Whenever I recall dreams, the memories of them seem rather distant; unreal. I can always separate them from real memories, however fleeting. Even if I recall the dream as unusually vivid, and I remember a great number of details and get a good sense of the overall atmosphere, the memories have a certain haziness to them. Not only are dreams unrealistic in content, but you always remember them as being so foggy and disjointed that you wonder how they could have passed to you as legitimate reality on that basis alone, no flying purple hippos needed.
But lucid dreaming seems to provide some interesting insight into this. I remember, just the other night, an incredibly vivid lucid dream. In it, I stopped for a moment to simply appreciate the details of the world around me. I noticed how concrete and utterly real the world around me seemed. I consciously took in how the sunlight shone on the ground; the sound my feet made as I walked; the startling detail of the courtyard around me; etc. It seemed to imitate reality perfectly, minus the physical limitations.
And then, after a considerable amount of time was spent exploring this dreamworld, I woke up, and thought back to my time spent there, and though the memory was much more vivid than most dreams I’ve had, I realized that the hazy and unreal aura was still present in those memories. But I KNOW it felt real. I know because I thought about it enough within the dream that it was able to truly sink in. I just don’t know how real it felt anymore. That detail never survives into the waking world.
But its odd, isn’t it? How upon waking, your memories get so muddied as to rob you of the realism of the experience. I’m not even talking about how much you remember. Just how clear what you do remember is.
Is there anyone here who can remember with clarity how real their dreams seemed, or is this a problem with everyone? I’m curious as to your thoughts on this.
Yeah, this happens to me with normal dreams. If I remember a dream, while I’m experience it the world is crazy clear and then I wake and it seems a bit hazy. It’s like, I had a friend who last night saw a colour in his dream, and had no idea how to describe it (and he does graphics). So I dunno if it happens to everyone, but I mean for me at least, the dream is so so real and feels great, until I wake and then it feels like a hazy mess. O_o
Same here, while in the vividest LD, i think its one of my greatest ld’s! and when i wake up its importance kindof fades and even if i remember the details they are surrounded by a certain foggyness. maybe this foggyness is a characteristic of all dreams, NDs and LDs also.
The more you work on DR, the more it will correct this problem. But, as you said, the haziness does almost always seem to set in. I think it has something to do with the fact that we’re not actually using our real senses. In a way, we’re only imagining that we’re using those senses. Still, by making an effort to pay attention to every sense and every detail in RL, it will be easier to associate those feelings to the dream world. It certainly helps a lot for me, even in ND’s.
I have the same problem. It seems like dreams are something my mind created (Actually that is the truth, but you know what I mean), something that never existed, an illusion I created. They are mystic, thats for sure.
Yeah, I do experience this same kind of haziness in my dream memories. The only exception would be directly after waking up from a vivid lucid dream. In those moments, when I’m still halfway in the dream world, those memories seem as real as anything.
But as I start writing them down, they become somewhat distant, regardless of how much I remember. And anyone who’s had a peak at my DJ knows that I sometimes remember an insane amount of details…
I guess it’s like a previous poster said: you don’t use your “real” senses in your dreams but just the interpretive part. Although I have to say that the same is true for distant memories of my childhood. I only have hazy memories from my old school for instance, or my old house. Even when I look at pictures from that time, the memories stay foggy. Not like more current stuff.
So I guess dream memory just naturally fades faster (which is why many people don’t even remember any). Working on dream recall counteracts this fading, but only to an extent, it seems. I’m pretty good at DR, but I still experience this fogginess, despite how much I remember.
I’m going to be really annoying now and say how very vivid my first LD was (may have something to do with the fact it was horrible), I still remember every detail, it was in black and white and the sensations I felt still seem real to me, like I’m still in them when I recall… Do you think it was because it was my first LD, and after a few memories they will fade like a ND does. In my DR from last night, in my mates house, i remember sitting by a fire and feeling the warmth and heat, and when i recall now I can feel it. Does that mean I’m not doing it right,(if you now what i mean lol)
I think the haziness may also be a form of protection, the mind stamping things as “THIS IS A DREAM” so that we don’t confuse WL and Dream Life, and drive ourselves mad trying to differentiate between the two.
That’s not necessarily annoying or anything. I mean, my first lucid dream (actually my sixth, since my first five only lasted a few seconds) was FANTASTIC, and to this day I still remember it very well (it was 3 years ago now). That memory seems more real than most waking life memories that are equally old.
It doesn’t mean that it’s going to fade like an ND would, especially if it was your FIRST lucid dream.
What the thread is about, generally, is how dream memories - while extremely vivid - are still often foggier or hazier than memories from waking life by their very nature. For you, I’d say, hold off on judgements until you’re a year or two down the line. But if things stay like they are for you, then so much the better.
I tested this once. I was in my house in an extremely vivid LD and i looked out the window at a distant object. When i woke up i went and looked out the same window at the same object. The dream object was more detailed. Note that i have a little decreased eyesight, but i don’t use glasses.
When we think about a dream when we are awake, it feels unreal to our brain. But if we are in a dream and think about reality, perhaps that feels unreal to our “dreambrain”?
It may also have something do with our sleeping mind being “stupider”. When we are awake we critically examine what we see, in this case the memory from the dream. And after that critical examination we consider it not real. But in our dream we don’t do this - hence why every dream is not a LD.
This happens to me in most ND’s and sometimes in LD’s.
It seems to be a natural impulse to forget the majority of our dreams, especially details, when we wake up (perhaps for protection, as Dreamjutsu said).
As Rhewin said, working on your dream recall does help; I’ve begun doing that recently and it’s improved the clarity of my dream memories. Noting minor details seems to make the biggest difference.
This is just what happens to me: I have never ever had a dream with enough vividness to be confusable with waking memories. Even in the pinnacle of my dream recall period, the memories were all hazy, even if they were a lot, and they also had this “real time” feeling, like I go to sleep, experience the dream, and then wake up. Even with that happening, my dreams have always been extremely unvivid, they mostly have a hazy visual component, the rest is absent 99% of the time.
but! last week or so, I noticed this, so I wanted I began to focus on waking life (apparently this is called lucid living) and even though it has made waking life more interesting, it has had no effect on my dreams and neither did the > 100 daily dreamchecks (I did whenever I remembered it or saw something strange). The resolution of making my dreams more vivid actually helped in the sense that last week sensations have been in my dreams, mostly tact, but limited to 2 specific moments and actions per dream, no more than that, and one of them had a really beautiful girl who had a pretty vivid appearance (compared to the rest of my dream life, that is) but still haven’t had a dream comparable to waking life. Actually, while doing the lucid living thing, I noticed how much more rich and detailed is my waking life than my dreams.
Still, none of this habits has shown up in my dreams, tough it doesn’t help that I have disastrous recall because of bad sleep schedule.
This is a natural protection.
If you were perfectly reminding dreams, you couldn’t tell the difference between reality and dream.
It would be a real problem for your mind, just think about it ,you dream that you are eating in your kitchen ,but you are eating rats poison and you find it delicious and harmless, you wake up, and want to eat something really good, oh ,why not this thing in the rat box? it was delicious…
