Reoccurrence in Dreams

[Punji]

A strange phenomenon I've always experienced is reoccurrence in my dreams. Specifically, themes and most predominately locations. I used to be a lucid dreamer too, when I was a younger coon with fewer stripes on my tail.

I've had a lot of different places keep coming back, all of which are places that don't really exist, or at least not in the way they do in my dreams. There's a great big school, a hospital, a shipping dock, an airport, a suburb, a big open park, a grocery store, an entire mall, a C-train station, and the downtown region of the city I live in, and more. Sometimes they bleed into each other, the C-train station is sometimes a walkable distance away from the school, and other times it's right next to the park or the airport. Once I went from the school to the hospital without leaving the building, like the two were connected.

The themes and emotions of the dreams don't typically have any real connection to the place. Sometimes I'm there for fun, sometimes I'm trying to find parking, sometimes I'm just walking around the place. A few times I was lost or late for work. Sometimes I'm there for work! Usually I'm alone, but sometimes other people are there. Friends, acquaintances, even a group of strangers.

I don't believe there is any significance or meaning to it. A novelty that makes the waking hours following a tincy bit more interesting. I don't really hear much about this kind of thing from other people, and I'm always curious if anything tends to reoccur in other peoples' dreams! Do they happen often? Is this a symptom of something, or just merely a minor oddity? Does it happen all the time for everyone and we just forget about it? What kinds of places do other people "visit?" What if any commonalities do these places share for each individual? It seems to me the only real common "location" for one's dreams are the place he lives in or grew up at, which does make sense.

A curious coon's interests can not be sated easily. Tell us about your own experiences with dreams! How often do they happen? The same places at the same rates? Is there some kind of theme or emotional state when in these dreams?

 

[Katara the Sergal]

Location-wise, my dreams typically involve elements of a childhood trailer home I grew up in from around 2001 - 2011ish (wasn't the first house I lived in, being born in 1997, but it was the first house I lived in for a long time and is where virtually all my childhood memories stem from), my public school system in my hometown (specifically one of the buildings in particular, there was several very old buildings as far back as the 1950s spanning a huge campus, this one has an above and underground section), and my late grandparents' trailer home in another town, which they used to live in my entire life before they died not too long ago, and I used to visit this place several times a year. I say "elements", because my dreams tend to be very bizarre, almost nonsensical (randomly generated, you could say) mix mashes of any one of these places all fucked up and corrupted. Layouts, rooms that never existed, my grandparents' house being on the property of my childhood home where a shed would have instead been in real life, a one story building becoming a two story, any number of things like this happens. It's like my brain takes significant locations for whatever subconscious reason I distinctly remember them or whatever significance they may have, and just completely distorts them and stretches things around like a mental blender. It's actually kind of cool, as I have no idea how my brain actually does it, but it's always interesting waking up and wondering why a certain detail was there, why there were extra hallways, or rooms that don't actually exist.

