weird dreams

[lazygood4nothinbum]

Lazy, what do you think of this dream?

Last summer, after my ex-husband told me he was getting re-married, his late mother (my ex-law) came to me in a dream,sat on my bed, and told me "Not to feel bad" and that she was sending someone to me. My ex-mother in law and I were NEVER close, in fact we hardly saw each other for the last fifteen years of my marriage. And she was not happy with me about the divorce either. I thought the dream was odd at the time. I would have thought that my own late mother might appear in my dream to comfort me but not my ex-MIL.

Subsequently, I have met two men who in different ways have assisted in healing my heart. No short or long term relationship was possible with them. It was as if someone was showing me that I could feel love again.

My own experience has shown me that dreams can be predictive of the future and I think it has to do with the mind's subconscious shifting through events and making decisions for you while you sleep.

like achiever's very fun dream, i suppose you can look at these things as "actual contact" with "the other side." that is up to the dreamer. we all decide how we experience what we perceive as reality.

with all the lucid dreaming i've done since childhood and with my practice of dream yoga since my early 20s, with having spent so much of my life being conscious & self-aware in my sleep, experiencing as people experience their waking life what no one in their right mind would call real, i could not quite say for certain at this point that what's left is so very real either. so while it seems to me that a dream might have some basis in reality, i simply don't know if there is any reality to it or at all for that matter.

some my good friends have always found that frustrating about me, that they seem to have so much more faith in my experiences than i. of course, i fault them for lacking the skepticism which i view as healthy. there is always more that we don't know than what we do. so if you care to enjoy a life of abundance, the direction is clear.

and doesn't it often seem that even this waking reality we call life is open to interpretation. so given all that i would be very careful about interpreting a dream of a person who so obviously wants to see their dream as more than just a dream.

but even all that never stopped me from shooting off my mouth so off the cuff i'd say you're mind is resolving guilt issues about your divorce whether you were much at fault or not and so it is the dream character of the blaming mother-in-law who now comforts you, signaling that you are coming to terms with yourself over an issue which has made you question your own motivations and past actions.

that you have never dreamed of your own mother could simply be caused by strong emotions which might upset you too much for now.

as to thinking the dreams predictive, i think you might be close on your theory of how dreaming can influence the mind and then, once awake, we might act upon those thoughts. so you might have prepared yourself in your sleep to be more receptive to listening and enjoying people in your waking state. or, as studied by carl g jung, perhaps it was an example of sychronicity.

as to the dream elements according to this particular dream dictionary:

bed:
resting comfortably in own bed = security & love
sitting in own bed = early marriage
stranger being in your bed = matrimonial unfaithfulness

there is no mention in this particular reference book to a mother-in-law in a dream and you offered no other dream elements.

"our truest life is when we are in dreams awake"~~henry david thoreau

"when we dream that we dream, we are beginning to wake up."~~novalis

"all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream"~~edgar allen poe

"he who looks outside dreams. he who looks inside wakes"~~cg jung

"merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream"

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

How can I tell myself a joke, don't I know the punchline already?

on the other hand, if you got too far ahead of yourself, you just might trip yourself up.

 

[TromboneAl]

I remember the joks when I awake

Let's hear one of these...

 

[ladelfina]

yakers.. I LOVE IT.. I know exactly what you mean, though it mostly involves things that aren't usually jokes. It's like I want to express a bunch of stuff and THEN I want to see how it plays out in the dream.. even though I'm aware of being both the playER AND the playEE. I even get enormously frustrated with the feeling of wakening, and mostly want to go back and "see how it ends."

LG4NB.. what an intriguing analysis. If you were to come to my house you would see innumerous elements of extreme disorder that might belie your analysis.. but maybe that's due to a kind of perfectionism; if I can't, or circumstances don't allow me to, make sense of it.. it goes straight to hell in a handbasket.

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

i said your thinking was organized; i made no reference to your tidiness or lack thereof. though having missed that point might suggest it's time to clean the house.

in my job i properly handled huge amounts of information but you wouldn't know it from that mess on my desk.

life seems more integrated when the inside and outside match, though i've worked more on that between me & my dreaming than i have between me & my outside self.

many years ago, a buddhist cousin of mine suggested to me that whenever i have trouble oranizing my thoughts i should organize my room, my desk, a drawer. too bad for the room, desk & drawers that i figured out how to do without them.

