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[NF] Do you remember your dreams?

Peter Deadpan

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I don't really remember my dreams and I'm not a vivid dreamer. When I do remember them, it's tiny fragments that are hard to visualize. I might remember a concept or theme that was present in the dream, but not so much visual details. I have zero control over my dreams... I cannot manipulate them. They're also weird but slightly boring, like not weird enough in a way that I would want to tell people about them. Or maybe they're freakin' awesome and I just don't know it. The only "cool" thing about my dreams is that I read in them and it seems as if the text is legible, but maybe my mind is just really good at making me think that's what's going on.

I theorize that I don't remember my dreams because I have horrible sensing abilities, so I'm wondering if other NFs are like this too.

I'd really like to be about to dream vividly, but there was a time frame of about 3 months where I was falling asleep every night to a guided meditation about either vivid dreaming or "astral projecting." It never affected my dreams but did effectively serve it's purpose as meditation. Also, really freaky things started happening in my house, but I don't want to annoy the skeptics with those details ;)
 

highlander

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I have frequent and vivid dreams. I still remember what I dreamed about last night. I dreamed about a person I used to work with. No idea why. A lot of my dreams are about things that will happen in the future. There is worry or concerns expressed through them. I might dream about something I should be doing but forgot to do for example.
 

cosmictone

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not really.. :(
I usually forget them as soon as I wake up.
they start to fade and I'll try to hold on to them but I fail.

sometimes I remember bits and pieces.

but there is one dream I remember quite vividly from about 10 years ago.
it was a lucid dream but I wasn't in full control.

I would say my dreams are vivid, they feel vivid, I just forget because my memory is bad.
or maybe they are just really short.

when my dreams fade I just remember color, light, and an expression, and just blurriness..
but I can sense someone is there.
 
Last edited:

Firebird 8118

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Sometimes - I tend to remember the ones that either inspired me to write or "warned" me against doing stupid things that I later did anyway.
 

Flâneuse

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If I've been sleeping soundly, I remember my dreams in vivid detail the first few minutes after I wake up and then my recollections of it are very vague. When I've been sleeping fitfully (especially if I've had too much caffeine) I can hold onto the memories longer after waking, for some reason.
 

Peter Deadpan

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Does the vividness (I was not expecting that to be a real word but there are no squiggly lines under it) of your dreams correlate to how vivid your memory is? For example, both of mine completely blow. Do you vivid dreamers also have little difficulty recalling events?
 

Jellyfish1234

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I sometimes remember dreams, sometimes I remember them as soon as its over but feel myself losing it and then lose it, but there are quite a few dreams that I remember. I don't remember them in detail, but they're vivid for me nonetheless, because I don't see detail in reality either, so to someone else my dreams might be way too blurry and loose to seem vivid but to me they are usually quite vivid. I also daydream a lot and they have pretty much the same texture as sleep dreams, which also has the same texture as my awake state, so I frequently ask myself, "Did that really happen or was I daydreaming or sleep dreaming?"
 

Snickie

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Not an NF. Whether or not I'm more TiNe or TiSe is also up in the air.

When I can be bothered to write about my dreams (I keep my phone in bed with me with a note for this purpose), I'm more likely to remember dreams in the future. They're usually pretty vivid. Some of them seem to be like epics in a sense that they feel like they're taking place over an extended period of time in the same way that a 22 minute episode in an anime or other tv show can cover an extended period of time in-universe.

The confusion arises when I realize something is off inside of my dream world but am not quite lucid dreaming. Things repeat and my time line gets shuffled. Or I'll go into semi-awake twilight zone and replay the events of my dream, or even dream about writing down my dream, and then immediately forget because there's no need to remember anymore, right?

Sometimes I'll have a really vivid dream but when I wake up, I can't remember anything about it. Then out of nowhere something will trigger my memory of the dream later in the day, and that usually brings the whole thing back.

When I read through old dreams, I can usually recall specific images from those dreams as they were when I first dreamed them. It's interesting how those connections don't really die out.

I have several recurring themes in my dreams. The main two of mine are surgeries (usually but not always open heart, and I'm always the one on the table) and flying (this one is something of a development arc because I usually get better at it with each dream).
 