As for my dreams themselves...the actual "type" of dream varies, but it's almost always negative. Almost always, there are elements of stress within the dreams. Situations that create some kind of problem for me that makes me at unrest, be it getting into a very heated yelling argument with my father (very common), or things like being stuck and unable to move, unable to remember how to find a particular room or place as I'm lost in a place that should be familiar and isn't, and there was even a recent dream only about a week(?) ago where a bull was trying to kill me and my dogs, and I was hiding up high as I'd keep having to lurch out of the way of incoming horns as I could do nothing but hope my dogs wouldn't get trampled as it would keep breaking away to chase them, only to come right back for me. Another common type of dream I thankfully haven't had in a minute is what I like to refer to as "chase" dreams, where I see an ex in my dream who for some reason is mad at me, and keeps disappearing through doorways or around corners as I keep running after them, wondering what's wrong, what it is I did. Sometimes, I see exes beyond chase dreams, and in these dreams, we're together, and most of the time, something is wrong. Again, they're angry with me, and I can't seem to figure out why. Much more rarely, we're together and happy, and everything is just fine. But those are not nearly as common as the ones where something is wrong between us, and usually, I'm chasing them as they keep disappearing. It's always one of a couple exes of my past, too. Out of countless people I've dated over many, many years, it's a specific two I keep seeing in these dreams. No matter what the case may be, when I wake up from these dreams, I fall to a very low state emotionally and become hopelessly depressed, and cannot cope with them not being there anymore - one of these exes especially out of the two. I can't accept that we aren't together anymore, and they still haunt me like a ghost in the back of my mind. Thankfully, because of certain factors in my emotional life the better part of this past year, I haven't had nearly the ratio of these dreams as I used to, and I am far stronger against their effects. They don't bother me nearly as much as before, nor do they happen hardly ever these days. But around a year ago, they used to be very common. One type of dream I'm very thankful not to have had at all in years is nightmares, true ones anyway. Years ago, I used to have horrible nightmares that started happening. In these dreams, I could not wake up until I was dead within the dream. The dream did not end when I was touched or grabbed like typical nightmares a lot of people have. In these dreams, I could only wake up when I was dead of the injuries sustained within the dream, and I would be attacked by seemingly random, demonic creatures I can hardly explain that would tear into me and rip me to pieces, and I would feel everything as I was killed. It hurt a hell of a fucking lot, and in the real world, I would be jerking really hard like I was being grabbed and thrashed violently by my torso. One of these dreams, I tried to have some sort of heart issue right as I awoke, and I remember my chest hurting badly as everything was locking up, and then that's all I remember as I passed back out after that. Thank fuck, I haven't had those dreams in years. Never knew why they started - never knew why they stopped. They came and went, but by comparison, typical stress dreams just don't bother me, unless it's about an ex lover. There was also a very odd dream that's hard to classify, over a year ago, but not too much more than. I just call this dream "purgatory", because that's essentially what it was. In this dream, I was in the middle of what appeared to be Venice, Italy. I was all alone, and it was late in the day. Not quite sunset, but soon about to be. The entire city was abandoned. No one was there, like everyone just randomly vanished, and everything was silent and eerie. I was lucid in this dream, and I walked around for quite a while, wandering about, wondering what was going on. Interestingly, in this dream, I was my main fursona, Katara, and perhaps most interestingly of all, when I would look at myself, when I'd see my reflection, or look at my hands, my body kept flickering randomly, irregularly between a living and a skeletal state. I'd be flesh and fur one moment, and then I'd quickly flash to just a skeleton in clothes, and quickly flash back. In this dream, there was a sense of somberness. Sadness...emptiness. I could sense that I was dead, and all I could infer was this was some sort of afterlife. I can't remember much beyond this, because I think I just woke up at that point, but it was really a bizarre dream that makes me question a great many things. Similarly, but I don't know if it was a dream or a weird hallucination or a vision because I was half awake at the time, but it wasn't long either before or after the purgatory dream (days? Weeks? Preceding, or following? Can't remember), but I remember at one point seeing my fursona Katara from third person, and they were shrouded in a black, ominous mist, and I couldn't see my own face, just parts of it as the mist made it hard to see. I got almost the very same sensation as the purgatory dream, a strange sense of emptiness and sadness, and again this looming sense that I was dead somehow. I assume this was related to the purgatory dream, but this occurred completely separate on a different day, and I have not had any sort of related dreams or experiences before nor since like this.

Perhaps not always, but I like to see dreams as a sort of window into one's subconscious. A lot of the time, they can point to deep, dark feelings or troubles in oneself, or perhaps show us our own desires and what we want most in the world around us. It's debatable, though. But if that's true, then I worry my own dreams point to quite severe emotional issues within. The thing is, I almost never have "good" dreams. I don't ever have happy dreams. Almost every single time, they're negative in some way. Some element or another about them is stressful, or brings up past trauma within myself. Makes me relive losing those I loved. My dreams are basically never a good thing, and nights where I don't dream at all are the preferable ones for me.

