I have been a lucid dreamer since I was about eight, way before I even knew what the word lucid meant I was doing it once every few weeks. I also kept sporadic dream journals. I was never told to do these things, I just did them. I have also experienced sleep paralysis several times, potentially several dozen times, as I can recall readily one or two nights where it occurred twice in the same night. I generally can recall between one and four dreams most every night, with varying accuracy and the memory lasting anywhere from hours to years. My dreams have ranged from mundane, almost prophetic, to rather bizarre (complicated rituals, many talking animals, the passing of several “days” within a single dream, recurrance in a single night and over a longer period of time, zombies decked out in drag eternally occupying a discoclub located right outside of the hotel room I currently resided in, and it goes on). I have had every cliche and so much more. But lately I have been experiencing a heightened memory for dreams. Before you ask, no I haven’t been doing drugs lately, I have done various substances off and on over the years and while it may have affected that night’s sequences, it has never lasted weeks, and I have remained clean for the last month, abstaining even from nicotine and other weaker drugs. small mod edit Okay, that all said, I have been remembering between 6 and 20 dreams in a single night. I know it is kind of hard to believe that I would recall over 20 dreams, but it definitely happened (I can still recall a majority of them with great detail). Moreover, within the 20ish I had several recurring dreams, several lucid dreams, and an occurence of SP. After the 20 dream night the following evenings produced between six and 12 dreams a night, with the last few days producing so many dreams I stopped keeping track of them all. Sometimes I have trouble focusing on what reality is, but I have always had this problem. Many times when I am awake, I feel as though I were actually dreaming. I’m curious as to what everyone’s take is on this, as it has left me confused and slightly troubled for the last couple weeks.
You think it has something to do with the fact that you are not using any drugs? I hear that you dream more when you stop smoking, I assume it’s a transitory thing. You say it’s been weeks, and you’ve been clean for a month, that’s why I thought it.
are you sure the 20 dreams are acutally separate and not the same dream that you remember fragments of? Maybe instead of remembering more dreams you are acutally just missing more parts of your dreams and thinking they are acutally different dreams.
I had thought on waking up that maybe it was different pieces of the same dream, but in all of them I took on a different persona, each unaware of the last. I even remember a transition between the dreams. It was like a split screen, almost, in that I could see and act through my eyes and mind and had no idea I was anyone outside of my dream self, but then I was simultaneously a hidden observer who was able to sit outside of the dreams and record what happened while knowing who I was in reality, and through this I was able to remember everything.
In one scene I was a drug dealer running through the streets of NYC and I had just gotten separated from a friend. We had the police on our trail and had nowhere to run except a really bad neighborhood. Moreover, we were not from NYC and didn’t know it that well, and we had no guns, so running into the darker slum-type areas meant more or less certain death, or some such unpleasantry. A few minutes after getting separated, I found that the only place I had left to run was through the pitch dark of this huge warehouse that was down a dark alley. There was a dim light I could make out at the other end, and if I were to merely walk or run through this building, I knew that I would get caught and bad things would happen. But then I realized I was dreaming and just flew across the room into safety.
On reaching safety, everything faded, like on a camera, and then it came back into focus. But I was suddenly an entirely different person, this time walking down a street in a village in the moutains of Austria. In this new entity, I did not think at all about my past experience in NYC or about being lucid. Then I went through a sequence that lasted about a day in which I went home to my family which consisted of a mother, a father, and a sister (all of whom were nothing like my real family, and I have more siblings in reality). I helped my dad fix up his house, I walked down the street and saw the town was in poor shape and tried to fix it up some. I talked to some locals and stuff. It was like I was just a normal citizen, but then I became lucid again, and I would secretly just will things to be fixed, instead of working on them, and people were so happy, and even though I knew I was dreaming, I was glad I’d made them happy. I became lucid in maybe one or two other dreams, and they were generally far more complicated than this. In the dreams I instantly knew entire background stories for all the people I met, it was like I’d known them for years.
My dreams felt just as real as reality, except sometimes I’d wake, but I’d like it so much that instead of leaving, I’d just stay in the dream. I would just will myself to remain. Or I would suddenly become conscious of a set of rules that I had to follow in order to remain, and every time I’d break one I’d have to leave.
But maybe you’re right. Maybe my body is just adjusting. Although nicotine leaves the body after three days, and everything else I’d been using leaves quicker. So I dunno…
They may be different dreams in the same REM period ofcourse. Also I’ve heard of simultaneous dreams. don’t know how that’s experienced though.
I think that the extra REM is because of the adjustment to non smoking. Either the adjustment of the body from physical dependence, or the psychological part, or both.
It seems that you have a high degree of awareness in your dreams, I seldom if ever remember a transition to another dream.
I heard a theory that brain is able to work way faster that it does while being in normal state, awake. Sometimes it works faster that usual, in state of high danger. But there also people that says that they’re able to spends days (maybe even years ?) in dream, doing awesome suff there, like creating whole worlds, etc. . Their existance works on that theore - it’s hard to explain it another way. If that theory was right, your brain would work slightly faster while being asleep, because of leaving nicotine.
Just a throught.