Lord Lavender

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Not a NF type but as they say sometimes some Chinese food at an Indian themed meal isnt a bad thing :happy2:. I remember roughly 80% of them and they are always very surreal (I have never had a normal mundane dream as far as i can remember).
 

Pionart

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I can relate [MENTION=31348]RareBird[/MENTION], my dreams are mostly remembered as a vague few images, or a theme that's at the back of my mind.

Generally, whenever I feel that my dream is about to get lucid, my mind gets too active/aware and I wake up.
 

Peter Deadpan

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I am so jealous of all you vivid dreamers. If 3 months of nightly guided meditations won't help me dream more vividly, I don't know what will.
 

Riva

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Why don't you try lucid dreaming techniques. They really worked. I used to do it for a month or two but stopped after I realized it was stressing me out - perhaps due to it affecting my sleep. When I lucid dream I realized that I have to be awake in the dream, which takes a 'bit' of effort. Effort which might affect my sleep. However, that was my personal experience. Doesn't mean it would affect you the same way.

A few things I practiced to be able to lucid dream were:-

- make it a practice to count the fingers of ALL the people I saw IRL. It will come to a state where even in dreams you would count fingers. In dreams people don't have 10 fingers. The moment you realize that you are talking to a person who doesn't have 10 fingers you realize you are dreaming and lucidity it attained.
- Telling yourself that you WANT to lucid dream (attain consciousness) during sleep.
- Writing a dream journal. The first thing you do when you wake up is to write everything you remember about the dreams you've had. Even the smallest details.

Worked for me.

*Drags [MENTION=5159]Lexicon[/MENTION] into the thread*
 

Peter Deadpan

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Why don't you try lucid dreaming techniques. They really worked. I used to do it for a month or two but stopped after I realized it was stressing me out - perhaps due to it affecting my sleep. When I lucid dream I realized that I have to be awake in the dream, which takes a 'bit' of effort. Effort which might affect my sleep. However, that was my personal experience. Doesn't mean it would affect you the same way.

A few things I practiced to be able to lucid dream were:-

- make it a practice to count the fingers of ALL the people I saw IRL. It will come to a state where even in dreams you would count fingers. In dreams people don't have 10 fingers. The moment you realize that you are talking to a person who doesn't have 10 fingers you realize you are dreaming and lucidity it attained.
- Telling yourself that you WANT to lucid dream (attain consciousness) during sleep.
- Writing a dream journal. The first thing you do when you wake up is to write everything you remember about the dreams you've had. Even the smallest details.

Worked for me.

*Drags [MENTION=5159]Lexicon[/MENTION] into the thread*

That's all really good advice, but I tried every night for 3 months straight. I would listen to guided meditations specifically for lucid dreaming or sometimes astral projecting on YouTube with headphones. I had no success. I don't even have memory of dreams really, so to have the awareness/control during a dream to count fingers has been completely unattainable for me, if that makes sense. I know that it takes a real effort to get to that point for some people though, and I probably didn't try hard enough. If I remember correctly, it helps to look at your own hands during waking hours many times so that it almost becomes a mental habit, and thus helps you to do it during dreams.

I have decided to read more fiction books in an effort to strengthen my mind's eye (I read only non-fiction stuff as it currently is). I think that will help me too.

I have never tried the dream journaling, so that would probably be a good thing to start, along with the whole looking at my hands thing.
 

Falcarius

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Falcarius wishes he has vivid dreams as he hardly ever remembers his dreams. When he does they just involve being chased around one of his old school, which he went to when he was about nine million years old. Apparently, dreams about being chased mean one is "unconsciousness avoiding an issue or a person dinosaur".:unsure:
 

humanvessel

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I tend to have many vivid dreams, sometimes I forget them but it depends oh how deep I am in REM sleep.

The best times to gain conscious of your dreams are right after you fall asleep and right before you wake up. The key is to wake up your consciousness during your sleep.

Here are some instructions I posted on tumblr on how to lucid dream which I think will be helpful for anyone who wants to practice being conscious during sleep.

In your waking life be aware consciously of your thoughts/desires/decisions

This will help you become more aware of thoughts in general so it becomes a habit when you enter into the subconscious part of your memory. By doing this it will be easier to connect your understanding of your awareness of self through your subconscious thought rather than the conscious.

