10 replies to this topic

[Nalyd Khezr Bey]

I couldn't find a thread specifically discussing this so here is one. First, I'm only referring to regular dreaming in this thread.

Do you have recurring motifs, people and geographies in your dreams? If so, please share and compare.

I don't have much consistency in most of my dreams but there are a couple of things that may be worth mentioning. A general geography that has cropped up several times over the years is a desolate mid-western plains America looking place, often with a lone abandoned two-story wooden house. I have a lot of dreams that take place in surroundings like that. Not all have been exact necessarily but very similar. Often times there will be numerous tornados off in the distant horizon surrounding the house I'm in. The era actually looks like the early part of the 20th century, maybe 1920's-30's. Tornados, low-hanging clouds and violent storms are also recurring motifs in a lot of my dreams whether within that geography or not. A lot of the time a tornado will go right through where I am or if it's a storm the clouds are sometimes so low that I can reach up and grab pieces of them as if they are more of a solid fluffy substance.

[voidgazing]

Absolutely! Lots of them, in fact.

Last night I went to one. It is a very large shopping mall- miles large. When I first went there years ago it was a terribly hostile place- a place of nightmares in which I was never safe and subject to attack at any moment. Over the time since then, I have participated in conflicts there, defending myself and on one notable occasion a group of underdogs who only wanted to flee (but who were being caught and devoured one by one). Eventually I got or was given a domicile within the mall. It borders on the 'badlands' part of the mall- think squalor and not going there if you aren't known and accepted at the risk of your life.

Last night I was redecorating the house and partying with the people who showed up to help (they came just to be nice and brought all the redecorating stuff). At one point I needed to get something (I didn't know what) and left my house-in-the-mall. I ended up in a little room looking for the something. The people there were very, very dangerous and completely non-hostile to me. They were conducting the kind of business that witnesses don't normally live through seeing, but I just got a nod and a "s'up!".

[Nysidra]

Several places.

The first one that comes to mind is "the school." It's not a school I've even been inside, but there's always the rolling hills outside the front, the expansive paved driveway for pick up and pick off.

The "water place" is like this rainforest where you can swim through the water. I've been there a few times. It's quite fantastical.

I have a house in the same location as where I grew up, but it's a different house, all the rooms and architecture are different, but they are consistent in my dreams.

I'm not sure about a 'recurring motif', but I sometimes have dreams that pick up from where I left off weeks or even months ago. With the same dream people in the same dream place. That's pretty fun when it happens. I've even taking to talking about things happening "in waking life" versus "in dream life."

[080]

There was a thread where there were some allusions to this: Dream City

I do seem to have a relatively stable geography to my dreams (it seems to roughly approximate my psychic impression of my home city as a five or six year old.... with additional appendages based on other cities that I have lived in). The geography is sometimes so consistent that I occassionally will reference my location in the dream to other dream location and so begin to lucid dream. There are definite suburbs (the central area is a large green parklands with various Victorian era buildings of red brick that house insitituations like Zoological Gardens and vast necropoli... the southern area is a decrepid sea side resort of creepy bed and breakfasts, sleezy hotel and an abandonned amusement park with its own microclimate of baking heat and bone chilling cold). It seems to me that these suburbs are pretty much actual places which have become mythologised.

Another motif that occassionally recurs in my dreams is what I call the Blue Room. This is a room with small tiles across the floor and walls and with a ceiling of shimmering blue light. The atmosphere is very quiet and tranquil but suffocating and terrifying and I am quite sure that it is memory of nearly drowning in a swimming pool as a child. The dreams that take place in the Blue Room seem inconsequential (involve doing nothing much) but they filled with intense anxiety and panic.... and they tend to occure when I am stressed.

Some time ago I spoke to a guy at work who said that for most of his life he has had a Dream City (situated vaguely on another continent) in which he had an entirely different life, and stable relationships with different people.

[arceedee]

I definitely do. I have certain consistent places that don't look anything like their real counterparts. I have dreamt frequently of the college I went to, and it looks similar every time, but not much like the real one. I've wondered why that happens. My unconscious mind obviously has a consistent picture of it that looks nothing like it.

