I woke up instantly, and forgot all about it until driving on my way home I heard on the radio that the IRA had set off a bomb in London with many resulting civilian casualties.

Later, I realized that I had my dream at the exact same time the bomb went off, after correcting for the time difference between Florida and London.

I don’t notice much change in my dreams. Still packing for a trip often or discovering hidden rooms. Don’t fly or leap over buildings as much as I used to, though. Always enjoyed that.

However, I wrote here on the HZ many years ago about the dream I had during the Boxing Day tsunami. I dreamt of a flooding city, and Buddhist monks covering my hand with red ocher. I often wonder if I subtly felt the earth ringing like a bell, and my geologist intuition made a leap? Red ocher has been used by many cultures to ward off spirits. I didn’t know that at the time (or did I?) and learned about this practice in researching it. A story about the mass graves of Native Americans in Washington State, found during construction, and the tribe that recovered the bodies used red ocher on their hands. It is believed they drowned in a tsunami.

Why would I dream that? I actually looked it up. The largest seismic waves where I was sleeping occurred about the time I had the dream.

I am more aware that I am dreaming, though, while dreaming. Like ER, I can wake from a dream and pick it back up like I hit a pause button. The other night, I was talking to my departed mother, remembered she was dead, and thought, “Oh, right, this is a dream.”

I dream more when I travel and in a different bed.

No doubt its a coincidence, but I dreamt about Richard Dreyfus myself not too long ago. The dream was somehow about his hippie private eye character, Moses Wine, in “The Big Fix”, a great film, BTW!

My dreams used to be like you describe, but lately they are tending to become more involved with frustration, confusion, and conflict. I don’t understand it, I’ve managed to arrange my life so its very peaceful and relaxed now. After being retired for 14 years, I’ve managed to pretty much systematically eliminate stress from my life–at least, so far. I feel great, why are my dreams so fucked up?

Don’t tell me: “You’re not really happy, you just THINK you are.”

I too believe dream content has nothing to do with mental state, but when you start noticing long term pattern changes it makes you wonder…

I am not someone that thinks dreams have anything to do with my life ( I mean, when you have a dream that involves hunting down mad scientist Richard Dreyfus – chasing him through flooded museums in Venice and killing him before he uses a device that will destroy the world… if that has any bearing on your real life or mental state, you are in serious trouble)…

What gets me is how complex and detailed the landscapes and architecture are and how unrelated it is to anything I have ever seen in my life… where does that all come from?

One of the more recent dreams was very psychedelic… I was flying above mountains (no plane, just flying) and somehow I knew that the universe was ending… all of reality washed away, like an oil painting washed in kerosene- all of it smearing and streaking and sliding away to coalesce in a small glowing ball, leaving nothingness behind…. until finally I was alone in a small room , with walls of glassy ‘nothingness’, staring at the glowing ball on a podium in the corner…I had no body but was trying to swim my way towards the ball… then I awoke…

Sadly, all my dreams are rated PG- but they have incredible production value- way over the top special effects. My subconscious also has a sense of humor… often including silly little gags for a silly laugh, even though it seems deadly serious within the dream.

I had to clone a cat for some reason in order to stop an invasion of war of the worlds type tripod alien machines 1000′s of feet tall… I run around carrying the cat dodging death rays and the tsunami created by the massive legs of the machines moving in the ocean just off shore… I run into a futuristic building with incredible architecture and finally find a cloning vending machine … I put the cat in and hit the button, a blue light flashes and I reach into the door at the bottom of the machine and pull out 2 kittens, I then check the change slot and pull out a ball of cat fur that was left over…

I tend to usually be on some sort of mission in the dreams, but almost always awaken before the conclusion (Though, I did kill Richard Dreyfus, and thus-I think- prevented the destruction of the world- No need to thank me…)

99% of the time the other characters in my dreams are people I do not know… my subconscious just invents them and their personalities. They never actually involve situations I am dealing with in real life, or places I have experienced in real life.

They are interesting, and never too terrible- very intense, but not quite nightmares-But the dreams are mentally exhausting… I wake up exhausted thinking ‘WHAT THE FUCK?!’

Now as I get older, I’m wondering if perhaps I should re-consider that.
The character and frequency of my dreams is changing, probably responding to natural physiological changes in my hardware, but perhaps due to other, more obscure changes in the software.

Many of my dreams now seem to center on frustration, on fears of not being able to accomplish some important task. I (and I suppose everyone else) has always had some dreams like this, but now it is a nightly thing. I dream a lot about work, and college, but never about my time in the Navy or my childhood. Why some of my most formative experiences should be so closely examined, but other parts ignored, is a mystery. Only rarely do I ever dream about issues that are in my mind now, or that are troubling me at the present time. Instead, I seem to be spending more and more time in my past, or in imaginary landscapes in some unforeseeable future as in my Heaven and Hell example above.

Many of my dreams are saturated with feelings of frustration, or helplessness, or even ‘impostor syndrome’. I have pleasant dreams too, and the occasional nightmare, but these seem to occur at the same frequency they always did in the past–rarely. I also seem to be experiencing more ‘lucid dreams’. After awakening, I can go back into the dream and prolong it briefly, although never as vividly as before.

I’ve never accepted the Freudian idea that dreams offer clues to our mental state or health, except when they are clearly connected to some real-life traumatic episode in the dreamer’s past. Old soldiers dream about combat, ex-cons dream about prison, Hemingway’s Old Man dreamt about the lions he saw when he traveled to Africa as a young sailor.

But I’ve lived a pretty placid, even charmed life. I’ve never really experienced a real traumatic or tragic episode. I have never been subjected to real physical or psychological pain, or even fear. Now I dream about if all the time, sometimes I am fighting these battles expertly and bravely, sometimes I am unraveling pitifully, but in either case, I always seem to be losing.

I find that interesting.