Recognizing real things that are in your waking life

In dreams you may notice people, events, or places that actually take place in your waking life. Take advantage of this and try to reconnect to the "thing" that is actually real in your life. Is there something odd or different about it? Your brain mixes what is real and what is not in your dreams so the key is to separate these things so you realize they don't correlate in your waking life. This can be an "aha" moment in your lucid dreaming.

Focus on sensory surroundings

Hold onto the thought that you are dreaming and notice the environment that you're in. Time is skewed in our dreams because they aren't actually taking place in the same "dimension" that we know of. We have around 35-48 thoughts per minute which is why our dreams constantly change and don't make sense when we describe them. It's almost like things seem as if they are happening simultaneously. To prevent this from happening and falling back into our subconsciousness, take in the moment that is happening and absorb how you can feel it through sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. It is easy to fall out of lucid dreaming as there needs to be a strong control on the subconsciousness.

Think of positive events and the impossible

You want to avoid negative thoughts because they will appear as you think, making it even harder to think out of it. Try to think of things that would be hard or impossible to do in your real life. Remind yourself that you're dreaming and you really don't have to follow any rules so just have fun with it.
 

Korvinagor

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I don't really remember my dreams and I'm not a vivid dreamer. When I do remember them, it's tiny fragments that are hard to visualize. I might remember a concept or theme that was present in the dream, but not so much visual details. I have zero control over my dreams... I cannot manipulate them. They're also weird but slightly boring, like not weird enough in a way that I would want to tell people about them. Or maybe they're freakin' awesome and I just don't know it. The only "cool" thing about my dreams is that I read in them and it seems as if the text is legible, but maybe my mind is just really good at making me think that's what's going on.

I theorize that I don't remember my dreams because I have horrible sensing abilities, so I'm wondering if other NFs are like this too.

I'd really like to be about to dream vividly, but there was a time frame of about 3 months where I was falling asleep every night to a guided meditation about either vivid dreaming or "astral projecting." It never affected my dreams but did effectively serve it's purpose as meditation. Also, really freaky things started happening in my house, but I don't want to annoy the skeptics with those details ;)

I don't know if I'm an NF, but I'm going to answer anyway. My deepest apologies.

Apparently, this is a skill which can be trained. Simply record your dreams immediately after waking up, and you'll begin to consciously remember and perhaps manipulate them. I don't really believe that such a skill is associated with poor sensing abilities - if anything, dreams are so cerebral in nature that N types ought to be better at remembering dreams than S types...but that could just be my bias leaking through.

As for me...my dreams are a peculiar fusion of reality and impressionism. The strange feels sensible, places familiar to me become altered in a way that makes them completely new. Hopefully I'll begin recalling more and more. It'd be nice to develop the skill to the point where I can actually manipulate my dreams.
 

Snickie

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Disclaimer: Still not NF.

Guys, I had a lucid dream last night. I mean full on lucid. I've been semi-lucid before and have maybe had one fully lucid dream before but not like this.

There wasn't much in the way of surroundings to manipulate. I just remember things being a dark blue. And then I decided to try flying.

Normally in my semi-lucid flying dreams, my flying is restricted to something akin to jumping around in a low-gravity environment (e.g. being able to jump on top of 5 story buildings), keeping myself afloat by swimming in the air, or (very recently) growing wings from around my shoulder blades. I've done a lot of imagining that I have wings in real life and even writing stuff down on paper about how wings would have to work for humans given our atmospheric conditions, gravitational forces, body composition, etc etc, in case I ever write a fic about it one day and have to build that world. This wasn't like any of those.
I jumped off the floor or whatever I was standing on with the most propioception and tactile sensory input I think I've ever experienced while in a flying dream (I'm excluding dreams I've had that included tactile pain), and I stayed in the air. Without wings. Without paddling. Without floating back down. Just levitating. It was amazing.