In addition, when I was younger I had something similar to the Dream City phenomena that 080 mentioned. I would have recurring dreams that would take me to this consistent place with a consistent story and consistent relationships but it was obviously nowhere in the real world at any time. I could see vague aesthetic similarities to my understanding Japan in the 1500s, but they were fairly superficial in the architecture, dress, weaponry, etc., and nothing that's actually accurate. Just like my mind took very loose inspiration from the aesthetics of that place and time. There were many very beautiful rivers that ran through the city, and mountains nearby. It was absolutely gorgeous terrain.

Perhaps the strangest thing though, more strange than any recurrent motifs or particular geography in my dreams, was that people spoke consistent gibberish that I understood in my dreams. Not English, not any other language I've ever heard. But their own consistent language of gibberish. I was only 11-13 when I was having these dreams, and kind of fascinated by it, so whenever I woke up from those dreams, I would write what I remembered of the language down thinking maybe it meant something. I never found it to mean anything, but I still have what I would call a very incomplete but still interesting dictionary. Sounds that meant x or y that I wrote down upon awakening from sleep and what they meant. It seems to be internally consistent and sensical. I can pick out influences of many languages, but it doesn't really truly sound like any one language. My best guess is that my fevered teenage imagination constructed a "language" from the snippets of sounds I'd heard from a million other languages in the background for some reason. I can definitely pick out the phonemes and linguistic conventions of at LEAST Latin, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian, and I suspect there are more. None of the words make sense in those languages or have anything to do with their actual meanings though. It's as though I just borrowed the sounds. Those dreams stopped a couple years after they started, both with the Dream City and the language that people spoke in it. I don't think it's significant in any larger scheme of things or anything, but I'm just amazed that my mind had its own complete dream language for some reason.

The funny thing is that in my adult life, I've done a great deal of dream work. I'm actually very skilled at lucid dreaming, and capable of stepping into dreams from waking states by just keeping myself conscious as my body falls asleep. And I've tried occasionally out of curiosity in my lucid dreams to go back there. I can't reproduce the place or the language. Not sure why. I think minds are fascinatingly funny, especially when it comes to dreams.

Edited by arceedee, 22 December 2010 - 08:28 AM.
Confusing typo

[Master Inferno]

Sorry to dig up a somewhat old thread, but I suddenly had an urge to post on here that I have a recurring setting in a lot of my dreams and I figured I'd see if there was an appropriate thread to post such a thing in.

For the last two or three years I've had numerous dreams take place in a location I call Astral Knoxville. It's basically a dream version of the city where I live, with a lot of the same geography, but numerous differences as well. For example: some roads don't go to the same places they do in the waking world; there's a steep hill downtown with a grassy field on it and an abandoned mansion with a dragon living in it (which I escaped from in one dream); part of the city apparently borders the ocean despite being in Tennessee; and so on. It also connects to "astral" versions of at least two nearby cities, Maryville and Oak Ridge; in fact, Astral Maryville was, to my knowledge, the first location in this setting that I ever visited. It has some kind of hidden government facility in the mountains (insert conspiracy theory about the government invading people's dreams here). In one dream I apparently took a plane to Astral Finland as well; what I saw of it was mainly a great big ski lodge with lots of snow. I'm very interested in exploring these locations more and am trying to get some skill in lucid dreaming (which so far I've never done).

Closing note: I refer to these locations as "astral", but I have absolutely no experience with astral projection and don't know if they actually exist on the astral plane or not. At this stage it's mainly just a convenient label for them.

[Rose]

I just realized I have a recurring Legend of Zelda dungeon in my dreams. XD

It's like a combination of a fire temple/air temple that's as tricky and annoying as a water temple.

There are others: the school, the supermarket, a house or two, and some more ethereal/less pitifully suburban-mundane 'scapes, but ah, I find it hilarious that I habitually dream of being Link solving puzzles/beating monsters/somehow surviving in this lava-filled series of rooms with long drops and tricky hidden timed switches...

If I have a more mystical experience in a more mystical-sounding dreamscape, I'll let you know. XD I know I've had them, but they're hard to bring to mind until I visit the dreamscape again.

[Metaller]

I usually wake up without remembering my dreams but many times I am able to lucid dream only at half of the night so I can remember the environment of the last non lucid dream I was living...

