Recurring Dreams

Ive been a lucid dreamer from a very young age.

I dont practice it, its more, as I start dreaming, the context is off(as it usually is in dreams), and once I make that awareness leap, its more my dream to actively shape.

Occasionally, for whatever reason, about 1-2 times I year I will have a nightmare.

The odd part of that is, even with my awareness of knowing it is a dream, I cant control it.

It sucks, because im my dreams I can do all sorts of stuff I will never be able to do here.

RyuJin wrote: Zombie penguins?....I'll have to look into that...coincidentally my brother is working on a zombie koi yin-yang tattoo for me...lol

Well back on track (sort of) while I don't recall ever having a recurring dream, I have had recurring themes and elements within dreams...ie searching for something, traveling great distances etc...

I don't know if some of you are playing or not but I'm serious. Please don't go on tangents on me. Thanks

Rickie The Grey:

I see thats as astral experience.Is part of work in western mysteries

I did work-

If that is naturally in you, thats maybe means a hability in astral plane /

Tiger and many animals in my dreams, but tiger was repeated much on past
( I, as angry tiger )
( and I was growling, returning in awake )
...when awake I discovered myself in a FFHHHH.....like cat scared...(many times)

In more recent times lion and tiger are friendly with me in dreams.
Regards

I'm not sure I have recurring dreams, but I do have recurring themes. Like not being able to find a bathroom, missing my bus, being late for a class, can't remember my locker combination... I'm not a high school student, but the impression of it has dug deep into my subconscious.

Dude, I have a whole dream world in my head. It's pretty elaborate. In a recent dream I was driving along and turned onto Jedi street. At first it all began as recurring dreams and then I did a lot of dream analysis and it eventually became another reality. Some days I would spend the whole day thinking about the dreams. When I couldn't make sense of a dream it would recur until I made sense of it. Crazy stuff man.

Maybe that's why I don't have recurring dreams...because I write them down and analyze them...or have them figured out before waking...and I always seem to have control over most aspects within the dreams...whatever aspects I can't control become targets for analysis...

Whyte Horse wrote: Dude, I have a whole dream world in my head. It's pretty elaborate.

That's a good point, I have a coastline mapped out in my dream. Different coastal cities located in some way relevant to each other. It get's hotter to my right (facing out to sea) so its either East facing in the Northern Hemisphere, or West facing in the Southern.... or completely unrelated and maybe its because I'm right handed :woohoo:

I guess I needed some way to locate them, so climate seems like one way.

I used to have recurring apocalyptic dreams but I don't seem to ever remember my dreams these days. I just looked up reasons for this and they are varied as you'd expect. I could be a Vampire, stressed, scared of losing control or it might be because I look at my phone before going to sleep. The most likely possible factor is that I tend to wake up very early and could miss out on the second stage of REM sleep which is usually in the morning and the period when we experience our most vivid dreams and then wake up so we remember them.

"Depuis des siècles, et dans toutes les diverses cultures du monde, l’homme analyse et médite sur les significations abondantes de ses rêves. Comme bien avant l’œuvre d’Artemidore ou celle de Macrobe, antérieurement à l’Onirocritique d’Achmet, jusqu’aux dissertations de Freud et de Jung de notre époque quasi-moderne, le sondage des occupations de l’esprit lorsque le corps sommeille fascine les générations. Les grecs définirent cinq genres distincts du rêve selon l’activité prophétique : , le rêve énigmatique ; , la clairvoyance ; , la voix de l’oracle ; , le cauchemar ; et  la visite d’une apparition qui guide le songe à son dénouement divinatoire. La mythologie est emplie de contes qui touchent au sujet du rêve symbolique et ses conséquences. Un rêve particulièrement puissant, il pourrait s’agir de plusieurs de ces genres à la fois, renforçant le pouvoir du destin à être divulgué…"
~ "Mensonges et erreurs", Alexandre Orion, 2004

That was ten years ago, so I do feel a little bit different about it than I did then ... The lot was, and still is to a large extent, one that I share with most of the human race : a quest for existential reassurance. I need that just a little less now, not because I have found any comfort, but because I've come to accept existential uncertainty. And dreams, as it were, are indeed a large part of that.

