Killer7 SINdicate

[Laugh at the Moon]

I had frightening experiences and I’m uncertain what was a nightmare, what was waking fear and what was something in between. I found myself at one point among entities shrouded in shadow who each had a different colored aura. They seemed to represent very concentrated essence of emotional states or concepts such as comedy and the certainty of death. There were 3 of them, two with clear auras. They were sitting across from each other in something like an old fashioned train car. I awoke, or didn’t, and I had the overwhelming feeling of being pursued. I thought that I had seen something I was not supposed to. I had the feeling that something in my body had been left open and I couldn’t close it, and things were able to get inside. I experienced a few cycles of sleep paralysis after this and was trying to stay awake in the darkness. Each occurrence seemed to be inflicted by a different being and I felt like they were circling around me in the darkness. After probably a few hours of this, while trying to stay awake again, I got a phone call from my ex girlfriend asking if she could keep the call on while she slept. Things dissipated after that and I must have eventually fallen asleep.

I hadn't felt so vulnerable for a long time as I felt last night in the dark.
I 'woke up' within the dream so many times that I don't know where the nightmares ended or where the waking hallucinations began.

Do you ever have nightmares?

[cj_iwakura]

I think we all do, but mine are often immersive in films or media, like I once had one where I was relieving scenes from Moonwalker like I was stuck as a fixed observer. (Yes, the Michael Jackson movie.) So I guess the moral of the story is, keep media consumption to a healthy level.

[redrum]

the dream state is an interesting place. i have been plagued with nightmares for the majority of my life and spent a lot of time attempting to understand why, and what they mean. after delving through various schools of thought and approaches to dream diagnosis, i have learned a number of things -

1) dreams are essentially your brain defragmenting. dumping all the files out on the floor and attempting to sort them.
2) through extensive training of the mind, you can exert an amount of conscious control over your dreams.
for example - as a call center agent, i used to get angry callers in my dreams that demanded i fix their problems. problems that operated on dream logic and had no real solution. eventually i learned how to ask them to "call back during operational hours" and the dreams stopped.
3) expanding on that, if you teach your mind to look at a clock when a dream starts getting weird, it will likely boot you out of the dream. the subconscious mind tends to not interpret abstract concepts such as time, or even written language.
4) freudian dream analysis is bullshit, not everything symbolizes penis.
5) everything that happens in a dream is subjective. these things are all YOUR interpretation of people or events and may be vastly different from what they are in the waking world. this is why other people will rarely make sense of your dreams, they don't have the same interpretation of it.

if you really want to know what's going on in the subconscious mind, i recommend this book.

it takes a different approach to understanding dreams that makes a lot of sense to their subjective nature. even things that seem arbitrary, like colors and numbers, tend to symbolize something... and having a way to interpret that can help quite a bit.