Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

dreambank.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 171 posts

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#161

Post by kkoncevicius »

nprz wrote: post #45
as1mov wrote: post #19

Just curious, does anyone here have dreams with some recurring themes? I've tried googling for this but sadly most of the content seems to be related to spiritual/mystical "explanations" of it. And I don't bring it up with anyone in real life so as to not appear like a kook. I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great probability that it falls into these 2 categories - 1. I suddenly find myself…

Only recurring dream I have is I'm back in college and it's the end of a semester, suddenly I realize there's some math class I haven't been attending and I have just a few days to cram everything I've missed in time for the final.

I have exactly that. It can be from highschool or university but the setting is always the same - there was some class that seemed easy, I took it for granted, didn't attend, and now only a few classes left before the end of semester and I am facing a dilemma: I haven't done anything, I am afraid of confronting the teacher who might not even know me, and I am uncertain if I can still make it or if it's already too late and I failed the class.

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#162

Post by kkoncevicius »

rebuilder wrote: post #39
as1mov wrote: post #19

Just curious, does anyone here have dreams with some recurring themes? I've tried googling for this but sadly most of the content seems to be related to spiritual/mystical "explanations" of it. And I don't bring it up with anyone in real life so as to not appear like a kook. I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great probability that it falls into these 2 categories - 1. I suddenly find myself…

I don't know if I'd call it recurring, since it's pretty rare, but: Sometimes I lose my mind in my dreams. I can feel myself losing my grip on my faculties, as if something were ripping my mind apart. It's hard to describe, visuals become distorted, things split apart into colours, my grip on reality feels slippery. I imagine having a stroke might feel that way, although I hope it's less dramatic. This is just sheer…

These sound quite hardcore. I had the "wake up twice" dream once back in middle school, and it has stuck with me ever since. I remember it whenever someone mentions the topic of dreaming. I can only imagine how much of an impact a dream where you wake up more than 2 times would have.

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#163

Post by parenthesis »

tzs wrote: post #116
as1mov wrote: post #19

Just curious, does anyone here have dreams with some recurring themes? I've tried googling for this but sadly most of the content seems to be related to spiritual/mystical "explanations" of it. And I don't bring it up with anyone in real life so as to not appear like a kook. I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great probability that it falls into these 2 categories - 1. I suddenly find myself…

One I sometimes have is needing to go the bathroom but all the bathrooms I can find have disgusting problems that send me looking for another bathroom instead of relieving myself there. These always involve either bathrooms from my past (such as at schools I once attended or at places I once worked) or bathrooms in places that as far as I can tell are dream places. I don't recall these dreams ever involving a real ba…

I get this too!

I'm barefoot and the floor of the public bathroom is too disgusting to walk onto is a common one I get.

And then, yes, I awake to discover I need to go.

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#164

Post by knuthsat »

lqet wrote: post #12

I would like to know what small children (1-2 years) dream, but we can of course never really know for sure. My daughter (2 years) definitely seems to have nightmares. She also seems to have conversations in her dreams, as she often speaks answers to questions while sleeping. Personally I very strongly remember some wild dreams when I was very young, probably around the age I started remembering things at all, so aro…

I had the same horror dream from about 2 years old to 12. It repeated before sleep walking or when I had fever. It brought the same feelings and had the same motifs every time, and it was looping (I'd get massively scared and the dream would restart and the same sequence of events, quite long, would get to the end again). Sometimes I would get to explore a new motif in more details but this would happen after several repeats of the same old horror.

Characters and scenes looked a bit like they were out of a Disney movie (Aladdin, Pinocchio, I remember the guards from Aladdin and the princess/fairy from Pinocchio), which I guess I watched a lot when I was young.

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#165

Post by IgorPartola »

I have written code in my dreams. When facing a particular problem if I think about it obsessively all day long I can sometimes end up dreaming about it. If the dream comes towards the morning I can often times remember the code I wrote and go try it out when I wake up. It doesn’t make for good sleep but the code usually works even if it has some really weird convoluted quirk that I end up working out once awake.

I had similar things happen in high school. For example the first time the teacher explained integrals I had a rough time visualizing the geometry. Having a dream a few nights later of an integral being like an apple peeled into a long strip helped me wake up with a better intuitive understanding of integrals.

