What’s the weirdest dream you’ve ever had?

Have u heard from Bookworm is she ok ?

I'd heard of people having the occasional dream within a dream, but your experience is extraordinary to me - even the most mundane of my dreams, I would never confuse for reality for a moment; they either lack clarity or are outlandish.

And fascinating that it seems to be hereditary (I see no way that anyone could be taught to do it.).

I've met a few lucid dreamers, which seems to be part of your experience, but I don't recall any of them ever mentioning their dreams being indistinguishable from waking. Have you ever met or heard of any others who dream like this?

That’s a very altruistic stance to take

Well done to you too Aidie! Now I just need to beat my nicotine addiction! Don’t even smoke anymore, just completely hooked on the nicotine lozenges!!

Of course, it’s totally understandable that you would want to avoid addiction issues, especially if you’ve had them in the past. Well done for beating your alcoholism, that must have taken a lot of internal strength and hard work! 

Thanks, Aidie, and well done to you too. I hope that by being open and honest about our experiences of it, we can help at least a few people to avoid making the same mistakes that we did.

beating alcoholism is a major victory, well done Trogluddite. I beat it as well :) and havent looked back.

It was certainly fascinating. But I think it set off alarm bells because it felt like something I might get addicted to, and so also to the medication. I had a serious drinking problem for much of my early adulthood, so I'm well aware of how prone I can be to chemical escapism. I beat my alcoholism, by and large; and it's not the kind of battle that I ever want to go through again. I've seen enough people addicted to prescription drugs to know that they can be just as dangerous, and I know I could get the prescriptions just by being autistic - it was mistaken for depression often enough before I was diagnosed.

Personally I have an 'extremely' good imagination BUT if you are usually unable to bring images to mind let alone whole sequences of events, then I imagine that suddenly realising the extent of your minds abilities of imagination must have been very scary/enlightening/amazing? Was this insight good or bad?

This is interesting! It seems like your conscious and unconscious minds have somehow blended into one! 

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

This might take some explaining..

In most of my dreams there is absolutely no difference between the dream and reality.. I fall asleep and then wake myself up.. a minute in a dream is the same as a minute in the real world and quite often I'm unsure if I'm awake or asleep.. 

The strangest dream Ive had though was when I thought id see how far I could travel from my body.. so I jumped in my car and drove aprox 6 miles away and then had the same feeling as when I wake myself up.. "I bite the back of my hand to wake myself up.." the feeling is like magnetism pulling me back..

When I wake in my dream there is no difference at all.. same sounds, smells, colours everything's the same..

I've totally got used to it but I do remember my first ones and it was very frightening and claustrophobic.. my dad and my middle son also have the same thing..

Anyone else..?

As I said in the Mirtazapine thread, it really threw me for a while. Remembering dreams is incredibly rare for me, and even when I do, they're usually quite banal; little fleeting glimpses of something not much different to real life. It was a really amazing experience, but also quite bewildering and unnerving to discover that my brain had this power (I was getting on for 40 by this time). The "time dilation" effect, in particular did freak me out a bit; my memory of the second dream really did feel like it might have covered a period of days (though I do have a notoriously wonky sense of time even when I'm awake!)

One of the things I find most fascinating about it is that I'm visually aphantasic. I have very little success conjuring images in my mind's eye; fleeting glimpses of half-formed things at best - mostly I just see the visual snow and geometric/migraine-like hallucinations which have always been part of my vision. When a counsellor tried out guided meditation on me, I finally grasped that seeing pictures in the mind's eye wasn't as metaphorical as I'd always thought. To then discover that my brain has the ability to take me on such vividly imagined journeys, but that this imagination seems inaccessible to me consciously, is very perplexing.

I can imagine that it would be an anti-climax for most men, falling asleep while being tied up by 3 female 'entertainers'! 

Do you find that your conscious and unconscious minds overlap? It's never good to be abused by one's own brain! I think you should have a word with your unconscious mind about that one!

You're lucky! That would have creeped me out for weeks!

I've had the trying to run but only being able to go slowly dream numerous times, it's never progressed though. I usually wake up when I get caught by whatever I'm trying to run from! How nice that you were able to overtake all the cars!

Hi Kitsun,

No, I didn't struggle to get back to sleep afterwards as it was morning. The same for the second one.

Lots of people seem to have lots of really vivid dreams!

Your first dream seems oddly reconciled rather than scary. I think if I had a dream like this, I'd wake up wondering what it all meant?

Your second dream sounds amazing, it must have been a really vivid tour of culture even though it was just a dream. Escher's work is brilliant too! 

That seems like quite a bad nightmare! Did you struggle to get back to sleep afterwards?

Aw! The second one seems like a dream that would have been nice to carry over in reality!

The dreams that I used to get when I was on Mirtazapine were definitely the oddest, some of them seeming like they had lasted for days, and extremely memorable afterwards - I wrote a couple of them down, as they amazed me so much (I very rarely remember dreams usually).

In one, I was in a seaside village and noticed that everyone was walking off to the beach, so I followed them. When I got there, the beach looked like the aftermath of a huge WW2 battle - there were burned out wrecks of aeroplanes, tanks, and ships everywhere, all populated by the skeletons of their unfortunate occupants. The people of the village had gone there to talk them, and I knew somehow that this was a regular part of village life, and that the skeletons were the villagers' relatives. There was no feeling at all of this being frightening, morbid, or a religious/remembrance ritual of any kind, and the conversations were perfectly ordinary idle chit-chat - the people of the village seemed to have gone there just to give the dead servicemen a bit of company.

Possibly the oddest one involved a ridiculously long journey; for what purpose I did not know. It involved swimming the channel alongside huge ships, hitch-hiking in a van of Rastafarians, travelling through bizarre tunnels like ancient catacombs, a city made entirely out of Escher-like flights of steps, and several other equally bizarre stages. The ending was oddest of all - I found myself sitting in an allotment which had indoor furniture, watching the previous parts of the dream again on television as I recounted my incredible journey to a bunch of my friends, unable to convince any of them that it had really happened.