Like the sky, in a dream sometime.

[Unless]

So, as of about a week ago or possibly a little more, or what certainly at least feels like a lot more, I've been dreaming rather vividly and every night. I wake up a lot and when I get back to sleep, often the dreams seem to continue from where they'd left off beforehand, which is something I usen't ever be able to do whether I wanted or not. I've been getting up in the mornings not feeling sleepy and deprived, but certainly tired. Every night has been an entire ordeal and just seems to last an awfully long time.

So I suppose I'll start this off with the questions you're all expecting — do you dream often? What do you dream about? Are you one of those people that likes to pretend they have nightmares every night because it makes you cool? Do you even dream at all any more? Are you one of those annoying people who likes to claim that we dream every night but just don't remember it, even though that's only something they heard once from another student in school, never once deciding to fact-check?

Though, now on to the main reason behind my creating this thread. Do you ever dream up ideas?
The most frequent example I can think of in my case is music, often I'll wake up with a tune in my head that I've come up with in my sleep. I mull it over in my head when I do, and depending on my level of consciousness, if I think it's good enough, I'll either try to figure it out on guitar there and then so that it's easier to remember (usually it's only a short, neat riff) or I'll hum something in a groggy voice into my iPod's voice recorder and possibly be even able to make out a few notes when I listen to it later.

Another example about which I'm thinking is in character interactions, regardless of how or why it played out in the dream, that would likely fit into a written story of some sort. When I was partaking in a multi-author project about characters with superpowers (and was thinking about it a lot, consequently in that mindframe), I dreamed up an interesting interaction between a shape-shifter and a social cloaker^† that blew my mind in the dream^‡, and I was pleased to find that when I woke up, it remained an awesome thing.
Last night, I dreamt my sister was delivering an early draft of a play she was creating, a  black comedy, and there was a humerus interaction between a main character and villain. Oh, how it made us all laugh at how inventive and creative my sister was, and what an original and hilarious script she had written^‡.
I'm afraid I'm not posting either scenario onto the forums because one requires context and the other is all about presentation, but perhaps you'll just take my word on this.
Since waking, I've gone through it a number of times in my head, and the interaction is still fucking hilarious. It also makes me happy to know for a fact that if somebody with an outsider's perspective had the same valued as I, they would value highly my original joke, which I can tell because this is the scenario in which I was introduced to my own joke. How odd. Yes, yes, I sure do crack myself up. I'll ask my sister when I meet her next week if she had any notable or funny dreams the week prior so as to make sure I can lay claim to it, lest we have shared the dream.

Has anybody else ever shared a dream with anybody? I read once somewhere on the internet that it's a semi-common phenomenon between [identical] twins, so it must be true. I know that I and my sister shared a dream one night when we were both much younger, both sleeping in the same house, about our cat being torn in half. Unless she was just a convincing liar. I mean, she was, but usually there was a reason behind it when she did. She liked to manipulate people into doing things for her — I was the one who liked to spin stories just to see if they could stick. (No, not about people or in school or anything like that. Fuck those people.)

†: This has been an outright fabrication. I mean, the pretense to this scenario. I lied slightly to protect my work because I'm particularly paranoid about this project, second-to-one, for reasons I can't quite pin down considering nobody's touched the thing in years. The general idea still comes across, though.

‡: It baffles me that this is a thing. Does anybody else often get surprised in their dreams (relative to how often the dream (and/or remember their dreams, if you're an insistent asshole))? How the hell does that even work?

Well, I suppose I've droned on long enough; I'd better post this before the internet cuts out.

[valiums]

I dream remember some of my dreams every other night on average.
My dreams are now either fantastic escapism or an explicit mine for ideas. Pretty much every dream I have, I can use to supplement something I'm currently working on, if not as a base for a new project altogether. I too dream up music, sometimes entire songs, but i have no skill with instruments, so I usually just replay the tune again and again in my mind when I'm trying to wake up and gather the energy to get out of bed. And then I forget it forever.
I also never have nightmares, and a few of my dreams are explicitly the opposite; encouraging and uplifting, and I feel really damn good after them.
I think media has strongly shaped how I dream. They're often in unreal visual formats, like anime and weird sketchy pencil cartoon stuff, and are almost never about me as a person. Sometimes I worry that consequences will never be the same because of this, but it's just dreams.


Also yooooo that social cloaker concept is dead relevant to a project I've been figuring out, thanks for including that!

[Bamyasi]

Don't we have a dream thread on page 4 or something.

Oh well.

[webm]http://www.thebackalleys.com/dump/files/1530/247Np5_let%27s%20do%20it%20again.webm[/webm]

[Unless]

Don't we have a dream thread on page 4 or something.

Oh dear. Well, I suppose this is yet another boring dream thread. Oh boy.

