReplyDeleteIn the past few years I've started having dreams where the characters in them remember the last dream they were in and what happened and tell me what they've been up to since I was last asleep, and occasionally chastise me for being awake so long. Some of them are fictional characters, a lot of people I went to school with make cameos but always from the middle years at secondary school for some reason. The settings for the dreams are always a bit Escher.
ReplyDeleteQuite often I know I'm dreaming, so I can do stuff I wouldn't normally without fear of death/getting dumped, which is quite cool, but occasionally the knowing-I'm-dreaming makes me incredibly literal so when I try to use magic powers it doesn't work because know I can't really do that. Which is rubbish and makes me look daft in front of Death from the Sandman comics. Am getting better at knowing I'm dreaming and using this knowledge to do cool stuff though. Practice seems to help...Occasionally I worry about myself. This is clearly a sign I don't do enough cool stuff when I'm awake.
Paul is a nice name, isn't it?
I have VERY vivid dreams, always have -- and I have continuation dreams, similar to the phenom you mention. When I tell people my dreams, they think I am making the details up -- when I say something like, "We were driving in the car my neighbor had when I was 6 and then we went down the street from the intro to Starsky and Hutch..." they tune out.
ReplyDeleteSo it is awesome to hear I have company out there.
My family members in Bellingham tell me they sold all the snow plows 7 or so years ago.
all I can say is: WTF