I don't know if this "counts", but I keep having this weird thing during the night where I can't breathe.

I'll wake up at ridiculous times in the early morning and feel like I'm suffocating. I'll tell myself to calm down and take deep breaths, which I do. The breaths, however, never feel satisfying. I completely freaked out last night when no matter how much I breathed I felt like I was drowning. I don't remember what happens after that. I'm 80% certain that I'm actually awake when it happens, but I can't be too sure.

I have that too sometimes...

I think in bad cases it's called Sleep Apnea or something like that.

That kind of thing's caused by a constricted flow of air. For extreme cases (some people can have hundreds of episodes a night), there are medical devices which rectify the problem which causes the incident. It is a very bad feeling.

I know about sleep apnoea, as my dad suffers from it. It is a hereditary thing, too :/

It didn't feel as much like something was constricting my air as the air just wasn't doing anything worthwhile once it hit my lungs, but maybe I ought to get it checked out. I've been feeling really sleep deprived lately. No matter how much sleep I get my brain always feels lethargic. I've seen how much difference a sleep machine can make, but I really don't want to have to use one at age 15.

Wrestling with a man made entirely of sausage roll.

It was every shade of fucking weird, I'll never forget it. Simply put, I never had the notion to mention he was made of sausage rolls, in fact, in said situation, I thought it was completely normal.

I once dreamt that a murderer killed my whole family and turned them into glasses....

I had a dream I met up with Wil in London last week and then I woke up. Yes. I had a motorbike too but someone stole it. Wil had a bicycle and he was angry because he couldn't get passed all the traffic.

Stay out of my dreams.

I once had a dream Wil raped me. It was so very bad.

Then he just added water and everything was super.

That was shit.

I had a dream that me and Wil trawled Nottingham looking for some food. Owait that actually happened! :D

Weird dreams? HOOBOY I've had a lot of those.

Earliest and maybe freakiest one I remember was a bunch of Spyro-style dragons running around a Sonic Robo Blast-style land screaming about Mount Playstation erupting.

Had another that involved a commercial about the effects of spam on your teeth (cartoon rapid rotting of teeth, eck), another about wandering around my primary school's playground during a fair of some sort and not having enough money to buy anything or not being sold any food by the assholes running the stalls. Um...

More recently I had a dream of a huge amount of Mudokons giving me piercing blank head-on stares, all of 'em facing the camera. That was freaky. I think it was my conscience trying to scare the shit out of me over something. I still need to scan in the interpretive drawing I did of this, if I can balls up and look at it again fdsfsdf.

Sounds like a good game.

That always happens with Wil.

:p

I had one set in some futuristic blade-runner dystopia in which I was traveling with a dangerous ex-special-ops vigilante fugitive because he was the only person in the world who wasn't a complete cock. We tried to board some kind of neon-lit aircraft with fake identification (I had none on account of being from the twenty-first century for some reason) to parts unknown, which he assured me would be fine. However they immediately knew, and after letting me through as though everything was normal, a shoot-on-sight kill order was put out on me across the entire world's law enforcement. This is not a situation that I take to very naturally but, due to a fortunate twist of that peculiar dream-logic these things obey, the fugitive and I were suddenly the same person and I went on the run quite expertly. And not without what appeared to be super-human abilities. I was swimming into the open ocean ahead of hunter-killer helicopters by the time even dream-logic was not sufficient to keep me from calling shenanigans and waking up.

That dream, at least, was exciting. But it was one of those that leaves you exhausted in the morning.

I wish I could tell you about my dreams but I don't dream, it's just pure blackness for like a minute or so and then I wake up.

That must suck a bit, but then if you never dream you don't know what you're missing I guess.

I had another zombie dream relatively recently, I get those so much. Don't remember too much, but I held up in my house for a while. Killed a few with the defence bat by my bed too.

I have two kinds of zombies dreams. One in which I can fly, but am indoors, in a room packed with them. I desperately cling to the ceiling just above grabbing fingers while I search for a way out.

In the other one, the atmosphere is like treacle for me. Running is prohibitively exhausting as I try to move my goddamn limbs, and I can barely move faster than the horde. In those dreams I always wake up feeling like I've run a marathon.

Hey BM, a question for you as a scientist, do you believe that dreams can be vivid enough that the brain triggers a synaptic response to pain? Causing us to actually feel it in reality? For example say you were stabbed in a dream as I was recently, it was enormously painful and up until then I had always firmly believe you could not feel pain in a dream because it was not physical. Now I'm not so sure.

The science of dreams is wibbly-wobbly as it is - which much of psychology our attempts to explain the outcomes of our brains is in advance of the ability of neurology. In doing so we get ahead of ourselves. Also, even by the relatively meager standards of the field I am no expert.

But the experience of pain is nothing more than a quale. Qualia are what we experience, distinct as a term from the physiological processes. For the time being they remain the greatest mystery of biology - we cannot explain what makes the experience yet, though no doubt the answer is in the brain.

I see no reason why there cannot be a pain version of a hallucination. I haven't actually heard of pain being felt in a dream, at least not that is recalled, but again I don't know why or that it absolutely cannot happen.

But memory is also a funny and almost useless thing, more so with dreams. Many of our memories are entirely fabricated. It could quite easily be the case that you did not actually experience pain at all, but now remember that you did.

I find dreams so fascinating. If I weren't so hell-bent on becoming a games designer, I'd definitely look into studying dreams further.

Sorry to break it to you

But interpretating dreams is about as scientific as interpretating tea leaves.

I would have said that, but that he had not yet indicated that he was talking about interpretation. Perhaps Jordan is interested in Somnology?

I find most kinds of psychology interesting as a whole, but Somnology sounds very appealing.

Oh, somnology is my third favourite area after psycholinguistics and the study of memory (Which try as I might I can't find a snappy term for).

If you accept that dream interpretation is pseudoscientific (And therefore ultimately pointless) but still find it fascinating, then I suggest ignoring Sigmund Freud and reading into some of the works of Carl Jung. He's like Freud in that he talked a lot of shit, but unlike Freud in that most of his bullshit is of philosophical interest and his work doesn't revolve around PENIS PENIS PENIS

I think dreams can be interpreted. But I also think they are unique to the dreamer, meaning symbols and stuff don't mean the same for everyone.

I mean, logically, if you dream something up, it must have been for a reason. Even if just because you've seen it before and your mind just decided to visualize it.

Most dreams boil down to 'I'm puzzling over something that happened today'

They are not deep.

Who ever said they have to be deep?

Do you want a list? It starts with the Epic of Gilgamesh, goes through religion for thousands of years as an undercurrent and is then made a pseudoscience by Freud.

Well yea.... But I meant in this thread.


Anyway, I sometimes enjoy deciphering my dreams. As ridiculous as they are, they often take root in stuff that means something to me.

So you suppose, people like to solve puzzles and as such if there's even the vaguest shred that you can 'decipher' your dreams into what they mean the you might snatch at that when actually it didn't mean anything. I'm playing devil's advocate a bit though, I think some dreams might have some sort of meaning as suppressed memories or something.