/yume/ - Dreams

>>2427
I've had dreams and nightmares similar to the documentary-type. I usually wake up from them exhausted from all of the mental gymnastics and explanations of absurd concepts. The specific case ones where there is a rare disease or physical deformity can happen for me, but I personally have a lot of disconnected thoughts with no real attachment to reality when awake, so when I fall asleep this disorder tends to transfer over to the dream world and my brain is often thrown for a loop by it and the subconscious sometimes adapts by taking the kind of "Narrator" approach if it doesn't fix itself. I've had dreams that entirely consist of me narrating my stream of subconscious whims like a documentary to an audience in several different languages that I could understand while dreaming but don't actually speak. I had a dream once where I was directing a documentary about alien food on mars and I had 3 sidekicks stuffed in a UFO with me. We flew all around mars tasting different alien food from different restaurants, subsisting on robbing vending machines with baseball bats to get by on our off time while people decked out in bondage on motorcycles were chasing us all around the planet trying to blow us up with a bazooka.

I've had a nightmare that was similar to a documentary-style dream, though I'm not sure if it counts as one. It's recurring, and it differs whenever I have it.

In the nightmare, the world is ending thanks to an epidemic. I'm trapped in this spartan-esque room with white walls, almost no furniture, and windows, but no doors. There's a television in one corner, and I'm sitting in front of it and watching a report that gives me information about the progression of the disease. When I try to get up it doesn't work- but sometimes when I have the dream, I'm standing in front of the window instead of the television. I look out, and I see amorphous shapes under a black sky. Then it ends.

The dream doesn't scare me, per-se, but it always gives me an uneasy feeling. I'm not sure what it means, but I think I can give some insight. OP said they watched a lot of documentaries in real life, and dreams are heavily influenced by what we see in the waking world. So that may be it. I don't know if this was the cause, but I started having the epidemic dream around the time I played a game called The Mirror Lied, which has similar themes.

>>2429
OP here.
I think you are correct in that it's probably from watching too many documentaries with body horror back then. The only type of documentaries i watch now are those "Top 10" styled videos on Youtube on certain topics. It still perplexes me though that my dreams play out the "unsolved mysteries" format, despite only ever seeing one episode of the show. The fact videos i see now are vastly different (in terms of presentation) to that series but for some reason my brain just latched onto the show's disturbing atmosphere.

>>2430
Not that this is what's going on here, but I'm just going to blog for a minute.

I just had a dream, and though all of the details have already disappeared because I have been moving around, I distinctly remember lying in bed, thinking about the dream, and realizing, "Hm. Maybe it means that I want to see things like I'm a little kid again."

It was something about listening to figures of authority - a lesson which I have been stubborn in remembering since I have a decent job and can afford to be on my own.

So what I would try to do if I had a dream like a documentary, and when I was a kid it was what I watched a lot of, is abstract the fuck out of the information until it becomes a sort of Rorshach test.

So I used to __sit__ in front of the TV and __watch__ a __documentary__.

What is sitting?
Something that requires no effort and is presumably comfortable.

What is watching?
An act which requires again, no effort from us, may imply distance, which may imply safety (e.g. watching a documentary about lions 6,000,000 miles away is quite safe.)

What is a documentary?
Something that basically takes all of the danger and work out of acquiring information and spoonfeeds it to us.


As for the horror stuff I would not want to speculate, because being scared can be a personal thing like a phobia we might have, or it can be, in my book, a random evolutionary LARP which your brain is trying to prepare you for - an evolutionary explanation for all dreams, as I'm sure you're already aware.

>>2431
Okay, I will speculate on the horror.
The furthest I would take it though, is that your brain may be attempting to replicate the phenomena of the "Documentary," in which simply by the act of watching you are granted the solution, reason, or history behind some previously unknown person or historical place, or it is trying to help you figure out the explanation or reason behind some specific suffering you are experiencing, or suffering in general. Do you think about suffering often? Whether your own or others'?

>>2432
OP again.
Wow, that Rorshach test example on how you thought about the dream is something i definitely need to try the next time a documentary nightmare occurs. It might help me understand better what the origin might be of my personal anxieties.

As for thinking about suffering, it really only occurs through intrusive thoughts that i try hard to push to the back of my mind. On occasions when i'am about to doze off, my mind churns out creative and artistic ideas, which is awesome. However, that all of a sudden slowly devolves into horrible memories of being too curious about a horror movie and reading or watching a review of it (Tetsuo the Iron Man or Serbian film). Sometimes a scene from a horrifying documentary called "Children of Chernobyl" would pop into my head and i can't sleep until i put music on to distract me. I used to be into horror movies as well back then and still am now but after stumbling onto "Tetsuo the Iron Man", my desensitization to gore/body horror dropped so hard that i couldn't watch horror films again till 2 years later.

Maybe i'm pushing these intrusive thoughts back too much and they are starting to show in my dreams. Heck for all i know i just might be a bit winded from being bombarded with daily negative news about people suffering and feeling bad for them.

I don't know when i'll have another documentary dream to confirm any of these theories about why they happen but when it occurs i'll make sure to write every detail and feeling down, even if thinking of it after awakening scares me to pieces. :/

>>2433
The self-administered Rorshach test is something I do with each and every dream my brain chooses to present to my consciousness.

>Maybe i'm pushing these intrusive thoughts back too much and they are starting to show in my dreams.

I was getting curious as to why you run away from them. Is it just because they feel bad? Don't you feel bad all the time already? Why hide from bad things if they won't kill you?

When I was going through my period of vivid psychic horror, I would explicitly summon it, and attempt to capture it in drawings. Avant garde/Dark ambient sound really assisted with that expression and experience. I decided that the horror which existed within my brain, and at the same time seemed impossible to have been generated by it, was nonetheless a part of it, and that assimilation with was the only way to move in any direction - not necessarily forward, but maybe down?

There is no good or bad, and everything in the world suffers anyway - look at how the bugs writhe, starving, how the cute animals fight over what raw scraps of plant life or even better, human garbage that is left for them on their paved-over ancestral homes. Much to the chagrin of the people who built their own physical, mental, and emotional prisons, and now starve within them for all forms of sustenance.

I say it's not that there's nothing to fear, it's that there's nothing left to fear; we are already dead and dreaming.

Sorry this got bloggy, I am very tired and felt like writing something.