 

[Jack Foxtrot]

There's this one house that I've never seen in real life yet keeps popping up in my dreams. Always has the same rooms but will often have an extra addition or something. The dreams almost always involve me walking up the stairs from the first floor. It'd always be dimly lit by the windows on the side, which usually have translucent curtains. Usually some doors on the left. Sometimes in my dreams it'll have me be sitting at the TV in the dark, playing an Xbox 360 or some other console.

I tried to recreate it once...

 

[Punji]

Location-wise, my dreams typically involve elements of a childhood trailer home I grew up in from around 2001 - 2011ish (wasn't the first house I lived in, being born in 1997, but it was the first house I lived in for a long time and is where virtually all my childhood memories stem from), my public school system in my hometown (specifically one of the buildings in particular, there was several very old buildings as far back as the 1950s spanning a huge campus, this one has an above and underground section), and my late grandparents' trailer home in another town, which they used to live in my entire life before they died not too long ago, and I used to visit this place several times a year. I say "elements", because my dreams tend to be very bizarre, almost nonsensical (randomly generated, you could say) mix mashes of any one of these places all fucked up and corrupted. Layouts, rooms that never existed, my grandparents' house being on the property of my childhood home where a shed would have instead been in real life, a one story building becoming a two story, any number of things like this happens. It's like my brain takes significant locations for whatever subconscious reason I distinctly remember them or whatever significance they may have, and just completely distorts them and stretches things around like a mental blender. It's actually kind of cool, as I have no idea how my brain actually does it, but it's always interesting waking up and wondering why a certain detail was there, why there were extra hallways, or rooms that don't actually exist.

As for my dreams themselves...the actual "type" of dream varies, but it's almost always negative. Almost always, there are elements of stress within the dreams. Situations that create some kind of problem for me that makes me at unrest, be it getting into a very heated yelling argument with my father (very common), or things like being stuck and unable to move, unable to remember how to find a particular room or place as I'm lost in a place that should be familiar and isn't, and there was even a recent dream only about a week(?) ago where a bull was trying to kill me and my dogs, and I was hiding up high as I'd keep having to lurch out of the way of incoming horns as I could do nothing but hope my dogs wouldn't get trampled as it would keep breaking away to chase them, only to come right back for me. Another common type of dream I thankfully haven't had in a minute is what I like to refer to as "chase" dreams, where I see an ex in my dream who for some reason is mad at me, and keeps disappearing through doorways or around corners as I keep running after them, wondering what's wrong, what it is I did. Sometimes, I see exes beyond chase dreams, and in these dreams, we're together, and most of the time, something is wrong. Again, they're angry with me, and I can't seem to figure out why. Much more rarely, we're together and happy, and everything is just fine. But those are not nearly as common as the ones where something is wrong between us, and usually, I'm chasing them as they keep disappearing. It's always one of a couple exes of my past, too. Out of countless people I've dated over many, many years, it's a specific two I keep seeing in these dreams. No matter what the case may be, when I wake up from these dreams, I fall to a very low state emotionally and become hopelessly depressed, and cannot cope with them not being there anymore - one of these exes especially out of the two. I can't accept that we aren't together anymore, and they still haunt me like a ghost in the back of my mind. Thankfully, because of certain factors in my emotional life the better part of this past year, I haven't had nearly the ratio of these dreams as I used to, and I am far stronger against their effects. They don't bother me nearly as much as before, nor do they happen hardly ever these days. But around a year ago, they used to be very common. One type of dream I'm very thankful not to have had at all in years is nightmares, true ones anyway. Years ago, I used to have horrible nightmares that started happening. In these dreams, I could not wake up until I was dead within the dream. The dream did not end when I was touched or grabbed like typical nightmares a lot of people have. In these dreams, I could only wake up when I was dead of the injuries sustained within the dream, and I would be attacked by seemingly random, demonic creatures I can hardly explain that would tear into me and rip me to pieces, and I would feel everything as I was killed. It hurt a hell of a fucking lot, and in the real world, I would be jerking really hard like I was being grabbed and thrashed violently by my torso. One of these dreams, I tried to have some sort of heart issue right as I awoke, and I remember my chest hurting badly as everything was locking up, and then that's all I remember as I passed back out after that. Thank fuck, I haven't had those dreams in years. Never knew why they started - never knew why they stopped. They came and went, but by comparison, typical stress dreams just don't bother me, unless it's about an ex lover. There was also a very odd dream that's hard to classify, over a year ago, but not too much more than. I just call this dream "purgatory", because that's essentially what it was. In this dream, I was in the middle of what appeared to be Venice, Italy. I was all alone, and it was late in the day. Not quite sunset, but soon about to be. The entire city was abandoned. No one was there, like everyone just randomly vanished, and everything was silent and eerie. I was lucid in this dream, and I walked around for quite a while, wandering about, wondering what was going on. Interestingly, in this dream, I was my main fursona, Katara, and perhaps most interestingly of all, when I would look at myself, when I'd see my reflection, or look at my hands, my body kept flickering randomly, irregularly between a living and a skeletal state. I'd be flesh and fur one moment, and then I'd quickly flash to just a skeleton in clothes, and quickly flash back. In this dream, there was a sense of somberness. Sadness...emptiness. I could sense that I was dead, and all I could infer was this was some sort of afterlife. I can't remember much beyond this, because I think I just woke up at that point, but it was really a bizarre dream that makes me question a great many things. Similarly, but I don't know if it was a dream or a weird hallucination or a vision because I was half awake at the time, but it wasn't long either before or after the purgatory dream (days? Weeks? Preceding, or following? Can't remember), but I remember at one point seeing my fursona Katara from third person, and they were shrouded in a black, ominous mist, and I couldn't see my own face, just parts of it as the mist made it hard to see. I got almost the very same sensation as the purgatory dream, a strange sense of emptiness and sadness, and again this looming sense that I was dead somehow. I assume this was related to the purgatory dream, but this occurred completely separate on a different day, and I have not had any sort of related dreams or experiences before nor since like this.