 

[yakers]

Dream Jokes

Let's hear one of these...

Well, the first one I remember goes back over 35 years ago when I was in college and working a summer job in road construction in a small company. The owner was 'a depression era string saver' with parts everywhere and a bone yard that may have Model T parts. Anyway, in my dream some visitors are on a tour and the owner is showing off a modern parts system and I comment to the visitors that of course we have a modern system, we 'throw things out'.

Now its just vaguely humorous as I explain it here but it was so rip snorting funny I woke from my dream laughing.

Sorry there is no Leno level stuff, most of the humor is more commentary that a stand up joke. But it does happen and often enough that I get to share it with my wife in the morning.

 

[Zoocat]

Wow, Lazy, that was interesting. I don't literally believe that dreams are predictive. I think dreams are very complicated and likely include many elements, probably all of those you talked about. I've never heard of yoga dreaming (or is it dreaming yoga?). Is there a book I could read or a website about it?

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

I have a lot of vivid dreams and flying dreams.

if you want to try lucid dreaming, you can access your consciousness through a flying dream. you can give your dream character directions before you fall asleep as i've described earlier. and now for the really easy part: during your dream of flying, fly faster and faster and crash into a wall or a tree or dive bomb into the ground and chances are you will break yourself free from your subconscious while you sleep. if it only wakes you up, try it again next time.

similarly, if you have a dream of falling that wakes up your body with a jerk, give yourself directions that next time you won't wake up. "let yourself fall and a net will appear." or not (moohaha).

warning: if you currently enjoy your flying dreams, this could change the nature of your dreaming and you might not like it so much. if you suffer paranoia or if you are particularly religious (especially of a fundamental type) the experience might make you question what you would rather not. if you are at all mentally unbalanced or too tightly wound, this could be dangerous. but if you can break through and handle it, even if you can only do it once in your life, you will never forget it and it will fill your life with wonder.

I think in dreams logic is suspended.So your dream self would not necessarily know the punchline. I wonder why you need dream jokes. Very interesting.

&

Now its just vaguely humorous as I explain it here but it was so rip snorting funny I woke from my dream laughing.

i don't know if logic is suspended or if some other logic is created but it does sometimes seem that information processed during dreaming, even in some cases during lucid dreaming, does not translate back to waking life in a way that makes sense here.

Wow, Lazy, that was interesting. I don't literally believe that dreams are predictive. I think dreams are very complicated and likely include many elements, probably all of those you talked about. I've never heard of yoga dreaming (or is it dreaming yoga?). Is there a book I could read or a website about it?

yes, i didn't say you thought them as literally predicting the future; you called them predictive which i took to mean that you can see how they might influence future activity because of how they play on the mind and i think that can be true.

dream yoga is a practice of various (mostly tibetan as far as i've so far studied) schools of buddhism, particularly of dzogpa chenpo, more commonly referred to as dzogchen, and atiyoga which are the two primary schools i've been studying. the tibetans have been studying dreaming in a systematic way for over 1000 years so of course they have much to offer.

it is a bit more complex than this and understanding requires learning about the buddhist view of life & death but basically dream yoga explores the bardos (the betweens) during life so as to train the practitioner to maintain consciousness during the transition to death. i just read that back and wow is that a simple and incomplete explanation. sorry but so much else would have to be explained to really grasp it.

the relationship between lucid dreaming and dream yoga is that lucid dreaming is a part of dream yoga in that dream yoga involves maintaining consciousness while the body sleeps like lucid dreaming does but dreams (as most would recognize them) are not necessarily involved. while dreams can be used for realization and the recognition of the illusory nature of reality, ultimately they distract from so-called enlightenment.

in any case, you can find some stuff online. mostly there are references within other studies as i mentioned above but some books have been written dedicated to the subject such as tenzin wangyal rinpoche's the tibetan yogas of dream and sleep. first i would study various translations of the tibetan book of the dead. w.y. evans-wentz is about the best editor i've come across but there are other worthy editions such as robert a.f. thurman's.

 

[Meadbh]

Last night's dream......

