Is it normal to have weirdly... “fictional” dreams?
I make the assumption that my dreams are somewhat abnormal because when hearing about lucid dreaming techniques, I just can’t see “me” doing them in my dreams. Like my dreams are so ridiculous and obviously not real, that I seem to be dream-blind. My dreams make dream analysis look even more like a pseudoscience.
I don’t know what the opposite of lucid or vivid is, but all my dreams are like that, and the same amount of vividness/lucidity each time. Everything feels distant and lacking in sensory stimulation.
Also, the “plots” of my dreams range from being tangentially based on my life to having absolutely nothing to do with it. Sometimes I’ll have dreams where I don’t even exist, and it’s basically different movie camera angles in some completely novel world and situation, or the “screen” (there is no outside world) of a nonexistent video game.
They can sometimes be rather structurally and emotionally complex. For example, once I had a dream where me and some people I don’t recognize came through a portal to this widely-spaced small auditorium of sorts, that had four walls and a floor, but was distinctly outdoors. We were stuck on this side of the portal for whatever reason, so we passed the time. At some point, two of the others decided to get married, and we held a ceremony. There was a nihilistic air of deep sadness and forced smiles.
There’s a lot of Harry Potter and TARDIS type weirdness with how rooms and doors work. I’ll be playing hide-and-go-seek (God knows why, I’m 19), go into a closet, and then come out in someone else’s house. With the Purge happening outside or something. And my cats teleported with me.
If it seems like a more normal late-for-class dream, I’ll go through a door and suddenly I’m using GPS and a giant bouncing ball with handles to get to a hotel in the middle of a construction site dirt pit, where my family has rented a room.
I’ll just list off a few dreams I’ve had:
- On a space station “village”.
- Stranded on a planet being told by my friends (who weren’t there, was it a video game?) to have sex with a dead cow "while it’s still warm".
- Leading a helicopter to an “autistic ghetto” using a long leash.
- A Dr. Suess-type “muscly” landscape inside what seemed to be one of those giant funhouses playgrounds.
- A snowy WW2 scenario where all the combatants are children. I get shot in the head by a couple girls and then they fingered my brain and it felt real weird.