Perhaps not always, but I like to see dreams as a sort of window into one's subconscious. A lot of the time, they can point to deep, dark feelings or troubles in oneself, or perhaps show us our own desires and what we want most in the world around us. It's debatable, though. But if that's true, then I worry my own dreams point to quite severe emotional issues within. The thing is, I almost never have "good" dreams. I don't ever have happy dreams. Almost every single time, they're negative in some way. Some element or another about them is stressful, or brings up past trauma within myself. Makes me relive losing those I loved. My dreams are basically never a good thing, and nights where I don't dream at all are the preferable ones for me.

Interesting, makes sense that places like that would come up some more. Strange how things are so... unstable. Must be quite the "sight."

Those nightmares sound just awful, same with your chase dreams. Glad you don't have to suffer them much anymore. Hopefully they stay away. Interesting that you feel pain in your dreams, I do too, but usually not in any reoccurring manner like these sorts of dreams. I get those stress dreams too. Conflict dreams a lot. I've heard it's the brain trying to practise these kinds of things to make them easier to deal with in the future, but I think the better night's rest would help more.

Fursona dreams are neat, don't get them often though. I could see some certain arguments for some dreams being directly related to one's subconscious, but personally I don't think they mean much on their own. Perhaps some bits of real life and personality seep in, but only in so much as the brain can only work with what it's got.

There's this one house that I've never seen in real life yet keeps popping up in my dreams. Always has the same rooms but will often have an extra addition or something. The dreams almost always involve me walking up the stairs from the first floor. It'd always be dimly lit by the windows on the side, which usually have translucent curtains. Usually some doors on the left. Sometimes in my dreams it'll have me be sitting at the TV in the dark, playing an Xbox 360 or some other console.