I have two main places where my subconscious brings me...
the first one is a place I call "matrix of chaos" it's very difficult to describe concretely and started showing up after I gained a balance between my magick and my ordinary life.
I can define it as a dangerous place of peace. normally It's like a place with a strong but attractive light that shifts colours. the light comes from an object that continues to change it's shape with the only constants of being extremely big and being lifted in the sky at least at 3km high. the ground acts like rubber, constantly going up and down slowly, but it's solid and I can walk on it easily. there is nothing else in the sky but the light from the object gives it a darker version of it's color. I am not alone in this place, there are humanoid beings that look like armored warriors but under the armor there seems to be nothing but a black flame and the eyes behind the helmet glow of the same color of the light from the object. when my consciousness awakes there I see them going to a spot that seems to be the nearest point under the object and form a circle. there is no noise every sound is weak and they seem to not produce any noise at all even if they seem very heavy.
they aren't hostile to me and usually if I get near the circle they make one of them, usually bigger than the others and with a highly decorated armor, comes near me and invites me to join them with simple gestures, if they can talk I've never heard their voice. when I join they seem to not notice the evident difference between me and them and usually the silence is broken by a relaxing sound and the object right upon us changes it's shape to a sphere and then stops moving but continues changing color. the ground instead becomes flat under us but starts elevating around in small peaks like if the object attracted it and some of the peaks actually manage to touch it... at that point I feel enormous energy inside me and wake up perfectly rested.

the second one is a bit more normal.
I am inside a town... european style, reminds me of home. everything seems normal if not that the details are different, like if there was always something wrong in an environment that appearently seems perfectly normal but everything seems to happen only once, then it corrects itself aligning to the reality we live in. every clock signed different times, a cat barked once, a car had victorian style keys. I have a house there and when I find myself in that place I always have the doorkeys in my pocket, every single time I'm dressed differently and the doorkey is never the same, even the house always has different furniture but the rooms are always disposed the same way and the palace, the street and everything is always the same, maybe with some changed details and some flying pigs (yes I saw those once). appearently there is no need for money but there is private property (it's not like that if someone needs a lamp he comes in your house and takes it), my hipotesis is that the goods inside this place are generated directly by the astral plane and are free for everyone and the sellers aren't like the other people and have the only purpose of distributing the goods that are generated in their shops.

if something starts recurring very often like these two places I'll let you know

[vulnera]

canyon and mountains, often with odd formations or weather (think de-na-zin/bisti badlands and high mountain passes like the alps, etc) except "after people". at least a few times a week.

i used to also have "running" dreams in which malls, military carriers and other large places held prominence. i think thse eventually morphed into the canyon/mountian scenarios, which also involve journey, but less intense evasion than the running dreams.

[Aurum]

I've had dreams where I go to places that have been familiar to me in the dream but not necessarily in waking life. I travel a lot to different places.

I've had dreams of being at train stations or being on trains. I've had dreams of trains hundreds if not thousands of times.

And in the past maybe two years, sometimes I've had dreams of eating mainly sweet foods. Cakes, lollies, ice cream. One time sugary cinnamon. Apparently, my Grandpa who passed away a couple of years ago used to have most of his dreams with eating food and actually tasting it.

I think it's a strage coincidence that I started having dreams of tasting food around after he passed on.

[oneiroplanes]

Rose said:

I just realized I have a recurring Legend of Zelda dungeon in my dreams. XD

It's like a combination of a fire temple/air temple that's as tricky and annoying as a water temple.

Ha! Mine is actually the Shadow Temple from Ocarina of Time, which appeared in a series of dreams after I played the game.

That place scared the wits out of my barely-teenaged self.

Other than that, I find these posts fascinating, but there are no other geographies that I remember.

As far as motifs, here are a few:
- A loved one is threatened. I unfailingly step up to the plate to defend them, but fighting whatever I need to fight -- a person, a monster, some natural disaster -- is inevitably extremely hard. In my worst nightmares, as soon as I try to throw a punch, my strength leaves me, and I'm left trying to distract whatever it is while the person I'm trying to help escapes.
- Flying. I fly in dreams constantly. I suppose this is common for many people, but I really do it all the time. I credit this to my longstanding Peter Pan fixation - I've had many Peter Pan dreams, now that I think about it.
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