Dream Study
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I have had many dreams that I remember to have been "different." But these seem to be happening more and more often than before lately. With these recurring ones, I feel that I can recall them more than my normal dreams.
This one begins with me sitting in my room, which is unusually dark. I don't see my roommate or anybody. I then feel this strange sensation that seems to pour over me like rain falling on a building. As I try to leave my room and open the door I realize that it's locked. I then turn to the large glass window in my apartment and I see this overwhelming light, like looking into the sun. I try to look away by shielding my eyes with my hand as if the blinding light could be ignored. The silence then turns into a shattering noise of broken furniture flying all around me. Everything that was in my room was being torn apart. I feel I must escape the devastation of this place; I then begin to run towards the light coming from my window. Crashing against the glass, I fall through. I don't feel scared, rather relieved or liberated. As I open my arms, I am consumed with the white light. This is when I wake up.
When I was younger (from around nine years old to about my junior year of high school), I would constantly experience vivid dreams about people and events that had happened in my life. Until recently, my ability to dream more or less vanished, but I still remember many of the dreams I had when I was a kid, especially the one time I had a dream that actually happened in real life a few days later.
I was about 11 years old and my entire junior high school of about 100 students and teachers were going to the beach for a school trip. A few days before the trip I had a vivid dream about the entire trip. I remember dreaming about the students on the bus singing "One Sweet Day" by Mariah Carey on the way to the beach, then getting off the bus and running over to a concession stand that was on the beach. I vividly remember dreaming about students playing beach volleyball, swimming in the sea, and playing other games throughout the day. Then, before I woke up, I remember dreaming about the ride back to the school and looking around the school bus and suddenly realizing that I was remembering the dream that I was having at the time.
The crazy thing is that everything that occurred in the dream happened during my school's trip, in order, including the part when I realized I had a dream about the experience just a few days prior. I was completely spooked by the dream, and never told any of my family or friends about it.
Recently, I have had more and more dreams that have come true. I don't know why it has happened again, but it really scares me at times. Sometimes when I remember a dream again, it feels like a fog lifting from my brain for a split second, just before it falls again. This feeling really scares me though. Maybe someone can help me out.
I am standing in a large enclosed space with whitewashed walls and double doors to my left. Light streams in from large skylights, throwing the concrete floor into stark contrast with the staunch white of the walls. To my right along the cinderblock wall there are tables filled with important objects. Something delicate. I get the feeling there is something significant about the amount of effort that has been put into these things.
For some reason I feel slightly ill at ease in this space. Not as though it is particularly disconcerting, but rather that it is not quite familiar. I only just inhabit this luminescent white room, and it still feels strange. Water is somehow involved in my discomfort.
As I turn to my left, I begin to speak to a male professor. His name eludes me. We speak at length about something significant, until I am interrupted by two people, one male, one female. They have come to take me away from this room and this professor and this place I don't quite understand.
This dream seems particularly strange and somewhat mundane, but after having it, I can only feel that it is somehow significant.
I once had a dream after a classmate of mine in college died. He had been in a bad car accident. In this dream I was watching a slide show of different people I knew at college, and it shocked me to see his image there in the pictures... He was smiling however, and looked in the image the way he did when I had last seen him. All the backgrounds in the pictures were black, but I could see faces clearly, like a spotlight was lighting them. I told my psychology professor about the dream too, and I think this fellow was telling me not to grieve too long.
A number of years ago, I met a girl in a dream. We had just met traveling, and were going to be on a long leg of the trip together. I don't recall what we were talking about, girl stuff, family and music. We had a good time talking.
We were both in our early teens in the dream. She was Hispanic and had long brown hair and was always smiling. After we traveled a long time together, we got off at our respective stops and said goodbye.
When I awoke, I really felt like I had met another person, a real soul in that dream. I swore I was going to walk down the street any day and see her and wondered if she'd recognize me.
A few years later, I had a dream where I was traveling on a plane on a long trip. As I was looking for my seat, I saw her there. In and out of the dream I recognized her and she me. We were delighted to see one another. She introduced me to her family, whom she was traveling with. We showed each other things we had bought on our travels. We had a really fun trip and her family was great.
When I awoke I can only say I felt as certain as I ever could that I was sharing an experience with someone who was outside of my dream and more than my imagination. I still believe that I could run into her in reality or in the dream anytime, and I swear she might remember me from the dream too.
When I read a book called Mutant Message Down Under, about aborigine tribes in Australia, the use of telepathy within the tribes was discussed at some length. Telepathy was almost more ordinary than speech, and they used it to communicate over long distances, as you or I would use a phone. I think perhaps the lack of cultivation of this amazing ability is not only a detriment, but that it is latent and comes out in other ways. My own experiences, awake and sleeping, point me in the direction of believing that people can connect, and not only in the dreamscape.
I remember once I had a dream where I was being chased by a man in a black coat and cap. He had a knife in his hand. This wasn't at a specific location; it was like an isolated area in a desert. I ran until I stopped at a cliff. I looked down and could see no floor. It was night and really misty. I turned to find the man walking towards me. I was cold and wet from sweat. Then he lifted the knife and stabbed my forehead. In the dream I watched my body fall into the darkness.
I opened my eyes wide, fell off my bed, and hit my head on the night table. I turned on the light and looked in the mirror to find a scrape on my forehead. I remembered the dream at that moment and noticed I was drenched in sweat. What freaked me out the most is that the cut on my head and me falling off the bed was like the dream but it had happened after the dream!
I started out in a house where a woman was released from a tiny jar. I think maybe a witch released her. Then after she came out, it was like all these mummies were released. It was as if they weren't supposed to come out, but they got out anyway. I was afraid, but they didn't hurt us or even try. We were trying to find a way out of the house. "We" is a younger version of one of my younger cousins and a baby. Don't know whose baby, just a baby that I felt I needed to protect.
Suddenly, we were on a huge ship, almost like a cruise ship, but one that had been stripped down and junky. It was full of people running the boat. Then in the blink of an eye, they were all gone. All of a sudden I had to try to steer the boat to protect my cousin and the baby. We were doing okay, until for some reason the boat started going down smaller and smaller waterways.
We ran aground, but that didn't stop us. We kept moving faster and faster even though we were on the ground. I kept trying to steer us closer to water. Sometimes we made it, sometimes I had to keep finding areas where people wouldn't get hurt. A couple of times, we ended up going over bridges and breaking them.
Finally I got us back to a big body of water and realized that we had made it from one ocean to the other. We were safe. I remember thinking that maybe when we were in the water that we should jump over so that we could be rescued, but I was afraid that I couldn't support my cousin and the baby and keep them from getting hurt. Very strange and it has kept with me all day.
I had a bizarre dream where I was a nun and the other sisters didn't like me because I was different; so they put a red habit on me (like a scarlet letter) and threw me in a jail cell. A littler nun was trying to convince the mother superior that I was a good person while she cooked a huge meal in the kitchen with fire. There was a pot in which she put noodles that at first looked like the Pillsbury dough boy and then all of a sudden all my friends and family were in the pot too. Flat images of those whom I love cooking amongst fire.
The mother superior sang to all the pots to be quiet because they were squealing and still on fire. When she finished singing, they steamed instead of squealing.
Then I woke up.
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