Scene 1: I am visiting the city where I grew up, and in my dream I own an apartment there which I am renovating. The apartment includes features of past and present homes, such as woodwork, stairs and quirky character, and is painted the same yellow as my current office. I meet with some visitors, who say they think the apartment is "too old".

Scene 2: I am driving towards an intersection in a new city. As I pull up to the red light, passersby ridicule and taunt me. The light goes green and I turn left. Pretty soon I am in open country. My car has become a single engine plane. As I revv up to take off, I realize that my car/plane has been vandalized. The instrument panel has been removed, as have the seats and windows. I can't get going. I get out of the plane and realize that there are no wheels or propeller (how I got this far is anybody's guess, but this is a dream). One wing falls off. Someone helps me to move the pieces of my battered plane to the side of the road. I walk back (home?), devastated.

Here's my interpretation:

This is definitely a mind churning recent events dream. In real life I may soon have an opportunity to "take flight" to a new job in a new city. Scene 1 represents my acceptance that it is time to move on. Scene 2 represents my fear that the opportunity will be "stolen" from me. Perhaps the vandalized plane represents my fear that I don't have the "right stuff".

I don't think I am trying to FIRE in this dream, because the timing is too coincidental, and if I did RE now, I would not be moving to that city.

Comments?

 

[freebird5825]

Hamlet: "To sleep, perchance to dream- ay, there's the rub." - WS

my worst dreams happened before i FIREd. not worth repeating. glad those dreams are gone.

my best dreams were after losing my mom and then DH. i won't go into the details, but the dreams i had of them in the 6 months after their deaths were the most comforting of any thing i had experienced. i think it's called closure.

my doctor told me that it was the special bond i had with each that kept them alive in my subconscious and to dream of them was a good sign of healing.

 

[Martha]

Meadh, I like your positive assessment of the dream. I would have read part one as "I am to old to change."

 

[BunsGettingFirm]

The vast majority of my dreams are rooted in work-related trauma, often accompanied by kicking, thrashing, & screaming. The dreams, not so much the trauma.

Spouse isn't very interested in hearing the details.

It's been nearly six years since I ER'd, though, and if I'm still dreaming then I'm not remembering them.

LOL! When you're a working stiff, you don't know dreams that "...pertain to possible futures" because your most probable future is still that of a working stiff. My dreams mainly consist of 1) being unprepared about some emergency situation for which I have no qualification to be prepared for anyways, 2) yelling at some idiot or another for the blunder they are about to make, and 3) spewing multiple variations of the f-word about some untenable situation or perceived slight. Come to think of it, do my dreams really need interpretation or further reflection?

On more thing, Martha needs to lay off the Nyquil or the Nicotine patch so that we don't have more discussions about weird dreams.

 

[bssc]

Scene 1: I am visiting the city where I grew up, and in my dream I own an apartment there which I am renovating. The apartment includes features of past and present homes, such as woodwork, stairs and quirky character, and is painted the same yellow as my current office. I meet with some visitors, who say they think the apartment is "too old".

Scene 2: I am driving towards an intersection in a new city. As I pull up to the red light, passersby ridicule and taunt me. The light goes green and I turn left. Pretty soon I am in open country. My car has become a single engine plane. As I revv up to take off, I realize that my car/plane has been vandalized. The instrument panel has been removed, as have the seats and windows. I can't get going. I get out of the plane and realize that there are no wheels or propeller (how I got this far is anybody's guess, but this is a dream). One wing falls off. Someone helps me to move the pieces of my battered plane to the side of the road. I walk back (home?), devastated.

Here's my interpretation:

This is definitely a mind churning recent events dream. In real life I may soon have an opportunity to "take flight" to a new job in a new city. Scene 1 represents my acceptance that it is time to move on. Scene 2 represents my fear that the opportunity will be "stolen" from me. Perhaps the vandalized plane represents my fear that I don't have the "right stuff".

I don't think I am trying to FIRE in this dream, because the timing is too coincidental, and if I did RE now, I would not be moving to that city.

Comments?

I suspect that I am just going to reinforce your interpretation. For me, dreams place that I live can represent either values or feelings about myself. After all, where you lived helped shape you. It seems to me that you realize that you have been in the same place too long and the current office (painted yellow) is too old for you. I agree that it makes sense that it time to move on.