I had some other lucid dreams last night too but I've forgotten them already (I ate breakfast at 6am and then I went back to bed without writing anything because exhausted). I do remember that it was very difficult to maintain visual imaging and temporal velocity, which is consistent with my previous semi-lucid dreams from which I ended up waking up. I could tell though that I wasn't getting restful sleep, and that's probably why imagery was so difficult to maintain. With temporal velocity, things just stop or slow way down and that's not how I want to experience it - I want the scenario to play out (clearly I've never come close to lucid dreaming during a nightmare, not even the one where the background music turned into I'm the one physically performing the background music in the mall bathroom where I'm hiding, prompting people to come in saying the Chinese restaurant next door could hear me thus leading the big bad to come in and shoot my dad in the head at point blank range). I was once successful in speeding it back up for a time but it slowed down again and affected the scenario (it was a marching band show, and the band director was upset that it had slowed down and then snapped back to the original tempo because how is the rest of the band supposed to follow that sudden tempo change that was never rehearsed yet still managed to execute together because DREAM LOGIC).
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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I had a dream last night. I was stationed in some far off solar system on a space station. Inside were lots of cool science exhibits like you might find in a science museum. The lighting was dim, the walls and ceiling were black. I needed to go back to Earth, although I wanted to spend more time looking at the science stuff, all of which was new and unfamiliar to me. I had to find the wormhole, which was hidden behind some medieval looking structure that I had to push aside, as though it was a secret passageway. I found the wormhole and traveled quickly to the other side before beginning the second leg. The stopping point for this phase of the journey was on Uranus (I'm guessing this was a Cloud City-type deal). It looked similar to last place, except there was a section that had sea creatures swimming in the air. I speculated that they had been genetically modified to breathe the air. They included angelfish and several octopi. I petted one of the octopus, and it put it's mouth on my arm, and I was okay with that, but then I realized that if I left my arm in there too long, the digestive juices would dissolve my arm, so I took it out. I hesitated a lot before taking the second wormhole, which led back to earth. I don't remember what happened next. There was a lot of uncertainty as to whether I was really on space or whether it was some elaborate Walt Disney World type simulacrum. I remember wondering why on Uranus there was no viewport, and being disappointed and asking some of the staff why it was so. It made me somewhat suspicious of the whole endeavor. They told me that the view wouldn't look that different from the night sky on the Earth, and given that it was so costly to build a viewport, it just wasn't worth it.

Yeah, I have cool dreams.
 

Peter Deadpan

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I had a dream last night. I was stationed in some far off solar system on a space station. Inside were lots of cool science exhibits like you might find in a science museum. The lighting was dim, the walls and ceiling were black. I needed to go back to Earth, although I wanted to spend more time looking at the science stuff, all of which was new and unfamiliar to me. I had to find the wormhole, which was hidden behind some medieval looking structure that I had to push aside, as though it was a secret passageway. I found the wormhole and traveled quickly to the other side before beginning the second leg. The stopping point for this phase of the journey was on Uranus (I'm guessing this was a Cloud City-type deal). It looked similar to last place, except there was a section that had sea creatures swimming in the air. I speculated that they had been genetically modified to breathe the air. They included angelfish and several octopi. I petted one of the octopus, and it put it's mouth on my arm, and I was okay with that, but then I realized that if I left my arm in there too long, the digestive juices would dissolve my arm, so I took it out. I hesitated a lot before taking the second wormhole, which led back to earth. I don't remember what happened next. There was a lot of uncertainty as to whether I was really on space or whether it was some elaborate Walt Disney World type simulacrum. I remember wondering why on Uranus there was no viewport, and being disappointed and asking some of the staff why it was so. It made me somewhat suspicious of the whole endeavor. They told me that the view wouldn't look that different from the night sky on the Earth, and given that it was so costly to build a viewport, it just wasn't worth it.

Yeah, I have cool dreams.

Whoa. I've never even had a dream experience resembling anything that detailed. Way jelly right now.

Btw, the octopus is my favorite animal, hence my weird avatar (elephants are pretty awesome too but in a way completely opposite octopi, which makes it cool to put the two together).
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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Whoa. I've never even had a dream experience resembling anything that detailed. Way jelly right now.

Btw, the octopus is my favorite animal, hence my weird avatar (elephants are pretty awesome too but in a way completely opposite octopi, which makes it cool to put the two together).

I've always thought octopi were pretty darn cool. I remember I did a report on one in high school. How on earth did you find that image?
 
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