I wouldn't have considered this a [nytemarish] topic in any case. The closest thing I've had to a nightmare over the past week was in a long and arduous night and extended dream where at one point there was a series of unnatural disasters à la Jumanji, and there was at one point a stampede of make-shift Unicorns that ran like Crabs, as they consisted of the back halves of two Horses badly grafted together, with a neck extending low from the middle and with horns extending both from their forehead and snout, both above and below. They were horrifying and fantastic and probably at least slightly inspired by the Fleshmad Steed, as I've been madly into Magic lately. I wouldn't have called it a nightmare though, because it ceased bothering me the moment I awoke, and instead only fascinated me. That's the type of creature I generally only think up whilst awake when I let my imagination fly whilst I close and put pressure on my eyes to see the funky colours in exactly the way my parents always told me to not.
I find sometimes that I tend to shift perspectives in dreams between people, and this just makes the whole thing a little more surreal anyway.

I dream remember some of my dreams every other night on average.

I'll have you know I shook my fist disdainfully at the screen just then.

I too dream up music, sometimes entire songs, but i have no skill with instruments, so I usually just replay the tune again and again in my mind when I'm trying to wake up and gather the energy to get out of bed. And then I forget it forever.

That's very upsetting.

I also never have nightmares, and a few of my dreams are explicitly the opposite; encouraging and uplifting, and I feel really damn good after them.

That's very pleasing.

Also yooooo that social cloaker concept is dead relevant to a project I've been figuring out, thanks for including that!

Glad, as always, to oblige my friends and neighbours.

[rtil]

i come up with ideas for stuff when i'm awake. my dreams are horribly mundane. at least compared to everyone else. either that or people come up with extravagant lies about their dreams

[cipher]

For a good chunk of my life I never really remembered any dreams I had. Maybe a few a year at most. That's changed though in the past 14 months or so however. I too can often wake up, fall back asleep, and continue a dream. But most of the time it's a dream I don't want to continue, something stressful or anxiety provoking I guess, even if said dream has a completely ridiculous premise.

I've had a few dreams that have resulted in game ideas for projects I'd like to make one day. I've never actually made one that resulted from a dream, but I wrote some notes down. I've only had 2 or 3 of those ever though.

Sometimes I have dreams that just put me in this weird emotional state, sometimes it persists as long as the entire next day (or two). Also rare though.

[michaell]

no but i had shitty dreams of that one girl falling in love with me like i did with her probably because i thought about her a lot

shes my fiancee now but they were far from prophetic and unforeseeable wow since we already spent like 9 hours a day with each other back then

[Bamyasi]

i guess i just feel a lot of inner experience and interpretation about what dreams were and represent are generally radically different so it's pretty hard to ever talk about openly without feeling you're giving away something personal and vulnerable

Yeah, this.

i left this on for a long time

Why not do it again?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbDVSwr_E4

[SHADOWFOX2]

I will return to this thread in a bit
Read Bam's story

[Unless]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wA_S8TlLu0

[Gilthwixt]

I read an article a few years ago that Scientists are able to record the brain's visualizations as really low res video. Maybe in 30 years we'll have DreamTube.

[Unless]

I speculate that different sorts of brains might interpret the same things very differently. For example, it'd be really interesting to see if the way you see orange is the way I see purple — and to what degrees people only think colours match because they were taught to think so, where in actual fact my green and blue do go great together and fuck you, mom.

Maybe... maybe 2 + 2 is yellow.

[Bamyasi]

For example, it'd be really interesting to see if the way you see orange is the way I see purple

Really? What do you find interesting about it?

I've always found color qualia to be one of the less interesting philosophical problems, like solipsism, but I'm open to new interpretations.

[Unless]

Well, mainly this:

... to what degrees people only think colours match because they were taught to think so, where in actual fact my green and blue do go great together.

I just find it funny how much people repeatedly, consistently get surprised by the notion that things they find innately 'normal' aren't innate at and after all.

But I agree that it's not one of the most grand and intriguing mysteries. It's just exciting to think about because this would mean we could actually be on the verge of uncovering it.

[Bamyasi]

Last night I had a dream that Unless and I went on a seaside adventure. All our favorite animals were there in some form. Towards the end she abandoned me to chase a black cat into the hazy moonlit night.

Why did you do it Unless? Why did you leave me all alone under that emerald ocean sky?

[Unless]

It's a metaphor. I think you're great but will always prefer pussy.

[Bamyasi]

Satisfactory.

[Philip K Dick]

It's a metaphor. I think you're great but will always prefer pussy.

you'd rather fuck a cat than bamyasi? thats harsh

[Unless]

Harsh, but fair.

[Philip K Dick]

ICE COLD