I tried to recreate it once...

Neat! I often find when I try to focus on the details as to write about them or draw them like this, they get harder to recall.

Seems kinda chill though, not too bad!

 

[Jack Foxtrot]

There's been a few times I had been there where I was being chased by someone or something. I remember one time in particular I was there, and the upstairs area led to a long hallway with a metal gate to outside, that led to some backyard garden thing. Like you know those hedge mazes with a fountain in the middle? It was something like that, but a lot smaller. It would be a safe haven from whatever was chasing me indoors, but for whatever reason I'd only be able to stay for a couple minutes at a time before having to head back inside.

 

[MooseHorns237]

A few main themes are that my sister is often the main character or hero, tasting nasty things, looking for a bathroom or privacy but someone (usually my mom) is there.

My favorite dreams are scary dreams. I LOVE falling, being afraid, being followed or in dark places. I love demons. I actually enjoy being afraid and actively seek it. The only thing I am actually afraid of is someone else being hurt and I am powerless to stop it. My greatest fear is me hurting someone I care about and is the only thing that truly scares me in dreams.

One of my favorite things are inception dreams -- dreams in dreams and I can't tell when I actually wake up because I wake up so many times.

 

[Jack Foxtrot]

I always felt like dream interpretation is a bunch of baloney. It feels like people are trying to make sense of things where this simply is none. Plus people tend to overthink it and interpret things way too deeply. Like... I dunno... if you see a spec of dust in a random spot on your desk, it means you're depressed or something.

Granted, we're still not entirely sure why we dream or what any of it means, but I doubt that it's supposed to make some kind of sense... I personally believe it's just random noise and your brain cherry-picking things, whether it's things that happened earlier that day, or memories or faces from practically decades ago.

I love how random dreams can get though, or more specifically, how accepting your brain is. You could have a dream where you can fly or where you have some kind of power, and your brain's just like "Yep, I've always been able to do this", and never questions it. You could have a fucking 3-headed horse in your bedroom and your brain would be none the wiser about it.

Other times I'm having dreams of being chased, sometimes by a very large insect such as a wasp that's about half the size of a person. I always have to run in these types of dreams, but whenever I move I'm like super slow. It's like trying to run while there's moon gravity and the ground is frictionless at the same time. So you're just constantly floating in the air and when you do manage to touch the ground your shoes simply can't grip. Sometimes I can't even just walk normally either because of it. Like I remember a dream where I walked home from school with some folks, everyone was walking ahead of me and I was at a snail's pace in comparison, and again, I'm walking in low gravity on a frictionless surface, so I'm only moving a few inches a second at most, it was my maximum speed and I physically couldn't gain any more momentum. Literally the most I could do was push my feet against the ground, but that would basically just give me upwards momentum and I'd be stuck floating in the air for a few as I slowly come back down.

If there's anything I've learned about dreams, it's that my brain is a dick to me like all the time lol. In my dreams I'm always mildly inconvenienced in some form or another. Like going outside somewhere but I've got no shoes on, or being in a school or public place and I somehow managed to go from home all the way to said place, not realizing I'm butt-naked or just wearing a t-shirt without any pants or underwear or something stupid like that. You know how it goes... Heh, there's even been a couple times too where I'd be like... typing on my computer or texting somebody, and I can't ever spell anything. So I'm constantly backspacing everything and getting pissed off wondering why I can't type. With phone/tablet-related texting/typing, it's like autocorrect would take over constantly and fuck up what I'm trying to say and get on my nerves. Like one time I was in the middle of a street at dusk, no idea where I was at, I was trying to text Mom or something to come get me, but I fucking couldn't because all I could do was just send her indecipherable gibberish and random letters, and again the stupid autocorrect came into play and made it even worse.