There are some dreams that I remember very vividly albeit I cannot witness to them being 'recurrent'. Only rarely remembering my dreams while retaining some quite clear images of dreams from as far back as 25 years ago lends itself to the possibility that these dreams do re-occur since, despite what the hypnotists who practice 'memory recovery' want us to believe, the subconscious mind does forget things. Its particularity is that it is less easily distracted than our conscious mind is. That is why it is particularly well suited to directing us to and fro although we are quite convinced to be doing things completely differently with other motivations in mind.

:huh:

Nevertheless. I've come away from a belief that all of our dreams are 'trying' to tell us something. There is a little bit of Descartes' ghost in the machine when we say that our subconscious (a notion that Descartes never even considered) is 'trying' to do anything. Any reference to sub- or in- consciousness is more Jungian. But even according to both or either views, it is not something apart from ourselves. Even to say something as idiot as "the Force, or the Universe, 'trying' to tell us something" is externalising the agency ; one may as well be talking to angels.

That does not mean that our dreams, recurrent or not - though, it could be surmised that the ones that recur do so for some utility - do not serve some sort of function. We dream naturally (and are not the only species which does), and except in the case of lucid dreaming (sic), we do not dream "on purpose". We experience more dreams than we can remember, more than we can even know we've had. Are the ones of which we are never conscious of less value than the ones we are ?

Dreams are one of the ways that we deal with the absurdities of Life ; dreaming is a corrective lens for the hazy view of our conscious-ness experience as a centre, that experiences a World that we generate by the way we present and re-present it mentally. There are innumerable discrepancies between reality and perception that must be reconciled lest they disturb the relationships that we must necessarily make to function among others whose Lives are carrying out the same processes ... I feel (I do not know) that is what dreams do. They are, to make an illustration, somewhat of an excess absurdity valve for that which has been 'normalised' by the conscious mind, yet, for myriad instances of incongruence, just does not make 'sense' ...

Now, this is not to say that some, perhaps often (but that would be a random variable), of our dreams can contain useful insights into things, it is not systematic. Like anything which escapes by way of an over-flow valve, there can sometimes be some non-waste products that flow out with it and could be recovered. But not all, nor even much, of it ...

There are some who suffer from debilitating mental illnesses who likewise may, by virtue of their impairment, not be distracted by the same influences as would be a mind functioning within the parameters which we recognise as 'normal'. Sometimes these individuals may have phenomenal insights on things which escape mentally 'healthy' people. But often, their ramblings are simply non-sense. Likewise our dreams, burdened with the constant labour of reconciling our perceptions and the re-presentations, and the relationships between these re-presentations -- sometimes useful elements get chucked out with the over-flow. From time to time, we spot these in dreams, then waking up to solve perplexing problems or to create dazzling art. But very often also, dreams are simply just subconscious sewage.

On the upside, our subconscious sewage doesn't smell bad and can be entertaining -- as long as we don't brutalise ourselves by trying to be told something from it. Sometimes dreams reveal valuable insights, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they are only dreams ...

I agree with Alexandre but from a different angle. I've seen recent studies done with fMRI on the brain and they do shed light on what's going on while we sleep. It turns out that the 90% of our brains that we thought isn't utilized... probably is utilized. It takes the whole time we're asleep to process all the info we get from the day and recharge the brain. We're not aware that our brain is taking in everything we see and hear but it is and then at night it purges all the irrelevant info and reprograms the nerual network in our brain.

So recurring dreams are some kind of link between the brain trying to purge/learn and our conscious state. In classical terms, your subconscious is telling you something. For me, I usually have to come to some realization in order for the recurring dreams to stop. I just look at what's stressing me out and that usually provides enough clues to sort it out.