My dreams rarely have to do with my real life either. I tend to have dreams of a few different phenotypes. One is the anxiety dream... I will dream I am going around, needing to accomplish various tasks (which are often quite weird), and they tend to take place in one of a handful of dream worlds with similar characteristics. Often it's in some sort of post-apocalyptic or extremely grimy, gray industrial city, with stark metal or ruined buildings. It usually involves finding people or objects, and they're not nightmares at all, just tense situations that drag on and on. Generally these dreams involve hypothetical people I "know" in my dreams but who are not real people in my life. In these dreams I tend to encounter this state where I feel bogged down in some sort of goo or something, like for example I need to run, or accomplish some fine motor task, and my body will not cooperate, I can't move forward as if I am stuck in some sort of solid air. It also feels similar to how it feels when you sleep on your arm funny and wake up and it's entirely asleep and you cant move it how you want to, except it's affecting my entire body. Like I'm trying to run but I can't make my legs cooperate, I'll step sideways with great effort instead of forward, or start walking in a circle when I'm trying to move towards something.
I also have dreams of using drugs, or usually, ones where I am going to use drugs but it never quite happens. These usually involve things I have been thinking of in real life... for example, recently I had 2 dreams on 2 different nights of trying to use cocaine, and it was because a friend of mine and I were talking about cocaine last week. One of those dreams also involved a new-ish friend who has been caught lying and stealing/being shifty to my friend I talked about the coke with, in the dream he had all this coke and he was going to give me some but he laid out the tiniest little bump for me and a huge pile for himself and said he had to make sure he had enough for him, I did the little bump but felt nothing and spent quite a while trying to see if I could find more. Little things like that will seep into my dreams sometimes of my actual life happenings. Usually these dreams involve real people from my life, and real places from my life.
The third type of dream I will experience is my favorite kind. They involve these fantastical, cool dream worlds where I am going around doing tasks or experiencing cool things. These dreams worlds are varied and they slowly shift, some coming in and out over time. Some of them are continuations of dream worlds I recognize from when I was a kid, and sometimes a brand new one comes in. For example, a couple of years after I moved to where I live now (in the NC mountains), I started having dreams of this amazing mountain world, which is like a combination of these mountains and the western US mountains, but more prehistoric. In these mountains, there is my house, except it isn't my house, it's a different house that reminds me of my house. Also there are doorways that lead into this massive underground complex inside the mountains that I will explore. There are doorways that lead out onto balconies that reveal hauntingly beautiful long-range views. There are certain roads and pathways that lead between various destination places that are always the same in these dreams, which I will travel and remember from dream to dream. Inside the underground complex, to move between rooms, you have to stand in front of these little tiny holes that suck air through them, and when you stand there it pulls your body into a sort of energy mist that sucks it through the hole and into the next room. I have another dream world that is this extremely massive building that has many rooms and areas, that is on the beach. I also have a dream world that is a compilation of the town I grew up, with my parents' house and parts of the town, and the town I went to college in, and the highways in between them, which are actually just compilations of highway interchanges that I have encountered in various places in life that don't actually correspond to the real roads between those places.
My dreams very rarely involve actual, applicable things in my life. For example, I would expect I'd have dreams about my dad, who is dying of ALS, but I never, ever do. I never have dreams where it seems that I am directly ruminating on decisions I need to make or something. However, sometimes I can interpret the dreams I do have as being abstract representations of things in my life. Particularly, the drug-using dreams usually seem to illustrate to me that I am a compulsive drug user who tends to focus too much on drugs, which is true. It's a recurring issue for me in life, though it's a lot better than it has been at other points in my life.
When I did ibogaine to get off opiates, the entire thing (for 3 full days) was one long string of dreams whether I was awake or asleep, all extremely abstract and strange with seemingly no relevance to my intention for the trip, at the time. Most people seem to report being fairly conscious during the experience and revisiting events in their lives and seeing them in a new light, or revisiting all the pain they've caused others. For me it was nothing like this, but in retrospect, the dreams were very representative in an abstract way of things I needed to consider and understand, and additionally, during the entire experience, I was entirely unaware of the fact that I was dreaming during the dreams, and the entire thing consisted only of a series of dreams, rather than a fully conscious experience. My unique ibogaine experience (both the fact that I was sub-conscious during it and the abstract nature of it) coupled with my strange dream landscape has often led me to wonder if my brain is set up differently than the brains of most. I also generally don't think in a linguistic way... my thoughts are these conceptual packages that consist of words, feelings, and mostly just fully formed ideas, and when I want to communicate them I have to come up with words. I don't usually have an internal dialogue of words, which is weird because I love communicating with words (as you may have guessed
).
I literally never have nightmares anymore... when I was a kid I did, but ever since becoming a late teen I have only one time had a dream where I felt actual terror, when I have unpleasant dreams they are filled with anxiety or drudgery but not actual fear. Even when I am, for example, being chased by some knife-wielding person in a post-apocalyptic landscape, I just feel anxiety about it but it is a muted sort of anxiety, more like a feeling of fretting or even annoyance.
It seems to take me a long time for new things in my life to enter my dreams. I won't start dreaming of new places until I've been there for a couple of years. I only recently started dreaming about my girlfriend of 2 years. I still most often dream of my family members and my oldest friends from childhood, rarely of my friends where I live now, even though I've been close with some of them for a good 6 years. I've never one time dreamed about my bandmates or playing music or my band at all, even though it's been about 2 years and my music is perhaps the single most important and impactful thing in my life these days, that I spend the most time thinking about an the most energy doing.
For 10 years while I was addicted to opiates, I remembered only a small handful of dreams, almost every night was just a period of blankness with no memory, which caused me a lot of concern. Ever since I did ibogaine and got off opiates, I have been remembering dreams most nights again, which is nice.
One other thing of note is that I have only been lucid in my dreams I think 3 times in my life. Twice it was very fleeting and becoming lucid made me start to wake up, and once I was having the most intense dream of my life... I used to abuse AMT (a serotonin releaser) and for the next night after going for 3 days or more in a row, I'd experience sleep paralysis followed by extremely intense and dark dreams. On this particular night I dreamed that my eyeball was disintegrating. I seemed to wake up (I thought I was awake, it seemed fully solid and real and I did not even consider I was dreaming), I sprang up because of an intense pain in my eye and looked in the mirror and my eye was rotting and falling apart (though I could still see out of it). I noticed that my girlfriend (my ex now) and my cats were not there, though I was in our apartment, and that my dad was sleeping in the next room. I woke him up in panic and told him about my eye, but instead of jumping into action he acted disgusted and annoyed, and told me I was just delusional again. The rest of the dream involved he and my mom driving me to the mental institution. Early on I realized I must be dreaming, but try as I might, I could not wake up. My parents treated me with this intense resignation and tiredness and scorn, and it was revealed to me that I was actually insane, and that I frequently would go on about how this wasn't my real life, that my girlfriend, cats, job, and entire life were fabrications of my sick mind. I ended up accepting it and it was a really traumatic and depressing experience, one of the most terrible things I've ever experienced. Eventually I woke up when I let go of my panic, fear and anger and accepted my lot in life. The whole next day I kept wondering if I was going to wake up again, because my experience of waking up into an altered reality was so convincing and real that I couldn't be sure I was really awake and that I wouldn't wake up a third time back into the world where I was insane, or a different world entirely.
