Somehow it feels ungrateful of me to complain about my dreams, but lately they have become rather boring. They tend to either be mundane or so surreal that they aren’t very engaging. I have read dream journals where people seem to have exciting adventures and meet interesting dream characters. What can I do to have more interesting dreams?
In some ways I’m not entirely sure. My immediate instinct is to say “Have a wide variety of experiences in your waking life,” but to be honest I’m not sure if that’s necessary or not, or even makes sense to say. I think most people by the time they’re adults have been through a lot of different things, so everyone probably has a lot of good fodder to work with. Even people whose lives might look rather plain from the outside have often had a wide variety of strong emotional experiences behind the scenes, I think. So, maybe it doesn’t really matter what you’re going through in your waking life at the moment, even if it has some kind of influence.
It might sound a bit out of left field, but I’ve found that computer games can have a really strong influence on dreams, moreso than other art forms it seems to me. So you might have good luck if you spend a lot of time playing games with settings or atmospheres that really please you deeply, if you know of or can find any; they might work their way into your dreams in nice ways. Hard to predict, of course, but it might work out well. Of course, this requires having the time to play games a lot, which might be hard for you to come by depending on what your life is like day-to-day. Even a little bit of time throughout the week playing a game like that might make a positive contribution if the game has a really strong atmosphere for you, though.
Do you daydream a lot or anything like that? I don’t know if that’s a tendency that one can really cultivate or not, but somehow I feel like there’s a connection between that state and the state of dreaming vividly/intensely. Maybe that doesn’t even make sense to consider, though—I don’t know how someone would become more or less “daydream-y” if it is possible. 
I also feel like the thought processes involved in making narrative art, like novels or plays, can contribute to having interest dreams if you engage in them regularly. Even there, though, it probably depends on the art, which in turn depends on the person’s personality. Writing things like that does pressure you to spend a lot of time thinking about interesting people and situations, though, so I think it can spice up your dreams a bit if you do it a lot. If you haven’t tried it already you could see what it’s like to take up writing short fiction as a hobby or something like that.
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Thanks! I have dreamed about computer games that I have played before. At the moment my laptop is broken and I’m borrowing one from my school, so I’m not sure if I should download games.
I used to daydream a lot. I think I have kind of gotten out of the habit lately, which might have something to do with boring dreams.
I have done some hobby writing in the past (once again something I haven’t done lately). I’m wondering if it would make a difference if I took dreams that I have had and added more details to them. I was doing that with other people’s dreams at one point, but as far as I can remember I have only done that with one of my dreams. Maybe I could start an “embellished” dream journal.