---

A common dream I tend to have involves space-related stuff, and it's usually exacerbated if I played a space game recently. Most notably Outer Wilds or Space Engine where it's more kind of sandboxy or freeform. I've often dreamt of being able to noclip/freefly through space at my leisure, and explore all sorts of celestial bodies and fly at different speeds. Sometimes though I would come across black holes, and those often make me uneasy. Sometimes I'm scared of black holes in media, depending on how its depicted. Like in shows/movies it's whatever, but sometimes in games where I have more free reign, it's a little scary. But anyways, sometimes I'll spot them in space in dreams and try to stray away from them. Overall, I could occasionally visit planets and they'd be of various sizes; some realistic and massive, others with a radius of the size of my bedroom or something, like Super Mario Galaxy levels of small. Or while free-flying I could "zoom out" and have all the galaxies at a small scale surrounding me where I could then make them large and zoom into them again.

Sometimes I'll have dreams where I can look up at the night sky and see various celestial bodies comically close to Earth. Like Jupiter or a random gas giant just huge in the sky above us, or several other random planets. Sometimes they'll move really quickly across the sky at varying speeds. One of my favorite dreams was a dream that let me open up a "UI" that floated in front of me, and with it I can use various left/right sliders to manually set the time of day, offset the sun and moon elevations and azimuths, create/delete astronomical bodies anywhere in the night sky, change moonlight brightness, how fast the time of day went, all that jazz. I could even use checkboxes to do various things like freeze the time of day or toggle moon phases.

I also had a dream once where everyone had a constellation app on their phone, and the way it worked was that in the night sky, people could draw their own constellations using the existing stars in the sky. And if you turned on a setting in the app, you could physically look up IRL at the sky and see lines connecting the stars together followed by text way up in the sky showing the titles and names of the submitters of the constellations. I don't think you could create/delete stars, it was just drawing using the existing ones that were already present.

---

Heh, one time I also had a Half-Life dream and it was like the most vivid dream I had ever had, and I've never had a similar dream since.

I was a rebel living in some hideout somewhere in the ruins of City 17 that was where Eli was.

Eli sent me off with an SMG that had (and surprisingly I can remember this) 10 full magazines of ammunition and 5 SMG grenades. I was also given a shotgun and about 18 shells.

They sent me off to go pick up some sort of supply drop across the city, and I had to remain undetected by a Combine convoy that was along the way. It consisted of a few APCs and a gunship if I remember correctly. I hid in some bushes when they came past the road.

Around the city I collected the dropoff and made my way back when a strider came by and used that massive cannon or whatever and blew a building up to block my path. I had to hide behind some cover, and under the rubble was a wrecked white van with the side doors taken off. But if I could make my way through the van from the right side over to the left side I'd make it to the other side of the rubble and keep going. So I waited for the strider's delay of gunshots (those few seconds between each time it fires a few), and bolted and jumped through the van and made it to the other side.

On the way back I came across another Combine convoy and had to make it back inside the hideout undetected, which I luckily did.

It was the most vivid dream I have ever experienced in my life. May have even been a lucid one. But it was really awesome. I think I even remember hiding in my own house in town at one point, with the lights off at night as some APCs drove by my street looking for me. What made this dream all the more interesting was that I was a Resistance member and not Gordon. So uhh... that was something.

---

Overall, I noticed that whenever I first got my VR headset in 2019, I used to lucid dream a LOT afterwards. It's kind of died down a lot since then over the years, but I just remember for a while always having lucid dreams constantly, and being in full control. Though I think a study or two actually showed that VR usages increases lucid dreaming, so maybe it just tickles your brain in the right places.

For reoccurrences in my dreams, the space stuff is the most common thing. I'm often dreaming of flying around and viewing space, or having a little drop-down menu I could summon where I could do crazy sandbox shit. The second-most common being the "chased by a large insect" bullshit or something similar to that nature where I can't really go anywhere.

---

Heh, wasn't intending to flood the thread here with this garbo. But dreams indeed have always fascinated me and I've always wondered if we'll ever find a true biological explanation for why we dream and why different things happen in them, without all the random interpretation BS people seem to do a lot of.