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#167

Post by hliyan »

IgorPartola wrote: post #165

I have written code in my dreams. When facing a particular problem if I think about it obsessively all day long I can sometimes end up dreaming about it. If the dream comes towards the morning I can often times remember the code I wrote and go try it out when I wake up. It doesn’t make for good sleep but the code usually works even if it has some really weird convoluted quirk that I end up working out once awake. I h…

That's odd. There's a belief that you cannot read in dreams because the part of the left brain that specializes in it tend to be less active during dreaming. Well, you can read, but the symbols look jumbled. For some people, they can make out words, but if they look away and look at the page/area again, it says something else. In my case, personally, it's quite peculiar: I can read words, but not digits. In one recent dream, I noticed some Japanese-like characters in a road-side ATM screen, panicked and started grabbing people of the street and yelling "Show me a number! Show me your phone clock!" and sure enough the digits were garbled, which is how I realized I was dreaming.

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#168

Post by IgorPartola »

hliyan wrote: post #167
IgorPartola wrote: post #165

I have written code in my dreams. When facing a particular problem if I think about it obsessively all day long I can sometimes end up dreaming about it. If the dream comes towards the morning I can often times remember the code I wrote and go try it out when I wake up. It doesn’t make for good sleep but the code usually works even if it has some really weird convoluted quirk that I end up working out once awake. I h…

That's odd. There's a belief that you cannot read in dreams because the part of the left brain that specializes in it tend to be less active during dreaming. Well, you can read, but the symbols look jumbled. For some people, they can make out words, but if they look away and look at the page/area again, it says something else. In my case, personally, it's quite peculiar: I can read words, but not digits. In one recen…

I can’t really read large chunks of code but for me code is less a collection of words and more interconnects between concepts plus processes that allow them to communicate. I don’t need to read it as much as think about what the things are and what they should do. I remember doing this with some networking code a few years ago and thinking of how I wanted to structure different datagrams and which parts of the system would be responsible for creating and processing them. It had less to do with waking up and copying everything word for word and more to do with thinking of “put this function into this module which should do this kind of thing, then hook a callback to it from this function”, etc.

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#169

Post by justcame2say »

kreeben wrote: post #155
hellbannedguy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my twenties I had recurring dreams about being in a field of golden wheat during the summer, with a guilty feeling I hurt someone. They really were weird. Maybe testosterone? Maybe Freudian? Maybe it was due to a stint job I had at the Coroner’s Office in high school? Maybe nothing? Those dreams ended in my thirties, after a breakdown in grad school. I pop a gasket (just really bad anxiety), and all those dreams s…

I used to dream vividly at night and while awake I was always the most calm and rational person in the room until a couple of years ago when I ran into financial (and love-related) problems and then struggled for years with extreme anxiety. I lost my capability to dream/remember my dreams. After having mostly fixed those problems I found that I was still anxious and unwilling to live in the now, always fearing the fu…

Things will improve quickly now.

Re: The DreamBank, a collection of over 20k dream reports

#170

Post by derbOac »

benmller313 wrote: post #52
nprz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only recurring dream I have is I'm back in college and it's the end of a semester, suddenly I realize there's some math class I haven't been attending and I have just a few days to cram everything I've missed in time for the final.

I have this dream constantly. Always that I forgot to ever go to the class, never that I'm struggling in a class or that I'm going to fail I class I've been attending. I wonder, did you skip a lot of classes in College?

It's funny to know this is a dream theme that others have. It's not the only recurring nightmare theme I have but it's a major one. You're right that it's just that I forgot to attend or something, like I just totally forgot I was enrolled for the course.

In my case, there's some real-life precedent for it. I enrolled in one course in undergrad, and dropped it right away my first week or so for some reason I don't recall. Toward the end of the semester, before finals, I found I was still enrolled, but had never set foot in the classroom or anything.

I was sort of panicked, but went and talked to the professor, and he was fine with it. He basically verified that I never did anything with the class and it was somehow deleted from my record completely.

I still don't know why it wasn't dropped in the first week, although this was before electronic registration systems.

Post reply on HN