Also, for me, when I am travelling, I find that to be symbolic of my life's journey and vehicles, such are your car and plane, represent your travels in life. So I also agree that this dream represents your fear that you won't be able to take flight and will have to return to where you came from. Is there something about this new opportunity that is "at a higher level" that you don't think that you can fly to?

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

i wouldn't put any stock in this guy's dream interpretation book if only just the other night i wasn't thinking about and actually figuring on paper how much money i've lost to the bubble. that night during sleep i dreamed i was on a front porch watching the moon, when it dropped from the sky. it was so odd that it almost turned my dream lucid but my consciousness came rushing in so quickly that it woke my body up instead. i went to the dream book just out of curiosity and it said: "the moon falling from the sky: loss of money." so there might be something to this nonsense.

what it says of your dream elements...

driving: discovery of lost valuables
being in an apartment: avoiding rivals
owning an apartment: family quarrels
color yellow: important but bad changes will occur in own affairs (i would take this as current worry and not as anything otherworldly predictive).
visitors: will receive assistance from a friend
riding alone in automobile: new surroundings are anticipated
an airplane taking off: success in your affairs
being in an airplane disaster but not killed: financial gains

 

[Meadbh]

Is there something about this new opportunity that is "at a higher level" that you don't think that you can fly to?

That might just be natural fear of failure in a new environment with new responsibilities. But I am a nervous flyer in real life!

 

[Meadbh]

driving: discovery of lost valuables
being in an apartment: avoiding rivals
owning an apartment: family quarrels
color yellow: important but bad changes will occur in own affairs (i would take this as current worry and not as anything otherworldly predictive).
visitors: will receive assistance from a friend
riding alone in automobile: new surroundings are anticipated
an airplane taking off: success in your affairs
being in an airplane disaster but not killed: financial gains

Lazy, I was hoping you would look this up for me, thank you!

I haven't been involved in any family quarrels of late. The important but bad changes could be in my portfolio. I'm going to selectively look at the last four items and be optimistic!

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

well, i wouldn't take anything i just wrote literally or verbatim. the source i've at hand is a bit too new agey for me. written in 1963, it supposedly draws on a 2nd century dream interpretation book. i have not found the original to cite. as i've mentioned, some of the symbols as described by this author do seem to coincide with fair regularity some of my experience whereby i will be thinking something one day, note my dreams during that night, and then find the next day that the interpretation of some dream symbols match pretty closely what had been on my mind.

dreaming is so subjective, of course. and then there is what is important to you. perhaps you didn't relate all of your dream. perhaps only parts stuck in your mind. perhaps in recalling the dream you remembered in a way which would support your own preconceived interpretation. and so you, really, are the best interpreter of your own dream. just like in determining the so-called meaning of life. what would you like it to mean?

 

[Notmuchlonger]

I used to have this reoccurring dream that I had a werewolf chasing me and I always ran into a circus tent. I haven't had it in a long time. It was one of those dreams when you wake up you could recall every little tidbit.

 

[lazygood4nothinbum]

(very delayed response: ) i've mentioned before that reoccurring dreams are great opportunities to connect with your dream character. out of curiosity, did you actually turn around and see the werewolf chasing you or did you just assume it was a werewolf? did you ever actually see what was chasing you? i ask because sometimes our mind fills in details after the fact. in any case, in such a dream i'd look more to the action than the elements to understand what was really happening there.

i had a dream last night of a cousin of mine expertly deshelling a lobster for her dinner. now, in real life, she had recently screwed me over so horribly that we are no longer friends. she destroyed a 50-year friendship so badly that it is beyond repair.

so when i awoke, out of curiosity i went to the dream interpretation book. quoted here:

"lobster:
relatives eating lobster: doomed for disappointment"

sometimes even my own skepticism takes a breath. i think this is a good example how the brain takes all the prose of our lives and files it neatly away with just a few pictures.

 

[Notmuchlonger]

Well in the dream the werewolf had the face of a werewolf but a human body. Ya weird I know but thats what it was. One of those dreams you wake up and can recount everything. I haven't had it in awhile though maybe last year. But from what I remember as I was entering the tent I looked back and see the werewolf face with the human body. Crazy huh. WoW weird! I was having a strained relationship with my cousin who was on drugs and being non communicative! That is freaky. but no lobster in it.